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Criteo Expects Sanction For Undisclosed GDPR Violation AdExchanger’s Comic Caption Contest Winner: Paul Gubbins Why Would Apple’s ‘iDSP’ Succeed When iAd Failed? Unilever Brand Liquid I.V. Takes Its First Steps Into TV, OTT, OOH And MMM AdExchanger’s Caption Contest: It’s Time To Vote! Why Some Brand Marketers Are Going Back To Their Roots With Mix Modeling Concerns About Advertising Using Health Data Are Rising. Where Does HIPAA Apply? Amazon The Unstoppable Continues Its Ad Platform Expansion Google Delays The End Of Third-Party Cookies (Again), From 2023 To The End Of 2024

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Ad Exchange News

Game Apps Get Tougher For Ad Tech; Is The Newsletter Apocalypse Nigh?

By AdExchanger

Friday, August 5th, 2022 – 12:03 am

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

All Fun And Games (For Some)

A week ago, Google quietly made a large chunk of mobile gaming revenue disappear with the news that it would prohibit certain in-game formats – namely, full-screen ads that display unexpectedly, full-screen ads that display before the main app page loads and ads that appear during gameplay when a user begins a level or a new sequence.

This is a user-friendly change, since those formats are also extremely annoying.

Problem is … they’re also some of the most commonly used formats.

Casual game developers will now have fewer impressions to sell and will no longer be able to achieve (ahem, force) certain lucrative metrics, like “engagement” tied to unskippable full-screen video.

But one gaming ad format was explicitly exempted by Google: the rewarded ad, which allows users to unlock features or move forward in a game in exchange for watching a video.

The move away from ubiquitous interruptive ads – and a growing focus on rewarded ads – is only the first step, however, as Google strives to improve the Play Store gaming experience, writes Dave Madden, founder and president of Simulmedia subsidiary PlayerWON, in a blog post.

Next up, developers will need to start attracting larger and non-endemic brands and stop relying so heavily on rival mobile game developers to buy their ads.

Digital TV and Video

Paramount Thanks DTC For Almost All Its Growth

By Alyssa Boyle

Thursday, August 4th, 2022 – 11:25 am

Paramount is just one of many broadcasters juggling its linear (and declining) TV cash cow with a budding DTC streaming biz.

Paramount’s total revenue grew 19% year-over-year in Q2 to a total of $7.7 billion. But the growth was primarily attributed to streaming.

Streaming channels, which Paramount and other broadcasters classify as a DTC segment, were up by more than half from last year, and totaled $1.2 billion in Q2 2022. Specifically, the network grew its subscription revenue by 74% (that’s mainly Paramount+) and its streaming ad revenue by 25%.

Paramount+, the network’s AVOD streamer launched in March 2021, is now the company’s biggest growth driver.

Paramount+ alone saw a 120% revenue increase for Q2, and it now makes up two-thirds of Paramount’s total DTC subscribers.

“Paramount+ added 4.9 million new global subscribers, while our other subscription services grew modestly,” CFO Naveen Chopra said on Thursday’s earnings conference to investors, referring to Paramount’s free ad-supported channel PlutoTV and its other, subscription-based services, such as BET+.

The next hurdle for Paramount+ is to go international.

commerce

Criteo Sees A Bump – In Profit, Not Revenue – And Stands Out In A Weakened Ad Tech Field

By James Hercher

Thursday, August 4th, 2022 – 8:01 am

In the face of a potential global recession on top of a horrendous year for ad tech stocks, companies have to find comfort in the small victories.

Wednesday was one such victory for Criteo, despite a few troubling trends.

The company reported revenue of $495 million for the second quarter, which was down year-over-year from $551 million. But Criteo’s net profit did tick up from $15 million to $18 million.

“July was slightly worse than June and June was slightly worse than May,” Criteo CFO Sarah Glickman told investors, referencing the impact of some advertisers pulling back spend – not because of diminishing sales, but because they’re taking a more conservative approach in anticipation of an economic downturn.

On top of that, platform privacy changes, primarily Apple’s ATT and other iOS-related alterations, reduced revenue by an estimated $16 million – with higher losses forecast for Q3 and Q4 of this year.

Mobile

Why Would Apple’s ‘iDSP’ Succeed When iAd Failed?

By Allison Schiff

Thursday, August 4th, 2022 – 1:00 am

The details are still sketchy, but it looks like Apple plans on launching a demand-side platform of its own.

Digiday’s Ronan Shields broke the news on Wednesday.

According to a late July job posting on its career website, Apple is seeking a senior product manager with experience building a mobile demand-side platform and optimizing mobile campaigns using measurement and attribution. The job requires at least eight years of experience in product management, technical architecture for mobile ad platforms and “crafting mobile and web ad experiences.”

Although Apple has publicly denounced data-driven advertising in the past – CEO Tim Cook makes regular references to what he calls the “data industrial complex” – this DSP-to-be is not Apple’s first stab at ad tech.

On TV and Video

Linear And CTV Each Have Their Own Measurement Problems – And The Solution Is A Fusion

By Alyssa Boyle

Thursday, August 4th, 2022 – 12:35 am

An interview withJon WattsManaging Director

“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

Streaming is attracting more and more of TV ad spend.

Over the past couple of years, major TV networks, including NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, have been leaning heavily into streamed and on-demand content.

It’s likely that, in as little as another 18 months, more than half of their impressions will come from streaming rather than linear content, said Jon Watts, managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM).

And measurement still hasn’t caught up.

The TV ecosystem remains rife with overfrequency, audience deduplication and viewability problems – not to mention the fact that Nielsen continues to reign supreme despite loud grumblings from the network.

But traditional panel-based measurement is far from the only culprit. And although advertisers are spending more on streaming, issues with ad fraud, viewability and audience identification are considerably more prevalent in connected TV environments.

Ad Exchange News

Where Big Tech Meets Diplomacy; Shopify Could Buy, Build Or Invest Its Way Into Ads

By AdExchanger

Thursday, August 4th, 2022 – 12:03 am

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

Speak Softly, And Carry A Big Tech

Big Tech is on the defensive in the US, where it’s become politically popular to take shots at Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. But events that have transpired over the past year abroad demonstrate how powerful those companies, as well as behemoths like Microsoft and Apple, are to America’s global influence.

The Ukraine War is a primary example. The Ukrainian government awarded peace prizes to Google, Amazon and Microsoft for helping to secure its data and computer systems, The Wall Street Journal reports.

But there are also counter pressures. GDPR and anticompetition cases in Europe have been enforced in part to spur the development of homegrown (as in, non-American) technology.

That said, these are American companies, and when push comes to shove they answer to the mothership.

Russia may suffer from this dynamic the most, since US companies have dramatically pulled back from that market since the war began. But it’s also an issue that will resound in China. There are hundreds of millions of iPhone owners in China – and it’s a powerful blow to morale that an American company has the power to unilaterally remove functionality. (That said, China has some leverage here, too, considering that practically every iPhone sold in America is manufactured in China.)

Online Advertising

DoubleVerify Grows Q2 Revenue By Expanding Brand Safety To Retail Media, TikTok And Gaming

By Alyssa Boyle

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022 – 7:05 pm

Most ad tech companies reported average or subpar quarterly earnings, and more than one of them are pointing the finger at current macroeconomics.

But DoubleVerify is expanding its brand safety tech to new areas, from retail media to gaming to Twitch, TikTok and Reddit. These new sources of revenue growth contributed to its stock surging 4% in after-hours trading Wednesday afternoon. The company upped its guidance for the rest of the year to a projected 35% total revenue growth.

DoubleVerify’s Q2 revenue grew 43% year-over-year to $109.8 million.

CEO Mark Zagorski says the company’s growth is due to both its revenue diversification into new types of advertising and its market position in the verification space, both of which make DoubleVerify “largely agnostic to shifts in ad spend and CPM volatility.”

Data

Buyers Are Dragging Their Heels On Seller-Defined Audiences Over A Lack Of Transparency

By Anthony Vargas

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022 – 11:54 am

Many publishers are betting big on seller-defined audiences (SDA) as a centerpiece of their post-third-party-cookie monetization plans.

Seller-defined audiences is a technical spec that was released by the IAB Tech Lab earlier this year to help publishers monetize their first-party data on the open web.

Problem is, although publishers are eager to test the performance of SDAs, there’s still very little demand from the buy side.

AdExchanger spoke with ad agencies and buy-side tech platforms to get their side of the story.

brand advertising

Unilever Brand Liquid I.V. Takes Its First Steps Into TV, OTT, OOH And MMM

By James Hercher

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022 – 10:00 am

You can call it a heat wave – but Liquid I.V. sees an opportunity.

The Unilever-owned brand, which makes powder that gets added to water to improve hydration (and taste), began its first national branding campaign a week ago, including its first TV, OTT and out-of-home media buys.

Liquid I.V. was acquired by Unilever in 2020 and six months ago added Stacey Andrade, a long-time brand director at Procter & Gamble, as its VP of marketing.

The brand and the company have now reached an “inflection point where we feel very well equipped to scale,” Andrade said.

Driving awareness and educating consumers are the top orders of business. And for Liquid I.V., which found its early traction as a Facebook and Instagram-based brand, that means exercising very different marketer muscles.

Comic Strip

AdExchanger’s Caption Contest: It’s Time To Vote!

By AdExchanger

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022 – 1:00 am

We hosted a comic caption contest this past week – and AdExchanger readers, you really delivered. Thanks to everyone who submitted a caption.

Now it’s time to crown the winner.

But although you’ve got until 2024 before Google phases out third-party cookies in Chrome, we need you to vote on your favorite caption by 4 p.m. ET on Thursday, August 4.

The caption with the most votes will be posted on our site this Friday, August 5 – and the winner gets a free ticket to Prog IO NY in October!