Children’s toys are simple. But advertising them? Not so simple.
WowWee is a large-scale, family-owned children’s toy manufacturer with clients including Walmart and Target. The company also advertises through multiple video channels – linear TV, streaming (e.g., YouTube or Hulu) and social platforms like TikTok and Meta.
On Wednesday, WowWee shared the results of an initial test campaign with contextual video company Precise TV. The campaign ran in the fall of last year and targeted co-viewing parents on YouTube – meaning an adult is presumably watching with a child – across 2.3 million households. The contextual data helped to quadruple the ROAS compared with the same ad budget for a previous campaign.
The results are reassuring because, for the children’s vertical in particular, all these media channels have one thing in common: strict limitations on data-driven advertising.
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“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Keith Petri, CEO and founder of lockr.
If you don’t have the email address of the person you’re targeting, your digital ad isn’t working as hard as it should. Period.
It’s no secret that if an ad isn’t associated with a persistent ID of any type (cookie, device ID or hashed email), it loses more than half its value. Regardless of whether you’re a publisher, a brand or a marketer, as cookies and device IDs continue to disappear, this problem will continue to worsen. As a result, publishers and retailers are desperate for the one identifier that is not going away: email addresses.
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The Four-Minute Mile
Details of the new Disney+ ad-supported tier are leaking as Disney lays the groundwork for its upfronts sales pitch.
For one thing, Disney+ will carry about four minutes of commercials per hour, with zero ads for preschooler-aged accounts, The Wall Street Journal reports.
HBO Max also benchmarked its new ad-supported tier at four minutes per hour; Peacock sits at about five minutes, Hulu more like eight. Linear commercials soak more than 18 minutes per hour.
Disney+ ads are expensive, as one might expect. But the company won’t let advertisers purchase ads for specific programs, which they can do on linear TV. The new Disney ads will have the vibe of a lucky dip (“Ooh, we got a Marvel and some Star Wars!”).
Disney will also prohibit alcohol brands, political ads and rival streaming services or entertainment studios, Variety reports. No poaching on Mickey’s preserves.
Although, the conquesting policy isn’t new. YouTube TV can’t advertise on Hulu and hasn’t been able to for years. Netflix already can’t air ads on Disney-owned networks. TV nets wouldn’t take Amazon Prime trailers during NFL games, so Amazon went over their heads and became an NFL sponsor (and now has exclusive distribution rights for Thursday Night Football).
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When Google announced the Android Privacy Sandbox in February – and subtly heralded the coming end of the Google ad ID – Google gave developers loads of lead time to prepare.
Google is putting out proposals over the course of this year with a beta release scheduled for sometime in Q4.
Makes sense. Advertising is Google’s main business.
But advertising is not Apple’s main business, which was evident in its somewhat careless rollout of its AppTrackingTransparency framework last year.
When, in June 2020, Apple first teased plans to start requiring an opt-in for the IDFA starting with iOS 14.5, mobile ad tech companies were left scrounging for details in ambiguous documentation.
But these days Apple is a bit more open, says Omer Kaplan, CRO and co-founder of ironSource, which offers monetization, user acquisition and mediation solutions for app developers.
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A rose by any name will smell as sweet, sure. But attribution by any name doesn’t work the same.
Marketers are trying to figure out how their ad budgets are actually working for them. Just don’t call it multitouch attribution (MTA). Or perhaps don’t call it attribution at all.
Madan Bharadwaj, co-founder and CTO of Measured, a startup offering marketing measurement and incrementality testing, said he uses “attribution 2.0.” But that nomenclature is being shot down too. The company is moving more toward framing campaign measurement as “contribution reporting” rather than attribution, he said.
“Contribution reporting” helps marketers understand that the analytics chronicle an overall channel’s contribution to sales, rather than attribution reports that assign credit to individual impressions or close the loop on specific customer journeys.
Parachute, the bedding and home décor brand, began working with Measured in late 2020 largely because of the company’s jaded (or experienced, if you prefer) take on data-driven attribution, said VP of Growth Ian Yung.
“One reason why I actually went with Measured as opposed to some of the other players was that they were likewise explicit in their belief that MTA [multitouch attribution] is not the best approach,” Yung said.
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Pre-pandemic, Great Wolf Lodge devoted the majority of its media spend to programmatic. But as the family resort rebuilds after the pandemic, it’s turning to TV and making a splash with a brand-building campaign.
Upper-funnel metrics are now front-and-center for the hospitality-focused brand.
Earlier this month, Great Wolf Lodge went live with an omnichannel campaign introducing viewers to the family resort. It worked with Horizon Media on media planning and buying and Erich & Kallman on creative.
The resort, founded in 1997, started advertising on regional television in 2014. Once the company built up its brand recognition with an audience at scale, it broke into national TV in 2018 – and started spanning the purchase funnel.
“Since [2018] we’ve been really focused on understanding our [audience] targets’ media consumption behaviors, and then really mirroring our media plans [accordingly] through KPIs and creative,” said Brooke Patterson, SVP of brand experiences at Great Wolf Lodge.
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“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 Neej Gore, chief data officer of Zeta Global.
The potential of data-driven marketing is entering a brave new world. The explosion in consumer data availability over the last few years has only been exceeded by marketers’ aspirations to find new ways to advance customer relationships and improve value exchanges. But as complexity increases, marketers must look toward a solution that simplifies data-driven marketing: agile intelligence.
Agile intelligence is a technology-enabled approach that helps marketers visualize, explore and take action against the most pressing business questions without depending on other departments, such as IT. Sitting at the intersection of business and marketing, agile intelligence provides easy cross-pollination of market, customer and location data through a Customer Data Platform (CDP), enabling real-time decisions.
Here are four ways agile intelligence can shape not just your marketing strategy but also your overall business strategy.
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The 1% (No, Not That 1%)
Hotel and travel companies are following in the footsteps of others that have embraced advertising revenue, including buy-now-pay-later companies, retailers and delivery startups … not to mention stores that have started repurposing any old surface as a distribution channel using digital screens. (Ads on pharmacy fridge doors, anyone?)
The latest is the hotel operator Marriott, which launched an ad network on Monday backed by Yahoo ad tech to target its own inventory using first-party site and loyalty program data, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Marriott, like grocery and retailer-based ad networks, is constrained in terms of where it will serve ads or apply first-party data. It’s starting with site ads and will later roll out video ads for hotel room TVs, which is a nice edge compared with retail (until Best Buy’s new ad business starts running spots on in-store demo TVs).
Companies are tripping merrily into the ads biz because it’s low and, well, low: low-margin and low-hanging fruit. Instacart can easily scale ad revenue but also must hire more delivery people to grow the app.
“As the market gets bigger, if you can get one percentage point of the digital retail media market, that’s almost half a billion dollars in revenue,” Insider Intelligence Analyst Andrew Lipsman tells the Journal.
Sounds feasible. But let’s be honest: Most of these fledgling ad platforms will never reach 1%.
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Jay Glogovsky, vice president of revenue operations and analytics for The New York Times, will be speaking at Programmatic I/O in Las Vegas from May 23-25. Click here to register.
In the post-cookie era, many in the industry anticipate power dynamics will shift to favor publishers, as first-party data becomes indispensable for targeting and media planning.
But that changing dynamic doesn’t mean a publisher needs to create distance from its partners. The New York Times is focused on its partnerships with advertiser and agency clients, as well as creating close working relationships with a limited number of DSPs and SSPs.
Glogovsky talked to AdExchanger about how The Times relies on these direct partnerships to create a positive ad experience for its readers, why open-web programmatic is the wrong choice for a privacy-centric in-app experience and why publishers should double down on close partnerships rather than worry about who will control the keys to monetization.
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AVOD is the same thing as FAST … right?
Not so fast.
The fragmented TV ecosystem uses a crush of confusing acronyms to describe itself. Their meanings are bleeding into each other, but it’s important for buyers to understand the nuance in these definitions.
Two of the most important acronyms to get right are AVOD and FAST.
Despite dozens of streamers, programmers and publishers crowding the space, AVOD and FAST are the only two ways to watch ad-supported TV beyond the set-top box.
The core difference between them comes down to content distribution. Streaming content can either be served on a one-to-many basis (as in live) or one-to-one basis (as in when you want it).
Free ad-supported TV (FAST) apps host linear channels that deliver scheduled programming to a mass audience through connected devices, while ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) is at the behest of the user, who initiates individual viewing sessions that generate inventory in which to serve personalized advertising.
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