We are in the middle of the NewFronts, the younger sibling of the TV upfronts. After a week of pounding the pavement and hearing splashy sales pitches, our reporters Alyssa Boyle and Victoria McNally stitch together the common themes in how companies are presenting themselves.
Performance is the name of the game. Companies are touting new interactive ad formats that send information to phones or otherwise encourage people to take an action after seeing an ad.
Plus, this NewFronts marked the first time Walmart and Vizio went to market together. The retailer and its TV manufacturer acquisition are stitching together their platform. Users now log into their Vizio or Walmart Onn TVs with their Walmart ID, paving the way for interactive ads with higher engagement or the possibility of using a remote control to add to a Walmart cart.
Logging into your TV with your retail account mirrors what Amazon does with its Fire TV. Speaking of Amazon, it feels like every company at the NewFronts is announcing some kind of partnership with Amazon, including Comcast, Tubi and Yahoo. Got a Samsung TV? You can buy something straight from Amazon, an interactive shopping experience heretofore only available when watching ads on Prime Video.
Data: the Play
Travel uptown from the NewFronts, and you’ll also hear people talking about data and AI. That’s because there’s a new off-Broadway play about data and AI. So of course the AdExchanger editorial team had to buy a ticket and check it out.
How data, tracking and AI shows up in our popular culture matters immensely for our listeners in ad tech, both in how they design their consumer-facing experiences and for those conversations they have around the Thanksgiving table with their relatives. Our associate editor Joanna Gerber, who wrote about her experience, shares how data tracking and AI was addressed in the play – and what its nuanced messages mean for an industry as it tries to maintain trust with the people it’s tracking or serving ads to across the web.
