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Advertisers are shifting their holiday campaign strategies this Black Friday and Cyber Week, moving down the funnel in response to economic headwinds. And so we asked the experts: How are inflationary and recessionary worries impacting media plans around Black Friday and Cyber Week?

Reminders of our own mortality trigger dramatic behavioral change. Terror management theory dictates that any death reminder will initiate a spectrum of behaviors designed to protect and uplift our sense of self. And these adaptations include changes in purchasing behavior, too, writes Swaroop Reddy, CIO at Omnicom Precision Marketing Group.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Gaming The System Apple’s ATT has far-reaching ramifications not just for mobile game monetization but for how studios conceive and build games. Google and Facebook were so adept at funneling players to game developers because they matched people precisely based on gaming history. […]

If you’re a marketer who wants to hear a comforting bedtime story about how brand marketing will endure during the impending recession, you’re not going to get it from Sir Martin Sorrell. The conventional thinking goes that if companies maintain their investment in brand marketing to stay top-of-mind, even when the going gets tough, they’ll be […]

Musk’s promises to overhaul Twitter’s content moderation and user verification policies have caused brands and agencies to rethink their budgetary commitments to the platform. Plus, Musk’s seemingly disingenuous tone shift on advertising and his tweeting of fake news may make brands more inclined to pull budgets from a platform that was never seen as a must-buy anyway.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. When Even The Whales Are Small Fish Microsoft has new job listings for software engineers to develop a line of “low-cost PCs powered through advertising and subscriptions,” reports Windows Latest. It’s one of many recent cases where Microsoft Advertising supports another business line, […]

Kubota Tractor Corporation has plenty of first-party data on customers who are likely to need its line of residential tractors and lawnmowers – namely, people who live on properties with a lot of land. But to capitalize on the trend of people moving from cities to rural locales during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kubota needed to be able to reach people who were actively looking to make such a move. That’s where Realtor.com’s first-party data came into play.

“The personalized targeting data points we’ve gotten used to are under examination,” said Jeremy Hlavacek, CCO of data services provider Experian. “Advertisers want better identity data, better segments and better understanding of consumer behavior. So they’re going to shift to higher-quality, more precise, more accurate, more trusted data sets.”

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Going Nowhere FAST Streaming TV services want people to pick a show already. Too often, viewers peruse a streaming app for a bit and never actually settle on a show, then try another app.  It’s an underappreciated linear advantage that something is always […]

Getting cozy with agencies wasn’t always a priority for Criteo, which has direct relationships with more than 20,000 clients. But now that Criteo has commerce and retail media aspirations, it needs to strike agency partnerships, says its CRO Brian Gleason.

For digital media, Scope 3 includes agencies, tech companies and publishers. Everyone in the digital advertising supply chain is equally responsible for its sustainability. That’s why, to successfully sustain it, marketers must connect their efforts to wider corporate goals, use standard certifications and measurements, and prioritize innovations that create a winning, sustainable scenario for everyone, writes Ben Riley, general manager at SeenThis. 

Media standards are needed to help guide buyers on where to invest and help publishers and platforms do better themselves. The “onus is on advertisers” to drive change,” said Eli Harris, EVP of global digital partnerships and media responsibility at MAGNA Global, presenting the fourth annual edition of the company’s Media Responsibility Index (MRI) at an event in New York City earlier this week.

To plan, target and measure media buys on TV, advertisers need to resolve identity at the household level, which calls for full media transparency, said Kelly Metz, managing director of linear and advanced TV activation at Omnicom Media Group. Kelly Metz will be speaking about the future of TV measurement at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference on October 17-18 in New York City. Click here to register.

Ecommerce momentum has tailed off since last year, but global ecommerce and retail media still have plenty of room for growth, according to GroupM’s 2022 Ecommerce and Retail Media Forecast. Total global retail media spend will hit $160 billion by 2027, which represents a 60% growth rate over five years, GroupM predicts.

Merkle’s retail and consumer goods group has become a testbed for multiple other verticals. Although people tend to think of retail advertising from the perspective of grocery store chains and major CPG brands (Walmart, Target, Kroger and the brands they carry), these days the “retail media” category includes a host of new entrant: Best Buy, Marriott, Lyft, Uber, craft goods store Michael’s.

For much of 2022, business leaders have been bracing for a downturn. But if a recession does hit, advertisers are unlikely to pull back on performance spend as they continue to chase consumer attention amid changing media consumption habits.

Rather than looking at one particular data signal, attention metrics include a variety of data points, which are fed into a machine-learning model to predict the likelihood that a given media environment and ad creative will draw attention from a hypothetical audience member.

Contextual targeting laid the foundations of TV advertising – particularly by ensuring that ads were stitched into content marketers considered “brand safe.” With the advent of CTV, buyers put context on the back-burner in favor of more granular, first-party audience targeting. Now, the pendulum is swinging back again. Why? Two words: signal loss.

Many publishers are betting big on seller-defined audiences (SDA) as a centerpiece of their post-third-party-cookie monetization plans. Problem is, although publishers are eager to test the performance of SDAs, there’s still very little demand from the buy side. AdExchanger spoke with ad agencies and buy-side tech platforms to get their side of the story.

Roy Armale, VMLY&R’s global chief innovation officer, believes in tackling technology with human behavior in mind – and being careful not to let the convenience of technology alter our perception of what it means to be human.

Google’s decision to kick the can on cookie deprecation even further down the road to 2024 did not come as a shock to many in the digital advertising industry. The longer runway will give advertisers and publishers more time to test post-third-party-cookie solutions. But despite the temptation to procrastinate, publishers and tech vendors told AdExchanger they don’t anticipate straying too far from the road maps they’d already established to meet the previous 2023 deadline.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Pronounced She-In, As In “Ooh … She In Trouble Now” The fast-fashion company Shein, a gigantic but secretive Chinese manufacturer of fast fashion, is getting a lot of attention. Which Shein both does and does not want.  On the plus side, Shein has […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Game-Changer The NFL has a history of media and marketing innovation. If we’re keeping score, it was the first sports league to reach every TV in America, the first to invest in studio-style production and the first to mic players on the field. […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Positive Influence Recession-wary brands are redirecting ad spend away from Google Search and Facebook and toward influencer marketing, Marketing Brew reports. Influencer marketing is more effective than other media channels right now, according to Junior Pence, CMO of Peace Out, a skincare brand […]

CTV presents an exciting opportunity for the midmarket and emerging brands and agencies – if they can leave some of the common misconceptions behind, writes Michael Wolk, senior director of business development at Goodway Group. Unlike traditional TV advertising, when the technology and data are used correctly, CTV is closing the gap between large and small brands.

Video games can support intrinsic or native in-game ads, as well as ads that are delivered alongside gameplay but exist outside the game itself, like pause-menu display ads and rewarded video. Marketers can also sponsor and advertise on channels related to gaming, such as at esports events and across online streaming platforms, particularly Twitch and YouTube. And we can’t forget about the metaverse.

Ad agencies are understaffed and their clients – small businesses in particular – often don’t have the time or the technical background to sift through reams of campaign data. And so, increasingly, they’re turning to automation to cut down on the more tedious and time-consuming aspects of account management. Tag, an independent agency based in Iowa, uses a suite of automated reporting tools, including from Basis Technologies, to communicate cross-platform campaign metrics to its clients.

Comcast-owned FreeWheel announced new identity integrations to bring the buy and sell sides of the TV ecosystem together. Its platform now supports ID solutions from Blockgraph, LiveRamp, TransUnion, Experian, Merkle and OpenAP, which can be overlaid with publishers’ and advertisers’ first- and third-party data sets for more accurate cross-screen targeting and measurement.

Marketers who are curious about the bias in their campaign targeting can put their media plans to the test by running them through a free open-source toolkit built by IBM. The idea behind using the tool, dubbed the Advertising Toolkit for AI Fairness 360, is to stay a step ahead of regulation by making sure the ad industry roots out bias in campaign planning, especially the invisible kind that can be amplified by a reliance on data segments (even a marketer’s first-party data) and black box algorithms.

Rising inflation, flagging consumer confidence and uncertainty due to ongoing supply-chain issues have economists predicting a recession. But, based on GroupM’s and Zenith’s mid-year forecasts of the global ad market, the recession fears may be unfounded. Still, after the record highs of 2021, ad spending will see a deceleration in 2022.