Marketers

TV industry executives discussed next steps for measurement and alternate currencies at CES in Las Vegas. Expect a heightened focus on ACR, calibration panels and advanced audiences.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. In Vegas, The American Way Ad tech can no longer avoid privacy scrutiny, from platform changes to privacy regulations coming into effect across the US. But many of the consumer tech startups at CES last week seemed blissfully unaware of such concerns, writes Tatum […]

At CES in Las Vegas, Kristina Shepard, head of US brand sales at Roku, tells AdExchanger why the company decided to start manufacturing its own line of smart TVs.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Goodway Group has chosen Jay Friedman as CEO. Friedman assumes the chief executive position after more than 16 years at the company, most recently as president. Former CEO David Wolk moves into the role of executive chairman.

In the face of persistent economic uncertainty, marketers are simultaneously hustling to satisfy quickly changing consumer appetites and striving to squeeze the value out of every last marketing dollar. Not to mention needing to adopt full-funnel marketing approaches and allocate spend to channels as flexibly as possible.

There are three key ways in which the industry can do a better job of selling customers on the value exchange they’ll see from sharing their data with brands, writes Scott McDonald, President and CEO of the Advertising Research Foundation.

In 2022, SPO solutions largely revolved around creating direct connections to so-called premium publishers. But machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) also took on a bigger role in SPO this year. And 2022 was the year the ad industry began touting SPO as the solution of choice for sustainability-focused marketers.

Dramatic shifts in consumer viewing habits during the pandemic have led, predictably, to an intense focus on the corresponding connected TV (CTV) advertising opportunity. CTV ad spend is growing leaps and bounds – and for good reason. But for continuation of that growth to be warranted, there are a number of enhancements that must be brought to bear.

When online grocery subscription service Misfits Market was founded in 2018, it took a page right out of the DTC advertiser’s playbook, says Holly Eagleson, VP of marketing. But since the release of Apple’s ATT, Misfits has been embracing new channels.

Brand safety’s detrimental impact on diverse, equitable and inclusive media goals is a question of automation gone wrong, ham-fisted implementation and industry leaders choosing the easy route, writes Charles Cantu, CEO and founder at Reset Digital. In this column, he reviews how brand safety’s DEI problem has developed and recommends steps advertisers, agencies and brand safety organizations can take to overcome it.

In October, Anagram spun off from programmatic platform Digilant and relaunched as a full-service media agency. Since then, it’s set its sights on serving the little guys: midmarket brands.

Advertisers often talk about supporting Black- and minority-owned media companies. It’s Mark Prince’s job to help them turn those pledges into action. As SVP and head of economic empowerment at Dentsu Media, he pushes brands to consistently diversify their media mix – and move away from one-off investments.

In 1973, Timberland – then called Abington Shoe Company – debuted its waterproof yellow boots. In 2023, the outdoor apparel and accessories company will observe the boot’s 50th anniversary. And Ezra Martin, Timberland’s newly minted vice president of marketing, Americas, will be rolling out a new marketing strategy for the occasion. Martin shares his insights on personalized customer experiences, localized campaigns and more.

DOOH has been thought of as pure branding, according to Elliott Hasiuk, principal for digital media at Part and Sum. That makes sense, considering out-of-home media might just be a big picture of, say, a Big Mac and the McDonald’s arches plastered 40 feet in the air. “Now we’re able to tie that branding to bottom-of-the-funnel metrics that matter more to the business.”

The IAB Tech Lab has updated its OpenRTB standard to include objects specifically designed for DOOH. It also published new DOOH-specific guidelines and technical resources for real time bidding in collaboration with the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) and Outsmart, the Out of Home Advertising Association for the UK.

Recently, when The North Face ran an RFP for a programmatic buying agency, it went with WITHIN, which also happens to be the performance agency that won its creative services RFP earlier this year. The agency restructuring reflects a broader change for The North Face’s marketing, says media VP Bethany Evans.

Brand safety has a hypocrisy problem. Violence that gets a pass when it’s a fictional TV show becomes flagged if it’s part of an online news story. But to what end? Plus: what Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales results portend for retailers’ prospects in Q4 and beyond.

SSPs had traditionally been among the first in the ad tech ecosystem to build profitable businesses. But their future in the programmatic tech stack is uncertain because they’ve evolved from publisher-centric technologies to demand aggregation businesses, often competing with their biggest customers: buy-side platforms or DSPs.

As part of a plan to consolidate its SSP partners, Horizon Media struck a deal with PubMatic Monday. Horizon’s clients who purchase open-auction inventory through its HX trade desk will be able to use PubMatic’s SPO products to automatically optimize their bidding depending on which KPIs they want to boost, whether the deal is open auction, programmatic guaranteed or a private marketplace.

Pixability started out contextualizing advertisers’ digital video buys on YouTube to make sure they ran in brand-safe environments. But now that consumers are watching more YouTube on TV screens than on web browsers (and CTV buyers are demanding media transparency with proverbial pitchforks), Pixability is expanding its brand suitability metrics to apply more broadly to CTV environments.

Performance marketing is a CFO’s dream – it drives measurable growth for every dollar spent. That’s why it’s absolutely essential in an unstable economic climate, writes Sean Popen, EVP at Matterkind.

Turns out 2022 was a bad year to merge two large media companies into one massive media company. Both Dotdash and Meredith experienced headwinds throughout the year. Traffic was soft compared with the rise in consumption during the pandemic, and the digital advertising market was unexpectedly weak. And next year isn’t looking rosy.

PubMatic’s total Q3 revenue grew 11% to $64.5 million despite an industry-wide downturn, but the company doesn’t have high hopes for the rest of the year. It expects that ad spend will continue to trend down in Q4. But although spending is decelerating due to recession fears, PubMatic is planning to capitalize on the eventual rebound by focusing on video, retail media and particularly CTV, which continues to grow.

If you’re a marketer who wants to hear a comforting bedtime story about how brand marketing will endure during the impending recession, you’re not going to get it from Sir Martin Sorrell. The conventional thinking goes that if companies maintain their investment in brand marketing to stay top-of-mind, even when the going gets tough, they’ll be […]

The state of advertising at Twitter is a hot mess. And advertisers are starting to react. Plus: a primer on the Google Analytics deadline delay and changes to Google’s clean room, Ads Data Hub.

If you think of livestream shopping in the US as a revolution, it’s a dud. But if you view it as a livestream shopping evolution, real progress is being made.

Proctor & Gamble recently announced their support of The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0 identity framework. The partnership is significant for a couple of reasons. First, where P&G goes, other brands will follow. And second, approval hints at the rise of new walled gardens that could become even more powerful than Google and Facebook, writes Nancy Marzouk, CEO and founder of MediaWallah.

Everyone knows retail media is hot right now. But more and more retail ad dollars are also being sponged up by social media. Social networks like TikTok can drive incremental sales … when used correctly, said Jacques Hagopian, SVP of marketing for Procter & Gamble’s North American business, during a panel at the ANA Masters of Marketing summit this week in Orlando.

Multicultural markets are the single biggest growth opportunity for the media and advertising industry. At least according to Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble, speaking at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) Masters of Marketing Summit in Orlando, Florida, this Wednesday. The industry needs to step up not just because it’s the right thing to do, he said, but because multicultural markets could be “the economic growth driver for decades to come.”