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How Oracle’s Rob Tarkoff Will Win The Next Stage Of Data And Ad Tech Reed Hastings Explains Why Netflix Won’t Ever Sell Ads DoubleVerify Takes A Crack At CTV Fraud With New Supply Certification Chrome Is Killing Cookies – But SameSite Still Needs To Be Updated Mark Read: The Future Of WPP Is Interoperable 4 Ways The Death Of The Cookie In Chrome Could Affect Marketers Publishers Sense Opportunity As Chrome Drops Third-Party Cookies What’s In Google’s Privacy Sandbox? Nothing, For Now Google Chrome Will Drop Third-Party Cookies In 2 Years

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Digital Publishers Start Turning A Profit; Why The Slow Transition From Linear To OTT Is A Good Thing

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 at 12:03 am.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

Back In The Black

Group Nine Media will turn a profit in 2020, CEO Ben Lerer shared Wednesday morning at a press breakfast. The crop of disciplined, profit-focused executives that came along with GroupNine Media’s acquisition of PopSugar at the end of last year – including its founders, CRO, COO and CFO – is helping move the rest of Group Nine Media into the black. In addition to gaining scale through multiple horizontal brands, Group Nine Media is focused on revenue diversification. PopSugar led in DTC offerings, such as a subscription box and paid online fitness classes, and now other GroupNine brands will follow in its footsteps. On top of that, Group Nine Media’s fleet of brands will produce 70 shows this year for Netflix, Quibi and other distribution platforms. And here’s another sweet treat: The digital advertising market is focusing more on locking up digital inventory, Lerer said. “More and more advertisers are starting to do upfront commitments to digital players. That’s a big difference we’re seeing.”

Prophets And Profits

Group Nine isn’t the only digital media company touting its profitability. Business Insider, Vox Media, The Information and Politico all turned a profit in 2019, Axios reports. (Oh, and so did Axios.) Meanwhile, digital news bellwethers BuzzFeed and Vice both expect to become profitable this year. Finally, a few tailwinds for news companies, despite general pessimism around the category. Major platforms, including Google and Facebook, are being forced to pay for content creators under new EU copyright laws, even if just to display snippets of a story when users search for news. At the same time, Google, Facebook and other big tech players, such as Apple or Netflix, are starting to shell out for access to stories and episodic content. More.

The Big Story: Call Of The Peacock

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020 at 5:44 pm.

Last week, NBCUniversal unveiled the money-making apparatus behind its upcoming streaming service, Peacock. Not surprisingly, NBCU has an ambitious advertising initiative to ensure its bird takes flight.

But the introduction of Peacock isn’t significant because it’s introducing a bunch of new NBCU ad formats into the wild. Instead, it marks a major entrant into the world of ad-supported video on demand (SVOD). While the world of streaming is largely dominated by non-ad-supported giants such as Netflix, HBO, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime, the SVOD world has scant few participants.

There’s Disney-owned Hulu and the much smaller Tubi and PlutoTV, which is now owned by Viacom. And now we have NBCU’s latest flex with Peacock.

But will the economics work out? It takes a lot of investment to market and support a major streaming service, and with lighter ad loads (five minutes per hour of programming), will Peacock be able to make the financials work, even with a five-year runway before it expects to turn a profit?

Tune in to stay on top of the debate.

Of course, we can’t have a discussion about streaming without including Netflix. The OG streaming media service missed its subscription goals in its latest earnings report, but lest you think Netflix will capitulate to advertiser dollars, CEO Reed Hastings would like to state otherwise.

How Oracle’s Rob Tarkoff Will Win The Next Stage Of Data And Ad Tech

by James Hercher // Posted on Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020 at 1:43 am.

Rob Tarkoff, EVP, Oracle CX and Data Cloud, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference in New York on Jan. 28-29, 2020.

Oracle’s data division has had a tumultuous year.

Eric Roza, Oracle Data Cloud chief, left last April, and was replaced by Rob Tarkoff, who ran the customer experience (CX) cloud unit.

The data cloud cut staff by 15% as it discarded products built around third-party data and refocused on contextual data, brand safety and measurement.

Tarkoff now oversees the CX unit, as well marketing, sales, service, commerce and the data cloud – though the distinctions between those legacy suites are becoming less and less important, he said.

AdExchanger caught up with him about Oracle’s evolution, and whether this year could be as frenzied as 2019.

AdExchanger: How has Oracle changed in the past year?

ROB TARKOFF: The biggest change is being proactive about where the industry is going. You saw Google’s announcement on their timeline for third-party cookie support. And the notion of identity is in transformation.

What we’ve done in the past couple of years is augment the team with executives like Mollie Spilman [the former Criteo COO, who joined last year as Oracle Data Cloud’s revenue chief] and organized the business around key themes that were emerging, particularly cross-media measurement with products like Moat and contextual audience targeting models with Grapeshot.

Those are both Oracle Data Cloud businesses, right? Are they part of any other Oracle suite?

Now that the entire world is moving to the cloud, we don’t think of products so much as distinct cloud businesses.

We’re also finding that as data and ad tech models change, there’s a lot of convergence happening when it comes to the visibility of customers across their journeys, from unknown prospects to known customers. Companies are doing more direct response type activities, or loyalty and affinity programs, and they need ad tech and mar tech to converge.

DMPs Aren’t Dead, But They Must Continue To Evolve

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020 at 12:05 am.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Gareth Davies, co-founder at Truth{set}.

Google’s announcement to deprecate the Chrome cookie within two years seals the fate of anonymous behavioral data and its underlying identifiers and technology. The move threatens a litany of open programmatic use cases, from view-through and multitouch attribution to (re)targeting and ad personalization.

In the wake of this news, some have proclaimed the certain death of the DMP. Some are calling the category out as zombie technology that no longer serves the needs of either the publisher or the brand, denouncing its ability to keep pace with a post-cookie identity landscape and evolving consumer privacy regulation.

There’s a strong argument that they called it right. The DMP’s original mandate – to collect, segment, taxonomize and port anonymous cookie-based audiences across the programmatic ecosystem for targeting and personalization – is under immense threat, especially when viewed through the lens of consumer privacy.

But naysayers are missing the point. The DMP is not dead – but the free-for-all days of non-consented, persistent identification and data promiscuity are. What must also die is the near-total disregard for consumer privacy and consent, which reigned supreme in the quest for one-to-one marketing and its associated riches.

Microsoft's Nadella On Why The Future Is All About Cloud; Buyers Are Into TikTok's Self-Serve Ad Platform

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020 at 12:03 am.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

The Not-So-New Microsoft

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, speaking at a private media event last week, explained how the trillion-dollar company plans to keep up with the evolution of enterprise and consumer tech – and why that doesn’t mean giving up on legacy businesses. “What do you think is the biggest hardware business at Microsoft?” Nadella asked, turning the mic on the reporters. Xbox? Surface tablets? “No, it’s our cloud,” he said. The distinctions between Microsoft’s business lines are more important for outside observers than for Microsoft itself, writes The Verge. The same engineering teams might handle Surface hardware lines, the Edge browser tech and Azure cloud products. Microsoft’s new products will be built around existing scaled customer bases, such as Windows, but won’t necessarily supplant them, Nadella said. “If anything, what people have come to realize is that Windows is there with a billion users, iOS is there with a billion users and Android is there with 2 billion users. It’s not like one killed the other.” More.

Self-Serve TikTok

Advertisers are pleased with the progress TikTok is making on its self-serve ad platform, but there’s still more work to be done. While buyers say the platform is easy to use and helps raise brand awareness, it lacks targeting capabilities, APIs and the reporting mechanisms available on more mature platforms, Digiday reports. Agencies and brands gripe that it’s difficult to drive performance and track conversions without these capabilities. As with most social platforms, native and influencer-driven content drives the most engagement on TikTok, but bounce rates are high. “There will be a lot of brands that will hesitate because they don’t know how to use it and it’s not as trackable,” said Asher Chester, Agency Within’s director of performance marketing. More.

Reed Hastings Explains Why Netflix Won’t Ever Sell Ads

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, January 21st, 2020 at 8:13 pm.

Seriously, folks, Netflix has no intention of monetizing with ads, ever.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings even referred to advertising as a form of exploitation on the company’s full year 2019 earnings call on Tuesday.

“We want to be the safe respite where you can explore, you can get stimulated, have fun and enjoy – and have none of the controversy around exploiting users with advertising,” Hastings said.

Hastings was just as emphatic back in July, when he first put to rest rumors that Netflix might introduce ads as another revenue source.

In Netflix’s view, remaining ad-free is a selling point, and wresting marketshare from Facebook, Google and Amazon wouldn’t be a picnic and, Hastings said, would also require Netflix to become a collector of large amounts of user data.

“We think with our model that we’ll actually get to a larger revenue, larger profits [and] larger market cap because we don’t have exposure to something we’re strategically disadvantaged at, which is online advertising against those Big Three,” Hastings said.

DoubleVerify Takes A Crack At CTV Fraud With New Supply Certification

by James Hercher // Posted on Tuesday, January 21st, 2020 at 9:40 am.

DoubleVerify introduced a certification program on Tuesday to detect CTV fraud and invalid traffic.

The exploding prices of streaming impressions have been a beacon for fraud, said Roy Rosenfeld, SVP of product management and head of DoubleVerify’s Fraud Lab. “And there’s an opportunity for fraudsters because CTV as a medium and how ads are delivered to content is totally different than web-based or mobile content,” he said.

The new DoubleVerify program includes five ad tech platforms at launch, Amobee, The Trade Desk, AppNexus, MediaMath and SpotX, that integrate with the measurement companies video tag for pre-bid analysis.

CTV fraud can enter the ecosystem in a few different ways. Some CTV apps are fraudulent: They either don’t exist or have paltry downloads and are juiced up with fake impressions. Bot networks that target mobile or desktop video campaigns also spoof the device type to masquerade as high-priced CTV.

But the most troubling contributor to CTV fraud, Rosenfeld said, is server-side ad insertion (SSAI), sometimes called ad stitching or dynamic ad insertion.

SSAI is when content and ads are bundled into one stream by the programmer or distributor. CTV requires a clean viewing experience, because audiences won’t accept buffering and lag like they do with mobile or desktop video players. SSAI ensures that consistent viewing experience and speeds up content delivery.

But SSAI also means that campaign verification comes from the publisher, instead of being collected by DoubleVerify at the device level, Rosenfeld said.

Google GM Sissie Hsiao Is Planning For The Next ‘Jump Forward’

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Tuesday, January 21st, 2020 at 9:30 am.

Google GM and VP of apps, video and display Sissie Hsiao will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference in New York on Jan. 28-29, 2020.

Google is known for making methodical changes with long roll-out periods. But Sissie Hsiao, who became general manager and VP of Google’s advertising business across apps, video and display in September, likes to ponder how bigger, more disruptive ideas could create more long-term impact.

“I’m always thinking about taking a bigger leap and a bigger risk,” she said.

She pioneered one such leap while leading AdMob, where she championed Universal App Campaigns, a product that uses machine learning where Google originally planned for manual controls.

Machine learning controls campaign bidding, targeting and creative selection. And instead of having to manage separate app campaigns for search, display and video, Universal App Campaigns buys across all three channels, swapping out the best creative or targeting that works for each place.

Advertisers who once only bought app install ads within AdMob apps saw their spend shifting to new channels, including Google's sister products, search and YouTube. Hsiao also helped open up the Play store to app ads for the first time, creating a new place for brands to advertise their apps.

“We were able to obfuscate the differences between inventory and simplify the buy,” Hsiao said. “The advertiser doesn’t have to understand the modalities of all those users in all those environments. The machine learning does it for them.”

Mobile Attribution Company AppsFlyer Raises $210 Million Series D

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, January 21st, 2020 at 8:00 am.

AppsFlyer said Tuesday it closed a $210 million Series D round, bringing the app measurement firm’s total funding to more than $293 million since 2014. It had previously raised a $56 million Series C in 2017.

The round, which brings AppsFlyer’s valuation to $1.6 billion, was led by General Atlantic with participation from existing investors Qumra Capital, the investment arm of Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, Pitango Venture Capital and Magma Venture Partners.

In June of last year, AppsFlyer’s direct competitor, Adjust, raised $227 million in funding.

Investors are jazzed about the growing opportunity around data security and reducing attribution ad fraud, said Brian Quinn, US president and general manager of AppsFlyer, whose clients include eBay, HBO, NBCU, Nike, Tencent and Walmart.

“It’s a competitive marketplace, and the market needs a trusted referee to help brands understand the true performance of campaigns and to help brands control their first-party data,” Quinn said. “We’re investing a lot in both.”

Chrome Is Killing Cookies – But SameSite Still Needs To Be Updated

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, January 21st, 2020 at 6:00 am.

By 2022, third-party cookies will be obsolete in Chrome.

But there’s a more pressing deadline looming that advertisers need to prepare for: SameSite. Beginning on Feb. 4, Chrome will stop supporting cross-site third-party cookie sharing by default.

Third-party cookies that aren’t secure – as in, accessed over HTTPS – and also properly labeled using the SameSite attribute, will no longer be readable across sites.

Google has framed the SameSite change as primarily a security measure to protect against cross-site request forgery attacks.

But in light of Chrome’s more recent announcement, it’s clear that requiring SameSite flags are also a precursor to the demise of third-party cookies.

SameSite feels like “a baby step toward a cookieless world,” said Nick Kaplan, director of programmatic at female-focused publisher SHE Media.

“Everyone has to address [SameSite] now to keep the pipes running properly,” Kaplan said, “but then we all really need to focus on what the new privacy-driven future looks like.”

In the same boat

SameSite lets Google easily identify third-party cookie trackers and see a cookie’s purpose, said Ken Weiner, CTO of GumGum.

Flagging cookies as “SameSite=strict” restricts all cross-domain sharing, while “SameSite=lax” will only allow sharing across domains that have the same top-level URL. As of Feb. 4, “lax” will become the default setting in Chrome for any third-party cookie without a SameSite flag.

The “Samesite=none” attribute is the most permissive, and the one every ad tech company is probably busily adding to its code right now. “None” allows third-party cookies to flow freely across domains, as long as they’re secure, thereby enabling the ad tech ecosystem to function as “normal” … for the moment.