Who Pays The Payers?
Is there suddenly a market run on challenger ecommerce marketplace players?
In May, GameStop proposed an acquisition of eBay. The idea was widely mocked, although the game retailer is still ostensibly pursuing the deal.
But there are more credible potential or proposed deals on the table as well. Most recently, online payments processor Stripe submitted a joint bid along with Advent, a private equity investor, to acquire PayPal for $53 billion, Reuters reports.
Earlier this month, Criteo reportedly received a joint bid from two PE firms, Quinti Capital and Vista Equity, offering as much as a 50% premium on its market cap at the time.
And, just this week, buy-now-pay-later payment company Klarna raised $517 million from PE, including Blackstone, Varde Partners and Sona Asset Management, which stand to potentially gain a 10% equity share.
Not to mention that, last year, investors were speculating and suggesting that eBay ought to merge with Etsy – which itself sold Depop to eBay in February for $1.2 billion.
All of the above stocks have been hammered over the past couple of years, but private equity writ large seems to have a plan for monetizing the pipework for ecommerce and ecommerce marketing data.
TikTok Shop? More Like TikTok Slop
A new TikTok Shop feature allows users to create fully AI-generated shoppable videos, which are labeled as such, including product demos – but many brands and creators aren’t thrilled.
Although some creators laud the new capability because it allows them to generate affiliate content quickly, others find it disingenuous. The AI videos can be “very frustrating” for affiliates, creator Rosemarie Soma tells the WSJ, because they’re “getting ad spend and are making sales.”
Many brands are in agreement with Soma, but they only have so much control.
Under TikTok’s open affiliate plan, any creator can earn commission for advertising a brand’s products, which, as the WSJ points out, requires a lot more “manual oversight” from brands if they want to avoid specific types of content. (Brands can also manually choose which creators they work with.)
Beauty and home appliance brand SharkNinja wrote in a memo that affiliates who use AI-generated content to promote the brand’s products “will have their commissions removed.”
“We didn’t want an AI-generated Shark vacuum cleaning an AI-generated floor,” Chief Commercial Officer Neil Shah tells the Journal. “We want real consumers seeing real products being used by real people.”
Hard To Process
Nielsen’s race to stand up its own cross-channel measurement currency amid challenges from a host of alternative currency providers just took an unexpected turn.
Both Nielsen ONE, the TV measurement provider’s fledgling omnichannel solution, and VideoAmp, one of Nielsen’s top alt currency competitors, have withdrawn from the Media Rating Council’s accreditation process, MediaPost reports. Their withdrawal was disclosed in the MRC’s latest quarterly update.
VideoAmp formally began pursuing an MRC accreditation last May after completing a pre-audit in July 2024. But it’s now pulling out of the MRC’s process with plans to reassess by next year, the company tells MediaPost.
Nielsen ONE entered its own MRC pre-audit last July, but it’s also taking a step back to reassess. However, Nielsen clarified that this withdrawal only applies to its Nielsen ONE Ads product, which measures ad performance across linear and streaming TV, and not to its Nielsen ONE Content product, which measures linear and streaming viewership.
Nielsen ONE Ads is undergoing a change to its methodology, the company says, hence its withdrawal from MRC certification.
Meanwhile, in 2024, VideoAmp and its alt-currency rivals Comscore and iSpot received certification from a different provider – the Joint Industry Committee (JIC) – attesting that their respective solutions are “currency-grade ready.” Their JIC certifications were reaffirmed last year.
P.S. For what it’s worth, both Comscore and iSpot have MRC credentials; Comscore for audience measurement and iSpot for so-called “ad occurrence” data.
But Wait! There’s More!
Hacked data from Suno reveals that the AI music generation company illicitly scraped YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius. [404Media]
Several FCC officials who approved the Paramount Skydance-WBD merger last year have recently accepted pricey gala tickets from CBS, a subsidiary of Paramount. [ProPublica]
Reddit debates the pros and cons of selling its data to LLMs for training purposes. [Digiday]
Amazon closes its upfront negotiations and brags about exceeding its own expectations thanks to engagement, sports and shoppable ads. [Adweek]
You’re Hired!
Former Snap exec Patrick Connolly joins LV8 as chief strategy officer. [release]
Lucas Brockner joins the OpenAI Global Ads Solutions team. [LinkedIn post]
Marketing measurement company MarketCast makes three senior appointments across media, customer success and European commercial. [release]
