Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
The Ecomm Bundle
Ecommerce tech has had a rough couple of years.
Marketers, like consumers, are dealing with subscription fatigue.
Brands added all sorts of ecommerce vendors in 2020 and 2021, including CDPs, postcheckout survey tech, fulfillment tracking, etc. – not to mention all the RFPs and tests related to the end of third-party cookies.
Also, there was a surge of small online merchants, which in turn powered growth for Shopify, Klaviyo, Affirm and other DTC ecommerce tech. But that firehose of new sellers trickled away as crowd-cautious shoppers returned to stores after the pandemic.
Also, ecommerce has simply become less tenable for many sellers. Facebook’s network of DTC brands and performance marketers was essentially dismantled by Apple’s privacy changes. It’s now both more difficult and more expensive for small businesses to get going.
One potential outcome from this dynamic, The Information reports, is for private equity and tech holding companies to pick up the pieces.
“People are looking to bundle and consolidate spend,” says Jerry Darko, managing director for William Blair’s technology investment banking team. “We do think that the folks that have broader offerings will be able to survive a lot longer, and we think that consolidation will be a way to kind of create more sustainable competitive differentiation.”
Next-Gen Or AI-Gen?
SEO company BrightEdge published its POV on several nascent generative AI-powered search engines: OpenAI’s SearchGPT, Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) and Perplexity AI.
According to BrightEdge, each has pros and cons, but SearchGPT is best poised to overthrow the search status quo. Mainly, that’s because SearchGPT is built for AI-generated prompting and not based on the current architecture of the web.
For instance, SearchGPT’s responses are meant to facilitate a back-and-forth conversation. By contrast, Google AIOs “prioritize brevity” because they must fit in a tight window on a page along with the usual Google links above and/or below.
AIOs come along with other Google baggage, too, like advertisers who must be integrated immediately and a crowd of publishers and antitrust regulators who won’t abide traffic and revenue leaving the incumbent Google web.
Where Google stands out, unsurprisingly, is in its response to queries for live news and events and data from local businesses. For a query about a local sports game or event, Google “is able to pull in ticket prices, local vendors, additional relevant events, team information, weather, and more considerations,” according to BrightEdge, “whereas SearchGPT doesn’t have access to the same massive pool of data.”
Primed For Politics
VP Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign will spend $370 million on ads over the next few months. Of that total, $200 million will go to digital ads, predominantly to streaming services, such as Hulu and The Roku Channel, Fast Company reports.
The proportion of political ad dollars shifting to streaming media continues to climb and at an accelerating rate, considering CTV accounted for roughly 15% of political ad spend during the 2022 midterm elections.
But even so, linear TV will still take the lion’s share of political advertising this year.
Of the $12.3 billion political ad dollars expected to circulate in 2024, $7 billion (57%) of that is forecasted by eMarketer to go to traditional TV. Streaming will only see $1.6 billion.
To be fair, unlike traditional TV networks, which are required to run political ads, many streaming publishers aren’t particularly interested in political advertising and don’t allow it on their services. Neither Netflix nor Prime Video run political ads, for example.
For streamers, the quadrennial lucky dip of political advertising budgets probably just isn’t worth the potential headache.
But Wait, There’s More!
Speaking of political advertising: Generative AI ad copy startup BattlegroundAI is only available to progressives and claims to have 60 clients just six weeks after launching in beta. [Wired]
Bubble burst, schmubble burst: Marketers don’t share investor concerns about the bottom dropping out of AI tech. [Adweek]
Warner Bros. Discovery is rolling out a global audience extension product in a bid for more streaming ad dollars. [Digiday]
Microsoft’s Copilot is getting another (hopefully not confusing) rebrand. [The Verge]
Apple is splitting its App Store division, with one team running the App Store itself and another overseeing alternative app stores in the EU. In related news, App Store VP Matt Fischer is leaving the company. [Ars Technica]
You’re Hired!
Yeti CMO Paulie Dery is leaving to be CMO at nutritional supplement brand AG1. [Ad Age]
