Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
After A Fashion
Criteo inked an exclusive deal with British online clothing retailer ASOS to be the ad tech pipes for its advertising business.
“The ASOS vision is to become the go-to global destination for fashion-loving 20-somethings and we want to take brands on the journey with us,” writes Elton Ollerhead, director of the ASOS Media Group in a release about the deal.
A couple of things to note.
Firstly, Criteo’s role is to manage on-site display ads, off-site programmatic and search product listings. The ASOS Media Group keeps creative services, social media, email marketing and app push notifications.
Secondly, Criteo specifies that it’s the exclusive partner for “endemic brands’ advertising” – and that’s an important detail.
A Criteo fashion advertiser may want to target ASOS customers, sure. But there are also many interesting hypothetical crossovers for ASOS with, say, TripAdvisor or Marriott – both of which, it should be noted, have their own retail media units as part of a joint push to reach young professionals who travel regularly.
It’s also not hard to imagine that Uber or Lyft could propose a marketing partnership for fashion week.
Non-endemic revenue may only be theoretical, but it’s definitely promising.
Tall Tok
TikTok toes a fine line between legit content promotion and “heating,” the practice of boosting certain posts when the algorithm isn’t cutting it.
TikTok execs admitted to heating content for tentpole events during SXSW in Austin over the weekend, Insider reports. But Jeff Louisma, TikTok’s US head of cyber and data defense, insists that what TikTok does is “much like how Netflix promotes a featured video or movie on its homepage.”
Not quite.
Streamers either promote their own titles or pay app distributors like Roku or Vizio to sponsor content for them. Neither strategy is an example of heating, whereby platforms boost content they don’t own without telling anyone. (Heated content is not labeled as sponsored, nor as an ad.)
You wouldn’t be wrong for thinking, “Well, who cares if TikTok wants to promote the World Cup?” But TikTok’s covert heating practice begs the question of what else might be hiding inside that magic TikTok engine.
TikTok’s algorithms are already drawing scrutiny from suspicious lawmakers. The notion of heating could spur suspicions that TikTok’s Chinese parent company has a method for promoting certain ideas very quickly to young Americans.
Eyes Right Here
Podcast publishers are mulling a pivot-to-video, so to speak, as preferences shift toward watchable podcasts and video-focused platforms.
YouTube ranks first among podcast listeners’ preferred platforms, and almost half of active podcast consumers say they prefer video to audio-only episodes, Digiday reports.
YouTube also helps with podcast discovery since it has a built-in recommendation algorithm, and video views translate to more valuable ad impressions.
Not to mention that YouTube has the only reliable ad rev share going for content creators.
Still, high-quality production costs a pretty penny, and podcast publishers must consider whether going all-in on video will change the nature of their show and relationship with listeners (*ahem* viewers).
Podcasts are “very intimate, and they’re very unself-conscious because you don’t have a camera in your face most of the time,” one podcast exec tells Digiday. “You don’t want the fundamental creative of the thing to suffer just because you’re trying to exploit it on other platforms.”
But Wait, There’s More!
Bob Iger: The streaming video business is “very, very tricky right now.” [Next TV]
News publishers lament how ad verification tech categorizes them in programmatic bids. [Digiday]
Twitter rolls out a video marketing course for advertisers (whoever’s left, that is). [Social Media Today]
The Google-Microsoft AI rivalry continues. [The Verge]
Speaking of Microsoft, the company just laid off an entire team dedicated to ethical AI while doubling down on its partnership with OpenAI. [TechCrunch]
And speaking of Google, it introduced new enhancements to its AdMob platform. [blog post]
