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Comcast Doubles Down On Ad-Supported Streaming With Deal For Xumo Here’s How NBCU’s Solution To Unite Its Linear And Digital Inventory Will Work Tips For The New Regulation Age: How To Curate And Ethically Use Data To Build Consumer Trust Why Every Ad Tech Company Must Understand Differential Privacy Moving A $20 Billion Market: How Local TV Is Fighting To Evolve Brand Velocity Partners Combines PE Investments With … An Ad Agency Ofer Druker On Tremor Video’s Plan To Buy Scale And Share In Ad Tech EMarketer: TV And Bloomberg Will Fuel Political Ad Spend This Year Criteo Expects 10% Revenue Drop In 2020, As CEO Clarken Lays Out Survival Plan

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The Big Story: Michael Bloomberg’s Money Bomb

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Thursday, February 20th, 2020 at 9:34 am.

Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s wealth couldn’t buy him a great debate Wednesday night.

This week on The Big Story, the team looks at how his money has affected the paid media space. As our own James Hercher points out: “The ROI only shows up when people turn out to vote.” And, despite vaulting into second place thanks to his unstoppable ad spending, Bloomberg, unprotected from the warm embrace of paid media on Wednesday, showed massive vulnerabilities.

Up to this point, though, Bloomberg has certainly disrupted all of the Democratic candidates by dropping pallets of cash into the electoral field. But there’s a little more to that narrative. Bloomberg’s money actually gives the campaign leeway to experiment and to innovate – at least within the context of political campaigns, which tend to be more conservative strategically.

The Bloomberg campaign has also been able to buy staffers and employees who might ordinarily not support him. While the Bernie Sanders campaign is staffed with true believers, Bloomberg’s has a lot of people attracted to the big payout.

Moving away – far away – from politics, the team looks at retailers and tech companies without legacy media selling roots getting into media sales. Roku, for example, has high hopes for its paid media business in 2020, and TV manufacturer Vizio, despite being a late mover, is angling to capture some of that thunder for itself.

How Programmatic Advertising Must Adapt To A 5G Future

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, February 20th, 2020 at 12:05 am.

"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 Jake Moskowitz, head of Emodo Institute and host of FIVE – The 5G Podcast for Marketers.

With the spectrum of exciting 5G claims and promises, it’s easy to understand why early 5G users expect blazing fast connections. The transition from 4G to 5G is being promoted as a monumental leap in speed and user experience.

That said, if you visit a popular webpage on your phone today, it can take anywhere from four to nine seconds (or longer) for the page to load and its ads to render. Consumers have come to expect that type of latency delay on their current mobile networks. But, here’s the rub: Even with all of the promise of high-speed, low-latency connectivity, 5G won’t do much to improve those load times.

The factors that cause most of the latency in ad serving are located at distant points beyond the cell tower – points referred to as backhaul and the cloud. To work at 5G speeds, the ad industry will need to update beyond the cell tower to meet consumer expectations.

DOJ/FTC Vertical Merger Rules Called 'Too Permissive'; Can Europe Grow Its Own Tech?

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, February 20th, 2020 at 12:03 am.

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

Do Not Merge

A group of antitrust economists filed comments on the new DOJ/FTC draft guidelines for vertical mergers, calling the new draft “excessively permissive” for large companies. Historically, antitrust cases focus on horizontal acquisitions, when a company buys a direct competitor. But old rules don’t apply to new market dynamics. Vertical acquisitions “greatly increase the opportunity to monopolize access to data,” according to the economists. For example, the DOJ approved Google’s acquisition of travel booking software ITA in 2011. In 2018, Google closed the ITA API, a valuable source of search metadata, and launched its own flight search product. Vertical mergers can also remove direct competitors from the market, even if regulators don’t see direct connections. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp were not considered horizontal deals, since at the time those companies were considered a photo-sharing startup and a messaging service, respectively. Facebook understood that Instagram, which at the time had 30 million users and zero revenue, was a potential direct threat. Do regulators see that as well? Hal Singer, professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, has a Twitter thread with more info.

Big Tech EU

Speaking of antitrust, Big Tech may soon have to start sharing more data with smaller companies that use their platforms in the EU, as the bloc investigates how platforms use other companies’ data to stamp out competitors. The rules, unveiled Wednesday, also include stricter regulation over the use of AI and machine learning by American and Chinese companies and aim to fine tune liability rules for big tech companies around content shared on their platforms. Behind the push is Europe’s desire to incubate tech giants of its own, rather than stay beholden to American and Chinese companies. The EU hopes to attract $21.6 billion in investment this year to compete in big data and AI, The Wall Street Journal reports. “We recognize we missed the first battle, the battle of personal data,” said EU Commissioner Thierry Breton. “Europe has everything it takes to lead the ‘big data’ race, and preserve its technological sovereignty.” More.

Ofer Druker On Tremor Video’s Plan To Buy Scale And Share In Ad Tech

by James Hercher // Posted on Wednesday, February 19th, 2020 at 4:45 pm.

Tremor Video has had a dizzying few years in ad tech.

In 2017, Tremor Video sold its demand-side business to Taptica, while shortly afterward the sell-side unit rebranded to Telaria and merged with Rubicon.

Once the name was available, Taptica re-rebranded as Tremor Video. In 2019, Tremor acquired RhythmOne, an ad network and exchange, and followed it up last month with a deal for the News Corp SSP Unruly. In exchange, News Corp owns a 7% stake in Tremor.

But don’t expect a slowdown any time soon. The next year and a half represents a crucial window for small and midsize ad tech players to buy their way to scale on the market, said Tremor CEO Ofer Druker.

AdExchanger caught up with Druker about his vision for the company and his plan to come out ahead after what could be a busy and messy year of ad tech consolidation in 2020.

AdExchanger: What’s the top priority for the company this year?

OFER DRUKER: Our focus since I arrived at Tremor has been video. After we acquired RhythmOne we have the full stack – DMP, DSP, exchange and SSP – including display ad offerings.

We believe video is strong enough to put our efforts into that one element. So we’re spending all of our resources there and thinking two or three years ahead, when I think we’ll look back and say this was clearly the winning format. And a company our size needs to have a focus.

Pinterest Pins Its Growth Prospects On SMBs And DTCs

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Wednesday, February 19th, 2020 at 12:35 am.

While Pinterest’s stock has been challenged since the company went public in April 2019, it anticipates direct-to-consumer and small and medium-sized businesses will be a huge growth vector.

“The Fortune 500 are great – but, this is the thing, there are only 500 of them,” said Harold Klaje, head of global growth at Pinterest.

Pinterest isn’t alone in this thinking: Google and Facebook count millions of SMBs within their total paid advertiser counts, and both regularly release tools and product features to help smaller advertisers spend more, particularly in service of their performance marketing goals.

Period underwear maker Thinx and The Citizenry, a home decor company based in Dallas, are two such brands. Both have upped their spend on Pinterest in the past year to help with performance-based campaign objectives and as a way to diversify their social spend.

“We need to make sure that we’re not over reliant on any one marketing channel,” said Daniella Amirian, director of growth marketing at Thinx.

Sellers.json Is Great, But It Could Be Better

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, February 19th, 2020 at 12:05 am.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.

Today's column is written by Adam Schenkel, senior vice president of global commercial development at GumGum.

Even if you haven’t followed the 2019 launch of the sellers.json spec, the thinking behind it should sound like a positive move forward. Together with the IAB’s ads.txt and OpenRTB SupplyChain object specs, sellers.json gives buyers new vision into the supply chain, disclosing all entities involved from the demand-side platform (DSP) all the way to the end publisher.

Specifically, sellers.json designates whether any entity in the chain is a direct seller of inventory (a “publisher”) or a reseller of inventory (an “intermediary”).

If you’re in or near ad tech, it’s easy to understand why that transparency is important. Sellers.json can assist with supply-path optimization (SPO), cutting questionable intermediaries to the most direct path for publisher inventory when 10-plus exchanges offer the same impression.

Like ads.txt, sellers.json is not a cure-all for the ailment at hand – at least not in its current form. We’re moving quickly toward transparency, but speed can leave some gaps. I’ve been hearing some grumbling from those in one of those gaps: ad management platforms and the small yet high-quality publishers for whom ad management platforms present the most viable means of monetization.

Walmart Ecom Growth Offsets Weak Store Sales; Zuck In Belgium

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, February 19th, 2020 at 12:03 am.

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

Writing On The Wal’

Walmart weathered a disappointing holiday sales season on the strength of its relatively new and fast-growing ecommerce business. “Ecom was ahead of plan and stores were behind plan,” Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon told investors Tuesday during the retailer’s earnings report. Walmart doesn’t break out ecommerce sales numbers, but online sales in the United States were up 37% in the past year, and the company’s guidance for this year forecasts another 30% growth. Read the release. Walmart emphasized why investors should like its world-leading gross merchandise volume and profitability, with its 47th consecutive year of share dividend increases. Some industry analysts consider that a handcuff – Walmart must commit billions of dollars per year back to investors, while Amazon invests more heavily in media, advertising and technology without much interest in ratcheting up profits.

Face, Talk To The Hand

Mark Zuckerberg is on a quasi-state visit to Brussels, meeting with European Union regulators and legislators about Facebook’s new outline for online content moderation – among other pressing issues in the bloc. But it’s been an uphill effort. Thierry Breton, the French markets regulator, rejected Facebook’s plan after a meeting with Zuckerberg. “It’s not enough. It’s too slow, it’s too low in terms of responsibility and regulation,” Breton said of Facebook’s proposal. Zuckerberg said it would be “operationally unfeasible” to moderate tens of billions of uploads per day in real time, Politico reports. On Monday, Zuckerberg met face-to-face for the first time with European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who’s investigating Facebook Marketplace for antitrust violations following complaints from rivals in the category. Facebook may have missed whatever chance it did have for a proper charm offensive. “It's not for us to adapt to those companies, but for them to adapt to us,” Breton said. More.

Hitwise Shuts Down Less Than A Month After Jumpshot Closes Shop

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 at 6:41 pm.

It’s a rough time to be in the clickstream data analytics biz.

On Tuesday, Connexity-owned Hitwise announced that it would cease US operations.

The closure is “due to events outside of our control,” Hitwise said on its homepage. “This is a very sad time for us at Hitwise after 20 years of operations providing first-to-market online measurement.”

Hitwise and Connexity did not respond to a request for comment.

The news shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to Hitwise clients. The company informed customers in early February that it was pausing its daily, weekly and monthly metrics updates, noting at the time that its “primary clickstream data partner is no longer in a position to provide Hitwise with data” as of Jan. 28, 2020.

The week prior, one of Hitwise’s partners, marketing analytics firm Jumpshot, was shuttered by parent company Avast, a cybersecurity firm, following an investigation into Jumpshot’s privacy practices.

It’s unclear how much Hitwise relied on Jumpshot data in order to support its data business, but the timing of the two shutdowns is telling.

AdExchanger Politics: Talking Shop With Bernie Sanders’ Analytics Partner; California Beckons

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 at 2:50 pm.

Welcome to AdExchanger Politics, our news roundup in which senior editor James Hercher tracks the latest developments in political advertising, augmenting our political marketing commentary and news coverage. Want it by email? Sign up here.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren embraced a new model for political campaigns last year with upfront investments in her campaign’s in-house media and data expertise. But those heavy salary commitments – second only to Michael Bloomberg’s campaign – could cripple the campaign before more favorable states for Warren vote later in the primary, Politico reports. More.

* * *

If you want a sense of why politicians nowadays are hoovering up email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses that can be connected to state voter file registries, consider these post-rally tweets by Brad Parscale, President Trump’s reelection campaign manager:

Big Data from New Hampshire:

✅ 52,559 Tickets

✅ 24,732 Voters Identified (41% From NH)

✅ 17% Didn’t Vote in 2016

✅ 25.4% Democrats

Thank You New Hampshire. Data Gold!

💥

— Brad Parscale - Text TRUMP to 88022 (@parscale) February 11, 2020

Matching organic data collected at rallies to voter files “creates the seed audiences to target and win incremental votes you didn’t know were on the table,” a digital ad-buyer for the Trump campaign told AdExchanger.

TripleLift’s First Chief Privacy Officer Is Tackling ‘The Most Pressing Strategic Issue In Our Space’

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 at 6:00 am.

The fate of each ad tech company hinges on whether or not it has a privacy strategy.

Regulators, privacy advocates and web browsers are targeting core capabilities around targeting and measurement, which affects vendor product, engineering and commercial teams.

So TripleLift appointed its first Chief Privacy Officer, Julia Shullman, in January.

Her mission is to make sure TripleLift doesn’t just comply with regulation like GDPR and CCPA, but also approaches privacy strategically, especially as third-party cookies lose viability due to Safari ITP and Chrome’s decision to drop them in two years.

“Privacy is the most pressing legal issue, if not the most pressing strategic issue in our space,” Shullman said. A large part of her role requires spotting how the company can get ahead of potential future privacy issues.

Shullman leads a cross-functional team that includes product, engineering, commercial teams as well as security and privacy experts.

And she’s not a newbie to figuring out how ad tech should navigate privacy. She previously served as VP and general privacy counsel at AppNexus, and later held the same position at Xandr. She also chaired the steering group for the IAB’s efforts around the transparency and consent framework.

She talked to AdExchanger.