Marketers Are Being Promoted To Operational Roles; Brands Remain Loyal To Facebook

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Marketers Rule

Legacy brands rarely choose marketers for broader roles like GM or CEO, but that may be changing. Clorox hired Jackson Jeyanayagam, former CMO of the online retailer Boxed, as VP and general manager of the DTC part of its dietary supplement business, CMO Today reports. Meanwhile Unilever replaced its outgoing CEO with Alan Jope, the marketer who currently leads its Beauty & Personal Care group. And Walmart-owned Bonobos promoted its CMO, Micky Onvural, to chief executive, taking over for co-founder Andy Dunn, who now oversees digital brands for Walmart’s ecom business. More. Onvural told AdExchanger last month that marketers have different perspectives on operations. For instance, Bonobos treats new retail locations as marketing extensions since stores impact search and social campaigns and become critical touchpoints in the ecommerce funnel.

Dollars Over Data

Facebook’s no good, very bad, terrible year hasn’t deterred marketers from pouring money into the platform. Most ad buyers are still giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt – and their dollars – while it works to fix vulnerabilities that have plagued it throughout 2018. That’s a stark contrast to the industry’s reaction to YouTube’s 2017 brand safety scandal, which directly impacted marketer reputations by associating them with negative content, Digiday reports. Until marketer ROI on Facebook is impacted by these issues, data security is a problem for another day. “It doesn’t bode well for long-term partnership and co-development because everything is case by case and the next incident could very well affect what we do,” said Lou Paskalis, SVP of consumer engagement and media investment at Bank of America. More.

Did We Mention Yahoo?

Verizon will officially sunset the Oath name on Jan. 9, replacing it with the more prosaic Verizon Media Group. In a blog post about the change, CEO Guru Gowrappan spends most of his time talking up Yahoo, describing recent enhancements to the Yahoo app, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Mail. Aol, on the other hand, gets nary a mention. “We’ve … set our advertising solutions apart by introducing over 20 new features this quarter, including engaging ad formats and unique supply such as digital OOH, connected TV and programmatic audio,” Gowrappan says.

Mixed Media

When people talk about Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook taking over advertising, they usually mean as walled garden media platforms. But they’re increasingly important advertisers themselves. Alphabet’s advertising was up 90% and Amazon’s up 80% in the first half of 2018 from the previous year, The Information reports. Facebook tripled its ad spend. The increase is partially due to spending to counteract cascades of public scandals. But mobile technology brand advertising has been rising for years. Samsung likewise shot to the top of the Ad Age list of largest advertisers because it spent to dampen news of the recall of its newest phone models. Procter & Gamble will probably regain the title next year, but the trend lines will still be flat or down for CPGs and going up for tech brands. Unfortunately for the digital media companies competing with walled gardens for ad dollars, when Google, Amazon and Facebook spend more they tend to do so with each other or traditional mass media like TV and billboards.

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