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After A Bumpy Road, Ooyala Sells Video Player To Brightcove For $15 Million Meet The Ex-Googlers Who Built ThirdLove, The DTC Challenger To Victoria’s Secret Scott Hagedorn Named CEO Of Omnicom Media Group Highland Math Forms First Data Co-op Of Data Sellers Under S4, MightyHive Plots Expansion Beyond Its Google-Centric Roots Amid WPP’s Focus On Creative Transformation, Triad Launches A Consultancy LiveRamp Adds Connected TV IDs To IdentityLink Will Small Advertisers Stand By Facebook During A Downturn? The Booming Business For Amazon-Only Ad Partners

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After A Bumpy Road, Ooyala Sells Video Player To Brightcove For $15 Million

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Friday, February 15th, 2019 at 5:34 pm.

Video ad platform Ooyala is slowly being disassembled and sold piece by piece.

On Thursday, Ooyala revealed it had sold its online video player to Brightcove for $15 million. The deal is expected to close in mid-2019.

Brightcove, founded in 2004, provides a similar cloud-based video distribution solution as Ooyala. Its clients include Acorn TV, Lowe's, Dunkin’ and Wendy’s.

Like many ad tech companies, Ooyala was once flying high. Founded in 2007 by ex-Google executives, Ooyala raised a total of $123 million before being acquired by Australian telco Telstra in 2014. Telstra bought the company in two installments for a total of $500 million.

But things quickly went south.

In September 2018, Ooyala sold its ad tech business to Invidi, the addressable TV platform owned by AT&T, WPP and Dish. By October, Telstra had taken a $500 million write-down on the deal and sold the rest of Ooyala back to its founders, publicly admitting the acquisition had failed and exiting the ad tech business.

Ooyala continues to operate its media logistics business, Ooyala Flex, independently.

“With this transaction we’re ushering in an exciting new chapter for our company, as we continue to focus and expand on Ooyala’s flourishing workflow and media asset-management solutions,” said Ooyala CEO Jonathan Huberman in an email.

Meet The Ex-Googlers Who Built ThirdLove, The DTC Challenger To Victoria’s Secret

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Friday, February 15th, 2019 at 7:39 am.

Six-year-old women’s underwear brand ThirdLove considers data critical to its whole business, not just its marketing plan.

The direct-to-consumer company was founded by husband-and-wife team Heidi Zak and David Spector, who both hail from Google’s advertising business.

“The biggest thing I learned [at Google] was about testing and optimization,” Zak said. “Even if something didn’t work years ago, we’ll test again. Your environment is always changing, the company is changing and platforms are changing.”

ThirdLove’s data-driven approach includes both structured data about what lingerie sizes they buy and unstructured feedback and suggestions.

“Fit algorithms” make sure the DTC bra company’s products match a customer’s unique measurements when they show up on her doorstep. Customer feedback informs product and marketing decisions, such as the range of sizes ThirdLove stocks and what models appears in ads (which it buys programmatically in house).

Both product decisions and ad creative skew inclusive. ThirdLove stocks twice as many sizes as Victoria’s Secret, and its models are more in the vein of Dove “Real Beauty” than Victoria’s Secret Angels.

ThirdLove dynamically updates its ad creative and website product listings to make sure when a customer shops, she sees her body type represented in ads and product listings. If a customer clicks on an ad featuring an older model, for example, she might see more older women modeling products when she browses the site.

Agencies And Buyers Need Robust Audience Verification Tools, But Innovation Lags

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, February 15th, 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 Sarah Rose, vice president of digital ad operations at IPG Mediabrands.

The digital media ecosystem is inherently a marketplace of pixel exchange, where data is captured for audience collection and user-level events, such as clicks, engagements and conversions.

Yet the ecosystem can’t verify that these audiences have been reached or uniformly quantify their quality across mediums. Where most third-party verification vendors provide MRC-accreditation for viewability, brand safety and fraud, audience verification has lagged, largely left behind in bespoke product launches in 2018.

Innovation in audience verification will need to be aligned and subjected to EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and other regulatory bodies. With first-party data dispersed across CRMs, data management platforms (DMPs) and demand-side platforms, it is difficult to build products that can manage this level of tagging, server-side alignments, opt-in / opt-out mechanisms and reach verification. Our industry needs qualifying ad verification partners to do so.

What are ad verification vendors doing now? There are some differentiations among the industry’s core vendors.

Privacy Initiatives Make Publishers’ First-Party Data More Valuable Than Ever

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, February 15th, 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 Radmir Nasyrov, CEO at Roxot.

I believe Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), ITP 2.0, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and similar privacy initiatives will change programmatic advertising as we know it today.

In a cookie-less environment, advertisers can’t personalize ads to specific users. Therefore, the value offered by programmatic advertising compared to other advertising channels will be lost.

With the tremendous reallocation of marketing budgets, publishers will suffer the most. Index Exchange’s Andrew Casale delivered a keynote speech last May where he said ad requests without a buyer ID, or a unique key used for matching users, receive 99% lower bids than the same ad request with the identifier. That points to significant loss in programmatic revenue if all ad requests lack cookie or user ID.

More recently, Google’s Sean Downey commented at Industry Preview that he’s seen statistics indicating that publishers’ CPMs may be cut in half due to ITP.

Comic: Great Expectations

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, February 15th, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

Disney Owns Ad Tech Now; Amazon Tries Loyalty Fulfillment

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, February 15th, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

Disney’s Castle … And Walled Garden

Disney has often been discussed as a potential buyer of ad tech, but hasn’t shown much interest in the category. It bought a majority stake in the streaming video technology BAMTech in 2017, and ended up taking a $469 million write down on the deal. But now Disney is bringing on an ad tech property, TrueX, with the acquisition of 21st Century Fox. The big question for TrueX customers is whether Disney will internalize the tech, using it exclusively across Disney properties, or will retain it as a standalone ad tech business, Ad Age reports. Others major media owners face the same question, such as Comcast–Freewheel and AT&T–AppNexus. “Buyers want cross-marketplace solutions that allow us to implement in a consistent way," says Adam Gerber, president of global media at GroupM’s Essence. "The more walled gardens that go up, the more separation that's created, the more challenging it is for us to innovate. For us to innovate at scale we'd need to do a bunch of one-off [tests]. That's not efficient.” More.

Seize The Moment

Amazon came out of beta with Amazon Moments, a subscription and loyalty program fulfillment solution. “Some marketers, especially in the loyalty space, created rewards programs that are points-based, and then had to figure out how to source physical products as rewards, how to get them to the customer, ship them, and so on,” Amazon’s head of digital marketing, Amir Kabbara, tells MediaPost. With Amazon Moments, a company can set requirements and their customer acquisition price, and Amazon will offer specific rewards or items that meet the price and then fulfill the delivery. It’s a way for brands and media companies to take advantage of their own research, he says. For instance, if a network knows people who watch the first seven episodes of a show tend to finish the season, it can nudge viewers by offering a reward after seven episodes. More.

Scott Hagedorn Named CEO Of Omnicom Media Group

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2019 at 4:34 pm.

At agencies, data-driven talent is rising to the very top.

Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn was named CEO of Omnicom Media Group (OMG) Thursday after 15 years with the company. Hagedorn succeeds Page Thompson, who will retire after 40 years at Omnicom.

Omnicom has not yet named a replacement for Hagedorn at Hearts & Science.

Over the course of his career, Hagedorn has worked across OMG at OMD, PHD and RAPP, which is now part of Omnicom Precision Marketing Group. As head of Omnicom’s data science platform Annalect, Hagedorn helped pioneer programmatic media buying across OMG.

In his new role, Hagedorn will build platforms and products that lead to client growth and recruit the right talent. OMG has already deployed Omni, an identity-based data platform that pulls media planning, buying and creative processes into one system, across all its media buying subsidiaries.

Next, Hagedorn aims to provide verticalized data packages to clients. For example, a CPG client may want to use Omni based on IRI or Nielsen Catalina data, while an auto client might want to focus on Polk data.

“I’m going to pull the vertical teams out of each agency and chat about which data sets can have the most effectiveness for a client through Omni,” Hagedorn said. “We’re modeling data and using that to write the marketing rules for how the business should behave.”

The Big Story: Is IAB DTC?

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2019 at 12:43 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.

The IAB’s Annual Leadership summit wrapped this week and increasingly, the show has moved to focus on DTC companies like ThirdLove, the startup underwear brand that keynoted this year’s conference.

That’s quite a shift from the past two years, which saw P&G’s Marc Pritchard and Unilever’s Keith Weed take the big stage. And it’s an even bigger shift from the IAB’s inception, when it was a publisher focused trade org.

Our editor Sarah Sluis made the long trek there and back. On this week’s episode of “The Big Story,” she describes what happened at the show, why the IAB might be making the wholesale shift to DTC and how DTC principles are effecting even the biggest companies.

Also, we talk about a potential economic downturn, and what that might mean for the advertising industry. It’s a little bit of a thought experiment, since it’s not clear if a recession is in the cards – it seems like someone keeps unnecessarily shuffling the deck – but if one does hit, the environment today looks a lot different than it did in 2008.

And finally, we talk podcast consolidation. With EW Scripps, iHeartMedia, Pandora and Spotify all making big plays to enter the podcasting industry, does that change the game for programmatic advertising?

Honestly, not so much. Following up on Alison Weissbrot’s incisive reporting on the topic, the team looks at what exactly is inhibiting more advanced advertising in podcasting. Hint: It starts with UX and ends with A-P-P-L-E.

Hearst Appoints Mike Smith As Chief Data Officer

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2019 at 11:05 am.

Hearst Magazines named Mike Smith as its first chief data officer Thursday.

When Smith joined Hearst in 2013, he introduced programmatic to its sites and oversaw programmatic buying.

As chief data officer, Smith will oversee data use in programmatic campaigns, branded content, direct sold campaigns, sales operations and editorial.

“When Troy [Young] became president of the magazine media company last summer, it was important to the leadership team to accelerate the cross-pollination of skills across the organization,” Smith said. He will continue to report to Young.

Making Hearst’s sales and business operations more data-driven, for example, means applying data much differently than Hearst would for a standard programmatic campaign.

Using machine learning, Hearst is analyzing its Salesforce data to learn how it can better allocate resources to serving its advertiser clients. When the publisher wins or loses an RFP, it collects feedback to locate patterns – with quick findings that can be distributed to managers and team members on Slack.

For programmatic, Hearst is thinking about the evolution of audience buying. Platforms like Facebook, Amazon and Google allow marketers to upload customer data and target, but don’t allow marketers to analyze how their audience behaves on those platforms.

Intuit Plugs Into CTV, But Linear Television’s Still Got Game

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2019 at 6:00 am.

Connected TV: Intuit is getting into it. But the financial software company is not giving up on television’s biggest tentpoles.

“We’re doing the blocking and tackling of strong reach and awareness building, but we’re mixing it with more experiential and digital,” said Lauren Stafford Webb, Intuit’s VP of brand marketing.

A balance between traditional and digital is “critical to reach our target where they are – and in a place where we can get attentive eyeballs,” she said, noting that CTV is a way to “complement what is happening live.”

That’s why Intuit is testing targeting segments for addressable TV with help from its media agency, Dentsu-owned Carat, using Merkle’s M1 people-based marketing platform.

But the goal is to reach a broad audience of financially active and aware 18 to 54-year-olds who are “technology inclined” and involved in managing their daily finances. And, in some cases, the most effective way to get that sort of broad reach is to hit people when they’re sitting on a sofa in a living room.