Netflix Brand Tie-Ins Raise Eyebrows; Political Season To Drive Up Social Ad Prices

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Tied Down By Tie-Ins

Netflix does more than Amazon or HBO when it comes to brand tie-ins. “But the tech company, which doesn’t sell ads, is still figuring out how to weave brands into and around its shows and how much it’s willing to let advertisers onto its platform,” Business Insider reports. Netflix doesn’t send proposals and field pitches for creative tie-ins, the traditional way studios handle product placement. It just reaches out directly to brand partners it thinks will drive engagement. “They were moving so fast in developing partnerships, and when leadership took a look under the hood they didn’t like what they saw,” said one marketing exec. “The story became more about the partnerships and less about the IP and, Netflix is all about protecting its IP.” More.

Political Costs

If you think DTC startups are driving up social ad prices … just wait for the 2020 political onslaught. The AAPI Victory Fund, a political advocacy group that focuses on Asian-American turnout, was expected to spend between $5 and $9 per email sign-up for a new donor acquisition campaign on Facebook. But it ditched that plan when the campaign started running and email sign-ups were costing $279, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Democratic primary is pouring gas on the fire, with competition between 21 candidates, a third of whom haven’t met the Democratic National Committee (DNC) threshold of 130,000 individual donors to qualify for the next debate. And billionaire activist Tom Steyer, who entered the race last month, has already spent millions in early primary states to boost his name recognition. More. And, AdExchanger has more on how the DNC rules are reshaping Democratic campaigns.

Swiping Data

Apple’s new privacy-focused credit card prompted a Washington Post reporter to explore how purchase data is shared across the ecosystem. When the reporter bought a banana at Target, he could have shared data with the store, the retail bank (Chase), Visa (which packages up its customers’ data) and the point-of-sale system (e.g. Verifone). Even the biggest companies see value in this third-party data. Google, for example, struck a deal with Mastercard two years ago and uses that third-party purchasing data, combined with receipts sent to Gmail accounts, in order to attribute sales for clients. More.

But Wait, There’s More