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Social Distancing With Friends: Todd Garland Social Distancing With Friends: Bayer North America Head of Media Josh Palau Crisis Puts Amazon (And Ecommerce) In The Balance What Happens To Sports Marketing Budgets Without Sports? Ad Tech M&A Fell Off A Cliff In Q1 – And Not Just Because Of COVID-19 Affiliate Marketing Is A Game Of Chutes And Ladders Right Now Social Distancing With Friends: Hearts & Science CEO Erin Matts Live Industry Updates: WPP Cuts Executive Committee Salaries By 20%; Maven Lays Off 9% How To Find The Bright Spots In A Bad Ad Economy

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How To Avoid A Coronavirus Marketing Fail

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2020 at 12:29 pm.

The playbook for how to advertise during a pandemic is still being written.

Coronavirus marketing fails are inevitable. Retargeting ads for out-of-stock products and tone-deaf or opportunistic messaging trail consumers on the web.

“This is an unprecedented situation. You have to think deeply about what is right for your business,” said Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail, who has been advising brands during the pandemic.

But as brands figure out how they want to approach their marketing during this pandemic, common themes are cropping up.

To avoid a coronavirus marketing fail, brands need to think long term, build their brands over focusing on performance and make sure their messaging appears in the right context.

Cannes Lions 2020 Is Canceled, Rescheduled for 2021

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2020 at 12:05 pm.

Bowing to pressure from agency holding companies, Ascential has canceled the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for 2020.

The ad industry’s largest annual event was postponed on March 18 from its regular timing in late June to late October 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The festival will now resume in June 2021, when award submissions from 2020 will be eligible.

“As the impact from COVID-19 continues to be felt across the world on consumers and our customers across the marketing, creative and media industries, it has become clear to us our customers’ priorities have shifted to the need to protect people, to serve consumers with essential items and to focus on preserving companies, society and economies,” the festival organizers said in a statement.

Pressure had been mounting since the festival was rescheduled.

Agency holding companies, worried about the optics of networking and partying on the French Riviera in the midst of a recession that will almost certainly affect their businesses, immediately threatened to pull out. Every major holding company has either withdrawn their financial guidance for 2020 or warned investors that the coronavirus will impact their businesses.

Contracts Are Under The Microscope Thanks To COVID-19 – But Force Majeure Isn’t A Cure-All

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2020 at 12:35 am.

Over the last two weeks, there probably wasn’t a lawyer in America who didn’t field at least one phone call from a stressed-out client asking about activating force majeure to get out of a contract.

With events on ice for the foreseeable – media buys either canceled or postponed and commercial productions ground to a halt – brands, agencies and vendors are scrambling to figure out which contractual obligations they need to fulfill … and which they can dodge.

But force majeure, a common legal proviso that allows one party to renege on a contract due to unforeseen events outside of the party’s control isn’t a panacea, said Doug Wood, a partner at law firm Reed Smith and co-author of a COVID-19 legal survival guide for brands developed at the request of the Association of National Advertisers.

“What no one likes to talk about is the fact that most force majeure clauses are just thrown into a contract,” Wood said. “It’s usually so broad that you end up with something generic and useless – I’ve seen some pretty horrible force majeures recently where I thought, ‘What is that even doing in the contract?’”

Social Distancing With Friends: Bayer North America Head of Media Josh Palau

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2020 at 12:12 am.

Really though, does a pharma company like Bayer even need to advertise during a global pandemic?

Actually, yes, says Bayer’s head of media in North America Josh Palau. “Right now, consumers are so in need of the products we make that anything we can do to make sure we’re front and center to get what they need – and understand what it’s used for and not used for – is really critical at this time.”

Also: Josh talks about supporting team members, who are mandated to stay at home but each struggling through unique challenges. Plus, how is Bayer prioritizing long-term issues such as CCPA enforcement and the deprecation of the third-party cookie? And will the pandemic have a lasting effect on consumer shopping behavior?

The big news, though, is that Josh has not yet watched Netflix’s “Tiger King.”

Finally, AdExchanger managing editor Ryan Joe erroneously claims in this episode that Josh is the first marketer to appear on SDWF. In fact, DraftKings' senior director of growth marketing Jayne Peressini was the first. Listen to her here.

Hypercasual Gaming Will Inherit The Earth

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2020 at 12:05 am.

Gamers don’t just wear hoodies.

“Hypercasual gaming breaks down every barrier,” said Jon Hook, VP of publishing at Polish game developer BoomBit. “It’s teens, parents – your nan could be playing these games.”

Considering the audience is anything but hardcore, the key to success in hypercasual is creating a game that’s snackable and simple to understand. The key components of a hypercasual game is that anyone can learn how to play in a matter of seconds and the actual game mechanics require minimal controls, often just one finger.

Right now, the hypercasual opportunity couldn’t be more ripe, said Hook, a Mediacom and AdColony vet who joined BoomBit last month after two years as CRO at French indie studio Homa Games.

Hypercasual games, which mainly monetize with advertising, rather than in-app purchases, is a fast-growing market worth around $3 billion – a 33% YoY increase, according to research from ironSource.

Hook’s job is to liaise between BoomBit and external studios in the quest to build hit games.

“Think of hypercasual as a global content marketing platform,” he said. “And think of your potential audience as literally anyone.”

In his spare time, Hook also advises startups as founder of Mallory Ventures, a fund focused on early-stage investment in AR, social influencers, fashion, blockchain, mobile ad tech and gaming.

AdExchanger spoke with Hook.

Comic: Updating The Platform

by Nate Neal // Posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2020 at 12:04 am.

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

Ad Supply And Demand All Out Of Whack; Big Agencies May Skip Rescheduled Cannes

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2020 at 12:03 am.

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

How To Finnish The Job

In Finland, social media influencers join jobs like doctors, bus drivers and grocery store workers as “critical operators” who continue working during a crisis. It seems like a strange designation (especially in the United States, where some influencers have set a poor example during the public health crisis). But the Finnish government has about 1,500 influencers in an emergency information network that it considers critical to inform younger citizens, who aren’t reachable by TV, print or radio, Politico reports. “Some people trust social media influencers more than the media,” said Tero Koskinen, the head of preparedness for the media section of the Finnish national emergency supply organization.

Topsy-Turvy

The natural equilibrium of content consumption and advertising demand has been knocked extremely out of whack by the coronavirus outbreak. “For the first time in history, you’re probably going to have the highest point of media usage in the history of the United States and the lowest point of advertising in the US,” ad industry vet Tim Armstrong, CEO of the DTC investment firm dtx, told The Information. What’s most at risk? Well, for one, the OOH category will see wholesale ad spend pullbacks, Armstrong said. “Anything that is not trackable and ROI centric is going to get hit. The further you get away from the ability to track results, you are going to have more people pull back from [it] more quickly.”

Crisis Puts Amazon (And Ecommerce) In The Balance

by James Hercher // Posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2020 at 2:26 pm.

Ecommerce is all about planning. It’s a carefully choreographed dance between manufacturing, warehousing and selling.

But what happens when Amazon – and the world in general – has gone off the rails?

It’s the nature of ecommerce and Amazon that tactics constantly change, said Sarah LaVallee, VP of client success at the ecommerce agency Channel Bakers. “But we haven’t seen anything like this, where clients will have a plan in place Monday and it’s obsolete by Friday.”

Many companies, for instance, manufacture products in China, and still aren’t sure when their supply chains will return to normal, LaVallee said. In some cases, those brands are pausing or reducing their advertising so they don’t deplete their inventory before they can re-stock.

These companies are juggling a variety of factors, including the cost of advertising, the value of new customers that result from that ad spend (e.g. panic-buyers have lower life-time value) and the risk of losing loyal customers when a product isn’t in stock.

Topping the list of uncertainties are the rapid changes to the Amazon platform, in what increasingly feels like a game of Calvinball.

For instance, categories like apparel and most consumer electronics have been deemed non-essential, so Amazon is delaying shipments and new inventory of these products for weeks, and in some cases more than a month.

“Amazon says those POs (purchase orders) are coming back in a week or two,” LaVallee said. “Are they though? We don’t know.”

Some brands and Amazon sellers think shipments in the United States might become even more restricted, following in the steps of Italy and France, where Amazon currently does not take orders for non-essential items.

Amazon does have options to support sellers. For instance, it could place bulk orders and give a boost to products that are unfairly punished by its shifting algorithm. But that’s unlikely, LaVallee believes.

The Big Story: Audiences, ACTIVATE

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2020 at 1:21 pm.

Google’s Ads Data Hub (ADH) is beta testing new audience targeting features. That shift is significant, considering ADH was originally positioned as a way for marketers to get post-campaign analytics and measurement.

AdExchanger senior editor James Hercher breaks down what he knows about this expansion of ADH. How granularly can you target? Is search and YouTube inventory available? Is this a cookie-based tool that will implode when Chrome drops the third-party cookie? Can other DSPs plug in to take advantage? (Ha-ha, trick question. Of course not.)

Sarah Sluis also details how the pandemic is pressuring the digital advertising ecosystem. From dealing with delayed payments from partners to a cessation of client spend, companies must find new ways to deal with the economic crunch this quarter – a situation that will likely worsen next quarter. This is a time when having and maintaining good relationships with clients and partners is absolutely paramount.

Social Distancing With Friends: Integral Ad Science CEO Lisa Utzschneider

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2020 at 12:02 pm.

What happens when everybody in a global organization suddenly has to work from home? Integral Ad Science chief Lisa Utzschneider speaks about leadership – across multiple time zones – during a pandemic.

“When you looked at the data early on, you could see it coming,” she says. “The team in Tokyo, they were the first ones to be working from home, kids out of school … Because we saw it early on, we started putting contingency plans in place.”

For Lisa, the challenge was making sure that as teams in other countries were compelled to work from home, they remained connected to the rest of IAS.

In this episode, Lisa also talks about “coronavirus” being the most blocked keyword among advertisers, although sensitivity varies by vertical and brand. Airlines, to the extent that they’re still advertising, don’t want to be adjacent to the term under any circumstances, while tech, CPG and ecommerce have no qualms.

As a bonus, listen in to hear about which leadership book Lisa recently read that left a lasting impression. And be the first to learn what her daughter is getting for her upcoming birthday.