El Pollo Loco began as a small restaurant chain in the 1970s, first in Mexico and later in Southern California. The brand only started leaning into digital ad channels in 2019, and today, it spends half its media budget on digital – a huge portion of which is reserved for TikTok. Last month, El Pollo Loco launched its latest campaign, “Abuela Approved” – its first TikTok-only campaign.
Digital media is undergoing rapid evolution. However, from CTV adoption to industry protocols around user privacy, growth and innovation tend to focus first on advertiser challenges, writes Andrew Smith, SVP of publisher products at DoubleVerify. Publishers need a seat at the table, too, he said, rather than being forced to make do with limited resources and bridge gaps in tech stacks.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Death By A Thousand Subscriptions News subscriptions. OK. Entertainment subscriptions, sure. Gaming subscriptions … I can see it. But subscriptions have now taken over the economy. This year, Sweetgreen and Taco Bell started testing subscription offers, and Alaska Airlines also began testing a subscription […]
If addressable ad IDs are the new keys to the kingdom, then you’ll find The Trade Desk at Epcot this summer. Which is to say, Disney and The Trade Desk announced an identity integration on Tuesday that will allow advertisers to activate against Disney’s first-party data programmatically via its clean room data product using Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) IDs.
Ad tech entrepreneur Chris Cunningham’s early-stage investment firm, C2 Ventures, has a new fund: just over $20 million for pre-Series A companies, plus $2.55 million for pre-seed startups. But there’s one thing he won’t be investing in, and that’s ad tech. Listen in to learn why.
There’s a disconnect between those ad buyers in the trenches of online advertising and their own corporate leaders up the C-suite, who are accustomed to determining marketing group budgets based on ROI and other basic advertising KPIs that, frankly, are going haywire right now. One way to deal with that disconnect is to add someone who speaks both languages, as it were.
Meta lost in court against French ad-tech champion Criteo, and it will now have to grant better access to its inventory. Meanwhile, France’s data protection watchdog, the CNIL, just deemed Google Analytics illegal – a move that the Italian data privacy authority has just followed as well. What happens now? It turns out there may be a server-side solution, writes Hugo Loriot, partner at fifty-five.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Get The Net Netflix isn’t just vetting third-party vendors for its pre-launch ad business (though it is vetting vendors, to be clear). The streaming leader is on the hunt for an executive to lead its incubating advertising business, The Wall Street Journal reports. […]
One of the most popular technical solutions to streamline campaign flights on connected TV is server-side ad insertion (SSAI). SSAI is technology that stitches together ads within a video stream before the stream loads on a user’s device. Most of the demand is coming from the explosive growth of CTV, but it can be used in any connected or over-the-top (OTT) video environments, including social.
The impending Google customer force-shift from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) represents a major change to how advertising ROI will be measured via Google’s services going forward. But publishers that spoke to AdExchanger about their migration plans aren’t feeling the same pressure as with, say, preparation for third-party cookie deprecation, Google’s other major upheaval scheduled for next year.
Netflix is planning to introduce an ad-supported model to attract new viewers, and chances are it will embrace programmatic advertising, too. Without the portfolio of strategic partners that NBC and Disney have, Netflix will need to catch up somehow. Programmatic is one enticing option for doing so, writes Nicole Scaglione, global VP, OTT and CTV business, at PubMatic.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Can A Tiger Change Its Stripes? Google offered to split its ad tech business into a stand-alone company (owned by Alphabet) as a concession to divert an antitrust suit, The Wall Street Journal reports. It’s unclear which products Google would transfer – although […]
The overturn of Roe v. Wade, the ongoing war in Ukraine, a stock market collapse – it’s all the news that’s fit to print, but how are publishers going to monetize it if brands are skittish about serious topics? Plus: The dangers of data collection in a post-Roe world.
Brands and tech vendors can do a lot more to make good on their public promises to support diverse and Black-owned media, says Rhonesha Byng, the CEO and founder of Her Agenda, a digital media platform for millennial women, and co-creator of the Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute.
Google recently began testing Topics API, the latest part of its Chrome Privacy Sandbox. It’s a significant improvement over FLoC, but it leaks audience information from trustworthy sites and enriches large platforms at the expense of niche or independent sites – especially sites that invest time and skill to cover categories in detail, writes Don Marti, VP of ecosystem innovation at CafeMedia.
A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Positive Influence Recession-wary brands are redirecting ad spend away from Google Search and Facebook and toward influencer marketing, Marketing Brew reports. Influencer marketing is more effective than other media channels right now, according to Junior Pence, CMO of Peace Out, a skincare brand […]
While programmatic advertising has its faults, it is still evolving. And as it has matured it has become a powerful, efficient and effective tool for brands to surgically disseminate their commercial messages to highly targeted consumers. But that doesn’t mean there’s no work to be done, writes Eric Warburton, SVP of technical account management and platform partnership success at Horizon Media.
Commerce and creator monetization are Pinterest’s two main priorities right now, said Jeremy King, the company’s SVP and head of engineering. King, who is also the former CTO of Walmart’s ecommerce business – he joined Pinterest in 2019 – said that the convergence of creator revenue potential with social media-based shopping and product discovery by consumers “will make Pinterest functional, versus purely inspirational.”
When customer experience software company Sprinklr went public in June of last year, it joined a veritable stampede of ad tech companies that hit the public market in 2021. And then … 2022 happened. The market might be tough right now, but Ragy Thomas, Sprinklr’s CEO, isn’t letting it shake him.
CTV presents an exciting opportunity for the midmarket and emerging brands and agencies – if they can leave some of the common misconceptions behind, writes Michael Wolk, senior director of business development at Goodway Group. Unlike traditional TV advertising, when the technology and data are used correctly, CTV is closing the gap between large and small brands.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Hungry For More The movie “Minions: The Rise of Gru” would be a box office hit even without swarms of TikTok-obsessed users – aka “Gentleminions” – showing up to screenings dressed in suits. That’s organic. But the Minions marketing team is also going to […]
What happens when your main monetization partner starts flagging your content as spam? Freecycle turned to header bidding to reduce its reliance on Google AdSense, but the company’s one-person engineering team had trouble managing the header-bidding system and the constant stream of Prebid updates on top of web development duties. So, after a 70% drop in ad revenue, Freecycle handed its digital ad business over to PubWise’s managed service.
Did you know Chicken Soup for the Soul now earns its keep primarily from manufacturing food, pet food and … streaming video? That also means Chicken Soup is partaking in the grail quest for cross-device CTV measurement solutions. Its streamer Crackle Plus renewed its partnership with iSpot to enable improved incremental reach through programmatic direct deals.
“We saw the rise and fall that can happen if you’re dependent on digital advertising,” said Bryan Porter, Simple Modern’s co-founder and chief ecommerce officer. “It worked really well for us … until it didn’t.” The experience of surfing an online ad wave and then crashing hard on the beach has shaped Simple Modern’s marketing strategy, which is fully in-housed
For years now, the digital advertising industry has been talking about the premature death of the ad network, writes Omri Argaman, chief growth officer at Zoomd. But there’s a reason why ad networks have survived for so long – they have standardization and massive reach, and are primed to become major growth engines for certain channels (such as in-app and mobile gaming) compared with programmatic exchanges.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Out Of The Blocs The European Parliament has voted decisively to sign two pieces of landmark legislation into law. The Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) both regulate online platform businesses much more aggressively. The DMA targets gatekeeper platforms (namely […]
Keyword blocklists are blunt instruments, and yet they persist in programmatic media buying. It’s time to kick blocklists to the curb and start curating keywords by campaign, says contextual pioneer John Snyder, who sold his company, Grapeshot, to Oracle in 2018.
Verve Group, the ad tech subsidiary of German ad software holding company MGI, has struck again with the acquisition of mobile DSP Dataseat. Terms of the deal were note disclosed.
Video games can support intrinsic or native in-game ads, as well as ads that are delivered alongside gameplay but exist outside the game itself, like pause-menu display ads and rewarded video. Marketers can also sponsor and advertise on channels related to gaming, such as at esports events and across online streaming platforms, particularly Twitch and YouTube. And we can’t forget about the metaverse.
