Despite rising interest rates and inflation, 2022 kicked off with a wave of M&A … that turned into a trickle … and became a relative dribble by the end of the year. Read on for a thorough (but non-exhaustive) refresher on M&A during the year that was.
In 2022, SPO solutions largely revolved around creating direct connections to so-called premium publishers. But machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) also took on a bigger role in SPO this year. And 2022 was the year the ad industry began touting SPO as the solution of choice for sustainability-focused marketers.
From the rise of alternative measurement currencies and retail media networks to the launch of Netflix’s AVOD tier, these are the stories that helped us animate the news in 2022.
2022 will stand out as the year that AVOD took center stage. Ad-supported video viewership growth surpassed subscription-only streaming and overall streaming viewership overtook cable for the first time.
CTV publisher Future Today banks on co-viewing to prove the value of household-level targeting against ad impressions served within its children’s streaming app, HappyKids. Future Today can’t track or store personal identifiable information for advertising on children’s content, but it can home in on co-viewing households to drive better business outcomes.
Cloud infrastructure technology services are converging on the media and ad tech industry. The sleeping giant is Amazon Web Services. And AWS has woken up.
Advertisers are starting to gravitate toward attention as a way to measure a campaign’s impact on the lower funnel, including conversion rate. Luxury car manufacturer Audi recently experimented with using attention metrics to algorithmically adjust programmatic bidding on ad inventory based on the amount of attention those ad placements are likely to draw. Audi then measured the impact high-attention placements had on post-click conversions.
“‘Cookieless’ is just a buzzword,” said Sanup Pillai, DHL’s global head of digital marketing and mar tech tells AdExchanger. “I wouldn’t say we’re getting ready for the ‘cookieless future’ as much as that we’re taking this opportunity to future-proof our technology stack.”
Data platform Dstillery released a contextual solution with healthcare analytics company PurpleLab to help pharma advertisers target audiences without third-party cookies. The tool uses ID-less signals, such as URL, time of day of web visits and regional location, then uses that data to find patterns in online behavior that are associated with specific health conditions.
The European Commission just left Meta a lump of coal in its stocking. On Monday, European regulators charged Meta with antitrust violations for “distorting competition in the markets for online classified ads,” including through unfair access to advertising data pulled from its competitors. Specifically, the commission issued what’s known as a “statement of objections,” which […]
Meta Advantage+ is not a new streaming service, despite the “plus.” And it’s not a healthcare plan, though it sounds like one. It’s Meta’s version of a first-party data-based ad platform locked inside the blackest black box any Facebook advertiser has ever known.
TV advertising is undergoing a tectonic shift from programmed to programmatic. Not unlike on the open web – but unlike on linear – advertisers can use programmatic to get scale across connected TV. There’s demand for biddable CTV because buyers realize they can get more flexibility and transparent signals from publishers.
The leadership team is out at LG Ads Solutions. As of Friday, at least two of Alphonso’s top brass were pushed out, including CEO Raghu Kodige and Alphonso co-founder and executive chairman Ashish Chordia. What gives?
In late May 2019 – one year after GDPR went into effect – European identity solutions provider Roq.ad decided to delete all of its data and rebuild its cross-device graph from scratch to make sure it only dealt in consented data as defined by the law.
Although there are important nuances between the different laws, businesses that have been working toward compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act and California Privacy Rights Act are in a good position for complying with other state privacy statutes. But the CPRA has several unique provisions that make it a beast all its own.
In October, Anagram spun off from programmatic platform Digilant and relaunched as a full-service media agency. Since then, it’s set its sights on serving the little guys: midmarket brands.
Smart TV manufacturer VIZIO announced a census-representative panel built using automatic content recognition data from Inscape, VIZIO’s ACR data subsidiary. VIZIO has access to ACR data from roughly 21 million smart TVs, and Innovid is one of the first measurement providers to use VIZIO’s so-called “National Representative Panel.”
Lost in the Sturm und Drang of Q4 (Q for quarantine) 2020, Google introduced a beta program called Performance Max, its first ad product spanning all Google-owned media. Fast-forward to today, and Performance Max has quietly become the fastest growing and potentially most controversial product in the Google portfolio.
Advertisers often talk about supporting Black- and minority-owned media companies. It’s Mark Prince’s job to help them turn those pledges into action. As SVP and head of economic empowerment at Dentsu Media, he pushes brands to consistently diversify their media mix – and move away from one-off investments.
The most commonly cited rationale for publisher staffing cuts has been marketers’ hesitance to spend on advertising amid persistent economic uncertainty. But publishers’ latest pivot to video and increased competition among digital channels is also likely to blame.
As any stateside ’90s kid can attest, backpack brand JanSport reigned supreme in the late ’90s and 2000s. Now, what’s old is new again. Fueled in part by Gen Z’s nostalgia for decades past, “we’ve resurged as America’s number-one backpack,” said Monica Rigali, JanSport’s vice president of global brand management.
Catalina Crunch started off in 2017 as a purely direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand advertising ketogenic (“keto”) snack products on search and social, including Facebook and Instagram. But, as product demand and Facebook CPMs concurrently rose, a DTC-only biz wasn’t enough to scale the business.
Google Ad Manager (GAM) was out of commission for about three hours Thursday evening across web, app and video inventory. Any ad placement served through GAM, even ads monetized by a non-Google SSP, went dark, leading to lost revenue for publishers of all sizes at a time when they can least afford to lose out on revenue.
Most people have already heard of Pizza Hut. But high awareness isn’t enough to generate new and consistent sales. Which is why well-known brands like Pizza Hut are looking to new channels, including CTV, to drive incremental sales by reaching younger and, hopefully, incremental audiences who could eventually turn into repeat customers.
In 1973, Timberland – then called Abington Shoe Company – debuted its waterproof yellow boots. In 2023, the outdoor apparel and accessories company will observe the boot’s 50th anniversary. And Ezra Martin, Timberland’s newly minted vice president of marketing, Americas, will be rolling out a new marketing strategy for the occasion. Martin shares his insights on personalized customer experiences, localized campaigns and more.
DOOH has been thought of as pure branding, according to Elliott Hasiuk, principal for digital media at Part and Sum. That makes sense, considering out-of-home media might just be a big picture of, say, a Big Mac and the McDonald’s arches plastered 40 feet in the air. “Now we’re able to tie that branding to bottom-of-the-funnel metrics that matter more to the business.”
NBTV is part of a growing trend of content studios producing long-form sponsored video for advertisers. Its channel Spirits Network works directly with brands on sponsored video content with shoppable ads that highlight specific spirits and liquor products on-screen and link directly to an ecommerce page and checkout option.
Video creators like Tastemade are blurring the lines between short- and long-form video. Tastemade launched in 2012 to create food-focused video content for social media platforms, but the exploding growth in connected TV viewership triggered a transition for Tastemade to expand into a broader media company that includes streaming channels.
The quality of marketing data – or, rather, the lack thereof – is arguably as big of an issue as signal loss, but doesn’t get nearly as much ink. On Wednesday, data validation provider Truthset opened the doors of its data collective to help data providers independently test the accuracy of their consumer records.
Recently, when The North Face ran an RFP for a programmatic buying agency, it went with WITHIN, which also happens to be the performance agency that won its creative services RFP earlier this year. The agency restructuring reflects a broader change for The North Face’s marketing, says media VP Bethany Evans.
