Agencies

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.

As clients look for alternatives to third-party cookies, ad agency Dentsu can steer them to its in-house Contextual Intelligence tool, which launched today. Although contextual targeting is often considered inferior to demographic or behavioral targeting, it can drive performance. Jewelry retailer Pandora piloted the tool during the 2022 Valentine’s Day season. Ads placed using the solution represented 2% of campaign spend, but drove 36% of revenue, a 24x return on investment.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brick By Brick-And-Mortar The march of the retail media networks cannot be stopped.  Dollar General on Tuesday announced a rebrand of its advertising business, now DGMN (for Dollar General Media Network), to extend its data to ad-buying across the web. According to the […]

Taking the “room” metaphor literally, the current clean room system is akin to a collection of stand-alone rooms existing outside the form and function of a house. That’s why the next level must look beyond clean rooms. It’s time to build a clean house using a method called distributed analytics, writes Marc Rossen, SVP investment and activation analytics at Omnicom Media Group.

The IAB’s Podcast Upfronts in May touted advancements in dynamic ad insertion, measurement and attribution and brand safety and suitability, as well as the rise of podcast networks. But ad agencies say the technology powering podcast-based marketing is not sufficiently developed to deliver what advertisers need to effectively target impressions and measure campaign effectiveness. And they believe the industry should do more to address brand safety concerns around podcast content.

It’s chilly out there, but PubMatic had a decent quarter. Organic revenue for Q1 totaled $54.6 million, up 25% year-over-year, representing PubMatic’s seventh consecutive quarter of 20% revenue growth or more. PubMatic’s stock was up a smidge, about .5%, in after-hours trading.

Criteo is still using third-party cookies while it can. Why not? But “if tomorrow we don’t have access to them, then we’ll have to use something else,” said CEO Megan Clarken. What sort of “something else?” Criteo has been testing what it refers to as “more privacy-enabled, controllable and reliable signals.”

The moment you entrust some or all of your digital advertising strategy to an agency is the moment you make yourself vulnerable to the pains of “red tape.” Simple tasks take too long, and you’re beholden to a third party’s business priorities in order to execute on your business objectives, says Rob Beeler, founder of Beeler.Tech.

Well, here’s the most ad techy thing ever: Clean room platform InfoSum is integrating with Unified ID 2.0 to expand how advertisers can use their first-party data in the bidstream. Omnicom Media Group is one of the first buy-side partners planning to take advantage of the integration.

Clients of growth marketing agency Tuff saw “painful” results on Facebook as a result of signal loss, but it’s been able to roll with the changes, according to CEO Ellen Jantsch. There was even a silver lining. Apple’s ATT accelerated the indie agency’s move away from last-click attribution. Plus: navigating an acquisition while pregnant.

Recently, McCormick brand Frank’s Redhot placed banner ads inside Basketball Battle, a free-to-play 2D basketball game developed for mobile devices. A proprietary metric from Frameplay, an in-game advertising company which uses computer vision to measure the viewability of in-game ads, monitored how long the ad remained visible to the player and compared these results to attention metrics for more established channels like social media.

With new first-party ID solutions flooding the market, the buy side of the ad industry is looking for ways to enhance campaign targeting and attribution by matching different first-party data sets. To that end, Goodway Group built its own first-party ID solution dubbed Passport One. The tool allows advertisers to connect to multiple data sets in one place.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Kilar Out Outgoing WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar had interesting tidbits for Bloomberg about HBO Max advertising, now that WarnerMedia merged with Discovery (and is run by Discovery chief David Zalsav).  Set aside the rubble of AT&T’s once-ambitious plan to build a top global […]

It makes perfect sense for TV manufacturers to break into advertising. But what about content and software-first companies considering the legacy biz? There are pros and cons to the move, but it all comes down to a profitable plan because “a better go-to-market strategy will crush better technology every time,” said GroupM’s global president of business intelligence Brian Wieser.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Privacy Tech And Privacy Theater The ad industry, particularly publishers, need programmatic ways to convey signals of trust. There’s the IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework. But that was ruled illegal by the Belgian data privacy regulator and is being overhauled.  The regulators say […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Royal Rumble Of Ratings The TV analytics company EDO, co-founded by Edward Norton, raised $80 million at a $200 million valuation.  The actor’s involvement stemmed from Norton’s experience with streaming production, since there are no obvious benchmarks like box office or DVD […]

Despite fragmentation and automation in TV inventory, marketers and brands have options to ensure advertising quality in their media buys. Ad quality is a “team sport” that requires industry-wide standards, writes Louqman Parampath, Roku’s VP of Product Management. But on top of that, “the best way for brands to ensure quality is to prioritize direct relationships with trusted platforms and publishers.”

Paula Connard, chief personalization officer at Horizon Media, on why third-party data is disappointing, why testing proposals in the Chrome Privacy Sandbox isn’t a top priority, why the indie agency decided to build rather than buy a data platform and the questions she’s getting from clients as they deal with signal loss.

At Tuesday’s ONE22 conference, NBCUniversal shared its second update on its ad tech stack One Platform’s developments for its clients. “Identity will be the new currency,” said NBCU’s chief data officer, John Lee, which means One Platform will focus on three key areas of growth this year: first-party data, automation and measurement.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Defunding Disinfo Is defunding disinformation the open web’s biggest challenge? The ad tech consultancy/watchdog Check My Ads made that case at SXSW last week, Fast Company reports. According to the group’s founders, the disinformation crisis is solvable but will require ad exchanges to […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Keep It Clean Clean room?  More like a mud room. It’s where people can leave their “dirty” (read: private first-party) data without ruining the rest of the house.  The marketer point of view often goes something like this: “‘Our data is going to […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Dos Va Donya IPONWEB founder and CEO Boris Mouzykantskii published an open letter and update on the company’s actions since the start of the war in Ukraine.  There was theoretical concern the war would be a wrench in the $380 million acquisition of IPONWEB […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. How “About” That? The Office of the California Attorney General issued a potentially impactful decision this week. Heads-up, ad tech companies: Inferences made about customers or consumers can be classified as personal information, even when the constituent data pieces aren’t personal or are gathered […]

McDonald’s has been criticized for alleged bias against Black-owned media. But McDonald’s recently struck a multiyear advertising deal with Pod Digital Media (PDM) as part of an effort to increase its ad spend with minority content creators and expand its reach with diverse audiences.

The Trade Desk recently made waves with the rollout of OpenPath, its direct-to-publisher offering, and its plan to turn off Google Open Bidding, a one-two punch in supply path optimization (SPO). Both of these SPO moves could reshuffle the ad buying ecosystem, making publishers less reliant on SSPs and cutting off a revenue source for Google’s Open Bidding.

Ad agencies have had an oversupply of crises to deal with over the past two years. Between the pandemic, the ongoing disruption of how the ad industry gathers and uses data and the Great Resignation, leaders have contended with outside forces on multiple fronts. Kepler’s CEO of North America Remy Stiles details how she’s keeping the ship steering in the right direction.

Content moderation policies sound good on paper. But policies are tested in practice. The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine is yet another example that content moderation will never be perfect. Then again, that’s not a reason to let perfect get in the way of good.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Privacy Sword, More Like The urgency is real to replace the EU-US Privacy Shield, the data-sharing accord brought down by the 2020 Schrems II decision.  EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said a replacement is “high priority.” Lobbyists from San Francisco and Seattle are all […]

The Great Resignation has hit digital and media agencies hard. But there are some things agencies can do to stop the not-so-virtuous cycle, said Ralph Pardo, US CEO of Omnicom agency Hearts & Science, speaking at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview event in New York City on Tuesday.

“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.  Today’s column is by Pam Zucker, SVP and head of marketing at Amobee.  In a recent interview, IAB CEO David Cohen challenged advertisers “to rethink how they buy television.” He highlighted the dramatic change in consumption since the onset […]