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AdExchanger is taking the day off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Our daily news roundup will return on Tues., Jan. 16.
The Clean Slate
Disney has been talking up its data clean room at CES. It now has 140 demand customers, and clean room activations grew by 570% since a year ago, Adweek reports.
But this is a good example of how percentage growth as a baseline can be misleading.
While a 570% uptick in clean room activations sounds like a lot, the super-high growth rate means the base number was relatively small.
Disney is working to increase adoption by expanding its clean room to more cloud platforms – namely, the Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, which both launched products last year to support third-party clean room integrations. It already works with Habu and Snowflake as cloud-based clean room operators.
Doomed To Repeat
There are too many streaming services, and they cost too much.
But desirable entertainment is increasingly walled in to individual apps with low distribution elsewhere. In addition to a baffling array of exclusive content rights, streamers have adopted counter-consumer tactics that prioritize growth but frustrate audiences.
Streamers, for instance, have alienated viewers by hiking prices and otherwise squeezing them for revenue at the expense of streaming media quality and the overall viewing experience.
In response, those audiences, according to Techdirt, are picking up a nasty old habit: piracy.
Case in point: It’s one thing for people to opt into ads, but Prime Video is planning to force-shift subscribers to ads later this month. Meanwhile, Peacock is making subscribers pay more to watch most seasons of popular shows like “The Office” and “Parks and Rec” without ads.
These and other “obnoxious nickel-and-diming efforts” have pushed many general users back to piracy, which didn’t stop because of philosophical opposition but because of tech barriers and the widespread adoption of music streaming.
SMS, What A Mess
The CMA, the UK’s antitrust watchdog, published new guidance outlining tougher standards for algorithmic transparency and potential self-preferencing by large tech platforms.
Relatively few companies will qualify for the added scrutiny, reports UK Tech News. Those that do are dubbed “SMS” companies, meaning they have “strategic market status.” (It’s a poorly chosen acronym considering SMS means something else – “short message service,” a reference to text messaging – for big consumer tech companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft.)
“The new digital markets competition regime will help ensure that tech challenger firms can bring forward genuinely disruptive and exciting new innovations that will create great new products for consumers,” according to the CMA.
That’s been the usual line taken by EU and UK legislators and regulators when it comes to Silicon Valley crackdowns. Yet there’s been no resurgence (surgence?) of European consumer tech or software as a result of their actions. Instead, the new consensus is that browsing the web in Europe is a drag, while an increasing number of software, retail and consumer tech startups take a pass on the EU bloc.
But Wait, There’s More!
WPP is considering options to sell its 40% stake in market research firm Kantar, including a possible sale to Bain Capital, which owns the other 60%. [Bloomberg]
Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot, maker of robot vacuums, is in doubt after Amazon refuses to make business concessions to EU regulators. [CNBC]
Sustainability standards are coming for digital advertising. [Digiday]
Google lays off hundreds of employees across its Voice Assistant unit, hardware and engineering teams. [Reuters]
Ecommerce tech Rokt acquires AfterSell and mulls a potential IPO. [Axios]
State legislators tighten rules for AI-generated content in political ads, which could be a huge problem this year. [NYT]
You’re Hired!
David Amrani, a 10-year Digiday vet and former COO, takes over as chief executive. [release]
