Agencies

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.

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.