Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
The 360 View
Life360, a location sharing app primarily for families, which also owns Tile, is entering the ad biz, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The company launched an advertising data sales business, investors were told last week when the company reported earnings – though Life360 is on the Australian Stock Exchange. By the time Life360 next reports earnings in August, it will likely break out advertising revenue.
“We want to be cautious on that for something that’s so new,” CEO Chris Hulls cautioned investors. “The real revenue is coming in outer years.”
Life360 is also pursuing a listing on a US stock exchange. Which makes sense. Companies with lucrative potential data for advertisers are better off in the US, where the laws tend to be more lenient and where demand for the data is strongest.
“Not only do I want to target people who, say, go to Walmart on the weekends; I want to target someone who just went to Walmart five minutes ago. And we have that real-time data,” Hulls said.
Setting aside the creepiness and possible turnoff to Life360 customers, Hulls is clearly speculating on US data sales. There aren’t even Walmart stores in Australia.
Upfront And Personal
Agencies are placing their bets on the winners and losers of upfront week.
Most buyers put Disney and NBCUniversal at the top of the scoreboard because of their tech and data partnerships, Ad Age reports.
Arguably, these two are the loudest about new programmatic integrations and shoppable ad units to woo new demand, including via annual tech and data showcases ahead of upfront season.
Speaking of shoppable, buyers are also bullish on Prime Video because it has retail data and shoppable ad units, plus a growing sports portfolio.
Many buyers consider YouTube a must-have – but not everyone. One anonymous buyer puts YouTube at the bottom of their list because it’s hard to explain to clients exactly what they’re buying. YouTube TV has sports and linear programming; classic YouTube has user-generated content; YouTube Shorts is basically TikTok. It’s complicated.
Warner Bros. Discovery plays the part of the last kid picked on the dodgeball team. Its ad revenue is dropping, and buyers blame the aftermath of the Warner Media and Discovery merger. Buyers say WBD is considered a cluster of disparate cable networks, while consumers are literally protesting Max on social media over title cancellations (#dontstreamonmax). The timing doesn’t bode well.
The New Publisher Revenue
Stack Overflow, a forum and repository for computer programmers, is one of the latest publishers to sign a lucrative data licensing deal with an LLM. In this case, OpenAI is purchasing access to Stack Overflow data to train ChatGPT.
Reddit signed one such deal with Google, and media publishers like Dotdash Meredith and the Financial Times have also signed with OpenAI.
Still, Stack Overflow’s particularly knowledgeable user base wasn’t happy about Stack Overflow’s about-face on generative AI tech, writes Tom’s Hardware, a site for PC and hardware enthusiasts. Stack Overflow contributors began deleting and altering their posts so they wouldn’t be used by ChatGPT. Stack Overflow responded by suspending and ejecting those accounts, since doing so en masse would materially degrade the site’s overall data set (unlike, say, readers on a Dotdash site deleting their comments in protest and nobody caring).
Until recently, Stack Overflow banned the use of generative AI to contribute or comment on its site and encouraged its own moderators to use software to root it out. That policy suddenly changed just before cutting a deal with OpenAI.
But Wait, There’s More!
The Senate approves sending the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill to the House without unrelated children’s online privacy amendments. [NYT]
Ad tech’s week on Wall Street underscores critical industry challenges. [Digiday]
Instagram beats TikTok for video-based user acquisition, survey finds. [Marketing Dive]
Publicly traded brands are facing increased pressure from conservative groups and activist shareholders to rethink LGBTQ-themed marketing campaigns. [WSJ]
Irony alert: OpenAI, which is facing several lawsuits alleging copyright violations, issued a complaint to the ChatGPT subreddit for using its trademarked logo. [404 Media]
You’re Hired!
Publica by IAS names Cameron Miille as CRO. [release]
