This week’s podcast features on on-the-ground check in from Austin, Texas, where our Senior Editor James Hercher is attending unBoxed, Amazon Ads’ relatively new annual conference.
At the conference, Amazon Ads has been showing off its ad tech, namely Performance Plus (its version of Google PMax and Meta Advantage+), where advertisers let Amazon’s algorithm do most of the optimization work.
Amazon has also been touting the breadth of its “canvases,’ Hercher says: think Audible, IMDB, Whole Foods, Amazon Music, Amazon Fire, Freevee, Twitch. And in order to serve as a matchmaker between its DSP with its “canvases,” Amazon built Ad Relevance, a machine learning ad ranking and optimization system. Together, all these innovations – and its growing staff and customer base – signal that the company is increasingly one of three big advertising platforms, joining Google and Meta as a dominant platform in the industry.
Brand safety vs. news publishers
Then, we make sense of how the brand safety space is evolving amid criticism of how its tech harms news publishers – and misses other blatantly brand unsafe placements, as our Senior Editor Anthony Vargas walks us through some of his recent coverage on the space.
News publishers are encouraging marketers to go around brand safety vendors when they buy news inventory, creating PMP-like products such as NewsPassID and ProNews Collective that use more news-nuanced brand safety mechanisms. Publishers are building their own brand safety tools too, like Washington Post’s tech that categorizes content in a way that greenlights way more inventory that an outside vendor, which often misses nuance.
The brand safety vendors themselves are building products they say do a better job of including news publishers, like DoubleVerify’s recent News Accelerator initiative. Together, it’s clear that the industry views current brand safety mechanisms as a challenge – but it seems there is no easy, and no single, solution to this problem.
