Marketers

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Our guest this week is Belinda Smith, a senior brand marketer at Electronic Arts who is also the author of many smart AdExchanger columns. Belinda is a font of insights for any marketer thinking about bringing their media buying activities in-house. When she joined EA, […]

  GroupM Chairman Irwin Gotlieb has always had an intuitive eye for technology. He’s been applying it to the CES show floor since the 1970s, when it was called the Comdex computer expo show and disc drives sold for $400,000. Gotlieb began offering his knowledge to clients, vendors and other partners on his legendary floor […]

When a company as large as SAP doubles down on digital, the executive org chart must change. For the last six months, the enterprise software company has had two primary CMOs: one who is responsible for brand and media and another who focuses on demand generation, life cycle marketing and bottom-line revenue. But they work […]

The center of media activity at CES is the C Space in the Aria hotel. Here you will find the private meeting spaces booked by Turner, Spotify, Twitter, Oath, CBS, NBCU and Samsung Ads. As in the past, the C Space showroom floor – ostensibly an ad tech vendor showcase – was pretty barren this […]

WPP is embracing the forces of change – both internally and externally. Internally, CEO Sir Martin Sorrell knows WPP’s clients want simplification, which will lead to more consolidation. “We’ve seen it amongst clients and media,” he told AdExchanger. “We’re quite likely to see a similar set of circumstances in the agency business.” And externally, he’s […]

L’Oreal will expand a media ownership strategy it piloted in Mexico to other Spanish-speaking countries to generate first-party cookies from its customer base. The idea is similar to sponsored content, but instead of working with a brand-name media company on a story package, for the past year L’Oreal has developed fiufiu, a kind of pop-up […]

Brand safety and transparency were top-of-the-agenda items for advertisers in 2017. But if this was the year of faux pas, mea culpas and the start of a move toward better controls, 2018 will be about buckling down. “The billions of ad dollars pulled off platforms in 2017 was a clarion wake-up call,” said Bill Marino, […]

More marketers are moving programmatic strategy in-house, pushing agencies into an executional role, according to a study released by the Association of National Advertisers on Monday. Most marketers approach in-housing in a hybrid fashion, splitting responsibilities between their internal team and an external agency partner. Marketers increasingly are taking responsibility for strategy while agencies serve […]

Since it began delivering makeup product lines in 2015, the London-based beauty startup Wunder2 demonstrates how savvy ecommerce companies can use Facebook targeting and video campaigns to push into retail distribution. Wunder2 follows in the footsteps of Facebook-centric startup brands like the mattress-in-a-box manufacturer Purple, which landed its first retail distribution deal last month, and […]

When ads show up next to questionable content, consumers are far from impressed. Sixty-four percent of adult consumers say a brand’s reputation is at risk if its media appears next to hateful or derogatory content, according to research released Wednesday by Omnicom media agency Hearts & Science, which surveyed roughly 1,500 consumers ages 22-45 across […]

Champagne used to be reserved for special occasions, but Moet Hennessy USA wants consumers to see its luxury products as more of an everyday utility. The company teamed up with its creative agency, Rehab, and Amazon’s voice-activated service, Alexa, to create Bottles and Bubbles, a customized “skill” or application. Once users command Alexa to “open […]

Wine brand Josh Cellars doesn’t have a taste for traditional media. “We made a choice to stay away from broadcast TV and cable, at least for now,” said Renato Reyes, CMO of Josh Cellars’ parent company, Deutsch Family Wine and Spirits, whose portfolio also includes more household names. Deutsch is the US distributor of Yellow […]

Publishers are getting ensnared in the filters used by many advertisers to combat the YouTube brand safety crisis. Earlier this year, many brands found their ads running next to offensive content on the video platform, prompting marketers and their agencies to enlist third-party monitoring. Now publishers as a whole are feeling the effects. The filters […]

Big consumer product brands like L’Oreal have soaked up as much data as possible in recent years as they try to assemble consumer profiles without the direct data enjoyed by ecommerce merchants and retailers. Doing so requires a multifaceted strategy. L’Oreal’s head of data acquisitions and partnerships, Aruna Paramasivam, described her company’s efforts along these […]

The interactive video ad server Innovid has acquired Taykey, a company that uses machine learning to extract contextual information about video, text and images to help inform ad buys. Terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were not disclosed. Innovid, which has 220 employees, will take on half – or about 20 members – of Taykey’s […]

B2B buyers are doing more of their product research online – and that was becoming a problem for security software provider McAfee. “We could grow the business when we had a seat at the table with our install base,” said Lisa Matherly, VP of content marketing at McAfee. “But when potential customers were conducting their research […]

For large CPG brands like Conagra that typically generate the most awareness through mass reach, hyperpersonalized video creative hasn’t always been their top consideration. But that is changing. “We’re seeing more personalized creative and ad versioning from CPG brands [that] might not own any data from the consumer up until the actual purchase point, because […]

New York Life is in the insurance business – but the brand also has to protect itself. Marketers today have several metrics to juggle in their digital buys: Fraud, viewability and context top the list. But it’s not enough to monitor these metrics; brands need to take action. Natan Cohen, New York Life’s corporate VP of […]

Activist investor Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management won a recount vote for a board seat at Procter & Gamble. In the wake of the early October vote, the initial vote count had Peltz down by a narrow margin, but that now appears to be wrong. In a statement shared with AdExchanger late Wednesday, the […]

Do ads for STD self-testing kits count as sexual content? If medical and recreational marijuana use is legal in California, why can’t a cannabis advertiser geotarget Californians over the age of 21 on the large social platforms? These are the gray areas that certain categories of advertisers have to navigate on a daily basis, and […]

Nestle Canada is exercising more control over its programmatic and first-party data practices, said Melissa Savage, the food and drink company’s programmatic activation manager in the country. But unlike within an ad agency holding company, which tries to centralize programmatic knowledge, brand transformation must occur regionally. Take the company’s plan to ramp up native video […]

Nelson Peltz, founding partner of Trian Fund Management, narrowly lost a bid to win a board seat with Procter & Gamble on Tuesday, following a vote at the company’s shareholder meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. Peltz and his Trian fund are known for waging aggressive proxy battles to obtain public company board positions and then using […]

Criteo on Friday released a suite of products, including audience matching and customer prospecting, as well as a new policy beginning in the fourth quarter to give buyers and DSPs impression-level transparency into every unit of inventory. At the heart of Criteo’s string of product releases this year is a newfound willingness among retailers and […]

Despite a year marred by brand safety blunders, measurement errors and targeting missteps, marketers are mending ties with Facebook and Google as they place blame for the industry’s many issues on its ad tech underbelly. “Just 25% of CMOs’ digital media investment reaches target audiences,” said ANA CEO Bob Liodice during his opening remarks at […]

Amazon is winning a growing share of CPG media dollars, and its September announcement that it would open an office in New York City to house a major expansion of its advertising platform business means the competition will only heat up. It comes as CPG brands pulling back on digital media undercut global agencies, marketing […]

DoubleTree takes a cookie-first approach to marketing – the kind you can eat. But when it comes to data collection, the Hilton-owned hotel chain, known for handing out warm chocolate chip cookies to guests as they’re checking in, is interested in deeper data than just demographics and browsing history. “It doesn’t matter to me whether […]

Women’s fashion brand Johnny Was wanted to do influencer marketing, but paying an Instagram star or blogger to wear its clothes didn’t feel right for the brand. “What we’re looking for is authenticity,” said Rob Trauber, CEO of Johnny Was. “There are very few people we would pay to influence our products because it’s not […]

Demographic targeting and behavioral targeting have both been around since internet advertising’s early days, but big CPG brands now say behavioral targeting drives the biggest results online. Instead of trying to hit in-target demos, they’re looking for more creative ways to connect with consumers based on purchase history or interests. At Dmexco, Johnson & Johnson CMO […]

Six ad industry trade groups have called for Apple to rethink an upcoming change to Safari that will unilaterally block some first-party cookies. Apple’s Safari browser started blocking third-party cookies by default earlier this summer with the release of its Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a machine learning-based feature that discourages cross-site user tracking. But an extension […]

In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, acknowledged that some marketers are “feeling uneasy” about viewability, online ad metrics and brand safety. She outlined updates meant to address that discomfort. First, Facebook intends to give advertisers more control over where their ads are running by tightening guidelines on the […]