The Point Of No Returns
When tariffs lead to manufacturing shortfalls, marketers will have inventory delay issues that have nothing to do with ad impressions.
Retail media is built for that, though.
Brands and merchants connect real-time product feeds to ad platforms, which means they can easily halt spend when, say, something is out of stock. But as Shopify grows its advertising and data business, the company is extending that mentality to product returns and payback modeling.
“It is a uniquely Shopify thing,” CEO Harley Finkelstein told investors during Thursday’s earnings report. Shopify has “incredible visibility and signal,” he said. “We can actually get a sense of changes to CAC [customer acquisition cost] within a week.”
Meaning, if a certain item or type of product is early in a growth spike, Shopify can be quick to spot opportunities for customer acquisition.
Shopify also sees when products are being kept or returned. Shipping and return costs are rarely factored into programmatic bidding but are critical for the overall profit equation. For Shopify, though, the payback window and return metrics are baked in, Finkelstein said.
Shopify’s returns-based approach to audience modeling “allows us to sort of play with those levers,” he said. “If we see opportunities to gain market share, we’ll take them.”
The Invasion Of Privacy
The privacy train is slowing down.
For one, Meta is renewing its facial recognition tech – a product feature dubbed “super sensing” – which integrates with its smart glasses, The Information reports.
Google, meanwhile, offered buyouts to Chrome Privacy Sandbox employees in January. Which, in retrospect, seems like a pretty important signal of things to come. That was followed by 10% layoffs to the group in April. (Gives new meaning to the term “signal loss.”)
In December, meanwhile, the Google Marketing Platform updated its policies to allow fingerprinting for targeting and tracking CTV audiences. Previously, Google considered IP address tracking to be a privacy violation and disabled the practice even where it was legal for businesses to collect and use that data.
But platforms aside, even the EU is planning to walk back some parts of the GDPR. As politics shift, the European Commission is attempting to signal to businesses in the bloc that it intends to simplify the rules around compliance and reduce the cost of starting a new business.
Roku ‘n’ Rolling
Roku saw a 17% year-over-year revenue increase during Q1, and its video advertising revenue is growing even faster.
But given the precarious economic environment, Roku is seeking measurement partnerships in the hopes that “advertisers will view CTV as a performance channel,” Sarah Harms, Roku’s VP of advertising marketing and measurement, tells Marketing Brew.
To make its data more accessible, Roku has struck deals with measurement platforms iSpot and Incrmntal. And in January, Roku introduced Data Cloud, a platform that provides media buyers with access to Roku customer data when buying inventory through the Roku Exchange.
But Roku claims to not be overly concerned about the pressure that economic uncertainty is putting on businesses right now.
“We’ve focused on building our programmatic capabilities, and that investment is absolutely paying off,” Charlie Collier, president of Roku Media, told investors during the company’s first quarter earnings call last week.
But Wait! There’s More
Uber Ads has a $1.5 billion run rate and grew revenue by 60% over the past year. It also just hired its first head of measurement. [Digiday]
Apple is considering adding a range of AI search engines to Safari but remains committed to Google as its default option. [Bloomberg]
Meet Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s latest top hire. She’s also the former CEO of Instacart and was a longtime leader at Meta. [Business Insider]
Why engagement, not traffic, drives media growth today. [Ad Age]
Justin Barton, digital lead at Black Enterprise and founder of Snackable Media, has acquired AdGrid, which he says is the first full-stack solution built with multicultural publishers in mind. [AdMonsters]
You’re Hired!
Crystal Park joins Horizon Media as CMO. [release]
AI ad campaign platform Creatopy appoints Thibault Imbert as chief product and growth officer. [release]
