Here’s a little good news from the publishing world for a change: BuzzFeed will restore staff salaries this month and end a program that cut union members’ schedules and pay by 20%.
In late March, BuzzFeed was one of the first publishers to announce pandemic-related cost-cutting measures with tiered 5% to 25% salary cuts, followed by furloughs and layoffs in May and July.
But advertisers are starting to peek their heads out, and BuzzFeed is ready to welcome them back with open arms and listen to their needs. One request: more flexibility in how deals are done.
For example, the window from RFP to the sale to going live “has shrunk dramatically,” said Ken Blom, BuzzFeed’s SVP of ad strategy and partnerships.
A process that once took as long as five months is now being done in a matter of weeks.
“A lot of what we’ve done and are doing is about trying to read and predict the marketplace,” Blom said. “We all try to be good at that, but it’s been incredibly challenging to see through to what may happen next.”
Blom spoke with AdExchanger.
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Max Ads
Are you ready for some ads on HBO Max? The ad-supported tier is coming in Q2 2021, according to agency execs speaking to Digiday. And it might come even sooner than that, possibly debuting with the NCAA’s March Madness. As per Digiday, HBO Max wants advertisers to spend at least $250,000 per quarter. But with HBO Max’s high CPMs, Tim Peterson of Digiday warns that buck isn’t going to stretch very far. No word on what those CPMs are exactly, but Digiday sources say they’re comparable to prime-time TV, so, likely around $80. It makes sense that HBO Max CPMs would be high, given that it will deliver lighter loads than traditional TV: four minutes of ads for every hour of programming, and two minutes per hour of movies. It’s interesting to note that WarnerMedia’s pitch is different from NBCU’s pitch for Peacock. Rather than seeking out a small number of exclusive launch sponsors that would pay tens of millions of dollars, WarnerMedia is looking for a broad array of advertisers to run ads across HBO Max.
Better Safe Than Sorry
Companies are lining up to earn a new global brand safety seal developed by the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) and the United Kingdom’s Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWS). TAG and JICWS merged in late July. More than 100 companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, GroupM and Walmart, have already undergone the requisite independent third-party audit, which ain’t cheap. It costs $10,000 a year to maintain the certification. Certified brands must also agree to appoint a designated TAG compliance officer who pledges to attend annual brand safety training and facilitate internal reviews. It’s been a tumultuous year on the brand safety front. When the pandemic hit, brands rushed to block keywords related to COVID-19, and some publishers avoided news content altogether. The program is “just one more big step down the path of protecting brands in the digital space,” TAG CEO Mike Zaneis tells Adweek.
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In light of Apple’s decision to delay enforcement of its opt-in feature in iOS 14, Facebook will keep on collecting the IDFA – for now at least.
Facebook had planned to stop gathering the IDFA for iOS 14 devices across its own apps and via third-party apps through the Audience Network.
But “given Apple’s delayed implementation of the user permission requirement, we will continue collecting IDFA on iOS 14 in an attempt to reduce unnecessary disruption to our customers’ businesses,” Facebook said in an update to blog posts it published in late August outlining plans for iOS 14 before Apple issued its reprieve.
“We, along with the rest of the business community, continue to await final policy details from Apple,” Facebook wrote.
The move is welcome news for app developers, mainly in the gaming category, that rely heavily on Audience Network.
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The World Wide Web Consortium has 437 business, community, interest and working groups – and soon there might be one more.
Around six members of the W3C’s Improving Web Advertising Business Group (IWABG) are pitching the creation of a new group, known for now as the Decentralized Web Interest Group (DWIG), that will help W3C groups across the organization identify and deal with the unintended consequences of web standard proposals before those standards are developed and deployed.
Because in the race to try and come up with solutions for a post-cookie world, it’s easy to overlook potential pitfalls.
Proposals that might sound reasonable and feasible on paper could end up being either unworkable or have unanticipated negative effects, said James Rosewell, CEO and co-founder of device detection company 51Degrees, who in late August initiated the effort to form DWIG.
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The structure of the World Wide Web Consortium can be confusing, since thousands of technologists across hundreds of companies participate in hundreds of groups, all with very specific purposes and remits.
There are four broad types of groups that exist within the W3C – interest groups, business groups, community groups and working groups – each of which has a different function.
Over the past six months, since Google made public its plans to phase out third-party cookies by 2020, numerous ad tech companies have joined the W3C for the first time, and they’re still getting their sea legs.
Here’s a quick cheat sheet that breaks down the main differences between the various W3C groups.
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The digital advertising world is changing faster than the seasons.
At the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Randall Rothenberg, who held the top spot for 14 years, is stepping into an executive chairman role, while David Cohen, IAB president since March, is taking over.
Not only will Cohen become CEO of IAB, he also inherits that same mantle at the IAB Tech Lab, which develops ad industry standards. That confederation makes sense, with the worlds of privacy regulations, big tech policies and the need for common standards colliding.
Cohen has a big task ahead of him and we’ll outline his biggest priorities as he steers the IAB and the IAB Tech Lab into an uncertain future.
And also, Facebook in February 2021 will start limiting how many ads a page can run. Its rationale: It’ll help its proprietary machine learning understand which ads are effective if marketers throw less messaging onto Facebook’s walls, thus paving the way to improve performance and pricing.
Sounds like a win for marketers except, again, they’ll have to cede significant control to a walled garden. (Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.)
But as things change, they also stay the same. Taboola and Outbrain were once planning to merge to create the monster link recommendation site you’ve always wanted. Now, no more. The reported reason: business practices Taboola initiated that cost it some pretty big customers.
Tune in this week to hear how it all went down.
Rishad Tobaccowala has kept busy during the pandemic.
Since leaving his post as Publicis Groupe’s chief strategy officer in March, he’s been dabbling in various passion projects and advising CEOs and Fortune 5000 companies, including Publicis. Most recently, in August, he joined the advisory board of ad tech company LoopMe.
Tobaccowala also released a book in August titled “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data,” which presciently covers topics such as the remote workforce and dealing with organizational change under pressure.
People ask Tobaccowala if he wrote the book having foreseen the impacts of COVID-19, but he says he had already finished writing it last summer.
On top of everything, Tobaccowala has participated in 52 Zoom webinars since mid-March, he’s publishing a newsletter on Substack with musings on a range of topics from art to science and he’s developed an online learning package that combines material from his book with webinar sessions on change, leadership and the future.
His most sage piece of advice: “You better get good at Zoom for the rest of your career.”
Tobaccowala caught up with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: What’s the biggest change to your routine since the pandemic started?
RISHAD TOBACCOWALA: I used to travel 140 times a year. This year, I’ve been to the airport twice: to pick up my daughters when they came home and to drop them off when they left.
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Party’s Over
The third-party data party is over in Europe – for Oracle, at least. Ronan Shields reports at Adweek that Oracle Data Cloud will stop offering third-party data targeting services in Europe as of Sept. 15. ODC reps began contacting partners to alert them to the news this week. There will be no impact to Oracle’s first-party data practices. The news follows ODC’s decision last year to stop using AddThis data across the pond. [Read AdExchanger’s coverage: “Oracle Data Cloud Kills Off Its AddThis Audience Business In Europe.”] Oracle’s move now is likely motivated in large part by privacy considerations. The software giant is facing a multibillion-dollar class action lawsuit, brought in August, alleging GDPR violations. At the same time, ODC’s data marketplace, BlueKai, used to rely heavily on AddThis data to flesh out its segments. It’s possible that once the AddThis spigot was turned off, there was a palpable effect on the BlueKai revenue line in Europe. [Haven’t had enough Oracle yet? Listen to this fresh episode of AdExchanger Talks featuring Oracle EVP Rob Tarkoff.]
Location Consolidation
The location technology market keeps on contracting. In the latest example of consolidation in the location space, location marketing platform InMarket has acquired location-based attribution and analytics provider NinthDecimal. There was no public price tag on the deal, which was announced on Wednesday, although InMarket CEO Todd Dipaola tells MediaPost that combined revenue for the companies for 2020 will be somewhere around $100 million. NinthDecimal CEO Michael Fordyce will join InMarket as chief business officer, while President David Staas joins as chief product officer. The rationale for the deal is to create a one-stop shop for marketers seeking location-based audience targeting, media buying capabilities and measurement. The past year has seen a spate of location-related M&A, including LiveRamp’s sale of Arbor’s location data business and X-Mode’s purchase of Location Sciences’ location data assets (both in January) followed by PlaceIQ’s acquisition of Freckle IoT and Foursquare’s merger with Factual (both in April).
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In February 2021, Facebook will start limiting how many ads a page can run at any given time.
Facebook is making the announcement now so that developers have more than enough time to prepare for the change, said Graham Mudd, Facebook’s VP of product marketing for ads. The change will roll out between February and the summer of next year.
As Facebook layers more automation into its ad products, capping the numbers of ads per page should actually help with ad performance and reduce ad prices, Mudd said.
Because machine learning enables efficient experimentation, Facebook can show ads to enough people to quickly understand whether those ads are relevant, before scaling up or deciding that the ads aren’t working, he said.
When marketers create an ad set in Facebook, the ads immediately enter a learning phase, during which Facebook’s ad delivery system tries to figure out the most efficient way to deliver the ads.
The more ads that an advertiser throws at the wall – “spaghetti-style,” Mudd said – the more difficult it is for Facebook to understand with statistical significance which ads are likely to work well and deserve more budget. With too many ads in the system for a specific advertiser, Facebook isn’t able to learn enough about any one ad because each ad is being delivered less often.
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