Apple's Data Perspective; Meager TV Ad Spend Growth

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Does Apple Care?

CEO Tim Cook draws a hard line between Apple’s mission and other companies that plumb for data. In a TV interview with Charlie Rose, he said, “Our business is not based on having information about you. You’re not our product. Our products are these, and this watch, and Macs and so forth. And so we run a very different company.” Insert frowny face for any marketer hoping to leverage Apple Pay transaction data for attribution modeling. Read more via Re/code and watch the clip.

TV Troubles

TV ad spend grew a meager 5% in the second quarter, while digital increased 6.2%, according to data from Kantar. Several of the nation’s biggest advertisers cut spending on traditional media and online display. P&G, for example, reduced spend in both those categories by 17%. But TV chiefs were hesitant to admit a definitive shift to digital. “I do think it’s mostly the economy at its core,” Fox President Chase Carey said. “You’ve got a view that people have a lack of confidence in the economy, and advertisers would like to make decisions on shorter time frames, which means scatter.” The WSJ has more.

Rebranding Radio

Clear Channel first introduced its iHeartRadio app in 2008, now home to some 800 of the company’s radio stations. Now it has adopted that app’s name, becoming IHeartMedia. It’s all about projecting digital DNA. “Any significant growth in radio … is likely to come from the digital side,” writes the NYT’s Ben Sisario, citing eMarketer findings that “revenue from broadcast radio will remain essentially flat through 2018, at about $15.6 billion, while digital sales will gain more than 160 percent during that time, to $5.3 billion.” Gone are the days Clear Channel was feared as a media monopolist. More.

Synapse Fires

Multiscreen audience platform Adbrain has officially launched a self-serve DSP (more info). Launch partners on the platform, dubbed Synapse, include M&C Saatchi Mobile, Fetch and Omnicom Media Group. Adbrain CEO Gareth Davies sat down with AdExchanger in August to talk about the challenges of migrating clients from managed service to self-serve. Read that interview.

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