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Civis Launches Creative Focus As Brands Bring Data To Pre-Campaign Strategy The Big Story: This Episode Brought To You By The Letters CES And PMP Basic Private Auctions Are ‘Going The Way Of The Dinosaur’ As Programmatic Cleans Up Verizon Isn’t Cutting Off The Subscriber Data Spigot To Its Media Unit – At Least Not Yet Martin Sorrell At CES: Clients Will Demand Speed And Flexibility In 2019 Nielsen Releases 'Bird Box' Ratings As SVOD Measurement Comes Into Focus CES 2019: Can Apple’s Billboard Shift The Conversation To Consumer Privacy? AT&T First-Party Data Floods Into Turner’s Linear And Digital Inventory As Targeting Becomes Old Hat, Ad Tech Turns To Creative

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Everyone Is Dreaming Of Streaming These Days, But Netflix Isn’t Sweating It

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2019 at 8:49 pm.

Attention, broadcasters, SVOD services and tech companies in the midst of launching a streaming subscription service (or thinking about it): Netflix doesn’t consider you to be competition.

“We compete so broadly with all of these different providers that any one provider entering only makes a difference on the margin,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said Thursday when discussing the company’s Q4 2018 earnings during a group interview led by UBS analyst Eric Sheridan.

[Netflix has a novel format for its earnings calls. A single investor is invited to question a handful of Netflix executives during a livestream (natch) on YouTube.]

So, who does Netflix compete with? The answer is more of a “what” than a “who.”

Netflix considers time its main competition. There are only 24 hours in the day, and some of those must be spent eating, sleeping, playing Fortnite and watching "Game of Thrones."

“I think about it really as us winning time away from entertainment, from other activities,” Hastings said.

In Q4, Netflix added 1.5 million paid subscribers in the United States and 6.1 million in international markets, bringing total paid memberships to 139.3 globally.

Here are three takeaways from Netflix’s fourth quarter report.

Civis Launches Creative Focus As Brands Bring Data To Pre-Campaign Strategy

by James Hercher // Posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2019 at 12:25 pm.

The analytics startup Civis was founded in 2013 with roots in political data and targeting and has since transitioned to commercial business, where advertisers are less familiar with testing messages to sway public opinion.

Most big brands rely on panels or focus groups, which “have a lot of contamination” because more people self-select into groups and increasingly live in places where others share their opinions, said Dan Wagner, founder and CEO and previously the chief analytics officer of former President Obama’s re-election campaign.

In politics, creative content and messaging are tested much more aggressively before any media is purchased, Wagner said, and it’s a strategy that could work for more brands as well. And on Thursday, Civis introduced Creative Focus, a pre-campaign tool to helps brands measure and plan creative, bookending the company’s post-campaign attribution product.

“Everybody is in this kind of tournament online to bid up a fixed amount of inventory,” Wagner said. “The next place you can have an effect is to move up the funnel and make those insights ahead of the campaign.”

McDonald’s is working with Civis to understand attitudinal shifts across different audience groups after people have seen the brand’s ads, said Emma Higgins, the brand’s media sciences manager. (It doesn’t hurt that McDonald’s chief communication officer, Robert Gibbs, was the PR chief for Obama and his re-election campaign.)

McDonald’s uses surveys to track people’s perceptions and conversion data, including first-party transactions and proxy metrics like location data or credit card partner data, to tie brand perception to business results. Higgins said McDonald’s is still evaluating which proxy metrics it prefers for modeling. But once it irons out the details, the results will be a stronger data-driven connection between macro, subjective brand perceptions – questions like “Is McDonald’s a brand like me?” – and the nitty-gritty of real-time media optimization and measurement.

How Dating App Company The Meet Group Gets Live-Streaming To Pay Off

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2019 at 10:05 am.

In less than two years, The Meet Group managed to diversify its revenue from a near total dependence on programmatic advertising to a healthy mix of ads, in-app purchases and subscriptions.

“I’d say 90% of our revenue was ad-driven before we started to shift,” said Geoff Cook, CEO of The Meet Group, which owns a portfolio of dating, chat and social networking apps, including Skout, Tagged and MeetMe with more than 4 million daily active users combined.

In late 2016, The Meet Group built a live-streaming video business modeled after Momo, a Chinese dating app which was able to make nearly $200 million per quarter within a year of introducing live video into its platform.

The Meet Group quickly rounded out its live video offering with one-on-one video chats and a feature, released in December 2018, that lets two people live stream timed competitions, like dance battles or rap duels. Viewers purchase virtual gifts in appreciation of the streamer’s talents, which generates revenue for the creator and the company.

In the 15 months since The Meet Group launched live-streaming video, annualized video revenue alone is more than $70 million.

AdExchanger chatted with Cook.

How Twitter Will Ensure Brand Safety For Video Advertisers In 2019

by Rae Paoletta // Posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2019 at 12:04 am.

As Twitter’s video ad business grows, so does the amount of user-generated content on its platform. The challenge for Twitter, and brands that advertise on it, is to keep brands safe from, well, the Internet.

In April 2018, 50% of Twitter’s business came from video advertising – and that still holds true today. In Q1 2018, the company made at least $287 million from video ads, according to Recode.

AdExchanger caught up with Sarah Personette, Twitter’s VP of global client solutions at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, to learn how the social media giant plans to grow its video ad business even more in 2019.

AdExchanger: What’s the current state of video advertising on Twitter?

SARAH PERSONETTE: The world has become mobile, and mobile has increasingly become video. We made a pretty significant investment in making our video products stronger, better and more performant. And with that, in-stream video sponsorships, in-stream video ads and website video cards are driving the bulk of our business.

Over 50% of our business is coming from video at this point. We believe that this will continue into 2019 as consumer behavior shifts there, but also as the demand from brand advertisers continues for using video to tell great creative stories. But [they] also want brand-safe, premium quality, scaled content that they can integrate their brands into, which is what our products offer.

New Agency Review At P&G; NYT Revenue Grew After It Killed Open Exchange Sales In Europe

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

A New Review

Procter & Gamble is running a round of internal bids in an effort to cut marketing costs and bring more services in house. Rather than launch a formal review, P&G has asked its incumbent agencies, Carat and Hearts & Science, to duke it out against its in-house trading desk for seven brand categories across its North American business. Execs with knowledge of the pitch tell Adweek that Carat won away some of Hearts & Science’s business with the CPG giant. As always, having P&G as your flagship account is a double-edged sword. “We are now providing brands a little more flexibility to decide if they do their own planning, digital buying or put their hands on the keyboard for search and programmatic,” says a company spokesperson. “This puts our brands closer to decisions to drive growth.” More.

Brand Cache

When The New York Times shut off its open exchange sales in Europe in the lead-up to GDPR, its digital ad revenue didn’t slip. In fact, digital ad sales increased significantly after the publisher introduced geographical and contextual targeting for GDPR last May. The Times briefly re-upped its inventory on the open exchange last year but then withdrew again, SVP of global advertising Jean-Christophe Demarta tells Digiday. “The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,” he says. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities.” More.

The Big Story: This Episode Brought To You By The Letters CES And PMP

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2019 at 4:52 pm.

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

On “The Big Story” this week, the team stirs some alphabet soup.

Rejuvenated after the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas to worship at the mighty altar of the Consumer Electronics Gods, the AdExchanger editors return to dish on developments within the giant cluster.

In a few words: It’s all iterative.

Certainly that’s not the most scintillating way to describe a show with all the puffery of CES, but as our own Alison Weissbrot points out, there’s a lot of hype around things that’ll take another five years to mature.

But there are still some developments worth noting – namely how the freshly-merged data and creative agencies are approaching CES.

Also on the show, we discuss how publishers are evolving the ways in which they PMP their inventory. On Monday, editor Sarah Sluis wrote a fantastic piece about how traditional private marketplaces are changing as more investment goes to the open exchange.

What a difference from a few years ago, when many ad industry watchers wondered if the open exchange was dying and we’d find ourselves in a world with nothing but PMPs.

Integrate Buys ListenLoop To Help B2B Marketers Link Programmatic To Demand Gen

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2019 at 9:00 am.

Most B2B marketers – more than 60%, according to Dun & Bradstreet – spend on programmatic advertising. But when trying to connect their programmatic investment to actual leads generated down in the funnel, they hit a wall.

To help them break through, Integrate, a mar tech and data orchestration platform for B2B marketers, is acquiring ListenLoop, a programmatic self-serve software platform centered on account-based marketing.

The acquisition, announced Wednesday, is Integrate’s first foray into M&A. Jeremy Bloom, Integrate’s CEO and founder, declined to share the deal price, but said ListenLoop’s 25 employees – composed mainly of engineers – are coming aboard, bringing Integrate’s total headcount to around 225.

B2B marketers spend their ad budgets on three primary categories: demand generation to drum up qualified leads for the sales team (aka, Download this white paper!); events (aka, Let me scan your badge!) and programmatic account-based marketing (aka, Check out my pre-roll ad!).

How PadSquad’s High-Impact Ads Survived In The Face Of Header Bidding

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2019 at 12:30 am.

Overcoming the banality of a standard banner ad in favor of a custom unit requires a lot of work.

Buyers need to work with creative tech companies to build the units, and publishers need to adjust their ad setup to support the unusual formats.

When header bidding became the norm, it cut off these companies’ access to supply.

PadSquad, which designs and places high-impact ads, traditionally nabbed a spot in the publisher’s waterfall, but had a tougher time winning impressions once header bidding became the norm.

Meanwhile, its publisher partners like CafeMedia missed out on PadSquad’s custom ads that provided more revenue than banner ads. While PadSquad could have developed a header biding adapter, or created a JavaScript tag, the publishers it worked with didn’t want to add more code to their pages, which would be cumbersome and slow down their sites.

Instead, PadSquad asked during the second quarter of last year if Rubicon Project could create a private marketplace to route high-impact ads through the exchange’s header bidding integration with CafeMedia.

The high-impact private marketplace is now up and running. In December, PadSquad octupled the amount of revenue it spent on CafeMedia via the private marketplace.

Our Shrinking Publisher Middle Class

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2019 at 12:04 am.

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

Today’s column is written by Matt Prohaska, principal and CEO at Prohaska Consulting.

“It’s a lot harder to make the same amount we made last year.”

“We used to make a comfortable living and now find it difficult just to get by.”

“It seems like the rules of the game are rigged against us.”

While these quotes sound like they could be coming from many families in America today, I heard them come from American digital publishers over the last year. And more than half the publishers my colleagues and I met with at CES last week are struggling to compete in today’s digital ad economy.

It seems there are some parallels to be drawn with challenges facing many publishers today. This column is not meant to delve into the socioeconomic struggles of millions of Americans or be a political thought piece worthy of a letter to the editor of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Economist. I am not qualified to write it.

But it does seem like there is an uphill struggle taking place with many that would find themselves in the middle, economically, or by rank of advertising revenue among US publishers.

Yes, Some Metrics Are ‘Fake,’ But Performance Marketers Don't Care

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2019 at 12:04 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 Eric Seufert, head of platform at N3TWORK and owner of Mobile Dev Memo.

Shortly after Christmas, Aram Zucker-Scharff, The Washington Post’s director of ad engineering, launched a viral jeremiad on Twitter against the ad tech industry in response to a New York Magazine article, excoriating ad platforms to agencies, measurement companies and even advertisers for propping up an ecosystem that, at its very core, he sees as “fake.”

To performance marketers, however, much of the indignation over misrepresented or misstated top-of-funnel metrics such as video views or Comscore audience estimates seems like a tempest in a teapot. Yes, some metrics are “fake” but, for the most part, performance marketers don’t care.

That’s because top-of-funnel metrics, such as video views, which Facebook admitted in 2016 to overstating, play a fairly trivial role in performance marketing. They are interesting to benchmark but mostly immaterial on their own.