As BuzzFeed struggles with advertiser uncertainty and a drop in user engagement, it reported flat Q3 ad revenue. Advertising revenue was $50 million, matching last year’s Q3. Ad revenue growth decelerated compared to Q2, “driven by ongoing price compression and uncertainty around consumer demand,” said BuzzFeed CFO Felicia DellaFortuna.
It’s almost impossible for advertisers to know who’s really sitting in front of a TV screen, and they typically aren’t told what content their ads are running against, either. TV measurement companies are turning back to panels for help. Panel-based measurement provider TVision announced a $16 million venture round led by alternative TV measurement provider iSpot.
When the pandemic hit, the global marketing team at Japan Airlines saw its budget disappear overnight. But rather than sitting, idle, JAL used the downtime to get its global marketing house in order and prepare for the day when Japan reopened its borders.
Tostitos recently implemented sonic branding and a new sonic logo into its cross-channel media campaigns and has been spending more on streaming audio channels. Audio now makes up between 30% and 40% of any given Tostitos campaign – or more, depending on the KPI.
We’re halfway through the football season, but streaming sports is just kicking off. The Amazon Prime “Thursday Night Football” show began in September and it represents the first time that the NFL is streaming games without a linear broadcaster alongside.
CTV advertisers still don’t know much about what content they’re running against, other than the fact it’s on the big screen. And they’ve had enough of it already. Buyers’ lack of visibility into which network, program or distribution channel their ads are served is almost enough to wish for the good old days of program guides.
Facebook’s ad platform is still misfiring and ad buyers are resorting to desperate measures, including a pay-for-access fee scheme that led to the firing of multiple Meta employees. Plus: It’s ad tech earnings week … and the category isn’t doing too hot.
Magnite’s quarterly revenue was up 11% year-over-year in Q3, with a large chunk of its growth coming from streaming. Growth guidance is conservative for next quarter, but Magnite expects AVOD inventory and retail media to become bigger growth drivers for its bottom line.
Turkey brand Butterball wants to reach millennials because they’re the most likely to become first-time Thanksgiving dinner hosts soon, at least according to the company’s research. But younger generations are less familiar with the brand than older ones, so Butterball is leaning heavily on streaming and social media, particularly TikTok, in its video campaign leading up to Thanksgiving this year.
Turns out 2022 was a bad year to merge two large media companies into one massive media company. Both Dotdash and Meredith experienced headwinds throughout the year. Traffic was soft compared with the rise in consumption during the pandemic, and the digital advertising market was unexpectedly weak. And next year isn’t looking rosy.
The Trade Desk’s revenue machine is still running strong. But with an economic downturn on the horizon, investors are pressing for TTD’s areas of optimism to translate into bottom line results.
PubMatic’s total Q3 revenue grew 11% to $64.5 million despite an industry-wide downturn, but the company doesn’t have high hopes for the rest of the year. It expects that ad spend will continue to trend down in Q4. But although spending is decelerating due to recession fears, PubMatic is planning to capitalize on the eventual rebound by focusing on video, retail media and particularly CTV, which continues to grow.
Disney is losing money faster than it’s adding subscribers. The media giant reported a $1.5 billion loss on its streaming business lines for the quarter, calling Q4 the peak of its operating losses. But Disney isn’t worried (or so it seems). It’s hanging on until the US launch of an ad-supported Disney+ tier on December 8.
SmartNews uses the first-party data it gathers from its users to create more intelligent content recommendations and serve more relevant ads. It’s also investing in its own ad stack so it can activate its first-party data by creating contextual audience segments that it can sell programmatically on the open web and as part of its new direct sales offering.
Samba announced its merge with the St. Louis-based AI startup Disruptel to bolster its machine learning chops, namely in automatic content recognition (ACR). Samba plans to incorporate Disruptel’s tech, which is built on show-level content identification and analysis, into its ACR-based measurement.
Eyeo is known for ad blocking, but it’s got its eye on ad filtering. On Tuesday, eyeo, which is the parent company of AdBlock and Adblock Plus – two of the most-downloaded standalone ad blockers – acquired Blockthrough, a company for ad block revenue recovery.
Axios eclipsed its overall 2021 revenue as of Q3 this year thanks to its expansion of local-news-focused newsletters. It also added display banners to its onsite inventory in September and launched its Axios Pro paid subscription in February. The long-term goal is for Axios to have about 50% of its revenue come from ads and the other half from subscriptions.
The Facebook advertising platform has been beset by glitches and miscues all year. But advertisers who hoped that the bugginess would sort itself out by the holiday season are only discovering coal in their stockings.
Following a dramatic courtship between Unity and ironSource, Unity put a ring on it. The merger closed on Monday. The purpose of the deal is to bring all of the tools developers need to create, test, launch, grow and monetize their games together under one roof.
Warner Bros. Discovery is rushing the launch date of its AVOD streaming service meant to combine WarnerMedia’s HBO Max and Discovery’s Discovery+. Combined, WBD networks lost 8% in total Q3 revenue, but the company doubled its streaming ad revenue, giving WBD hope as it smooths out its rocky post-acquisition start.
If you’re a marketer who wants to hear a comforting bedtime story about how brand marketing will endure during the impending recession, you’re not going to get it from Sir Martin Sorrell. The conventional thinking goes that if companies maintain their investment in brand marketing to stay top-of-mind, even when the going gets tough, they’ll be […]
Musk’s promises to overhaul Twitter’s content moderation and user verification policies have caused brands and agencies to rethink their budgetary commitments to the platform. Plus, Musk’s seemingly disingenuous tone shift on advertising and his tweeting of fake news may make brands more inclined to pull budgets from a platform that was never seen as a must-buy anyway.
The third quarter wasn’t a good one for Roku, which shared belt-tightening plans in expectation of worse results to come during the all-important upcoming holiday season. That’s what happens when advertisers get nervous and hit the brakes.
Like it did for the web, programmatic is transforming linear TV ad buying. But TV calls for a more nuanced approach. The programmatic technology that automates ad serving on TV will have to be different from the rest of the digital ad ecosystem, said Pooja Midha, EVP of Effectv, the ad sales division of Comcast Cable.
The New York Times’s subscription-focused strategy seems to be paying off amid a downturn in ad revenue. The Times reported 8% YoY revenue growth for Q3 2022, “with subscription revenue growth more than making up for a slight decline in overall advertising,” said President and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien.
If you think of livestream shopping in the US as a revolution, it’s a dud. But if you view it as a livestream shopping evolution, real progress is being made.
The future of TV is addressable, meaning one-to-one ad targeting to a device, across not just CTV but also linear inventory. Yet still, addressable TV remains a small piece of media buying, which the industry addressed at Paramount’s Addressable Now summit in New York City on Tuesday.
Ocean Spray is assembling its cross-channel campaigns for the holiday season – and just producing and managing the video assets alone requires Santa’s Workshop-levels of effort and cross-team collaboration. But fragmentation is both a challenge and opportunity, according to Melanie DiBiasio, the brand’s associate director of media and martech.
Call it a Halloween special. Our apparition of a guest this week, an anonymous ad tech Twitter personality, is staying beneath the invisibility cloak. “I’m not senior enough to get away with running my mouth,” says the @HumanPropensity account operator who goes by corndog.
Commerce data platform Klover raised $25 million in Series B funding and changed its parent company name to Attain. The newly branded Attain will use the funding to launch what it’s calling a software-as-a-service (SaaS) commerce data platform for marketers.
