OpenAP, a consortium of TV networks that allows advertisers to buy standardized audiences across their inventory, launched its first tech product on Monday, a supply-side platform (SSP).
SSPs are a mainstay of digital publisher technology, and now they're coming into the TV world to help improve the antiquated linear TV ad buying process by adding automation.
OpenAP claims it reaches virtually all US households. Its members include AMC Networks, Fox Corporation, NBCUniversal, Univision and ViacomCBS. Starting soon, it will also be able to avail more inventory from A+E Networks and The Weather Channel.
The new SSP connects directly to its existing marketplace, the OpenAP Market, which houses inventory from every participating TV content owner.
Omnicom Media Group – the media services arm of holdco Omnicom – is the first agency client using OpenAP's SSP, and has integrated it into its in-house platform. Software and data platform VideoAmp is the first partner to integrate with OpenAP as OMG’s preferred vendor.
The integration gives OMG the ability to see in real time the linear media inventory available through the SSP. The integration with Omni launched in January, with testing set to take place in Q1 and Q2 of this year across OMG agencies.
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Comscore released a solution for audience targeting and activation on Monday that relies on contextual signals rather than cookies.
You’d be forgiven for asking the question, “Wait, Comscore has tools for targeting?” It does. Although far more well well-known for its media measurement capabilities, Comscore has had its own suite of audience and contextual targeting solutions for the past few years.
Although far smaller than its measurement offerings, audience targeting is a quickly growing line of Comscore’s business, said Rachel Gantz, general manager for activation services at Comscore.
Until now, Comscore, like pretty much everyone, has largely depended on cookies and other traditional identifiers for targeting.
But with third-party cookies set to get their walking papers from Chrome next year, Comscore is rejiggering its activation tools to enable cookie-free targeting based on context.
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Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series, featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021.
This podcast is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.
If there was any doubt that short-form video would play a massive role in the future of media and communications, Bytedance-owned TikTok has erased it.
The popularity of short-form video content has helped spur many imitators, including Instagram Reels and the recently released Snapchat Spotlight.
But what makes TikTok, well, TikTok?
For one, TikTok is not based on a social graph, says Matty Lin, TikTok’s managing director of monetization and partnerships.
“We are a content platform,” he says. “People come here to discover and create content.”
And the more people come, the more marketers are interested, especially as TikTok continues to mature as an advertising platform. Over the past year, TikTok made its self-serve ad platform available globally, launched a business hub for its marketing solutions and introduced a marketing partner program.
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"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column is written by Mike Baker, former CEO of dataxu.
It would be an understatement to say that the past nine months have had a monumental impact on the way we consume entertainment. One need only point towards statistics measuring Connected TV viewership to get a sense of the tectonic shifts underway: NBCUniversal’s recently-published trend report saw a 95% growth year-over-year in CTV viewership; 80% of U.S. households have at least one CTV device, according to Leichtman Research Group; a Nielsen report cited by Brad Adgate in Forbes shows an 81% increase year-over-year in CTV viewership.
We’ve reached a tipping point at which video viewership has become a 24/7 aspect of our lives. Our work is conducted using videoconferences, and our children are going to school over Zoom. When we need a break from these apps, we turn to smaller pieces of content from Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. At the end of the day, we decompress by streaming premium TV. Though we won’t be “house hostages” forever, it’s obvious that our relationship to video has fundamentally changed since the start of 2020.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Built On Sand?
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching an investigation into Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome, CNBC reports. The CMA says it’s received several complaints about how Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals will impact competition. One of the most vocal complainants has been an alliance of digital marketing companies called Marketers for an Open Web (MOW), which called the coming deprecation of 3P cookies a “ploy” to sweep digital ad dollars from the open web and into Google’s own platforms. In a statement on Friday, the CMA appeared to agree, noting that advertising spend could “become even more concentrated on Google’s ecosystem at the expense of its competitors.” James Rosewell, MOW’s director and CEO of 51Degrees, applauded the CMA for taking preemptive action. “For the first time in history, the UK regulator is taking action before irreparable harm is done to the digital market,” Rosewell told AdExchanger. “Most regulators merely work out fines many years after the damage has been done.” [Related in AdExchanger: “The Privacy Sandbox And A Pre-emptive Breakup Of Google?”]
Debt Free?
Comscore has locked in a deal with Charter Communications, Qurate Retail and private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management to bolster its finances and strengthen its commercial relationships, The Wall Street Journal reports. Each is making a cash investment in the troubled media measurement company in exchange for shares of convertible preferred stock. Comscore will use the cash to extinguish its debt and improve its liquidity position. Comscore, known for its media measurement tools, has faced a number of challenges in recent years, including executive departures, an accounting scandal and a subsequent SEC investigation, which resulted in a $5 million settlement in 2019. The company has also faced increasing demand from media and marketing clients for new measurement capabilities. The deal will free Comscore from its loan arrangement with activist investor Starboard Value LP, which imposed strict covenants requiring Comscore to have a minimum cash balance and steep interest payments, as well as terms for repayment of $204 million next year. Comscore will also extend an existing data agreement with Comcast as part of the deal.
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When Cadillac put together a marketing strategy for its 2021 Escalade last year, gaming bubbled up as a place where the brand needed to play.
“All of our research into current and future Escalade owners shows gaming as popping up pretty high from an index perspective,” said Marcie Pérez, associate director of media and performance marketing at Cadillac.
But Cadillac wanted to do something more engaging than a typical sponsorship, Pérez said. And so, over three nights in November, Cadillac partnered with Twitch to host a series of livestreams featuring up-and-coming gaming influencers playing “Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout” with big-name gamers whose faces would only be revealed mid-stream based on guesses coming in from the audience.
Engagement with the streams exceeded Twitch’s internal benchmarks, Pérez said, and serves as evidence that gaming is “where we need to be as we lean into our future target audience.”
Heading into 2021, Cadillac is considering a more always-on strategy for Twitch campaigns, including taking advantage of Twitch’s more standard display and video ad units.
Pérez spoke with AdExchanger.
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When we recorded this episode of The Big Story on Wednesday to discuss what we expect the new year to bring, insurrection at the Capitol was not on the table.
That soon changed.
I would say we live in a different world than the one we inhabited last week, but the same could be said for every week of 2020. Despite the anticipation that 2021 might present some semblance of calm – and it still might – the beginning of the new year has instead brought the past four to a crescendo. Hopefully, what happened at the Capitol is the final combustion before the burnout.
And while advertising has also been touched by the recent madness – Facebook and Twitter finally shut down Trump’s platforms, and keyword banning is once again controversial – for the most part, its challenges are rather sedate and civil.
Though we shouldn’t interpret that staidness as a lack of complexity. From the future of online identity, to the impact regulation might have on the industry, to the way TV ads are bought and sold, each subject has its own difficult path forward and its own issues to untangle – and with great urgency.
In this episode, AdExchanger editors Allison Schiff and Anthony Rifilato will unpack these topics as we examine where the advertising industry left off at the end of 2020, and where it needs to go in 2021.
A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Stepping Back
So … 2021 is off to a great start. After pro-Trump mobs stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday, advertisers are pulling their paid social advertising and reevaluating their overall ad spend, Digiday reports. Some advertisers paused their paid social just as DC’s 12-hour curfew went into effect Wednesday evening and are starting to consider other channels, including digital news content and linear TV. Certain media buyers are advising clients to press pause for the next 24-hours while the dust continues to settle. Over the past year, advertisers have gotten quite trigger happy with the pause button and worked closely with their media agency partners to quickly halt paid advertising across various channels during the early stages of the coronavirus crisis and followed by the social unrest this past summer.
Don Is Done
Social media companies are (finally!) taking more aggressive steps to block President Trump’s angry, and in many cases flat-out false rhetoric about the general election. After receiving widespread criticism for not muting Trump’s inflammatory posts that helped incite angry mobs to storm the U.S. Capitol, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday that the company would block the lame duck president’s account indefinitely, and for at least the remainder of his term denying him a voice to his 35 million Facebook followers. Read Zuckerberg’s statement. Facebook made this more extreme move after first locking Trump’s account for 24 hours following the melee. Twitter, Trump’s platform of choice where he has 88 million followers, did the same but for 12 hours, warning that further violations could lead to a permanent suspension. Trump deleted the three tweets that got him locked out of his Twitter account on Wednesday, which could mean he’ll get his account reinstated. One of the tweets included a video in which Trump addressed the rioters, saying "go home, we love you, you are very special," while also making baseless claims of election fraud. Facebook also removed that same video.
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Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series, featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021. This podcast is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.
Will 2021 be a pivotal year for AI? In the second episode of AdExchanger’s Industry Preview podcast series, IBM’s Sheri Bachstein outlines the huge stakes as the industry scrambles to retrofit its pipes for a privacy-centric world.
Bachstein is global head of IBM Watson Advertising, overseeing two media brands, The Weather Channel and Weather Underground, as well as a B2B data unit. Over the past several years, these properties have offered a sizeable test bed for the use of AI in digital advertising during a period when the industry’s traditional model is under threat from the loss of identifiers.
“We are looking down the road at the upheaval in the advertising industry,” she says. “We saw a great opportunity to first solve those problems for ourselves as a publisher. We’ve been creating AI-driven ad solutions and using them on our own platform to make sure they work, and now we’re expanding that out to the ecosystem.”
Bachstein praises the industry’s successful collaboration on unified IDs from The Trade Desk, LiveRamp and others, but warns they are only a partial solution. AI, she argues, can help cover the gap.
“I worry that we’re putting too much attention on replacing the cookie with all the alternatives,” she says. “Unified ID is still going to require consent. That’s why we need to evolve to a different technology that isn’t necessarily about replacing the cookie, but is an upgrade to how we engage with consumers."
