Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Trustbusting The antitrust bills just keep piling up for Big Tech. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) unveiled one of his own this week, and he means business. Its even got a tough-sounding name that would make Chuck Norris proud: the “Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century […]
ViacomCBS’ advertising business fell 27% to $1.9 billion in the second quarter, as marketers pulled back during the coronavirus pandemic and golf programming was postponed. “We believe Q2 was the bottom [for advertising],” President and CEO Bob Bakish said. After bottoming in April, each month in the quarter showed sequential improvement. The scatter market held […]
What’s it like to start a new agency just as the coronavirus pandemic takes over the world and advertisers pull back spend? In early February, Kern Schireson unveiled his data agency Known, which he built by combining his company Schireson Associates with two acquisitions: Stun Creative and the branding agency Blackbird. A month later, the […]
It’s been a year of breakneck user growth for Pluto TV. Monthly active users hit 20 million in November, a 70% increase since January, when Viacom acquired the free ad-supported streaming service for $340 million. That’s nearly 8 million new users in less than a year. So, how did Pluto do it? Its growth is […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Walmart At Your Self-Service Walmart Media Group will roll out a self-serve ad platform and API in early 2020, Business Insider reports. The retail giant sees an opportunity to model an advertising business after Amazon, with the ability to bid programmatically for ad space […]
Bryson Gordon leads advanced advertising initiatives at Viacom. Catch him at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO New York on Oct 15-16. Ahead of its planned merger with CBS, Viacom is scaling up new, more data-driven models for TV advertising. Its Vantage product offers impression guarantees against narrowly defined audience segments. Vantage was the brainchild of Bryson […]
Viacom’s Bryson Gordon will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC I/O New York conference on Oct. 15 and 16. Around five years ago, advanced TV was still “a science experiment,” said Bryson Gordon, Viacom’s EVP of advanced advertising. But during this year’s upfront cycle, data-driven buying through Vantage, Viacom’s advanced advertising platform, more than doubled. “Marketers […]
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Walmart False Start Brands are seeing delays with their Walmart ad buys as a result of the retailer’s transition from Triad Retail Media, which previously repped its inventory, to an in-house sales team. “We are migrating remaining accounts from Triad to Walmart Media Group […]
CBS and Viacom are (finally) back together, and that will create lots of opportunity for advertisers. On Tuesday, after years of will-they-won’t-they corporate turmoil, the entertainment behemoths agreed to merge in an all-stock deal that values the combined company at around $30 billion, with $28 billion in annual revenue. The new entity will be called […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Come Together The CBS-Viacom merger is full speed ahead. Variety reports that there’s been significant headway in the negotiation process since last Friday, and the final details are being worked out. But there are still some serious wrinkles, the biggest being an agreement on […]
Pluto TV is the anti-Netflix. It’s free and ad-supported. Users scroll through channels and watch whatever show is already playing, replicating the channel surfing that’s a hallmark of old-fashioned TV watching. Viacom spent $340 million in cash to acquire Pluto TV in January, validating the concept and its audience. The deal felt like “Cinderella getting […]
Cords are getting cut left and right, but TV still works … right? “We all know that TV does drive ROI, but there haven’t really been any proof points like there has been in digital,” said Donna Speciale, Turner’s president of advertising sales, at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview event in New York City on Wednesday. That’s […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Viacom Nabs Pluto Viacom will acquire free, ad-supported streaming service Pluto TV for $340 million. The standalone app, which reaches 12 million monthly users primarily on connected TVs, will give Viacom a new audience to sell and a distribution channel for its content library. […]
If you had “something blockchain related” on your Christmas list this year (And really, who didn’t?), then consider Comcast Cable Advertising your very own Santa Claus. Comcast Corporation’s ad division unveiled Blockgraph on Friday, designed to help media owners and advertisers securely share data for addressable TV advertising. Blockgraph is winding down its pilot phase […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Young Guns Viacom is negotiating to acquire AwesomenessTV, according to Bloomberg. AwesomenessTV is a joint venture between NBCUniversal, Verizon and Hearst that originated as a YouTube channel. It’s not the first time this year that Viacom has tried to acquire its way to a […]
Viacom on Monday formed a multi-year agreement with Comcast’s advanced ads business, FreeWheel, to expand its use of the tech platform. Previously, Viacom used FreeWheel to power digital ad decisioning, but now, it will also use FreeWheel’s operating system to manage yield and grow revenue across live TV, set-top box and video-on-demand inventory. In addition, […]
NBCUniversal has joined the TV consortium OpenAP. Launched just over a year ago, OpenAP is a joint effort by broadcast networks Fox, Turner and Viacom to create a common data standard and provide a more accurate representation of advanced TV audiences across platforms. Through a multiyear agreement, NBCU will license its data platform Audience Studio […]
OTT audiences are prevalent and engaged. But while advertisers are buying, they’re not exactly beating down the doors. Watch any premium long-form show on an internet connection and you’ll see the same irrelevant message played so frequently it’ll haunt your dreams. What gives? The main issue is buyer confusion about how to transact on OTT […]
After bidding against Viacom for Scripps Networks Interactive, Discovery Communications has emerged victorious in acquiring the lifestyle cable network for $14.6 billion in stock and cash, the company revealed Monday. [Read the release.] Viacom backed out of a bidding war late last week with the rival network after making an all-cash offer that reportedly fell […]
Unlike in digital, where marketers can buy across multiple publishers, TV planning is largely limited to a single broadcaster’s inventory. Fox, Turner and Viacom have jointly formed an advanced audience platform called OpenAP, which will roll out to media agencies and advertisers in early April, to try to solve that challenge. While each network has […]
Independent media and entertainment agency Media Storm is deepening its client workbench. Media Storm specializes in helping network, cable and studio clients such as Starz and CMT increase audience tune-in. Now the agency is broadening its scope to new verticals. “We’re really starting to use what we learned from the entertainment and media space and […]
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 […]
Twentieth Century Fox’s new flick “Deadpool” shattered box office records over Valentine’s and President’s Day weekend, banking $135 million in the three days since its premiere. Although a popular Marvel comic (and actor Ryan Reynolds) certainly inspired that turnout, a week-long multiplatform activation from Viacom preceding the film’s launch helped generate awareness. Throughout the campaign’s […]
Viacom sales chief Jeff Lucas’s affinity for Snapchat dates back a year, to when the broadcast network first explored distribution opportunities with the popular video-messaging app. Now the two have set up a multiyear content and advertising agreement, which gives Viacom’s sales teams the right to monetize Snapchat US-based ad inventory. In turn, Snapchat gets […]
Longtime agency exec Julian Zilberbrand will join Viacom as EVP of Audience Science, the company revealed Friday. His transition comes at a time when Viacom is renewing its emphasis on data to address the slumps in linear TV ad sales and plummeting ratings. Zilberbrand will lead Audience Science, a Viacom unit that manages audience onboarding […]
It’s a transitional time for TV companies. Viacom, like Fox and Disney, had a volatile fiscal third quarter. It missed its quarterly revenue mark by 3%, citing declines in ratings and a “sequential slowdown in advertising conversion.” In light of these challenges, the network’s president and CEO, Philippe Dauman, said during the company’s earnings call […]
It’s a tough road for a stand-alone second-screen app. Beamly, the social TV network formerly known as Zeebox, would appear well positioned to help publishers engage millennial audiences across all platforms. Its install base grew from 2 million monthly active users in 2011 to 10.5 million today, and Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Viacom have a joint […]
Jeff Lucas, head of ad sales for Viacom Music and Entertainment, likes photo-messaging app Snapchat. Because its user base is dominated by females under 25, the platform that popularized the “fleeting” SMS aligns closely with Viacom property MTV’s young millennial audience. It’s one of the reasons why MTV is test driving Snapchat’s new Discover feature, part of […]
AOL on Tuesday appointed Dermot McCormack president of AOL Video and AOL Studios, its original content production arm. McCormack, formerly Viacom’s head of connected content, will replace Ran Harnevo, a key player in the development of premium online video content network AOL On, who is pursuing “other opportunities.” McCormack’s appointment comes at a pivotal period […]
