Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Poli-Ticking You Off
2024 is shaping up to be the worst year ever for political ad overload.
Americans are already revolting against the deluge of text messages from political campaigns (and from scammers, too), The Wall Street Journal reports. But the flood of campaign messaging will also hit TV screens, email inboxes and everywhere else ads are shown.
Political campaigns have loose TV frequency caps, which means more repetition. And since streaming platforms have such poor frequency capping capabilities, people will drown in political commercials.
But preserving the user experience is actually a politically fraught issue for mobile carriers and email operators, because they risk blowback if they enforce their own policies.
Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T drew fire from the Trump campaign and Republican politicians in 2020 after each carrier flagged and halted a Trump text-based fundraising campaign during a July 4 push. Meanwhile, Google has been in the hot seat for disproportionately filtering conservative emails to spam, particularly Trump campaign messages.
Mobile carriers and email operators have largely acquiesced to Republican demands to allow political messages that otherwise would be filtered.
Charting The Amazon
The latest ad tech startup is here. Gigi, an Amazon streaming TV ad shop, is launching with backing from Aperiam, the very active VC firm operated by ad tech vets, and Heracles Capital, led by Eric Seufert of Mobile Dev Memo.
What’s interesting is Gigi’s explicit focus on Amazon. Advertisers put first-party data into the Amazon Marketing Cloud, which has clean room and ID resolution services built on AWS but operated by the Amazon Ads business. Gigi then targets Amazon DSP campaigns and Amazon-owned inventory, according to a LinkedIn post by Founder and CEO Adam Epstein. Amazon streaming TV ad exposures can be tied to Amazon sales or sales on a DTC Shopify site.
That does sound like a service that Amazon can and might offer itself – if it doesn’t already. But the big platforms have largely forsaken services. Which is why companies like MightyHive, Adswerve and Jellyfish have had success providing services specifically to support advertisers using Google products, including Ads Data Hub.
Since cloud data analytics can require data science and querying language skills that brands don’t have, there’s a role for service providers. And that ain’t Google or Amazon.
“C”-ing Eye To Eye
Like cats and dogs, CFOs and CMOs are considered natural enemies – but if we’ve learned anything from unlikely animal friendship videos, it’s best not to take those kinds of stereotypes too seriously.
In fact, NewtonX’s latest survey suggests that most CFOs approve of the job their company’s CMO is doing (even when it comes to their marketing budgets), Adweek reports.
And although CMOs have a reputation for disappearing quickly, their average tenure at Fortune 500 companies is actually closer to that of CFOs than you’d expect, at 50 months and 54 months, respectively.
So how do both parties set aside their differences and band together? It appears that CMOs are now beefing up their financial know-how – as well as their ability to quantify ROI – which is what a CFO wants to see more so than viral moments or any other shiny object.
“You could argue 25 years ago marketing didn’t need a lot of quantitative skills,” says Patiwat Panurach, VP of strategic insights and analytics at NewtonX. “Today, it’s a totally different ball game.”
But Wait, There’s More!
Interpublic explores the sale of digital agency R/GA to India’s Tata Consultancy Services. [WSJ]
Streamers are doing what they can to keep subscribers around – but their efforts are yielding mixed results. [Marketing Brew]
Post-cookie preparedness among marketers has dropped by 23% since 2022. [Digiday]
CNN chief Mark Thompson teases a subscription product by year’s end. [Axios]
You’re Hired!
EchoStar hires Tom Fochetta to lead DISH Media’s advertising sales division. [release]
PubMatic hires former Criteo exec Tim Rogers as VP of commerce media and Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect alum Somesh Bindu as VP of product management. [release]
