Wayfair's Budding Paid Media Business; YouTube's Changing Homepage Ads

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Commerce + Ads

Wayfair is expanding its paid media business, also known as “Wayfair Media Solutions,” Digiday reports. Like Amazon, Wayfair reports its sponsored products revenue under an “other” revenue category, which was a relatively tiny $13 million in Q3 2018 (Amazon’s “other” business did $2.2 billion in the same period). “The reality is we think [sponsored products] will take a little while to ramp up,” Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah told investors during the company’s earnings report last quarter. “The volume starts relatively small, and I think the real economics for everyone involved get good as it ramps and so we’re in a ramp phase, but I don’t think of the ramp as not in a quarter, but as many quarters.” More.

Mastheads Up

YouTube is changing its pricing model for homepage takeover ads, its most valuable real estate for brands. The masthead ads have historically been sold ahead of time at a fixed price per day. Now the ads will be sold on a CPM basis, which means users will likely see more brands per day and advertisers will bid up the price, Business Insider reports. The change also better reflects how advertisers buy connected TV inventory, like targeting specific audiences or by time of day, says Tara Walpert Levy, Google’s VP of agency and brand solutions. A brand could set the price of YouTube’s masthead for a week if it was willing to foot the bill. “There’s only 365 days in a year and a lot of advertisers have interest in the masthead and use it on more than one day,” Levy says. More.

Big Game Buzz

With the Super Bowl over, we can now begin the postmortem on the commercials (as well as the LA Rams’ offense). There’s disagreement about which ads got the most social media activity. Salesforce rated the top five spots in this order: Bud Light (31,545 mentions, 73.1% positive sentiment), Pepsi (22,600, 83.2% positive), Budweiser (15,806, 88.9% positive), Doritos (13,057, 68.2% positive) and Avocados from Mexico (12,557, 97.2% positive). Meanwhile, iSpot.tv, using digital share of voice (DSOV), had a completely different view from the top: Marvel (DSOV: 33.23%, 99% positive sentiment), Verizon (13.11%, 62% positive), Xbox (7.80%, 95% positive), Amazon (5.63%, 93% positive) and Budweiser (3.94%, 82% positive). Incidentally, the big game itself wasn’t that great, with a Nielsen US household rating of 41.1, the lowest since 2005. More.

But Wait, There’s More!