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Apsalar and Singular Merge With An Eye On Busting Mobile Data Silos MEC CEO Tim Castree: Media Planning And Buying Is A Commodity Jet.com Courts Premium Publishers With Competitive Affiliate Rates WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell Won’t Be Deterred By A Disrupted Market AI Had A Modest Showing At Cannes, But Here Are Some Notable Developments Cannes: Leo Burnett Gets Creative With Data Oath Is Born: AOL Execs Reveal Plans For Mashup With Yahoo Zenith And Magna: Total Ad Spend Growth May Be Soft, But Mobile, Search And Social Are Superstars Facebook Has Its Own Brand Safety Issues. Here’s How It’s Facing Up.

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WPP Bets On Amazon; It's Also Still Fighting The Malware Attack

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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Amazon Guides

The marketing world is still debating who could be the next contender to the duopoly, but WPP is clearly placing its bets on Amazon. Media agency Mindshare and performance marketing agency Possible are offering clients a shared media and ecommerce solution “across the entire Amazon ecosystem,” Adweek reports. Amazon-exclusive services will include media planning and buying, ecommerce optimization, analytics, services around “innovative” products like Dash and Alexa and a unit focused on Amazon Prime. Capabilities for the service will come from Marketplace Ignition, the Amazon-focused consultancy WPP acquired in May. “We want to provide an end-to-end solution from awareness to sale,” said Joe Migliozzi, head of Mindshare’s Shop+ division in North America. More.

Sir Martin’s Ransom

As of EOD Wednesday, WPP is still crippled from a cyberattack that hit businesses across the US, Europe and Latin American on Tuesday. The malware, dubbed Petya, sent devices across WPP’s 200,000-person network into lockdown with a ransom of 300 bitcoin per device. “Although some of our operations continue to be affected … steady progress is being made towards restoring normal service across the Group,” WPP CEO Martin Sorrell wrote in a note to employees. “There is no indication in any of our companies that either employee or client data has been compromised.” Ninety percent of such attacks are money grabs, but there’s a chance it obscures something more sinister, like transferring money outside of the organization or covering a data breach, Jeff Pollard, principal analyst at Forrester, told Ad Age. More than once in the financial services industry, an attack of this ilk “was actually a smoke screen for something else, he said.” More.

Rakuten Marketing Snags Programmatic Pioneer Neal Richter As CTO

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2017 at 1:00 pm.

RTB whiz Neal Richter is the new CTO at Rakuten Marketing, the marketing solutions subsidiary of Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten.

Richter, who serves as a technical adviser to a number of ad tech startups, including Metamarkets and nToggle, joins the company after more than seven years with Rubicon Project, most recently as CTO.

At Rakuten, he’ll be responsible for driving technology innovation and uncovering revenue opportunities for the company’s advertiser and publisher customers.

Richter has quite the resume. In addition to helping pioneer programmatic specs like the OpenRTB standard and IAB Tech Lab initiatives like Ads.txt, he led a team of data scientists focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning at CRM company RightNow (acquired by Oracle in 2011).

Like some of its competitors, Rakuten Marketing has constructed its stack through a series of acquisitions, which range from smaller purchases, such as mobile demand-side platform Deep Forest Media and attribution tool DC Storm, to splashier deals, such as Rakuten’s acquisition of display platform MediaFORGE and the subsequent merger with its affiliate network, LinkShare.

Although affiliate marketing has long been the foundation of Rakuten Marketing’s business, the next opportunity lies in moving up the funnel into video as it seeks to unify formats like affiliate, display and mobile into “one holistic marketing channel,” said Tony Zito, CEO of Rakuten Marketing.

Zito and Richter spoke with AdExchanger about how Rakuten is evolving as performance blends with branding.

AdExchanger: Why move to Rakuten Marketing, Neal?

NEAL RICHTER: I was looking for a company with a big vision, a great team, lots of data assets and some large engineering problems to go after.

CafeMedia Uses Watson AI To Power Context-Driven Private Marketplaces

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2017 at 12:30 pm.

Food brands that want their ad creative to appear next to recipes for quick and easy dinners, Japanese food or gluten-free meals can buy inventory via CafeMedia’s private marketplaces that fits into those content categories.

CafeMedia created those content categories using IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence (AI).

Traditionally, companies use content management systems to categorize and tag content. But CafeMedia acquired blogging network AdThrive last October, giving it access to 1,500 bloggers focused on food, family and home content. All of those bloggers used different content management systems and formats for their posts.

CafeMedia didn’t want to make everyone switch to a new tech platform, and it would take an impossible amount of manual labor to tag and categorize 500,000 recipes. AI provided an automated solution.

In February, CafeMedia bought a subscription to IBM Watson, which focuses on natural language processing, and set up a database with Amazon Athena. Next, the publisher’s four-person data science team created a training set for Watson. CafeMedia found 30,000 recipes that were already correctly categorized because they had been coded using XML. Watson learned from there to categorize the remaining 470,000 recipes.

Four months later, the first private marketplaces and direct deals are in motion that take advantage of Watson’s AI to target the media. CafeMedia dubs the platform Marmalade.

Will Agency Media-Buying Groups Become Extinct?

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2017 at 12:24 pm.

“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 Jim Spanfeller, founder and general manager of The Daily Meal Ventures Group, a tronc company.

Let me start by saying, no, I don’t think agency media-buying groups will become extinct. But it now appears very likely that agency media-buying groups must change radically to stay in existence.

The good news? Radical change is a well-known state for these companies. Perhaps they will even go back to a business model from the past – more on that in a moment.

The world is a very different place for media planners and buyers than it was 10 years ago. In large part, the buying groups drove these changes as they looked for ways to improve margins in a very competitive landscape that evolved rapidly.

It has been discussed many times now, but as clients pushed agencies for increasingly lower fees, the profit margins for creative all but disappeared, and margins on media planning and buying became razor thin. For digital work, those margins often went negative. It was a very tough development at precisely the time when digital was exploding as a percentage of overall spend.

REI Scales New Personalized Peaks With Weather-Triggered Social Ads

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2017 at 12:00 pm.

Outdoor gear retailer REI is hitting the slopes with personalized local advertising.

The brand, working with dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform Jivox, is running hyperlocal campaigns on social channels informed by weather data, interests and past purchases.

In particular, REI has been piloting a new Jivox product that allows brands to add new targeting dimensions to their dynamic ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Using weather – a targeting trigger not offered directly via Facebook – was especially compelling to REI, which recently ramped up its efforts in local markets.

For a time, members of the REI marketing team were checking the weather every day in various locations and posting content on Facebook based on whether it was snowing in Chicago or raining in Seattle.

But that was far too manual a process to scale, said Amy Ball, REI’s senior program manager for advertising.

“We all respond better to advertising when it’s relevant,” Ball said. “But being relevant and actually doing personalization can be really overwhelming.”

Live Video Is About Branding – And Acquisition – For Publisher This Old House

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2017 at 12:30 am.

Live video is picking up steam, but because it takes extra resources to produce – and monetization is still nascent – it can be a tough tradeoff for premium publishers.

Yet, with more consumer platforms, such as Facebook Live, testing new monetization tactics like mid-roll ads in live video, publishers are experimenting more aggressively with live across their owned-and-operated and distributed properties.

This Old House, a multiplatform media company with tie-ins to a popular PBS television program for DIY home improvement enthusiasts, is doubling down on its live offering using JW Player.

Although the home improvement publisher already has a first-movers’ advantage from a decade’s worth of premium video content from its TV program, it also wanted to drive up engagement with members of its paid loyalty program, This Old House Insider.

“We’re starting to use live video as an added incentive for our most loyal fans, who already get access to a complete archive of every show we’ve ever produced,” said Michael Gutkowski, chief digital officer for This Old House Ventures.

To increase engagement, This Old House began hosting live events with personalities from its TV show, many of whom also have loyal fan followings across social media. Early results show live video participants and premium subscribers are consuming 10 times more video than nonparticipants, the company said.

Comcast Beat P&G As Top Ad Spender; WPP, And Others, Hit With Cyberattack

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

Hey, Big Spender

Comcast beat out Procter & Gamble as the top ad spender in 2016, according to Ad Age’s Leading National Advertisers report. P&G, which has ranked No. 1 on the list 42 out of the rankings’ 62 years, has been on a mission to cut its ad spend and agency roster during a slow economic growth period for CPGs. But Comcast’s win also reflects a change in the report’s methodology to measure broader advertising, marketing and promotional spend, Ad Age said. Overall, advertisers are spending more: Total US ad spend increased 3.6% to a record $152 billion, and two-thirds of the leading 200 advertisers increased ad spend last year. Amazon increased ad spend the most, by $602 million to $2.6 billion in the US. That number will jump again when it finalizes its acquisition of Whole Foods, which spent $96 million on ads last year.

Agency Disruption

WPP was among a group of global firms hit by a paralyzing cyberattack on Tuesday. The attack disabled employee computers and demanded a bitcoin ransom in exchange for reaccess, The New York Times reports. WPP was forced to suspend all work on desktops and PCs and its website was still down by end of day. According to Ad Age, creative agency Y&R sent a memo saying: "As a precaution, WPP is mandating that everyone immediately shut down all computers, both Macs and PCs. This applies to you whether you are in the office or elsewhere. Working on an office computer remotely is not an option. Please leave your computers turned off until you hear from us again." More.

Startup Acquired.io Aims To Rescue Mobile Devs From User Acquisition Excel Hell

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2017 at 12:00 pm.

The mobile ad industry is a fragmented mess of ad networks.

Singapore-based mobile game publisher IGG (I Got Games), which has about 17 million monthly active users globally and spends multiple millions on performance-based user acquisition (UA) every month, works with 100 different networks at any given time.

“It’s labor-intensive,” said Mark Zhang, IGG’s SVP of global operations. “And the potential for human error is very high.”

Despite having built its own internal business intelligence system that automatically collects and consolidates ad network data, IGG’s campaign creation and optimization is still a manual process across independent networks.

IGG’s roughly two dozen user acquisition managers spend multiple hours every day engaged in tedious spreadsheet wrangling and logging in and out of dashboards that don’t communicate with each other.

For the last few months, IGG has been testing a centralized ad network dashboard from Acquired.io, a startup that launched Tuesday with $2 million in mostly angel funding after about five months in stealth mode.

Founded by the guys behind AppScotch, an in-app analytics company acquired by App Annie last year, Acquired.io’s platform aims to be a one-stop-shop for user acquisition management across multiple channels.

Apsalar and Singular Merge With An Eye On Busting Mobile Data Silos

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2017 at 11:00 am.

Singular and Apsalar are consolidating, and they’ve got their collective head in the marketing cloud.

On Tuesday, the duo announced that they will become one and marry their respective technologies – Singular’s mobile marketing analytics tech and Apsalar’s mobile attribution and DMP offering – to take on the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce on the mobile front.

“The marketing clouds established themselves on the web, and now they’re adding mobile capabilities – they’re doing it in reverse,” said Apsalar founder Michael Oiknine, who’s joining Singular as CRO and chief strategy officer. “But mobile is the center of gravity for intelligence gathering.”

The Singular and Apsalar stacks have been integrated, and several customers, including Lyft, are already live on the blended platform. Together, the companies have a combined headcount of 110 and a global footprint spanning San Francisco, Israel, India, Japan and Germany. Everyone is staying on board.

Although the Apsalar name is being retired, the unified entity under the Singular brand will retain Apsalar’s status as an official measurement and attribution partner of Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Twitter and Snap.

The two companies decided to join forces because they each had blind spots. Singular’s system helps marketers track spend and ROI across channels. Apsalar’s platform was set up to attribute app installs and monitor post-install in-app behavioral data.

MEC CEO Tim Castree: Media Planning And Buying Is A Commodity

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2017 at 6:00 am.

As automation takes hold of the advertising industry, media planning and buying agencies are being forced to take a cold, hard look in the mirror.

“We’re dealing with a lot of forces of commoditization,” MEC CEO Tim Castree told AdExchanger.

Castree is in a delicate spot. Following MEC’s merger with sister GroupM agency, Maxus, he’ll have to demonstrate the value-add of his firm while also building the newly combined entity.

But less is more, Castree said. Agencies should be investing in value-added services, not fomenting fragmentation.

“We talk about our products in a fractured way, and it creates confusion for clients,” he said.

Simplifying and realizing the value prop of his media agency will involve building up services once considered ancillary to media planning and buying and then turning them into “the main game,” Castree said. That includes analytics, platforms, content, ecommere and performance marketing.

It’s about survival.

“The vast majority of our revenue comes from media planning and buying,” he said. “As investment dollars become more scarce, we have to be shrewder in how we spend them.”

Castree spoke with AdExchanger about driving forces behind the merger.