CTV

If the nonstop news coming out of Cannes Lions in France this week is making your head spin, this week’s newsletter dispatch will catch you up on how CTV is factoring into this year’s festival.

Streaming platforms won’t stop pumping out new shoppable ad formats and inking new partnerships with outcomes-based measurement providers. But it’s risky to hyperfocus on sales and purchases at the expense of brand advertising.

The average CTV platform now authorizes 30 SSPs to sell its inventory. And one of the most noticeable effects of increased SSP saturation in CTV has been higher costs due to SSP reselling.

Pandora can match the email addresses of its logged-in users to UID2 tokens, which can then be passed through AdsWizz, The Trade Desk and other ad platforms that integrate with UID2.

In today’s newsletter: Pinterest launches an ad optimization solution with familiar-sounding name; consumers can’t live without YouTube; and ad tech leaders try out trade journalism.

For a moment in time, agencies and brands upped their efforts to reach diverse audiences and spend on diverse-owned media. But that hype has since petered out, in part because brands lack the data to effectively target this audience.

In today’s newsletter: What the surge in political ad spend on CTV looks like for the end user; Mars Wrigley tries to make gum stick online; and Google neglects Fitbit after mining it for data.

PilotDesk offers AI- and machine-learning-based workflow software for ad buyers and sellers. These solutions are based on the company’s experience with how ad servers like SpringServe function.

Roku unveils what it’s calling the Roku Exchange, a more direct path between Roku’s ad supply and programmatic demand.

TV-focused demand side platform Madhive acquires Frequence, an omnichannel marketing platform with roots in broadcast TV. Both companies have a foothold with local advertisers.

E.W. Scripps becomes the first CTV publisher to adopt OpenPass, The Trade Desk’s single sign-on product for user authentication.

How big of a deal is The Trade Desk’s top 100 list? AdExchanger spoke to industry experts for their reactions and bounced some of their hot takes off The Trade Desk.

The more new FAST channels there are, the harder it is for them to stand out to advertisers that have long perceived them as the bargain bin of streaming. One way to grab the attention of advertisers is to provide the data and transparency they’ve long been asking for from CTV partners.

Since launch, 82% of advertisers that buy inventory through the Yahoo DSP have tried Backstage at least once. And buyers are seeing lower CPMs from cutting out SSPs.

In today’s newsletter: How changes in streaming ad inventory could impact upfront CPMs; video cracks 50% of engagement on Meta’s platform for the first time; and Apple is in talks to launch Apple TV+ in China.

The TV market’s vanishing impression problem is even more concerning than the numbers indicate. But maybe a little impression scarcity is a good thing.

Contextual ad platform Seedtag acquires Beachfront, a supply-side platform that specializes in TV and video.

While agencies push for more programmatic buying options, publishers want to maintain control in TV ad buying negotiations – and particularly over their “premium” content.

Inspire Brands, the fast-food franchise that owns popular chains such as Dunkin’, Sonic and Arby’s, is rewriting parts of its TV playbook to better manage reach and frequency in streaming media campaigns.

In today’s newsletter: Why Apple’s SKAdNetwork 4.0 is a bust; advertisers are irked by Google’s optimization-driven demand for different creative formats; The Trade Desk releases a baffling list of top 100 publishers.

In today’s newsletter: Publishers fear they’ll be excluded from The Trade Desk’s “premium internet”; buyers weigh in on Netflix’s plans to offer an ad server; and PayPal launches an ad network and data brokerage.

As more ad spend shifts to CTV, there are new opportunities to make errors with campaign delivery. To help address the issue, Zeev Neumeier, founder of Inscape Data, is launching a new venture called GraySwan.

In today’s newsletter: Ampla suspends loans to DTC brands, putting their ad budgets at risk; why Sony is investing in IP rather than a streaming platform; and Netflix will move on from Microsoft in favor of in-house ad tech by 2025.

To some degree, the digitization of TV marketing is inevitable. But there’s a limit to how much TV ad buying should digitize, according to Needham’s Laura Martin.

Enjoy this weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … 

Fixating on ROAS makes it harder to figure out how certain parts of a campaign perform, especially now that retail media buys often include other, less performance-focused channels like display and CTV as audience extension.

Telemundo wants to score bigger ad budgets by proving it can target ads to a multicultural audience in ways that drive real results. It’s also trying to reach more Gen Z by investing more in streaming distribution.

The phaseout of third-party cookies kicked off the sell-side curation trend. But it’s also being driven by advertiser concerns about open web media quality and the need to enhance publisher contextual signals with audience data.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Signaling Change Amazon has a new ad measurement product for publishers. Signal IQ, as it’s called, is designed to help sites measure the impact of alternative IDs on campaign performance, including for streaming media, Ad Age reports. The idea is to make it easier […]

In addition to taking execs through its plans to launch its own ad platform, Netflix hosted a separate event open to the press to showcase its content as part of its efforts to stand out to advertisers.