Platforms

The onset of the digital media recession, if not the global economic recession, has struck Google. But Google’s doing just fine, though, thanks for asking.

How should brands think about advertising in the metaverse? The question is a little hard to answer when there’s no consensus about what exactly the metaverse is or what it might become

Aflac launched its first-ever campaign on TikTok, dubbed #DuckVibes, to engage younger consumers with what it considers a mid-funnel-focused strategy. The new campaign, which will run throughout the summer, uses catchy music, lyrics and visuals involving the eponymous Aflac duck to encourage “duets,” a split-screen feature TikTokers use to retroactively “respond to” other creators’ videos.

The platforms taketh away – but sometimes regulators can giveth back. Google is seriously flirting with the idea of reopening YouTube inventory to appease European regulators and Criteo just won its 2019 case against Meta over being booted from the Facebook Marketing Partner program.

Back in 1997, when the oldest Gen Zers were born, Liz Smith joined a Silicon Valley startup called Yahoo! What started off as a group of misfits on the internet turned into a “Frankenstein’s monster” of sorts, said Smith, who left Yahoo! for film school and captures the effects of technological submersion on the next generation in her latest movie, I Am Gen Z.

Whenever there’s a sociopolitical or economic crisis, the lowest rung of online marketers finds a way to prey on the vulnerable and disenfranchised. The pending overturn of Roe v. Wade is no different – it’s creating a new class of online audiences that are potential prey, and publishers can stand to take more steps to filter out misleading ads (like donation scams and brand infringement) that harvest and sell users’ personal information.

TikTok’s content relies heavily on influencers and creators. As prime ad real estate for targeting younger “video native” audiences, TikTok is using its market positioning with brands to capitalize on both the creator marketplace and ecommerce through shoppable video trends, said Melissa Yang, TikTok’s head of ecosystem partnerships, speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference earlier this week.

A rose by any name will smell as sweet, sure. But attribution by any name doesn’t work the same. Call it what you want, the problem of channel-based incremental testing is important. Measured raised $21 million last week, as it expands in the post-attribution attribution category, alongside other startups like Triple Whale, which raised $24 million a month ago, and Northbeam.

Seven months ago, TikTok surpassed one billion worldwide users, breaking into a club that previously consisted only of Google and Facebook apps. Since then, TikTok has been on a massive ad platform expansion campaign as it tries to both follow in the footsteps of apps like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and differentiate itself from the old guard of the billion-strong walled gardens.

It’s not surprising that AppTrackingTransparency and the end of third-party cookies on Chrome didn’t come up during the razzle-dazzle of Meta’s NewFronts debut this week. But advertisers have been asking about both a lot, especially for brands focused on commerce.

Facebook marketer Rok Hladnik awoke last Thursday to discover that more than half of the 140 Facebook ad accounts he operates had been randomly turned off. The week before, the campaigns were overspending in the wee hours of the morning, when they should have been dormant. 2021 was the year of the cicada swarms in the US. But the bugs have come for the metaverse this year, apparently.

Signal loss – and dealing with it – was a big theme during Meta’s first quarter earnings call on Wednesday. Mark Zuckerberg referred to signal loss due to Apple’s privacy changes as a “meaningful headwind.”

Publishers that pack their ad servers with hundreds of thousands of line items can go ahead and clear them out: Google Ad Manager is building a connection to Prebid to better support header bidding

“The best way for us to deal with this is not to complain, but to partner with the ecosystem,” says Alvin Bowles, Meta’s VP of business ecosystem partnerships. AdExchanger caught up with Bowles to talk about the metaverse, Facebook haters, the $10 billion in revenue set to evaporate due to Apple ATT and the rise of TikTok.

Meta is bringing all of its automated ad products together under a single roof. Meta Advantage, which is what Meta is calling its new suite, may sound like a health plan but is really a home for Meta’s existing automated tools, including lookalike expansion, automated app ads and automatic placements, as well as the future home for other automated products in the works.

Meta announced plans on Thursday to create content-based controls for Feed (formerly News Feed) on Facebook and Instagram. The question is, why did it take so long for Meta to start bringing third-party brand suitability to Feed? After all, the News Feed was one of Facebook’s first products, launched during the long-ago year of 2006.

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.

In September, Meta (then still Facebook) alerted advertisers that Apple’s privacy changes were causing Facebook to undercount web conversions on iOS by around 15%. Meta now says it’s been able to close its measurement gap by nearly half, from 15% to roughly 8%.

Special purpose acquisition companies have fallen out of favor. But demand-side platform AdTheorent, which went public via SPAC late last year, has no regrets about the route it took to IPO.

As Mark Zuckerberg extolled the virtues of Facebook’s TikTok clone, Reels, on the company’s earnings call Wednesday afternoon, (apparently it’s the fastest-growing content format in terms of engagement on Instagram) Meta’s share price was experiencing an alarming and precipitous slide.

Late last week, Google made its first legal move to try and get the Texas-led antitrust case into its ad tech business tossed before it hits a courtroom. In its motion to dismiss, Google makes numerous arguments as to why the court should reject the suit, and they can be summed up thusly: If you didn’t like it, you should have said something earlier, but we didn’t do anything wrong anyway.

On Wednesday, Comscore announced plans to launch Comscore Everywhere, a cross-platform measurement suite that will eventually combine TV, connected TV, video, digital and social media measurement into one deduplicated offering. Nielsen, Comscore’s longtime rival, is also working on a cross-platform measurement solution called Nielsen ONE.

Media.Monks, S4 Capital’s content, data and media arm, is going big on Salesforce. On Wednesday, Media.Monks merged with Maverick Digital, a 50-person Salesforce consulting and implementation firm with a presence in North America and India. The deal price was not disclosed. Maverick Digital, whose clients include UFC Gym, Mercy Health and the Chicago Blackhawks hockey […]

Snap is bringing more machine learning into the media buying process on its platform. Although the release is not directly related to signal loss due to Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework, the move should help attract performance advertisers to the app. On Tuesday, Snap said advertisers can now buy multiple ad format types within a single ad […]

On Friday, a New York judge unsealed most of the Texas-led antitrust lawsuit against Google – and the devil is in the unredacted details. According to the judge, P. Kevin Castel, Google’s argument that the filing needed to be redacted for privacy reasons didn’t hold water. The multistate suit alleges anticompetitive ad tech policies and […]

Snowflake, the cloud data services company, launched a Media Cloud on Tuesday, bringing together customers and businesses with specific needs related to media and advertising. The new Media Cloud is a suite of data products and integrations for services such as measurement and attribution, identity resolution, profile enrichment and advertising activations. Experian’s identity data and […]

Longtime Facebook executive Nicola Mendelsohn will permanently fill Carolyn Everson’s shoes (so to speak). Everson, who served as VP of Facebook’s global business group, left the company in June after more than a decade and took a job as president of Instacart a few months later. Marne Levine, Facebook’s newly appointed chief business officer (also […]

There’s no denying climate change – on YouTube and in Google ads, at least. On Thursday, a week after banning anti-vaccine activists and accounts from YouTube, Google announced a new policy to prohibit the monetization of content that denies the existence of or effects related to climate change as agreed upon by authoritative scientific consensus. Think […]

Pinterest’s big bet on social commerce continues. Pinterest added several shopping-focused features on Wednesday, including a new spin on shoppable video, the ability for creators to tag brands they want to collaborate with and the option for merchants to feature brand values, such as “woman-owned” or “eco-friendly business,” directly on their profile. Merchants can now […]

Pre-campaign reach estimates on Facebook are about to get less precise – on purpose. In the coming weeks, Facebook will modify the way it displays potential reach and interest category predictions in Ads Manager so that advertisers see a range rather than a specific number. Read the blog post. The change comes in the face of […]