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Advantage+ didn’t come up during Meta’s Q4 earnings call on Wednesday, but it’s the ad product Chief Business Officer Marne Levine says she’s most excited about.

2022 was a no good, very bad year for Meta’s stock. It was the year that Meta reported its first-ever revenue decline – yet shares soared by more than 30% in after-hours trading on Wednesday following Meta’s Q4 2022 earnings report.

Performance marketers once turned up their noses at creative, seeming to only care about audience targeting. But signal loss is putting creative back into the spotlight by highlighting how essential even the smallest of details can be, says VidMob CEO Alex Collmer. Also: Hot takes on generative AI art. (Spoiler: Humans aren’t obsolete – yet.)

As the economy fluctuates and budgets tighten, 2023 will be a year of adjustment. In the face of these conditions, and the removal of IDFA, app marketers will need new ways to find scale for their app advertising campaigns, writes Levi Matkins, CEO of LifeStreet.

Netflix President of Advertising Jeremi Gorman was hired September 26. Less than two months later, on November 12, Netflix launched its ad-supported tier in 12 countries. For now, Basic with Ads is focused on the basics, including ad tech and measurement partnerships and the rudiments of brand safety. But Netflix is “ripping through all the […]

On Tuesday, Boathouse launched a product called Narrative Transformation through partnerships with consumer and market intelligence platforms Signal AI and NetBase Quid. The tool helps brands “cut through the clutter, get to the 10 or 15 most important conversations and give actionable insights,” said Boathouse President Peter Prodromou.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. AdExchanger’s daily news round-up will return on Tuesday, January 17. We will not be publishing any content on Monday, January 16, in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Nonhuman Capital Is AI the new intern? For one agency, the answer is “yes.” […]

The slow dismantling of cookie-based tech had its fingerprints all over our coverage in 2022 (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor). Data privacy supplied the drumbeat, from stories about clean rooms to new privacy-forward ad tech products to the rise of retail media (a data safe haven).

Brand safety’s detrimental impact on diverse, equitable and inclusive media goals is a question of automation gone wrong, ham-fisted implementation and industry leaders choosing the easy route, writes Charles Cantu, CEO and founder at Reset Digital. In this column, he reviews how brand safety’s DEI problem has developed and recommends steps advertisers, agencies and brand safety organizations can take to overcome it.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

It’s not hard to imagine the applications of AI-generated art for media and marketing, including spitting out multiple variations of creative quickly, cheaply and easily. But AI art is also sparking a lot of very tricky questions, such as: What is “real” art, and can robots create it?

Only about half of marketers are utilizing the full breadth of capabilities of their marketing tech stack. But, writes Katie Klumper, CEO and founder of Black Glass, what if we treated technology like a team member?

Meta reported $27.2 billion in ad revenue in its Q3 earnings report on Wednesday. That represents a 4% drop year-over-year (YoY). Net income for Q3 was $4.4 billion, down 52% YoY. And Meta is projecting another revenue dip for Q4. As a result, the company will implement layoffs and hiring freezes throughout 2023.

For digital media, Scope 3 includes agencies, tech companies and publishers. Everyone in the digital advertising supply chain is equally responsible for its sustainability. That’s why, to successfully sustain it, marketers must connect their efforts to wider corporate goals, use standard certifications and measurements, and prioritize innovations that create a winning, sustainable scenario for everyone, writes Ben Riley, general manager at SeenThis. 

Google Topics is Google’s proposed replacement, which takes us back in time to broad, interest-based segmented targeting. This means brands are about to return to the “bad old days” of marketing, when many audiences all saw the same message. And this one-message-fits-most approach doesn’t fix what’s fundamentally broken in MADTech: the consumer experience, writes Tara DeZao, director of product marketing, MarTech and AdTech, at Pega.

The term “machine learning” seems to have a magical effect as a sales buzzword. Couple that with the term “data science,” and lots of companies think they have a winning formula for attracting new clients. But there is a need for best practices in data science and for companies to invest in and fully support talent that can apply those principles effectively, writes Jasmine Jia, associate director of data science at Blockthrough. 

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Insta Needs Its Groove Back Instagram has (mostly) been able to balance its business priorities with the interests of its users. But its streak is over. Instagram is struggling to recruit people to create content for its TikTok clone, Reels, The Wall Street […]

Rather than looking at one particular data signal, attention metrics include a variety of data points, which are fed into a machine-learning model to predict the likelihood that a given media environment and ad creative will draw attention from a hypothetical audience member.

Meta has released new products available within Meta Advantage, its newly consolidated suite of automated advertising tools, and the global rollout of Advantage+ shopping campaigns, which was in beta since earlier this year, with additional features to support Advantage+ app campaigns.

The release of Google’s Imagen tool has certainly made news feeds more entertaining in recent months. Who doesn’t want to see pictures of a raccoon dressed as an astronaut or a corgi cycling through Times Square? But while Google’s new text-to-image generator is a really interesting development that illustrates the potential of AI, this type of technology can’t replace human creatives in the advertising industry, writes Graham Wilkinson, chief innovation officer at Kinesso and Matterkind Global.

Last year, Levi’s launched an in-house machine-learning bootcamp to help employees who don’t have a formal data science background learn about AI and develop new digital skills. More than 450 people applied for just 60 spots in the program. Roughly two-thirds of the first class were women, says Katia Walsh, head of AI at Levi’s.

As ecommerce continues to boom, AI technology promises to revolutionize nearly every aspect of a retailer’s operations. Yet, the human aspect of tastemaking has never had more influence, says Catherine Leung, managing executive director, head of activation, Hearts & Science.

The Weather Company is a large publisher with lots of first-party data and, with investments from IBM Watson Advertising, it’s using AI technology to mitigate bias in advertising. The goal is to use both to monetize quality content above short-term gains in ad revenue, says CEO Sheri Bachstein.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Mind Your Own IABeeswax Ad Age dinged the IAB for Meta’s prime placement during the trade group’s Annual Leadership Meeting this week. Three small businesses with the Internet for Growth, an IAB-backed advocacy group, all cited Facebook and Instagram advertising during their presentations. “I […]

“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 Melinda Han Williams, Chief Data Scientist, Dstillery.  Google’s announcement that its “data-driven attribution” – that its machine-learning-driven attribution modeling will be the default attribution method in Google Ads – took […]

Erik Huberman, CEO and founder of marketing consultancy Hawke Media, has some pretty strong – if not outright harsh – words for most media agencies out there: “They’re full of [expletive].” Before founding the Los Angeles-based company in 2014, Huberman launched and sold two commerce companies – Swag of the Month and Ellie – and […]

“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 by Sarah Rose, SVP International Digital Operations, Data & Platform Ops at IPG’s Kinesso. Artificial intelligence is a heavy and complex topic with tons of deep ethical complications, confusing applications and unknown […]

Direct-to-consumer advertisers pumping tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars into their Facebook ads each month know the power of a good creative message. The best ad creatives drive ROAS (return on ad spend) that can be orders of magnitude higher than a failed message. But how can busy, short-staffed marketing departments test new creative […]

Ad-Lib.io, a company founded by a group of former Google execs in 2017 and which offers creative workflow tools, has clinched an additional $6 million in Series A financing. The latest round brings its total funding to $12 million in less than two years and will be used to accelerate the growth of the London-based […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Taking A Hit The ongoing pandemic is still throwing IPG for a loop as the holdco rethinks its structure for the year ahead. IPG reported net sales of $8 billion in 2020, a 6.5% decrease compared with the previous year, The Wall Street Journal […]