Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Attribution vs. Contribution
Ad platform over-attribution is boiling over right now for frustrated marketers. Walled garden platforms aren’t new, but server-side data plugins by Google and Meta, plus the explosion of retail media walled gardens, mean brands might see a dozen platforms claim full credit for the same conversion.
Marketers can see through this murkiness, according to a blog post co-authored by Rameez Tase, co-founder and president of the analytics business Antenna, and MediaLink growth strategy consultant Whit Harwood. But it’s not easy (or cheap).
One strategy is to add a vendor like Measured or Kochava to manage buys across walled gardens and go to lengths to test and create incremental ROAS metrics.
There are also data co-ops. The incumbent there is Circana (formed by the merger of IRI and NPD), according to Tase and Harwood. NCSolutions is another example.
The problem with this model, they speculate, is that retailers with advertising businesses will stop contributing data to retain proprietary value for their platforms.
The third option is independent, digital-native panels such as Ibotta, Attain and Fetch. None of them have mass scale, but each has enough live purchase data to inform attribution models.
Political Promises
Not all political ad buyers are investing in streaming. Some aren’t even considering it.
The stats about cord-cutting and streaming scale are only getting more compelling, but it’s not enough to circumvent the “stranglehold” of linear TV budgets, which “is just impossible to break” for political campaigns, said Teddy Goff, co-founder of marketing agency Precision, during AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O event in Las Vegas.
Although viewers are spending more time on streaming, more ad impressions are coming from linear, Goff said, in part because of how high the ad volume is. Linear ads are also cheaper than streaming. In other words, linear promises a lower-cost heap of ad impressions that political buyers just can’t pass up in their quest to reach as many prospective voters as possible – particularly in swing states.
To poach more political budgets from linear, streaming needs better measurement to prove its value. The problem is political buyers have little way of nailing down the subscriber overlap across a patchwork of streaming services, which results in ad repetition at the expense of incremental reach.
And if political candidates need anything this year, it’s incremental reach.
Programmatic Preening
After flaunting its programmatic prowess, Netflix hopes that its first in-person upfront made a positive impression on advertisers as they head into annual budget negotiations.
“We’re trying to make it as easy to buy and transact with Netflix as possible by opening the aperture [of demand],” Peter Naylor, VP of ad sales, tells Adweek.
Currently, Netflix has a private marketplace (PMP) built on Microsoft’s ad platform. But starting this summer, advertisers will be able to make either programmatic guaranteed or PMP deals for Netflix supply through The Trade Desk and Google’s DV360.
Advertisers want to guarantee Netflix supply, but within the DSPs they already use. And, in TV land, programmatic buys are mostly through programmatic guaranteed deals since that deal structure emulates what TV advertisers are used to.
“We’re going to get started pretty conventionally,” Naylor said, referring to programmatic guaranteed and PMP deals for commercial breaks. (Sponsorships remain available only through direct deals.)
However, don’t fret that Netflix won’t get into open bidding. Naylor’s reference to “getting started” implies Netflix has a long way to travel on its programmatic road map.
But Wait, There’s More!
How Amazon is wooing publishers to bolster its $50 billion ad business. [Digiday]
Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web. [The Verge]
Gareth Glaser: The ad tech guide to giving a hoot. [blog]
How Google plans to pitch its 2024 AI agenda to ad buyers. [Adweek]
Comcast shares the details of the StreamSaver bundle with Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+. [Variety]
Mike Shields: YouTube’s quest to become a CTV juggernaut. [blog]
