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."
"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 Allison Schiff, senior editor at AdExchanger. It's part of a series of perspectives from AdExchanger's editorial team.
While most people were glued to their TV screens watching the chaos unfold in Washington, DC, on Wednesday afternoon as rioters breached the Capitol Building, some advertisers were busy updating their keyword block lists or pulling their ads from news sites.
A source told Campaign US that GroupM updated negative keyword lists within an hour of the siege, and that by 5:30 p.m. – just over 60 minutes after President Trump posted a video telling his supporters, “We love you, you’re very special” – six Omnicom clients had already halted all ad placements running against news content across digital and on TV.
Other brands followed suit, including clients of Dentsu and Havas, by pausing their media and fearfully battening the brand safety hatches as they always seem to do the moment the news cycle veers in an unexpected or extreme direction.
No one is debating that brands need to protect their image and their reputation. There’s no lack of fraudulent, inappropriate and unsuitable content online that doesn’t deserve the support of ad dollars.
But when advertisers are so skittish about brand safety that their first thought is to immediately go dark? Well, do that enough times and eventually there won’t be a robust Fourth Estate to support.
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Publishers enter 2021 in a position of strength, but only if they can overcome the data disadvantages that created their long self-inflicted servitude to big tech companies. This week's guest on AdExchanger Talks, Quantast VP of product management Somer Simpson, has worked on challenges faced by media companies since the late ‘90s. In this episode, she describes the high stakes these companies face in areas like privacy compliance, data ownership and user experience.
Key to capitalizing on their data will be creating partnerships that unify data assets across publisher companies in privacy-safe and compliant ways.
“Publishers can come together as a group, put aside competitive thinking and say, ‘We have more power as a walled garden of our own, to bring in quality advertisers and distribute across all inventory behind the wall,’” Simpson said.
But it won’t be easy.
“It’s complex and technical and difficult to make work, but it’s the nature of the law,” she says. “We have to iterate constantly as the various regulators put forth opinions. Obviously we could be further along. Just looking at Europe and GDPR, even now only 50% of publishers have a CMP [consent management platform] in place... Some companies have taken a hard stance on that, saying we will not drop a cookie without a consent signal. That’s fantastic. But there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
Assessing a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) usually requires observing that person’s purchase behavior over time.
But there are more efficient ways to calculate LTV earlier in the customer journey, said Emad Hasan, CEO and co-founder of Retina, a startup that uses machine learning and data analytics to help brands predict LTV and lower customer acquisition costs.
On Thursday, Retina launched an insights tool that builds personas for new customers before they make their first purchase so that brands can optimize their marketing without having to wait for those customers to complete multiple transactions.
The tool, which Retina originally started to develop in partnership with one of its clients, DTC hair care and coloring brand Madison Reed, was in beta for the past six months with a small group of brands, including Brickell Men’s Products and legal cannabis delivery app Eaze.
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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 Zack Zalon, CEO and co-founder of Super Hi-Fi.
Audio advertising is stuck in a time warp.
There have been no meaningful changes to speak of over the past ten years. In fact, one could argue that audio ads have been effectively the same since the 1970s – an experiential relic of how most audio entertainment was consumed at the time.
The question is, why? Why, in an era of unprecedented and accelerating digital innovation, are audio services still serving up dinosaurs of revenue generation?
Audio vs. video
While audio has stayed stagnant, video has seen consistent innovation that has helped create a rich digital ecosystem of marketing and revenue opportunities. Think of the skippable video ad that YouTube pioneered a decade ago, providing advertisers with an entirely new form of storytelling and the ability to drive commensurate advancements in targeting, retargeting and bidding.
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