Anthony Vargas ( anthony@adexchanger.com ) covers publisher news and sell-side technology, with a particular focus on the rise of alternative datasets to replace those derived from third-party cookies. He also covers the gaming, digital audio and digital out of home markets. His previous B2B publishing experience includes covering the commercial audiovisual and music retail industries. He also has a background in literary publishing.
Fireside’s platform allows creators to distribute content across a range of media channels, including social media, CTV and podcasts, and monetize it how they see fit. Fireside recently partnered with influencer management firm Slash Management to create Slash Studios, a Fireside network dedicated to content that brings audiences behind the scenes of talent management and social media star making.
Advertisers love a captive audience, and there are few audiences more captive than mass-transit riders. So it was perhaps inevitable that Intel-owned urban mobility app Moovit would launch an ad platform. Moovit’s advertising service is live for advertisers in Latin America, Italy and Israel, and the company plans to roll it out everywhere its app is used.
Investment firm North Equity has amassed a portfolio of established media brands like Popular Science, Field & Stream and Saveur with a few new media upstarts mixed in, including The Drive, Task & Purpose, Donut Media and MEL Magazine. In 2021, North Equity launched Recurrent Ventures as its media division. Its CRO, Matt Young, spoke with AdExchanger about Recurrent’s acquisition strategy, its ambitions in CTV and gaming and why the company is prioritizing its private marketplace business to reduce its reliance on open web programmatic.
The IAB Tech Lab’s seller-defined audience (SDA) spec is touted as a key contextual targeting alternative for the post-third-party-cookie digital ad ecosystem – one predicated on privacy-friendly addressability and publisher first-party data monetization. Some publishers are enthusiastic about testing SDA campaigns in the run-up to Google’s 2023 deadline for the phaseout of third-party cookies in Chrome. There is growing concern, however, about a marked lack of advertiser interest in doing the same.
Google may have a solution to the antitrust regulatory pressure it’s facing from governments around the world: a proactive spinoff. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is exploring splitting Google’s digital ad business into a separate entity under the Alphabet umbrella. The question is whether Google’s proposed solution will pass muster with regulators, and if it does, who stands to win – and who stands to lose?
The impending Google customer force-shift from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) represents a major change to how advertising ROI will be measured via Google’s services going forward. But publishers that spoke to AdExchanger about their migration plans aren’t feeling the same pressure as with, say, preparation for third-party cookie deprecation, Google’s other major upheaval scheduled for next year.
What happens when your main monetization partner starts flagging your content as spam? Freecycle turned to header bidding to reduce its reliance on Google AdSense, but the company’s one-person engineering team had trouble managing the header-bidding system and the constant stream of Prebid updates on top of web development duties. So, after a 70% drop in ad revenue, Freecycle handed its digital ad business over to PubWise’s managed service.
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.
Google’s decision to delay third-party cookie deprecation until 2023 came the day before Salon CRO Justin Wohl’s wedding. Salon had converted its ad business to an open-web programmatic model a few years earlier, so the brief reprieve from signal loss came as a huge relief and another reason to pop some champagne. Since then, Wohl has been laying the groundwork for effective post-cookie monetization on the open web.
The audio advertising market is heating up, and investors are getting in on the action. Audio analytics platform Veritonic announced Tuesday it raised $7.5 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to date to $14 million. The company will use the funds to further its audio measurement and attribution capabilities and to grow its engineering and sales staff, said Veritonic founder and CEO Scott Simonelli.
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.
PepsiCo’s video game marketing philosophy revolves around gaining a gamer’s trust through three main methods: being authentic, adding value and creating a consistent presence in the gaming community. These priorities have helped PepsiCo integrate its family of brands into highly sought-after video game fandoms, such as Call of Duty and NBA 2K, PepsiCo’s head of esports and gaming Paul Mascali told AdExchanger.
Foundry, formerly known as IDG Communications, wants to shed its old identity and build a new reputation not as a digital publisher but as a provider of data and marketing tech, according to Foundry President Kumaran Ramanathan. Ramanathan spoke to AdExchanger about why Foundry walked away from open-web programmatic, how it’s fusing its first-party data with a marketing and data tech stack and its M&A ambitions.
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.
The IAB, in collaboration with the IAB Tech Lab and the Media Rating Council (MRC), released its first update to in-game ad measurement standards since 2009. The new standards reexamine the metrics for counting a valid in-game ad impression and add criteria for measuring ad placements in 3D and virtual environments. They also define in-game measurement terms in alignment with cross-channel measurement efforts.
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.
The market is not being kind to digital media companies. The nearly 40% drop in BuzzFeed’s stock price on Monday and the decline of its valuation from $1.5 billion when it went public in December to roughly $300 million now is no doubt causing other digital-native publishers to rethink their IPO plans. But any doom and gloom about the long-term viability of digital publishers in public markets is likely overblown.
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.
Frustration with blanket brand safety and suitability solutions is boiling over, leading some publishers to call for marketers to block the blocklist and throw away the keywords. That frustration was on display during a brand safety and contextual targeting panel at AdMonsters’ Ops 2022 conference in New York City on Monday.
CreativeX will use the funds to broaden its offering beyond its current focus on providing feedback on social media creatives. The company will also launch new measurement capabilities, including solutions for rating a campaign’s accessibility and sustainability. And by upgrading its API, marketers can integrate creative data into their existing data lakes more easily.
You’ve probably heard (dozens of times) by now that first-party data will be the key to post-third-party-cookie ad targeting. But what exactly is first-party data? How does it differ from second-party, third-party and zero-party data? And what makes first-party data more suited to a privacy-centric ad experience?
In order to gain access to performance advertising budgets (and prove out the power of publisher first-party data), Vox Media is relaunching Group Nine’s G9 Direct performance marketing solution under the new name VM Connect. The relaunch is also a milestone in Vox Media’s integration of Group Nine’s digital properties and tech stack following its […]
Vibenomics announced a $12.3 million Series B round on Tuesday, led by Panoramic Ventures, bringing its total funding to just over $30 million. Vibenomics expects to grow its roster of 6,000 retail locations (just over half of which are grocery stores like Hy-Vee, QuikTrip, Kroger and GetGo) to more than 20,000 locations by the end of 2023.
At Programmatic I/O in Las Vegas, CafeMedia’s Paul Bannister, Tinuiti’s Nirish Parsad and Insider’s Jana Meron weighed in on the ad industry’s worsening signal-loss problem due to the deprecation of device identifiers and third-party cookies.
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.
Independent record label EMPIRE is well aware of the crossover appeal between video games and certain subgenres of music, including rap. So the label recently partnered with in-game ad platform Anzu to promote Babyface Ray’s new album, “FACE,” among young male rap fans in targeted geographic locations.
In today’s hybrid retail environment, customers can window shop in person or comparison shop online before completing their purchase in a store or on the internet. Or they partake in “buy online, pick up in store” (BOPIS). The need to capture the customer’s journey between online and offline behavior was the seed for Foursquare’s new Closed Loop feature, the location data platform’s latest addition to its attribution product
Jay Glogovsky, vice president of revenue operations and analytics for The New York Times, talked to AdExchanger about how The Times relies on direct partnerships to create a positive ad experience for its readers, why open-web programmatic is the wrong choice for a privacy-centric in-app experience and why publishers should double down on close partnerships rather than worry about who will control the keys to monetization.
Despite what you may have heard, artificial intelligence (AI) is not a magic solution for every problem facing the ad industry. But AI can help advertisers optimize the performance of their campaigns. Luxury beauty brand Charlotte Tilbury, for example, recently tested a custom integration with Scibids, a company that specializes in AI-based marketing solutions for the demand side. Over the course of two months, the brand was able to reduce its average cost per acquisition (CPA) by 29%.
Less is more for Dotdash Meredith, IAC’s fastest-growing business unit. When Meredith’s Health.com site migrated to Dotdash’s digital platform last week, the impact was immediate. Although the site now hosts 30% fewer ads, its pages load five times faster, and the click-through rate on ads is up by 60%.
