American Express

Why AI commoditizes publisher content; credit cards are incorporating brand deals at the expense of exclusivity; and McDonald’s launches a media network.

After a reenergizing week at the Cannes Lions festival, here are six observations on how our industry is changing to meet its new challenges.

In today’s newsletter: The marketing data ecosystem is key for fin tech; media buyers acknowledge YouTube as part of their TV strategies; and Threads will launch ads later this year.

American Express doesn’t just issue credit cards; it’s also in the attribution business. Because Amex can see both sides of a transaction, it’s able to collect insights about buying behavior directly from the source.

Search behavior is one of the main ingredients in Resy’s personalization strategy. The Amex-owned restaurant reservation platform uses search intent to inform its content and better understand what motivates users to book tables.

Instead of a funnel that slows traffic, we need to create a ubiquitous, always-accessible “sales superhighway” that provides countless on-ramps. This change of perspective will impact both how we define our potential audiences and the speed with which we have meaningful interactions with them, writes Lance Porigow, EVP of growth at The Shipyard.

American Express is investing in measurement technology to try and give credit where credit is due. Since 2019, Amex has been moving away from multi-touch attribution and embracing marketing mix modeling and machine learning to power its approach to measurement.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Remember Oath? Verizon Media Group, the company formerly known as Oath, is shrinking as the telco shifts its focus and most of its resources to 5G. The media group, which is made up of Verizon’s acquisition and merger of AOL and Yahoo, saw revenues […]

American Express on Tuesday launched a data-driven business division called Amex Advance. Along with it Amex is debuting a data platform designed to let marketers run custom audience segmentation and predictive modeling against Amex’s own first-party data. Amex Advance lets marketers and merchant partners use American Express’ database of deidentified cardholders to extrapolate insights about […]

Last year, American Express’ B2B division – a unit that delivers 40% of the company’s total billings – saw serious results from its programmatic advertising strategy. On Wednesday at the Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco, American Express VP Tatyana Zlotsky revealed that the financial services company had quadrupled programmatic media spend in 2016. The move […]

by Allison Schiff, Alison Weissbrot, Sarah Sluis, James Hercher, Kelly Liyakasa and Ryan Joe Programmatic advertising comes in many flavors. A handful of brands load up to take their buying fully in-house. Many give their agency partners carte blanche. Other brands take ownership of the tech contracts and segmentation, while letting their agencies pull the […]

Viacom and American Express on Tuesday announced Vantage Intent – a Viacom product powered by AmEx – to help advertisers use purchase intent to find audiences across TV, digital and social. As a premium offering within the data and audience platform Viacom Vantage, Vantage Intent is designed to analyze roughly $1 trillion worth of AmEx’s […]

What do loyalty programs and paid media have in common? Not a lot, at face value. Loyalty marketing has long been relegated to card-based, point-of-sale programs and customer retention. It was always the stuff of database marketers and direct mail – not user acquisition. But that’s starting to change. Coalition loyalty programs or “co-ops,” such […]

In 2014, American Express boldly declared in an RFP to ad tech vendors that it wanted to programmatically transact 100% of its then $128.5 million display budget. Though the statement was later clarified to be more of an aspiration than a brand-wide target, the financial services giant was one of several large brands exerting greater control over exchange-based buys at […]

When Rite Aid launched its wellness+ program in 2010, it didn’t want to create just another plastic rewards program. “We really wanted it to be a brand awareness and loyalty initiative, since we were the first in retail to not only offer savings and discounts, but also to offer health and wellness benefits as part […]

Plenti, the new American Express-operated loyalty coalition, seeks to streamline the rewards program. The premise is that consumers can gather loyalty points for up to two years from a variety of partner brands, including ExxonMobil, Hulu, Macy’s, Rite Aid, Direct Energy, Nationwide, AT&T and Amex, and can redeem those points across participating Plenti merchants. “The […]

The divide between publishers and advertisers around viewability sharpened during a Tuesday morning panel “Inside The Mind Of The Advertiser,” hosted by analytics provider Integral Ad Science. This wasn’t much of a surprise considering one panelist was Ari Bluman, GroupM’s chief digital investment officer for North America. GroupM has taken a notoriously hardline stance around […]

“Show me you know me, and just make it happen!” Digitally engaged customers are not only becoming aware of big data’s capabilities, they are expecting companies to use data to create personalized brand experiences, American Express VP of Digital Partnerships & Development Andrea Zaretsky said at the ANA Social Media and Digital Conference on Monday. […]

Location-based marketing player Placecast has taken the wraps off a new card-linked offers program geared to credit card companies and retailers. With the program, called Card-Linked ShopAlerts, Placecast will compete with FreeMonee Network, Linkable Networks, and Cartera Commerce among other vendors. But it claims to have a leg up when it comes to analytics, since […]