Digital Content Next Is Creating An Exchange; Programmatic Makes Up 73% Of All Display Spend

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Trade Group Pivot?

Online media trade body Digital Content Next (DCN) is creating an exchange, named TrustX, with inventory from 25 of its members, including ABC, Condé Nast, Hearst, NBCUniversal, The Washington Post, Meredith, ESPN, Vox Media and News Corp. DCN makes no profit and there are no investors, reports Jack Marshall at The Wall Street Journal. It’s unlikely TrustX becomes a major buying channel (it’s unclear what inventory DCN members will even put in the exchange), but the goal seems to be to establish a baseline for brands and agencies to gauge the cost of buying through an automated exchange without vendors skimming margins. The ad tech infrastructure provider Iponweb is setting up the pipes. More.

Programmatic Boom

Programmatic display ad spend will reach roughly $25 billion in the US this year to make up 73% of all display spend, eMarketer reports. The forecast exceeds eMarketer’s initial predictions for programmatic growth by several billion dollars. Programmatic spend will be driven largely by mobile, which will grow 65.7% this year to $17.7 billion. Video will also be a huge growth driver, doubling in spend this year to $6.2 billion and accounting for 60% of all digital video ad spend. Facebook will take the biggest bite out the programmatic pie, taking in roughly 43%, or $11 billion, in programmatic display spend through 2018. Google will trail behind with a 9.4% share of programmatic spend at $2.4 billion. But wait, isn’t search programmatic? Not in eMarketer’s view. More.

Snapfest

Snapchat has grown its presence in the ad fest circuit. During the Advertising Week extravaganza, its Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan trotted out at The Town Hall performance space in Manhattan to present what amounted to Snapchat 101. He discussed Snapchat’s consumer products, its ad products, and introduced General Mills CMO Ann Simonds to talk about all the cool activations the cereal brand does with Snapchat. In other words, it was all pretty high level – though Simonds modestly asked Khan about measurement opportunities. Khan acknowledged that Snapchat is very interested in measurement, ticking off a number of partners like Moat and Datalogix who help the platform assess metrics like viewability, reach and conversions. It was a lightweight panel for sure, but there seemed to be an implicit acknowledgement that while Snapchat is the darling for now, it’s still got much to prove, lest it goes the way of Twitter or Foursquare.

Cloudy Day

Microsoft and Adobe kicked off Ad Week with a strategic partnership announcement. Per the release, it’s a way for shared clients to integrate data across Microsoft’s business services cloud and Adobe’s marketing cloud. The relationship is a matter of “preferred partners” and not exclusive rights. But the deal still extends Adobe’s marketer-first skill set into the enterprise IT realm where Microsoft has deep roots, and Adobe reciprocates by putting Microsoft’s new data-driven products, like Cortana, in front of marketers. It’s also a flagship account win for Microsoft, which is pulling Adobe’s business from Amazon’s AWS cloud platform. More at GeekWire.

AOLOL

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong went on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” yesterday to twist the knife in Facebook’s side and untwist the knife in Verizon’s side. “When you look at what Facebook is doing with video is they’re using their platform for what it is,” said Armstrong about Facebook’s video strategy (alluding to firehouse distribution and … uhh, some user engagement metric issues). “So I’d say that they’re scale and we’re engagement, and I think that’s our strategic difference.” But there’s plenty of shade for everyone. When pressed on the Yahoo data hack, “Armstrong deflected, and spoke about the importance of keeping the data breach investigation separate from the Yahoo integration with Verizon.” More at CNBC.

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