Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Keeping Clean
Remember back when Netflix was anti-advertising? These days, it feels like Netflix has advertising-related news nearly every week.
Last week, while boasting about its upfront results, Netflix also unveiled new integrations with data clean room providers Snowflake, InfoSum and LiveRamp. Netflix buyers can already use Snowflake clean rooms, with access to InfoSum and LiveRamp coming in the next few months.
Netflix’s clean room rollout coincides with its pursuit of programmatic polyamory. Now that Netflix is selling ads via one-to-one private marketplace deals through more than one DSP – The Trade Desk and Google’s DV360 in addition to Microsoft’s Xandr – the platform needs privacy guardrails to prevent data leakage.
The clean room partnerships also indicate that attribution is next on Netflix’s ad product road map.
“Clean rooms will allow advertisers to determine audience overlap and last-touch attribution in a secure environment,” writes Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s president of advertising, in a blog post.
Although last-touch gets a lot of flak for being a flawed attribution model, something is certainly better than nothing.
Having Your Fill
CTV tech innovations aside, the channel is still struggling with low programmatic fill rates, TVNewsCheck reports.
How bad is the problem? FAST channel fill rates average just 38%, according to One Touch Intelligence.
And, while fill rates for premium CTV inventory can range from 60% to over 100% when streamers combine programmatic with direct sales, platforms that rely mainly on programmatic see fill rates between 30% and 60%, according to Aniview’s Jason Pedrick.
There’s just too much CTV inventory out there, even with advertiser spend in the channel expected to surge to around $30 billion next year. As a result, streamers often have to relax frequency caps or resort to using house ads to fill unsold slots.
It’s also too expensive for most small and midsize advertisers to produce video ads. But smaller advertisers are turning to generative AI to reduce costs. For example, one vendor, Streamr.ai, autogenerates ad creative and requires just $250 as a minimum buy for campaigns. Meanwhile, AI vendors are pursuing integrations with big-name streamers.
Will complaints about ad repetition on CTV soon give way to complaints about a deluge of AI-generated slop on streaming platforms? Watch this space.
AIM For Success
Warner Bros. Discovery is getting deeper into the CTV game with its own first-party data platform developed for the international market, Digiday reports.
Known as AIM (which presumably does not stand for “AOL Instant Messenger” in this case), the platform was originally built for CNN back in 2015 and is currently being used on 90% of the network’s digital campaigns.
It’s also already being used successfully on Discovery+ campaigns in the UK and Ireland, offering what WBD touts as higher-quality, more premium inventory than buyers would typically find in open auctions.
Between AIM and Olli, WBD’s first-party data platform for the US market, the broadcaster is clearly going all in on its digital advertising business. Not to mention Connect, a new marketplace WBD launched with Magnite in May.
Why is WBD going so hard these days? Most likely as a response to its dwindling subscriber bases and the revenue losses it’s been experiencing lately.
(Maybe actually releasing new titles instead of canning completed films and removing HBO original content from Max would help, too – but, hey, what do we know?)
But Wait, There’s More!
How streaming services are stacking up following the Q2 earnings season, from Disney to Netflix to Prime. [Marketing Brew]
The CEOs of Meta and Spotify say AI regulation in the EU is stifling innovation. [TechCrunch]
TikTok has been spending $20 million a month on OpenAI models through Microsoft. [The Information]
CrowdTangle’s untimely demise will have a big impact on civic tech products like iVerify. [Tech Policy Press]
The World Bank has stopped all paid advertising on X after reports of its ads appearing near racist content. [CBS]
Google brings the verification labels it’s been testing in paid search ads to organic search. [Search Engine Roundtable]
What marketers can learn from all the drama surrounding “It Ends With Us.” [Adweek]
