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The Big Story: Sellers Out

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At long last, Google released its sellers.json file.

And the world was 5% grateful, in line with the level of completeness of Google’s file.

This week on The Big Story, the AdExchanger team welcomes Jounce Media founder Chris Kane to talk about what’s missing in Google’s seller.json file. And senior editor Sarah Sluis, who spoke with Google product manager Per Bjorke for the story, digs into Google’s explanation of why the file is incomplete.

Also in this episode, we’ll look at the newest ad revenue projections from WPP’s GroupM and IPG’s Magna. Bottom line: Revenue didn’t dip as badly as people initially feared. Political advertising – no surprise there – bolstered ad spend. But so did SMBs. While small businesses certainly suffered during the pandemic, many pivoted to ecommerce and had to buy advertising to support these new endeavors.

And while digital ad spend didn’t decline – it was actually flat – different types of digital media did better than others. Banners were a no-go, but social showed some healthy growth.

Finally, we’ll examine some big enterprise changes at Adobe and Disney. Adobe has been phasing out its “low margin” and “resource-intensive” managed services, and we’ll discuss how that affects its Advertising Cloud.

As senior editor Allison Schiff explains, “It’s not like Adobe is flipping a switch here. It’s just ceasing to invest in its managed service product for programmatic TV advertising, and over time it will stop pursuing those types of deals. It’s self-service all the way, and IO-based network buys will be no more.”

Meanwhile, Disney combined its ad tech team with Hulu’s – where it has operational control – and announced its plans to build out a consolidated ad platform.

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