Marketers

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Unfluential  Meta claims to have taken down a Chinese political influence operation that used fake accounts to agitate and misinform Americans. The China-backed ring of accounts focused on hot-button issues, such as gun control and abortion, from both sides. This was about China […]

As technology and industry self-regulation converge to make supply and demand path optimization more seamless and efficient, we need a better name to describe optimization across the advertising ecosystem, writes Stephen Johnston, CTO of PubWise. “I’d like to submit for your consideration a new term: advertising logistics.”

It makes sense that brands in sexy verticals like fashion and hair care turn to social media influencers. But banking brands hire influencers, too. Kasasa, a fintech company that launched in 2003 to help local credit unions and community banks open more user accounts, ran a recent video campaign with a twist on the “shop local” trend featuring YouTube creator Trey Kennedy.

CTV scales. But does it perform? Matthew Koontz started his career at Arnold Worldwide before moving on to lead ad product teams at Hulu, Snapchat, Microsoft and Xandr (before the two merged) and WideOrbit. Koontz joined tvScientific in June, and he spoke with AdExchanger about why CTV is a “sweet spot” for performance marketers.

Smartify Media launched in 2020 as a digital out-of-home platform to allow small businesses in Boston to share real-time updates with customers during the pandemic. Now, the company is trying to create a retail media network with small businesses nationwide, like bodegas and other mom-and-pop shops, through its Small Business Revenue+ program.

For CPG brands, valuable business lines and data access can come from unlikely sources. One such example is the Tide laundromat franchise business. Selling laundry detergent and opening laundromat franchise locations may not seem like a cutting-edge marketing tactic … but it’s arguably more exciting than anything happening in the metaverse right now.

The programmatic ecosystem is so complex and opaque that bad actors are able to game the system to fund hate and social harm. Now, advertisers are getting more concerned about funding harmful activity through ad fraud and high-velocity disinformation within social and programmatic ecosystems, writes Sarah Bolton, EVP of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Trust But Verify An Instagram fraud scheme used free-to-set-up music creator personas on Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer and a spattering of sponsored posts and press releases to convince Instagram to dish out blue-check verifications to hundreds of undeserving or outright fraudulent accounts since […]

Today, there are so many flavors of in-housing. The term itself has become a bit like “programmatic,” where the meaning across organizations varies so greatly that there’s little point in using it on its own. What matters now isn’t how brands define “in-house” or if in fact they “in-house” at all – it’s whether they approach their digital advertising strategically and thoughtfully, writes Dan Larden, head of UK at TPA Digital.

Broadcasters have long been dissatisfied with Nielsen’s panel-based approach. But now, panels are making headlines again as a fresh way to measure streaming and TV consumption. But this time, the TV industry says it’s talking about “calibration panels,” not audience panels.

For women, finding health care treatment relating to sex is hard. But if you’re looking for “seggs,” that’s easy. DTC brands in the women’s health vertical are still stuck relying on algospeak to skirt around social platforms taking down their ads … As if marketing health care products and supplements for women wasn’t hard enough.

The newly renamed Washington Commanders are the only team in the NFL with a chief creative and digital officer rather than a marketing chief. Will Misselbrook took the job last year in the interim between the temporary name change from the Washington Redskins to “Washington Football Team.”

Many brands, startups and well-known CPGs are missing the more effective retailer data sets at their disposal: loyalty programs, writes Lauren Littlejohn, director of data science and research at 84.51°.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Fair Share In the years before Apple dropped its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework on the industry’s head like a ton of bricks, the company discussed a possible special arrangement with Facebook to cut Apple in on a slice of Facebook’s revenue, The Wall Street […]

Contextual targeting laid the foundations of TV advertising – particularly by ensuring that ads were stitched into content marketers considered “brand safe.” With the advent of CTV, buyers put context on the back-burner in favor of more granular, first-party audience targeting. Now, the pendulum is swinging back again. Why? Two words: signal loss.

Arlo’s first order of business as a standalone company was to pour money into performance marketing to drum up sales, which is what it did for nearly three years. But there was a problem: A lack of brand familiarity. So Arlo launched its first-ever brand campaign on TV, including linear and streaming, with digital and social also in the mix.

Marketers are often mission-driven. But too often, when informing the public through news and information is of utmost urgency, marketers choose to steer clear not just from bad or hot-button issues, but from all news content entirely, choking off potential revenue for news enterprises and doing a disservice to the public good, writes Dev Pragad, CEO of Newsweek.

Jackie Guarini has a lot of experience marketing in regulated industries. She spent more than four years as a digital marketer at Anheuser-Busch, including as its head of commerce media. But her new gig is a little different. In May, Guarini was appointed as the CMO of Mike Tyson’s cannabis company, Tyson 2.0.

Over the past two years, Qualcomm has restructured its marketing organization to position it as a business driver more directly tied to results. Here’s how.

Most marketers agree that digital and social are performance channels, whereas they’re less convinced that performance marketing works on CTV because it’s a less interactive, lean-back experience. But CTV is a lot more like digital than many marketers think, said Jason Fairchild, CEO of TV performance marketing platform tvScientific. “CTV is like digital in that you don’t have to guess at what works – you know.”

DTC brands are struggling to get by without the Facebook ad engine. Legacy brands are flummoxed by ecommerce. One company that’s hoping to split the difference is RoC Skincare, which spun out of Johnson & Johnson and was acquired by the private equity firm Gryphon in 2018.

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.

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.

Two years ago, shortly after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Nike doubled down on what it refers to as its Consumer Direct Acceleration. Nike wasn’t simply weathering a storm, but taking COVID-19’s worldwide shakeup of consumer buying habits as an opportunity to rethink its business “by expanding our digital advantage, reshaping the marketplace of the future and creating deeper, more direct consumer relationships,” CFO Matthew Friend told investors.

Legalized sports gambling is flooding the market with betting apps, which are becoming powerhouse spenders as they seek to gain a foothold. Some betting apps put crazy-high premiums on new users that they hope to make up in lifetime customer (gambler) value, but they’re not all in a grow-now mode regardless of costs.

Two years of sweeping disruptions – supply-chain shortages, staffing challenges, fluctuating COVID regulations and looming inflation – were tough on consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers and retailers. But consumers are eager to shop in stores again. As data across touch points converge, marketers have the power to elevate customer experience and increase conversions, writes Gila Wilensky, president of Xaxis US.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. All Systems Ro’ Roku insiders are abuzz about a potential acquisition by Netflix, Insider reports.  There’s no firm reporting of a deal, or even of negotiations. But two employees say Roku abruptly closed the trading window to sell vested stock. That kind of trading […]

This is the unlikely story of an Israeli social casino game app and its partnership with the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, a Minor League Baseball team in South Carolina.

In order to gain access to performance advertising budgets (and prove out the power of publisher first-party data), Vox Media is relaunching Group Nine’s G9 Direct performance marketing solution under the new name VM Connect. The relaunch is also a milestone in Vox Media’s integration of Group Nine’s digital properties and tech stack following its […]

With the lines blurring between traditional TV content and streaming media, YouTube made its upfronts debut this year. YouTube VP Debbie Weinstein explains why.