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Mark Read: The Future Of WPP Is Interoperable 4 Ways The Death Of The Cookie In Chrome Could Affect Marketers Publishers Sense Opportunity As Chrome Drops Third-Party Cookies What’s In Google’s Privacy Sandbox? Nothing, For Now Google Chrome Will Drop Third-Party Cookies In 2 Years Havas Tests Zeotap And InfoSum Data Partnership As Agencies Enter Onboarding Martin Sorrell: The Big Idea Isn’t Enough CEO David Kenny Brings Nielsen Back From The Brink CES 2020: IPG’s Michael Roth On Acxiom And The Changing Face Of Television

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Trampoline Brand Springfree Uses CDP Tech To Lower Its CPA By Leaps And Bounds

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Monday, January 20th, 2020 at 12:35 am.

Not everyone’s in the market for a trampoline.

And with the rising cost of customer acquisition, it’s vital to get the jump on consumers who are serious about making what’s both a niche and pricey purchase.

For that, you need unified data across channels, said Saugar Sainju, VP of growth marketing at Goba Sports Group, a sporting goods company whose holdings include Teva, Umbro, shoe brand Sanuk and trampoline brand Springfree.

“The way we think about data is becoming more and more profile-based, and we need to be able to activate that data to different channels,” said Sainju, who started working with customer data platform BlueConic in 2018 as part of a larger cross-channel data unification effort.

For Springfree, that means connecting anonymous web traffic with its direct response ads and any future lead gen. “If we can get that traffic to sign up, we’re able to convert an anonymous profile to an identified profile while still retaining some historical data,” Sainju said.

A World Without One-to-One Targeting

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Friday, January 17th, 2020 at 4:14 pm.

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Was it just three days ago that Google Chrome told the world that come 2022, it would block third-party cookies by default? Already a tsunami of coverage and analyses has resulted, much of it wondering about the negative fallout for addressable advertising.

This week on AdExchanger Talks, Belinda Smith provides the bull case for a world without universal addressability.

"When we got, I would argue, as close as we are probably going to get to one-to-one, I didn't see any company that had unleashed itself and 10x'd its valuation because of the one-to-one addressable market," she says. "I started in programmatic 10 years ago, and I thought then and think now that it's very exciting, but it's not the only thing. There are people in this industry who don't know anything else. And I think that's super problematic because we are ignoring 90% of marketing, which is everything that's not addressable."

Mark Read: The Future Of WPP Is Interoperable

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Friday, January 17th, 2020 at 11:25 am.

WPP CEO Mark Read has worked to make the holding company faster, simpler and more collaborative.

Since taking on the top role a little over a year ago, Read reshaped the world’s largest holding company, notably folding creative agencies J. Walter Thompson into Wunderman and Young & Rubicam into VML. He also sold a majority stake in Kantar to Bain for $4 billion.

“Agencies are being disrupted like every business is being disrupted,” Read said. “But I’m positive about our ability to evolve to be the partner that clients need to succeed.”

Despite this streamlining, Read doesn’t want to diminish WPP’s agency brands. He wants clients to feel like they’re working with a WPP agency, with access to an underlying technology and data platform.

The plan is still a work in progress. In Q3, WPP’s revenue in North America slid 3.5%, an improvement over prior quarters but an indication the company still has a lot of work to do.

“We set out a three-year plan,” Read said. “It will take time.”

He caught up with AdExchanger.

What's The Growth Team’s Job, Anyway?

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, January 17th, 2020 at 8:32 am.

"Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer's point of view.

Today's column is written by Alex Weinstein, senior vice president of growth at Grubhub and the author of the Technology + Entrepreneurship blog.

The project seemed fairly straightforward: Here's a city where our food delivery marketplace needs to accelerate growth. Here's a budget to buy some ads. Buy some billboards, spend some money on Facebook – that's all it should take to turn this around.

And yet, the route taken by two employees on the growth team was anything but buying ads, their tool set was anything but marketing and their results were beyond anything I ever expected.

What did they do? We'll get there, but first, some context.

Grubhub’s food delivery business is hyperlocal – having lots of restaurants on the Upper East Side in Manhattan doesn't matter for consumers ordering food in Brooklyn. As such, we need to approach each city – really, each neighborhood – as a separate marketplace in its own right. And if one ever struggles to gain traction, we send in "special forces" – folks who can turn that city around.

4 Ways The Death Of The Cookie In Chrome Could Affect Marketers

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Friday, January 17th, 2020 at 12:10 am.

Ad buyers aren’t thrilled about Google Chrome’s decision to phase out third-party cookies, but they’re thankful it’ll take about two years; Safari and Firefox didn’t extend such a courtesy.

During that time, most buyers intend to rebuild their targeting and measurement strategies. But Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox solution is still too theoretical for there to be any certainty around the future of audience targeting, programmatic buying and advanced attribution.

“This is a really disruptive time and brands are wrapping their heads around what this means for them,” said Krystal Olivieri, VP of global data investment and strategy at GroupM.

While some marketers and agencies see an opportunity to rebuild the digital advertising ecosystem off of a more secure infrastructure, others are anxious about losing their foundational tracking mechanism.

"Google’s decision to block third-party cookies … would threaten to substantially disrupt much of the infrastructure of today's internet without providing any viable alternative, and it may choke off the economic oxygen from advertising that startups and emerging companies need to survive,” the ANA and the 4A’s said in a joint statement issued Thursday.

Here are four things the buy side is thinking about as they navigate through uncertain times.

Peacock Unveils Ad Platform With Performance-Style Ads

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Friday, January 17th, 2020 at 12:05 am.

As the streaming wars intensify, NBCUniversal on Thursday sought to draw a clear distinction between the soon-to-be-launched Peacock and its streaming and digital competitors.

Peacock will debut with 10 ad experiences that emphasize interactivity and performance, the company revealed during an investor day in New York City. It will run just five minutes of ads per hour, the lightest ad load in the industry. NBCUniversal will also set strict standards for frequency caps.

“Our audiences won’t be inundated with the same ad over and over and over again, like they are on other platforms,” said Chairman of Advertising and Partnerships Linda Yaccarino.

NBCUniversal’s pitch to advertisers also highlights a scaled platform with content that costs millions of dollars to make – not updates from friends or uploaded videos – and better business terms than the digital giants.

“Transparency is the cornerstone of everything we do,” Yaccarino said. “While other platforms are building higher walls around their gardens, we’ve never had any walls at all.”

ANA And 4As Condemn Chrome Cookie Decision; Pelosi Lashes Out At Facebook

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, January 17th, 2020 at 12:03 am.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

Cookie Crumbs

Industry trade bodies are not pleased with Google’s bombshell announcement this week that it would phase out support for third-party cookies over the next two years. In an open letter, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) said Google’s decision could have “major competitive impacts for digital businesses, consumer services and technological innovation” and would “threaten to substantially disrupt” the infrastructure of the digital ad ecosystem “without providing any viable alternative.” The trade bodies argue that “unilaterally” blocking third-party cookies could choke off startups and small businesses that rely on online advertising. The letter urges Google to reverse its decision until it can present an alternative, and promises to work with “stakeholders and policymakers” to come up with a viable replacement for the cookie. Ad Age has more.

The Speaker Speaks

Many politicians treat Facebook like a punching bag, and Mark Zuckerberg has called out Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who’s pushing for the breakup of Facebook and other big tech companies. But Facebook’s most damaging antagonist might be Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House and one of San Francisco’s congressional reps. Pelosi used to portray Facebook as an unwitting tool for Russian and foreign election interference. But since May, when the platform refused to remove a video doctored to make her look drunk and incoherent, she’s blasted Facebook as a knowing accomplice. At a weekly press briefing on Thursday, she unloaded on Facebook for cozying up to far right politicians and interest groups, CNBC reports. “All they want are their tax cuts and no antitrust action against them,” Pelosi said. “And they schmooze this administration in that regard because so far that’s what they have received.” More.

How Will Publishers Fare As Google Moves To Kill Cookies In Chrome?

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, January 16th, 2020 at 2:00 pm.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Paul Bannister, co-founder and executive vice president at CafeMedia.

“You have no control. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” – Washington and Company, “Hamilton”

The Google Chromium team announced on Tuesday the tectonic change that everyone should have seen coming, but no one really believed would happen. Google finally really did it or it’s finally doing it two years from now (or maybe longer). But now that the news is official, and some amount of the documentation is available to understand how this will be approached, we can start unpacking what this will mean for publishers.

There are two large philosophical components of the announcement that are worth exploring before analyzing the winners and losers. The first is that Google is not just ripping out the third-party cookie infrastructure from browsers, but removing all cross-site tracking capabilities including fingerprinting and other technologies. Philosophically, this is very aligned with what Safari and Firefox have done to date. However, unlike Apple’s half-baked (and half-hearted) schemes to support advertising on the web, Google is proposing a massive new set of privacy-centric infrastructure and technologies to replace the existing ecosystem approach. It’s a huge undertaking, one of the largest remakings of web technology ever.

The second philosophical component of the announcement is a shift of power from web servers to web browsers. Today, much of the tracking, targeting and analyzing of users is done by servers run by publishers and a litany of their technology partners. In the new world, much of the processing, analysis and privacy protection work will be done by browsers, using technologies such as Google’s FLoC. This transfers power to the edge and removes a lot of the knowledge from the companies that currently possess it. Interestingly, these proposals also transfer more power to the browser creators, requiring them to authenticate browsers and other things that will lock in the existing dominant browser companies and make it harder for new entrants to gain ground.

Publishers Sense Opportunity As Chrome Drops Third-Party Cookies

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Thursday, January 16th, 2020 at 1:01 pm.

With Chrome bidding farewell to third-party cookies, publishers predict a steep rise in use – and value – of their first-party data.

Media companies with their own audiences and direct-to-consumer relationships expect power to accrue to them.

And many publishers already have a head start. With Apple’s Safari browser blocking cookies for about 30% of US web traffic, most media companies already invest in first-party data solutions to lift the CPMs of their cookieless traffic.

“Most publishers I talk to are not panicking,” said Rubicon Project CTO Tom Kershaw. “They are following through with the strategies they already have, leveraging publisher segments they already have, and using first-party identifiers to persist universal IDs and more effectively deliver ads.”

(In contrast, advertisers were less prepared because they focused on the 70% of traffic that wasn’t blocked by cookies.)

The large publishers that have invested in first-party data include a mix of new and old media: Vox Media, News Corp., Meredith, Insider Inc., Watson Advertising’s weather data, Hearst and Dotdash, among many others.

“First-party data and digital identity is critically important to the future,” said Jeremy Hlavacek, Watson Advertising’s head of revenue. “Publishers play an essential role in managing how that space takes shape.”