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Inside Xandr’s Pitch To Agencies YouTube’s Latest Brand Safety Scare Is Very Different From 2017 The Trade Desk Train Is Still Picking Up Speed With 55% Revenue Growth After Buying Sorenson Media, Nielsen’s Addressable Ads Strategy Starts On Smart TVs Oracle Data Cloud Companies Expose ‘DrainerBot’ App Fraud Scheme US Digital Marketing Spend Beats Traditional For The First Time A Marketer’s Guide To 5G Why 2018 Was The Year Header Bidding Realized Its Potential Erin Matts Becomes CEO Of Hearts & Science
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Latest

Amazon Goes Big On Conquesting Ads, Despite The Blowback

by James Hercher  //  Posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2019 at 10:05 am.

Amazon is ratcheting up conquesting campaigns, both as an ad platform and as a private-label brand operator.

Conquesting is when a brand tries to directly peel off a competitor’s customers or audience. It was a limited strategy in the old world of media and shopping, where there wasn’t much data to identify a rival’s loyal customers and malls wouldn’t allow, say, Banana Republic to distribute coupons outside of a Brooks Brothers.

But on Amazon, conquesting abounds. Amazon itself is the most aggressive conquest advertiser on the platform, with its private labels taking sponsored placements atop other brands’ own search results and product pages.

Conquesting comes with risks for Amazon, because it infuriates brands and could open the company to charges of anticompetitive action. But that hasn’t dented the growth of Amazon’s conquesting efforts or of Amazon ad platform features designed for conquesting, since Amazon is well-placed to steal legacy brands’ market share and conquesting creates fierce bidding wars that drive up ad prices.

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Inside Xandr’s Pitch To Agencies

by Alison Weissbrot  //  Posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2019 at 12:30 am.

If Xandr wants to live up to its promise and create a programmatic marketplace for the TV industry, it’s going to have to convince agencies to buy what it’s offering.

The AT&T-owned company recently hired Jay Askinasi for the job, and he joined Xandr in early February as VP, head of digital and agency partnerships. Askinasi hails from Publicis Media, where he was global president of investment solutions.

“It’s important for us to service agencies in a way that aligns with the way they’re working,” he said. “We’re setting ourselves up to be easy to use and buy from.”

Part of the challenge will be to navigate agency buying teams, which are still siloed by channel, and working out the kinks around who is in charge of buying connected TV. While some agencies leave that job to programmatic teams, others keep it with traditional TV buyers.

That requires Xandr’s sales team to speak a different language based on the team’s skill sets.

“Making sure the team that can understand what it takes to cut an upfront deal but also an always on, programmatic deal ID is something we spent a lot of time on,” Askinasi said. “We don’t want the 'Who is holding the budget?’ question to stop people from working with us.”

He spoke with AdExchanger.

AdExchanger: How will Xandr approach working with agencies?

JAY ASKINASI: When I was on the agency side, I thought about which companies were easiest to work with. Who did I not need to call three different people to get answers?

The best way to service our customers is by organizing around agencies and holding companies. We’ll have a national lead for each holding company that will oversee the business and think about client-specific needs within each agency. Underneath those folks will be sellers, both by market and by agency. We have folks that will be dedicated to all of the Xandr products across each agency in a holding company that rolls into an overarching structure.

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YouTube’s Latest Brand Safety Scare Is Very Different From 2017

by James Hercher  //  Posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2019 at 12:10 am.

Marketers are reacting differently to YouTube’s latest brand safety flare-up compared to 2017, when scores of global brands suspended YouTube campaigns over ads monetizing violent or offensive videos.

There’s certainly some déjà vu, with Disney, Nestlé’s and McDonald’s halting YouTube spending after YouTube creator Matt Watson showed them advertising on a video that had a comment section riddled with creeps and pedophiles.

But after Watson’s video published Sunday, Google had a call with representatives from all the top holding companies and 30-40 global brands, according to two agency executives who were on the call. But the call wasn’t acrimonious, as the disputes between YouTube and brands were two years ago, both marketers said.

The brand safety issue that surfaced this week was also a marked improvement from 2017. The video itself wasn’t salacious, but featured young girls, and the comment section became a horrific sideshow. So the brands buying ads weren’t directly monetizing the egregious content, like previous budgets going to terrorist cells or Russian propaganda.

Brands that are trying to have a more purpose-driven message and are sensitive to social issues will briefly drop YouTube just to send a message through earned media and to counteract having been named and shamed as an advertiser on the post, according to one agency executive who’s had multiple clients temporarily halt YouTube spending.

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Third-Party Data Is A Bad Habit We Need To Kick

by AdExchanger  //  Posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2019 at 12:05 am.

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

Today’s column is written by Kendell Timmers, vice president of advertising data at The New York Times.

I recently looked myself up on BlueKai’s registry tool to see what audiences I belong to within their third-party data sets. While some of the results were correct (Hello, two kids and a mortgage!), many were contradictory or wrong.

In addition to being a young man, I’m apparently both a homeowner and a renter, I belong to four separate household income brackets (including the lowest and the highest), and I am both the female and male head of household.

I’m not picking on BlueKai in particular ­– it should be applauded for making it comparatively easy for me to see how I'm classified. The point is that any advertiser looking to zero in on young, unencumbered men is also going to mistakenly find me.

The accuracy of third-party data is overrated, and we have passed the point of diminishing returns on further modeling. Third-party segments can, over time, approximate an audience that might be more interested in an advertisement, but it is not a truth set, and there are limits to how targeted marketers can get.

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Comic: Spring Data Cleaning

by AdExchanger  //  Posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2019 at 12:04 am.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...

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DoubleVerify Acquires Ad 'Breakage' Vendor; AT&T's Plan To Rival Disney, Netflix On Content

by AdExchanger  //  Posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

Verified Video

DoubleVerify announced it acquired Zentrick, an online video middleware technology. Zentrick focuses on solving for “breakage,” when an ad fails to load or report properly due to failures in the video delivery process. It’s a headache for companies on both sides of the ad exchange, and is a particularly keen problem in emerging markets like in-app mobile video and connected TV, DoubleVerify CEO Wayne Gattinella tells MediaPost. The addition of Zentrick’s tech gives DoubleVerify “a universally deployed video blocking and measurement tag,” he says. (Ahem … except for YouTube) More.

AT&T’s Opportunity

Speaking on the Recode Media podcast, CEO Randall Stephenson described AT&T’s ambition to offer a TV bundle that can compete with the likes of Netflix. The plan requires major new investments in HBO and other WarnerMedia assets. “I’m convinced that as you go three, four years out, every household will have at least one, two, three video on demand subscriptions. ... A Netflix, a Hulu, a Disney. Do we think our library and service is so compelling that we will be one of those that’s in virtually every household? We actually do.” The interview gives a sense of how AT&T plans to get there, including through legal sports betting. Read the transcript. Interestingly, there’s no mention here of Xandr or advertising.

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The Trade Desk Train Is Still Picking Up Speed With 55% Revenue Growth

by James Hercher  //  Posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2019 at 8:13 pm.

The Trade Desk’s growth streak shows no sign of diminishing, with revenue of $477 million in 2018, a 55% increase from the year before, according to the company’s earnings report on Thursday.

Shares of The Trade Desk were up more than 10% in after-hours trading. The company raised eyebrows last year when its stock went from a plateau of $50 per share to trading around $90 as GDPR went into effect. Following its earnings report, shares jumped to more than $165.

The Trade Desk forecasts revenue of at least $637 million in 2019. And the company laid out some of the emerging categories that will help it sustain high growth rates and justify a market cap growing above $7 billion.

Connected TV

After years of being the shiniest of shiny objects in programmatic, connected TV sales are now “measurably helping the business,” said Jeff Green, The Trade Desk’s founder and CEO. The company doesn’t break out its revenue by category, but Green said CTV sales grew more than nine times from 2017 to 2018 and a double-digit number of brands spent at least $1 million in 2018.

The fastest-growing inventory sources are large networks like Fox, NBC and ESPN adding direct-to-consumer channels, he said. But Hulu is the “tea leaf” company to watch for clues to what data-driven TV companies will do, since it has both an ad-supported tier and an ad-free subscription offering.

“Hulu makes more money on those users that request ads than those that pay not to,” Green said.

Many broadcasters and media companies will follow Hulu’s model, with an ad-supported tier and ad-free subscriptions, and when they do programmatic tech will prove its worth compared to traditional direct ad sales.

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Roku’s $151 Million In Q4 Platform Revenue Illustrates Rising Adoption Of Connected TV

by Sarah Sluis  //  Posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2019 at 7:25 pm.

Marketers were slow to move their advertising dollars from desktop to mobile, but they are transitioning to connected TV more quickly, according to Roku CEO Anthony Wood.

Advertisers’ quick adoption of connected TV contributed to its $151 million in Q4 platform revenue.Total revenue totaled $275.7 million. Next year, Roku expects more than $1 billion in revenue, with two-thirds coming from its platform business.

“Viewers are moving to streaming. Advertisers are following, but they haven’t caught up yet. We are starting to see that change,” Wood told investors Thursday during Roku’s Q4 earnings call.

Roku’s reeling in advertisers because it offers incremental reach – access to cord cutters and cord shavers who don’t watch linear TV.

More than 10% of viewing is in over-the-top, but “not even close to 10% of budgets are in OTT,” said Scott Rosenberg, SVP and GM of Roku’s platform business. Unlike its competitors, he said Roku can calculate the additional people advertisers reach beyond their linear audience.

Eighty-six percent of people who saw a Baskin-Robbins ad on Roku hadn’t seen the same ad on linear TV, for example, leading to 10.6% incremental reach, Rosenberg said. Eighty-one percent of people who saw RE/MAX ads on Roku hadn’t seen the ads on linear, delivering a 9.2% incremental reach.

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The Big Story: DTC Principles Come To Big Brands

by Ryan Joe  //  Posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2019 at 2:03 pm.

The Big Story is a podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

In 2019, US digital ad spend will finally hit the milestone we all knew it would reach: It will surpass traditional ad spend, according to eMarketer.

Congrats to digital!

And especially to Amazon, whose share of the advertising cake is expected to grow from 4.5% last year to 8.8% this year – a period in which Google, Microsoft and Verizon will all decline, while Facebook is projected to flatten out.

This week on “The Big Story,” we’ll talk about the growth of digital and Amazon, in particular: why it’s succeeding and what it must do to grab even more precious, precious spend.

We’ll also look at a curious case of Kellogg’s, an old-school brand that’s top of mind every morning when you’re heating up those Pop-Tarts. Kellogg’s recently launched two new health products – a smoothie bowl and a something-biotic cereal.

But instead of traditional wide releases, it did so iteratively, pushing out the products in select channels and tweaking them based on live customer feedback.

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Verizon-Backed Visible’s CMO Is Getting Millennials To Leave The Family Plan

by Sarah Sluis  //  Posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2019 at 11:00 am.

Verizon's Visible, a low-cost, digital-only phone carrier, is using direct-to-consumer principles to attract millennials who are leaving a family plan for the first time in their lives.

No stores exist. Consumers sign up for Visible by downloading an app. A new SIM card arrives in the mail for the $40-per-month service.

Like direct-to-consumer brands, Visible pays close attention to the customer experience and uses product feedback to inform the offering – inspired by companies like Zappos and Glossier, said Visible's CMO Minjae Ormes.

When Visible noticed early adopters posting about their experiences on Reddit, its marketing team reached out and asked what they liked and what could be better. Based on hundreds of responses, Visible added a mobile hotspot feature in addition to unlimited talk, text and data, since it ranked as the top request from early customers.

Responding to customer feedback also builds a community, an important part of Visible’s marketing plan. “As we scale and grow, we’re thinking about how we can change the relationship you have with your phone service,” Ormes said.

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