groupm

On the heels of the launch of its latest supply-path optimization product, PubMatic posted $55.4 million in Q1 revenue, growing 2% YOY.

PubMatic’s end-to-end platform, Activate, lets advertisers buy CTV and online video inventory via direct deals, bypassing DSPs.

Pundits predicted Microsoft would use Xandr to create an ad-supported video game content fortress, with the ad tech business getting exclusive access to Microsoft’s gaming IP. Any ambitions in that direction may now be on hold.

Agency holding company WPP met its own expectations in the first quarter of the year. Standout GroupM, its media buying and planning agency, contributed to about 36% of WPP’s Q1 revenue, growing 6.1% in Q1.

Disintermediation is in the air. If The Trade Desk’s OpenPath cuts out SSPs (while claiming not to), Magnite’s ClearLine cuts out DSPs (while claiming not to).

In its Q4 earnings report Tuesday, PubMatic highlighted how SSP consolidation is an opportunity for the company to pursue its goal of capturing a fifth of the SSP market.

The ad agency holding company WPP is on the up and up and remains confident in its clients’ continued investment in marketing projects despite a challenging macroeconomic environment. WPP is “well positioned to deliver sustainable, long-term growth” after seeing broad-based growth in 2022, said CEO Mark Read during the company’s earnings report on Thursday.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Bing Chat Is … Weird Microsoft’s AI-enabled Bing search is making waves for all the wrong reasons.  In early tests, the new Bing produced unhinged results that ranged from an aggressive know-it-all who’s constantly wrong to a jilted lover … to a robot […]

Retail media may still be a nascent industry, but it is quickly becoming integral to retailers’ advertising strategies. And, as traditional advertisers like Sainsbury’s or Tesco join the retail media space, there are issues and questions the market must urgently address.

Whereas brands and DSPs are whittling down the number of supply paths they use to purchase ad inventory, publishers are financially incentivized to work with as many partners as possible. But there are changes afoot that could alter the economics for publishers.

Connected TV advertising is here to stay. However, there is a downside: ad money leaking away due to fraud. Gijsbert Pols, PhD, director of connected TV and new channels at Adjust, offers suggestions for how to avoid the fraudsters when buying CTV ads.

In 2022, top players in digital advertising finally started taking gaming seriously, and the groundwork was laid for programmatic in-game advertising to grow thanks to a long overdue update to the IAB’s and MRC’s in-game ad standards. The scene is also set for in-game advertising to expand into console gaming, and we might even see the debut of the first sell-side platform dedicated to gaming.

Sustainability was a hot topic for the advertising industry in 2022. The momentum will only grow in 2023, though decarbonization remains a multiyear journey.

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.

Global advertising revenue grew 6.5% in 2022 and is projected to grow 5.9% in 2023, according to GroupM’s global year-end industry growth forecast. Meanwhile, Magna’s December global ad forecast predicts 4.8% growth in 2023 after 6.6% growth in 2022.

Getting cozy with agencies wasn’t always a priority for Criteo, which has direct relationships with more than 20,000 clients. But now that Criteo has commerce and retail media aspirations, it needs to strike agency partnerships, says its CRO Brian Gleason.

Ecommerce momentum has tailed off since last year, but global ecommerce and retail media still have plenty of room for growth, according to GroupM’s 2022 Ecommerce and Retail Media Forecast. Total global retail media spend will hit $160 billion by 2027, which represents a 60% growth rate over five years, GroupM predicts.

For much of 2022, business leaders have been bracing for a downturn. But if a recession does hit, advertisers are unlikely to pull back on performance spend as they continue to chase consumer attention amid changing media consumption habits.

Contextual targeting laid the foundations of TV advertising – particularly by ensuring that ads were stitched into content marketers considered “brand safe.” With the advent of CTV, buyers put context on the back-burner in favor of more granular, first-party audience targeting. Now, the pendulum is swinging back again. Why? Two words: signal loss.

Google’s decision to kick the can on cookie deprecation even further down the road to 2024 did not come as a shock to many in the digital advertising industry. The longer runway will give advertisers and publishers more time to test post-third-party-cookie solutions. But despite the temptation to procrastinate, publishers and tech vendors told AdExchanger they don’t anticipate straying too far from the road maps they’d already established to meet the previous 2023 deadline.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Game-Changer The NFL has a history of media and marketing innovation. If we’re keeping score, it was the first sports league to reach every TV in America, the first to invest in studio-style production and the first to mic players on the field. […]

Rising inflation, flagging consumer confidence and uncertainty due to ongoing supply-chain issues have economists predicting a recession. But, based on GroupM’s and Zenith’s mid-year forecasts of the global ad market, the recession fears may be unfounded. Still, after the record highs of 2021, ad spending will see a deceleration in 2022.

It’s chilly out there, but PubMatic had a decent quarter. Organic revenue for Q1 totaled $54.6 million, up 25% year-over-year, representing PubMatic’s seventh consecutive quarter of 20% revenue growth or more. PubMatic’s stock was up a smidge, about .5%, in after-hours trading.

Recently, McCormick brand Frank’s Redhot placed banner ads inside Basketball Battle, a free-to-play 2D basketball game developed for mobile devices. A proprietary metric from Frameplay, an in-game advertising company which uses computer vision to measure the viewability of in-game ads, monitored how long the ad remained visible to the player and compared these results to attention metrics for more established channels like social media.

It makes perfect sense for TV manufacturers to break into advertising. But what about content and software-first companies considering the legacy biz? There are pros and cons to the move, but it all comes down to a profitable plan because “a better go-to-market strategy will crush better technology every time,” said GroupM’s global president of business intelligence Brian Wieser.

The Trade Desk recently made waves with the rollout of OpenPath, its direct-to-publisher offering, and its plan to turn off Google Open Bidding, a one-two punch in supply path optimization (SPO). Both of these SPO moves could reshuffle the ad buying ecosystem, making publishers less reliant on SSPs and cutting off a revenue source for Google’s Open Bidding.

Content moderation policies sound good on paper. But policies are tested in practice. The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine is yet another example that content moderation will never be perfect. Then again, that’s not a reason to let perfect get in the way of good.

On its Q4 earning call this week, Criteo announced the start of a three-year global partnership with GroupM, shared an update on the IPONWEB deal, got frank about the privacy impacts of ATT and made the case for moving away from a focus on take rate.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Criss-Cross Media Measurement CTV ad dollars are expected to double by 2026, according to GroupM’s most recent industry forecast – which means ad tech firms with advanced measurement capabilities could be looking to make acquisitions this year, Business Insider reports. Measurement companies have their […]

Keeping Track Third-party trackers were hosed by GDPR, right?  Perhaps not.  A University of Oxford study found that third-party trackers in Google Play and Apple iOS apps remain relatively unchanged. “The same handful of third-party tracking companies have similar prevalence and prominence,” according to the Internet Policy Review journal. The number of apps with zero […]