Hospitality Vertical Pivots To ‘Clean’; New Snap Ad Unit

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

Here To Stay

Hotel and hospitality companies are well known for their marketing partnerships with food, cosmetics and retail brands. But a recent tie-up between Hilton and Lysol, the cleaning product brand owned by Reckitt Benckiser, on new cleaning protocols across all Hilton hotels is a new one, Bloomberg reports. And Airbnb published an update on Monday about its “Enhanced Cleaning Initiative,” a new standards and certification program for hosts. Airbnb partnered with Ecolab, a hygiene, water and energy technology company. “As we think about how behavior changes during this time, the importance of cleanliness is going to stay with us,” said Phil Cordell, Hilton’s head of new brand development. “The renewed focus on cleaning is not going to go away.”

First Things First

Snap launched a new ad unit that lets brands reserve the first commercial spot for the first video that a given user watches that day, regardless of the program. Commercials are six-second, non-skippable video ads that run between shows on Discover. AT&T is testing the product. The ad unit will be available first through direct sales and eventually programmatically with Snap’s self-serve platform, VP of global agency partnerships David Roter tells Adweek. Snap is banking on video ads, attributing much of its success in Q1 to new non-skippable units introduced last year. “There’s just a good amount of marketplace demand for a premium takeover, giving brands an opportunity to reach the audience that we deliver on a daily basis,” Roter said.

GDPR Falls Short?

The GDPR hasn’t proven as impactful as advocates hoped. Lack of enforcement, low funding and stalling from tech companies have defanged the law, The New York Times reports. Google is the only tech giant penalized so far, with a fine equal to one-tenth of what it generates in sales per day. For consumers, GDPR means little more than constant consent banners across the web. “We have failed to realize the potential of GDPR thus far,” said Johnny Ryan, chief policy officer at Brave. The coronavirus is a test of Europe’s privacy-first approach, because the contact tracing technology many governments want to implement involves aggregating location data to identify people who could have been exposed to recently confirmed cases. Supporters say it’s too soon to draw conclusions on GDPR’s effectiveness.

But Wait, There’s More!