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Cannes 2019: As TV Broadcasters Make Their Pitch, Linear Is The Next Frontier LinkedIn Paid Just Under $300M For Drawbridge Salesforce And Adobe Dominate The DMP Space, As Oracle Continues To Slip How To Engage Customers Across Facebook’s Platforms Salesforce Gets Serious About CDPs With Revamped Customer 360 Product Cannes 2019: Creative Meets Performance, DTC Shows Up And Regulation Looms Salesforce And Adobe Lead Forrester DMP Wave With Embrace Of Privacy The DSP Market Shakeup Starts To Settle In Latest Advertiser Perceptions Report Salesforce To Buy Tableau For $15.7 Billion, Expanding Its Integration Toolkit

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Cannes 2019: As TV Broadcasters Make Their Pitch, Linear Is The Next Frontier

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 at 11:05 am.

Two years ago, Disney’s presence at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity focused on social inventory within the Disney Digital Network.

This year, Disney has a lot more to pitch, with its refined data strategy, audiences available across all of its different properties, theme parks included, the acquisitions of Fox assets like National Geographic and FX and a controlling stake in Hulu.

It’s not alone. From one end of La Croisette – Cannes’ main drag – to the other, TV ad sellers, including Disney Advertising Sales, NBCUniversal and AT&T’s ad unit Xandr, are all pushing the ability to do data-driven buys across their respective media empires.

NBCU has invested more in the 2019 Cannes Lions than it ever has before, and its increased presence is noticeable, with a large cabana serving as a meeting room. The bigger investment makes sense, given some of NBCU’s recent moves in advertising.

Following a reorganization last October, it rolled its advertising technology AdSmart deeper into the sales org.

“We had really treated AdSmart as a stand-alone entity before,” said Mark Marshall, NBCU’s president of advertising and client partnerships. “It’s no longer an island over there, it’s part of our overall discussion.”

LinkedIn Paid Just Under $300M For Drawbridge

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 at 9:15 am.

Industry insiders were largely puzzled when LinkedIn said it would buy cross-device linkage company Drawbridge in May.

LinkedIn buried the announcement in a blog post, and the LinkedIn-Drawbridge synergies weren’t obvious, so it made sense to assume the purchase was either an acqui-hire or a fire sale.

But, according to two AdExchanger sources, LinkedIn paid just under $300 million for Drawbridge.

While much of the advertising industry didn’t see the value of Drawbridge, LinkedIn did.

LinkedIn is getting rid of Drawbridge’s business, but it values the company based on how it can help LinkedIn with relevance and targeting both on platform and off network, said Penry Price, LinkedIn’s VP of marketing solutions.

“Over a period of some years, it will pay for itself,” he said. He anticipates Drawbridge will fill in some of the blind spots LinkedIn has on its users.

Saucony Exercises Instagram To Expand How People See Its Brand

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 at 9:01 am.

Serious runners wear Saucony, the Boston-based footwear brand. But there are also many runners who don’t define themselves as hardcore.

Rather, they’re attracted to what running enables them to do: Stay fit, enjoy good food or run for a cause.

Saucony is tapping into that mentality through its Run for Good campaign, an Instagram-based relay race where miles translate into charity donations.

During the first week of the campaign in June, more than 2,000 public Instagram accounts posted selfies of their completed runs. Even more private accounts posted, but Saucony can’t track those.

The engagement rate on Instagram averaged 140% higher than Saucony’s benchmark. Almost 7,000 people were tagged in posts encouraging them to run the next mile – key to keeping the relay going beyond the 33 countries where runners have already participated.

The inspiration behind Run for Good came through market research and focus groups that CMO Don Lane commissioned when he joined the sneaker company in November 2018.

“We got feedback that Saucony is a beloved brand in our community – and that we had lost our way,” Lane said. “We weren’t clear on what made us special.”

Salesforce And Adobe Dominate The DMP Space, As Oracle Continues To Slip

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 at 6:00 am.

If you’re a data-management platform (DMP) and your name isn’t Salesforce or Adobe, it’s starting to get pretty chilly out there.

Oracle’s BlueKai DMP is a strong third, while Neustar and Lotame continue to chug along – but Salesforce and Adobe undoubtedly lead the pack, at least when it comes to how advertisers think about the DMP landscape.

In its latest DMP report, released Wednesday, market research firm Advertiser Perceptions polled more than 400 marketers and agency executives who are directly involved in the purchase of programmatic advertising with annual digital ad budgets of at least $1 million.

“I wouldn’t count Oracle out, but all indicators point to Salesforce and Adobe succeeding in the marketplace, whether that’s on the DMP front or with a customer data platform, which is where the market is heading,” said Kevin Mannion, chief strategy officer at Advertiser Perceptions.

Oracle BlueKai was the only one of the big three marketing cloud DMPs to lose ground on key funnel metrics. Although current clients are positive about their recent customer experience with Oracle, its DMP trails Adobe on consideration, buying intent and net promoter score.

How To Engage Customers Across Facebook’s Platforms

by AdExchanger Content Studio // Posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 at 4:41 am.

This article is sponsored by Facebook.

Creating a strong customer experience across all of the digital moments that matter is essential to prevent customers from dropping off. Few digital channels play a more pivotal role than Facebook and Instagram in funneling customers through this journey. According to one survey by Ipsos, nearly 75% of monthly Instagram users open the app with intent to shop.

But slow, complicated checkout processes and suboptimal user experiences often don’t meet customers’ rising expectations of speed, convenience and accessibility.

Brands are driving growth by adapting to these evolving customer behaviors and delivering relevant, personalized messaging, simplified purchase processes and accessible support across these channels.

“How will the way a business tells its story continue to evolve – especially as consumer relationships with digital channels are becoming more complex?” said Vatsal Mehta, VP, Solutions Engineering and Partner Solutions at Facebook. “This is the problem Facebook is trying to solve through innovative tools and APIs that allow brands and developers to tell a more comprehensive, connected story across the entire purchase journey.”

The Responsibility For Fake News Rests With Social Platforms

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 at 12:05 am.

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

Today's column is written by Michael Weaver, senior vice president of business growth and development at Al Jazeera Media Network.

Following the 2016 presidential election, the impact of so-called “fake news” reverberated around the world. As a result, society called on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to take responsibility for their roles in disseminating news – fake or otherwise – to billions of people.

For the most part, the platforms punted, leading to the rise of a new type of content intermediary. These companies, many of which offer their services directly to Facebook and Twitter, judge and report on the “trust and accountability” of today’s news outlets.

Unfortunately, there are as many lingering questions with their capabilities and interests as there are with Facebook and Twitter. And their emergence is taking the onus off the platforms to do better.

Snap Starts To Rebound; OpenAP Partners With NCC Media On Audiences

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

Adobe On A Cloud

Adobe bragged about its customer data platform Tuesday on the company’s second quarter earnings call. The marketing clouds are going for broke this week on the CDP front – Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle all made CDP-related announcements – but Adobe has an edge, claims CEO Shantanu Narayen. “We have the data and the content to differentiate us in terms of customer traction across different channel points,” he said, pointing to Adobe’s street cred with its audience management solutions and the DMP it brought on board with the acquisition of Demdex way back in 2011. But the enterprise cloud solution market is massive enough – worth somewhere north of $70 billion – that this isn’t a winner-takes-all situation, Narayen said. “There is just so much opportunity.” It was a strong quarter for Adobe, with 25% year-over-year overall revenue growth to $2.74 billion, including $784 million – a 34% YoY uptick – for Adobe Experience Cloud, which houses Adobe’s Marketing, Analytics and Advertising products. But who’s going to run it? Brad Rencher, a key executive in charge of integrating Adobe’s marketing cloud products, exited the company in January. Narayen is leading that business himself until a replacement for Rencher is found. There isn’t one yet. “The search continues, but we haven’t missed a beat,” Narayen said. “It is not hampering the progress at all in terms of what we need to do.”

Snap Is Back

Snap shares rose nearly 10% Tuesday after BTIG analysts increased their price target. Having lost ground – and the confidence of many investors – due to the popularity of copycat Instagram Stories, Snap has made a number of moves that shows its recovery plan is working, the analysts said. A gender-swapping feature increased daily active users, a gaming product could boost engagement and a forthcoming Snap ad network teased this April shows promise. But even without the boost from BTIG, the stock has been on a slow rebound this year. Read more.

Salesforce Gets Serious About CDPs With Revamped Customer 360 Product

by James Hercher // Posted on Tuesday, June 18th, 2019 at 8:00 am.

Salesforce officially threw its hat into the ring with the launch of a customer data platform (CDP) on Tuesday at its Connections conference in Chicago.

Salesforce has been circling a CDP launch for the past year, since its $800 million acquisition of Datorama, a data integration service, and the launch of an internal identity graph called Customer 360 shortly thereafter. That identity graph will now become the core of the CDP product, which is inheriting the name Customer 360.

Salesforce, along with practically every company in the mar tech ecosystem, has grappled with the definition of a CDP.

“Frankly, I think that’s mostly marketing. We have all the pieces of a CDP, but really, what is that?” Salesforce Marketing Cloud CEO Bob Stutz told AdExchanger a year ago.

At the time, he predicted CDPs would be a “passing fad” as identity graphs, tag management companies, CRMs and DMPs evolve into mobile, customer-based data solutions.

Whether it’s marketing jargon or not, the CDP moniker has stuck, and players across the industry are staking their claim in the nebulous category.

“We’re embracing the CDP as a natural evolution of the CRM,” said Marty Kihn, Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s SVP of product strategy, who, as Gartner research VP last year, was one of the first to try to define the CDP category.

“We have a strong claim to this space,” Kihn said. One reason Salesforce embraced the new three-letter acronym is that in surveys over the past year, clients often named Salesforce as their CDP vendor, he said.

How Unilever Navigates A Messy Media Landscape

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Tuesday, June 18th, 2019 at 6:00 am.

CPG giant Unilever has 400 brands in its portfolio.

Multiply that by a fragmented media landscape, an international consumer base and a crowded vendor ecosystem and it’s fair to say that Unilever’s global media manager, Luis Di Como, has a complex job.

Unilever, in Di Como’s view, has four main challenges when it comes to media investment: an overall lack of trust and transparency; the colliding worlds of media, marketing and ecommerce; the seemingly never-ending need for more content; and the imperative to use data for real-time optimization.

Charting those complicated waters, Unilever follows a framework set by advertiser consultancy Ebiquity that helps it define the role of media within its organization, to choose the right partners – and to hold them accountable.

“The media realities are completely different in China than in the United States or South Africa,” Di Como said. “Having an overarching approach that allows us to establish a couple of principles and to navigate this is super helpful.”

For Unilever, establishing a foundation of trust and transparency with partners is paramount. Confidence among large global advertisers has eroded over the past few years, not only due to the murkiness of the digital supply chain, but because of ongoing issues with agency partners.

It’s been hard for agencies to regain the trust they lost following the Association of National Advertisers’ 2016 report on agency kickbacks.

Ebay Tests AI Recommendation Tool To Up The Ante On Its Marketing Experiments

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, June 18th, 2019 at 12:30 am.

Large marketers are constantly running scores of experiments on their media investments. That can make optimization tricky, said Sadie Daryan, eBay’s global head of display and app marketing.

And so eBay has been playing around with a tool from marketing intelligence startup Admetrics, released Tuesday, that uses AI to automatically run thousands of concurrent tests and make recommendations on how to best tweak them in real time.

The tool, called Newton (because it’s seemingly impossible to not name an AI-related marketing solution after anyone other than a brilliant male scientist or mathematician), is trained to understand specific marketing use cases, said Markus Repetschnig, CEO and co-founder of Admetrics.

There’s a Newton model for optimizing Facebook campaigns, for example, and another for programmatic advertising. Marketers set up their tests within Admetrics, including their desired KPI, and Newton monitors the tests in real time and makes suggestions on the fly to improve results.