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Auction Theory Ph.D.s Share Five Things Buyers And Sellers Should Keep In Mind For First-Price Auctions Silicon Valley Tech Is Spending More On Ads – Largely On Itself Disney Closes On 21st Century Fox, And Enters A New Era Of Streaming Competition Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar: Marketing Is Facing An 'Existential Crisis' Podcast: The Singular BOK Oracle Data Cloud Kills Off Its AddThis Audience Business In Europe Inside The Agency Turf War Over Connected TV Mark Penn Named CEO Of MDC Partners Everything You Need To Know About Bid Shading

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A Cross-Platform Measurement Framework Is Finally Close To Becoming A Reality

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

“Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by George W. Ivie, CEO and executive director at the Media Rating Council.

In an advertising industry that is defined by data and measurement in a way that few other sectors are, there's possibly no more desirable goal than cross-platform measurement.

It is an objective that a range of industry consortia have been devoted to. The challenge they have all faced is formidable – and for good reason; true cross-platform measurement is an incredibly complex issue, both a technological problem and a business problem. Perhaps most importantly, it is a challenge of coordination, cooperation and consensus building.

At its core is the requirement for a common set of metrics to compare the performance of a video advertising campaign running on linear television, video on demand, streaming video or on a proprietary app platform. To accomplish this, the industry must have common approaches for measuring and reporting that can be used across all platforms by independent third parties. We need to normalize impression and audience measurements across all media platforms, insofar as possible.

The opportunity to align on what those metrics and approaches should be – and to take that critical next step – is drawing near.

Auction Theory Ph.D.s Share Five Things Buyers And Sellers Should Keep In Mind For First-Price Auctions

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Friday, March 22nd, 2019 at 12:05 am.

As all online advertising exchanges – including Google – switch to a first-price auction format, marketers and publishers can trust they will be run fairly. The auction type ensures that the exchanges, acting as the auctioneers, have no incentive to cheat.

“First-price auctions wipe out a lot of ways auctioneers would be tempted to bend the rules,” said Shengwu Li, assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. “There aren’t secret ways [for auctioneers] to boost the price anymore.”

Li co-authored award-winning academic research on the trustworthiness of first-price auctions last July along with Mohammad Akbarpour, assistant professor of economics at Stanford University. Neither does paid consulting for advertising companies.

Most auction theorists focus on how to prevent the buyer and seller from cheating, but ignore scenarios where the auctioneer could have an incentive to run an unfair auction.

Li and Akbarpour discovered during their research that that scenario had been playing out in online advertising.

“We started thinking about this from a purely theoretical perspective – ‘What would happen if bidders are worried that the auctioneer might cheat?’ To see it play out in reality was almost surreal,” Li said.

AdExchanger spoke with Li and Akbarpour about what publishers, marketers and ad tech companies should consider when participating in a first-price auction.

Is Ad Tech Consolidation Killing Programmatic?

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, March 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 Rotem Shaul, CEO at Primis.

Programmatic advertising has grown by hundreds of percentage points, and as the industry has matured, market consolidation has commenced.

Many vendors are too small and cannot compete with the industry's maturing tech and with big players’ data. Others are in an M&A frenzy to get better technology, sales efficiency or data to better position themselves in the market.

From January 2016 to April 2018, advertisers reduced the number of demand-side platforms (DSPs) to 4.2 from 6.9, a 40% decline, according to eMarketer.

For some, the trend might seem natural, but there is a big downside for the whole programmatic industry and DSPs: M&As are self-annihilating the programmatic industry.

Comic: DTC Assembly Line

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

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

The Implications Of Streaming Subscription Fatigue; Amazon Tries Mobile Video Ads

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

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

Streams Do Come True

Streaming subscription fatigue may be setting in. That means marketing costs to acquire and retain new subscribers will go up and advertising models will remain under pressure. “Media companies and content owners … should not only continue to strengthen their content libraries, quality, distribution and value, but also keep a close eye on consumer frustrations, including advertising overload and data privacy concerns,” Kevin Westcott, leader of Deloitte’s telecom, media and entertainment practice, tells Adweek. Tiny moments of consumer friction can hurt growth. For instance, about two-fifths of streaming service users switch to a different service within a few minutes if they don’t see something to watch. And many viewers will abandon a streaming service entirely if it has as much as half the average ad load of a typical linear television program. More.

Roll The Tape

Amazon has been experimenting with video ads in its iOS app, and will do the same on Android later this year, according to Bloomberg. The ads are triggered by searches and presumably offer higher yield for Amazon and better performance for advertisers than static display. Amazon has set minimum budgets for the program at $35,000, according to an unnamed source, but it’s unclear from this write-up how prices are set. More.

The Big Story: Spring Forward, Fall Back

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Thursday, March 21st, 2019 at 12:15 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.

Agencies are moving to buy connected TV (CTV) inventory, but wherever there’s construction, there’s dust.

The issue is that agency buying teams are at odds over who has the right to purchase CTV. The digital buyers were there first, but the TV buyers (or “video investment teams”) have staked out their claim.

In the future, the two sides will likely come together, but a shakeout needs to happen first.

This week, on “The Big Story,” Sarah Sluis lays out the benefits each type of agency buyer can bring to CTV, where the conflict is and what they can learn from each other. TV buyers, for instance, have imposed consistent pricing across different CTV inventory owners. But the targeting and optimization that makes CTV inventory so unique falls squarely within the realm of digital teams.

Moreover, digital teams have fought through the lack of transparency, fraud and complexities of the online ad ecosystem – and they’re best equipped to make sure that the CTV ecosystem remains as clean as possible.

Also on “The Big Story,” Oracle Data Cloud’s AddThis has retreated from Europe, due to enhanced scrutiny under GDPR. Allison Schiff reports on what led to AddThis’ gradual retreat and why Oracle is extremely conservative when it comes to its data businesses.

And, we discuss what exactly Oracle Data Cloud loses with AddThis out of the picture.

Silicon Valley Tech Is Spending More On Ads – Largely On Itself

by James Hercher // Posted on Thursday, March 21st, 2019 at 12:00 pm.

Internet-age companies like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Netflix, not to mention Chinese technology giants, are spending more on advertising, catching verticals like CPG, automotive and financial companies that traditionally spend the most on ads.

There are 10 new-age tech companies among Ad Age’s top 100 global advertisers. In 2017, the most recent full year data is available for, those 10 brands collectively increased ad spend by 29.6%. The remaining 90 top advertisers increased 2.6%.

While internet companies disproportionately outspend legacy brands online, they’re getting into traditional channels like television and out-of-home media.

Broadcasters used to debate whether to accept ads from companies like Google and Amazon that were siphoning audiences online, said Brian Wieser, GroupM’s global president of business intelligence. “Obviously the industry settled on accepting those ads.”

And tech companies are bolstering television spend and pricing, even as TV audiences decline, said Jonathan Barnard, Zenith’s head of forecasting and director of global intelligence.

Television is particularly important as companies like Amazon and Google build in-home hardware and media subscription businesses, Barnard said, because to gain mass market appeal they need to reach people who aren’t regular users of their online services.

Marketing Isn’t The Only Way To Go Direct To Consumer

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, March 21st, 2019 at 12:05 am.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Lance Neuhauser, CEO at 4C.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) startups are thriving as more consumers expect a seamless online experience with their favorite brands. But what if you are a major brand that needs to move a massive amount of units, and your traditional sales channel has been wholesale, and you don’t collect the last mile of data? How do incumbents become DTC companies if they were not built that way in the first place?

This problem can’t be solved through advertising and marketing technology; marketing is not the fastest or stickiest path to building a direct relationship.

The cold truth is that an incumbent can’t outrun a DTC on its home turf of people-based marketing. Data is the new economy of scale in media. And not only do DTC brands have data that rivals their larger competitors, they are in many ways more comfortable running in-house operations that leverage data management and media facilitation technologies. They are going to bring that strategic edge to TV as it transforms into a digital channel, taking away the incumbent’s last home-field advantage.

That’s why incumbent brands should look beyond marketing to their true place of leverage. For incumbents, that means hardware: physical products that build an intravenous sales model with a direct connection between brand and consumer – one that creates a channel for new, meaningful product extensions. You can’t persuade customers into a direct relationship with marketing savvy alone; you’ve got to give them something they want and need.

Smart TV Manufacturers Will Decide The Tipping Point For ACR

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, March 21st, 2019 at 12:04 am.

"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

Today’s column is written by Ronan Higgins, CEO at TVadSync.

Vizio, Samsung and LG make up 70% of the smart TV market, with many of the other manufacturers trailing in the single digits. It’s a new tri-opoly for brands to contend with as they try to reach their customers through ever more complicated media channels.

All three of these giants understand modern economics. They will make more money from consumer data than from actual TV set sales. And each one has gone about creating a data business in a different way, from reselling to creating the first smart TV walled garden.

But smart TV manufacturers have a problem. Without working together, they’ll never hit the scale that brands need to truly embrace targeted advertising driven by automatic content recognition (ACR). And because of this, the walled garden model that brands are used to on the internet will never appear on ACR.

Pay Up, Google; Ad Tech Readies For TV 2.0

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, March 21st, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

Third Fine’s A Charm

Google was slapped with its third EU antitrust fine in two years on Wednesday, to the tune of $1.7 billion. EU regulators determined the search giant used its dominance to block competitors from selling text ads on third-party websites’ search results that are powered by its AdSense product. The fine marks the end of a decadeslong investigation into the dominance of Google’s search and advertising business; the EU has fined company an additional $14 billion over the past two years, The Wall Street Journal reports. But antitrust experts are skeptical that the EU’s outdated approach to antitrust regulation will have any effect on the internet giants’ business models. “I think Google has outmaneuvered the commission in many ways,” says Alec Burnside, a competition lawyer at Dechert LLP. “There is great soul-searching in the antitrust community about whether the rulebook is adequate for this.” More.

The Private Eye

Amazon’s private-label brands are receiving more attention from retailers and investors – and more scrutiny from regulators, including in India, where a new ecommerce law forbids ecom markets from carrying private-label lines. On the one hand, Amazon’s brand portfolio receives undue credit for disrupting categories and using data, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the ecommerce market research company Marketplace Pulse. But brands can’t let their focus slip or Amazon may drink their milkshake. “Brands don't need to worry about the hundreds of brands that Amazon is putting out. They need to worry about the one in their category that succeeds,” Danny Silverman, CMO at Edge by Ascential, tells Retail Dive. Amazon is also a ruthless conquest marketer, unabashedly syphoning search and purchase intent from better-known brands toward its cheaper alternatives. “Saying that Amazon's access to its own platform is ‘unfair’ may seem like a stretch, but the company does seem to use it in ways that take run-of-the-mill marketing to new levels.” More.