Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Gotta Spend Money To Spend Money
Amazon’s ad business is blowing up. You probably knew that already. But that growth for Amazon isn’t a win for many sellers, particularly the early power users on the platform. There is heavy demand for Amazon inventory, with the average cost per click jumping from 86 cents a year ago to $1.27 today, the Amazon agency Canopy tells CNBC. Amazon is opening up huge new swathes of inventory as well. In the past three years, sponsored product ads have gone from 20% of Amazon’s top search result space to more than 40%. But the rates are still going up. And the added inventory is a boon for bigger, legacy store brands, which can box out independent sellers on the platform. Not to mention Amazon aggregator companies that scoop up niche brands and operate their ecommerce advertising. “They’re going from competing against other, smaller sellers to now competing against massive and well-funded sellers,” says Juozas Kaziukenas, CEO of the market research firm Marketplace Pulse.
In Search Of Search
Mozilla is running a test on 1% of its Firefox desktop browser population switching the default search engine from Google to Microsoft Bing, Ghacks reports. The experiment started in the first week of September and will run through January 2022. Firefox comes with a number of search engines preloaded so the user can toggle on or off, including Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and regional companies like Yandex in Russia. But this test marks the first time in years that Firefox is even dipping a toe outside of Google, which has a deal with Mozilla to pay between $400 million to $450 million per year to remain as the default Firefox search engine, reportedly through 2023. Mozilla’s quiet Bing review comes as many search engine challengers and browser operators see an opportunity to do the impossible: peel market share away from Google. AdExchanger has more on that.
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By Rob Armstrong, SVP of Product at Eyeota
If you’re a publisher operating in today’s digital ecosystem, you’re probably pretty sick of hearing that you need to get better at capturing permission-based audience data. The future, everyone tells you, belongs to the publishers with the strongest first-party data strategies.
While that’s true, it’s not helpful in addressing the biggest roadblocks you’re actually facing – like how do you encourage your audiences to sign up, log in or subscribe with their valuable personal info?
Most publishers still wield opt-in prompts like blunt instruments, swinging at every potential lead with the same crude approach. That should, must and will change.
The tools needed to better optimize website prompts according to an individual’s receptiveness are already being refined to better equip publishers for the future. Let’s take a look at what the proper implementation of these solutions will look like and why it will change the game for publishers that lean into this approach.
The problem with today’s prompts
In their quest to gather first-party audience data, publishers have leaned heavily into sign-ups and login prompts. Some publishers simply require registration to view desired content, while others look to monetize their content directly through tiered subscriptions. While the models vary, there tends to be a blanket consistency within the site experience of any given publisher when it comes to when, how and to whom they deliver their prompts.
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Oracle launched a prospecting and lead-scoring product called Fusion Marketing on Monday, as the company tries to reframe the value of the CRM in a world gone crazy for the CDP.
Fusion is the first in a series of what Oracle is calling “Engineered Experiences,” its term for automating workflow processes across different business orgs (or Oracle cloud product suites), such as services, customer experience, human resources, commerce and advertising, said Holly Simmons, global VP of product management for Oracle Marketing, Commerce and Unity, its CDP tech.
Simmons’ own job title shows how Oracle is focused on integrating its various cloud services, often with the CDP product as connective tissue.
The Fusion product addresses a specific B2B marketing use case, since B2B companies must navigate a disconnect between the pace of marketing and sales campaigns, Simmons said.
Marketing campaigns take time to plan and collect data. They may be optimized mid-flight, but that would be shifting budgets toward the media that performs best. Audiences aren’t immediately filtered into the sales funnel, Simmons said.
Sales is a faster-paced campaign environment. People who recently read a certain white paper might test a subscription software product. Account managers direct potential targets to an upcoming event or webinar. In the world of B2B sales, target audiences either move down the sales funnel and convert within a relatively short window, or they fade off.
“You need a much more rapid cadence to do that outreach and keep the pipeline moving,” Simmons said.
Oracle Fusion addresses this issue by ingesting advertising audiences and the client’s first-party data across its cloud products to create live lead-scoring filters that identify potential sales targets based on the data and place those individuals in the sales funnel.
Not all Oracle customers use the Unity CDP, Simmons said. But the Fusion product relies on the CDP to make scoring judgments.
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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 Oz Etzioni, CEO at Clinch.
2021 is shaping up to be a breakthrough year for advertising technology. After several fallow years for ad tech companies and a necessary period of reinvention because of both changing marketing conditions and the pandemic, ad tech has evolved products, capabilities and privacy practices, which has reignited M&A interest.
Just look at recent deals. Many once-independent players have been purchased by larger tech platforms: Integral Ad Science acquired Publica and Publicis Groupe acquired CitrusAd (to name but two). There is also an increase in the number of once-independent players seeking financing through the equity markets and a wave of SPAC mergers with companies like Captify, Innovid and AdTheorent recently announcing massive deals.
That’s unquestionably good for the founders and VC’s that backed these companies, kept them running through turbulent times and helped them become worthwhile acquisition targets. And that’s how the news covers them: Ad tech is back, baby!
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You know you’ve won the lottery as a brand when you go viral on TikTok (for a good reason).
Last year, it was Ocean Spray, and this year it’s Gap, whose vintage logo sweatshirts – the brown one, in particular – made a comeback on TikTok as an unexpected fashion trend of 2021.
Gap capitalized on the organic buzz with a campaign on TikTok over the summer to crowdsource the color for its next hoodie using a customized voting tool. (The winning color was neon pink.)
“This turned into an acquisition opportunity to reach teens, which is a new segment for us,” said Mary Alderete, Gap brand’s CMO. Gap launched its teen line in May 2020.
“It’s not just about disseminating the assets that we’ve created, but also co-creating and engaging with the customer on these platforms,” Alderete said. “It’s all about balancing and finding the initiatives that help you grow the brand.”
AdExchanger caught up with Alderete.
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"On TV & Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today's column is by Jo Kinsella, President, TVSquared.
Since the dawn of TV, Nielsen ratings have been the gold standard for marketers. They measured the percentage of a group (e.g., women aged 18-49) or households in a particular designated market area (DMA) that tuned in to a program. If you wanted to reach a specific cohort, you asked Nielsen which show offered the highest-rating ad breaks, and that’s where you placed your TV budget.
It was a simpler time. For years, families gathered at a set time and place to watch TV. Our lives revolved around appointment TV, and if you weren’t home when the show aired, you missed it.
Fast-forward to today, and “watching TV” is a totally different beast – one where Nielsen and its ratings simply can’t keep up.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Amped Up
In the wake of Nielsen losing its Media Rating Council accreditation for National and Local TV ratings, measurement companies like Comscore and VideoAmp are maneuvering to take advantage. But when it comes to cross-platform measurement as an alternative currency, VideoAmp has the most promise, Campaign reports. VideoAmp will test cross-channel video ratings with a pilot program consisting of five of the six major holding companies, with the goal of becoming a viable currency in 2022-23. Networks have clamored for solutions to linear, streaming and digital ratings disparities – and to gain a unified view across ad performing. But they’re still reliant on Nielsen, for the most part, and its ratings are still used to set upfront and scatter market pricing. “This is the first time there's been a three-way test between agencies, networks and a data provider all saying, ‘We want to trade on this currency,’ and getting everyone on board,” said Mike Law, US president of Dentsu Amplifi.
FAST TV
Google is cozying up to free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) companies to add more channels to Google TV, Protocol reports. The move is meant to boost the appeal of the Chromecast streaming device to cord-cutters. Some better-known FAST apps include Tubi and Pluto TV. Google appears to be taking a page from LG and Samsung’s playbook after they added FAST channels and gained inventory visibility. FAST is a growing component of AVOD as tech and hardware companies build up original programming and content libraries, Samsung Ads global head of marketing and analytics Cathy Oh told AdExchanger. “In 2021, these ‘channels’ will become household names just as AVOD has,” she said. AMC Networks has multiple FAST channels, which helped it build a strong direct sales business, according to Evan Adlman, SVP of advanced advertising and digital partnerships at AMC Networks.
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While diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts to work with minority-owned media companies and hire a diverse workforce are important, brands also need to address a rapidly changing cultural landscape in the United States, according to Isaac Mizrahi, co-president and COO of Miami-based multicultural ad agency Alma Ad Agency (no relation to the fashion designer).
“Diversity and inclusion, without addressing the marketplace from a more multicultural standpoint, may not be enough,” said Mizrahi, whose agency works with the likes of Pepsi, McDonald’s and Netflix. “Conversely, multicultural marketing without diversity and inclusion may not happen as effectively as it could with a more diverse organization. The two go hand in hand, but they're not the same effort.”
In other words – brands who don’t hire a diverse workforce may be blind to the market opportunity they’re missing. Recent census data shows the country is growing more diverse and urban, with the Hispanic population representing more than half of that growth.
Brands and holding companies aren’t putting enough emphasis on multicultural marketing strategies, Mizrahi said.
Some brands, he added, are just not having that conversation yet. Some conflate multicultural marketing with DEI.
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As of September 1, Verizon Media is now officially … Yahoo. Was that on anyone’s 2021 bingo card?
Guess everything old is new again – with a twist. This week on AdExchanger Talks, we catch up with Iván Markman, who joined Verizon Media in early 2019 as chief business officer and now fills the same role at the newly constituted Yahoo.
There’s no denying that Yahoo’s path has been full of twists and turns, and that the assets nested under the former Verizon Media umbrella have undergone a vast amount of change in a short amount of time – and provided some of the earliest evidence that the great ambition of telcos to use their data to become big players in digital advertising would remain an unrealized aspiration.
Private equity firm Apollo Global Management’s recent purchase of Verizon’s ad tech and media assets for $5 billion is only the next chapter for Yahoo Take 2.
And now that Yahoo has been freed from the scrutiny of the public market as part of Verizon, the company will be able to move faster, think more strategically and build richer relationships with advertisers and partners, Markman says.
“We’ve turned the business back to growth and we have been accelerating growth,” he says. “There is so much potential to go deeper and be bolder.”
Also in this episode: What attracted former Tinder CEO Jim Lanzone to the job as chief exec of the new Yahoo (he starts September 27); morale at Yahoo; Apollo’s plan to “aggressively” focus on commerce, content and sports betting; Yahoo tries its hand at NFTs ... and Markman indulges in a Yahoo yodel.
"The Sell Sider" is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today's column is written by Rich Calkins, Director of Product Management, OpenX.
For ad tech wonks who spend countless hours in industry working groups, getting deep in the weeds to solve problems is all but required. But when it comes time to communicate solutions to the community at large, we rarely rise to the level necessary to describe them clearly.
Instead, we often add more confusion to an already overly complicated industry. I was reminded of this while moderating a virtual discussion among publishers about Prebid, when the topic of first-party data came up. Several participants expressed frustration at the fact that they can’t generate first-party data because they have no realistic path to collecting user emails. It seems the breathless debate over authenticated ID solutions has led some to believe that email is the only kind of first-party data that matters, or even exists.
There is no doubt email-based IDs are going to be a critical component to the future, and publishers should test strategies to collect and activate them. However, first-party data is much more than emails.
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