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GroupM Sets Its Own Viewability Standards For Social In-Feed Ads Five Early-Stage Ad Tech Startups That Aren’t Focused On Ad Tech The Road To Rocket Fuel’s Sale Can Programmatic Be SoundCloud’s Next Big Revenue Driver? Snap Misses Revenue Expectations And Struggles To Grow Its User Base More Ad Net Consolidation As Genesis Media Merges With Altitude Digital The Crawl, Walk, Run Guide To Audience Suppression At AppNexus, Buy Side Falls By The Wayside Tremor Video Sells Its Demand-Side Business To Taptica For $50M

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DataXu Brings On 4As Vet To Strengthen Self-Serve Agency Relationships

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Friday, August 18th, 2017 at 4:08 pm.

Demand-side platform (DSP) DataXu hired former 4As exec Peter Kosmala as its VP of platform solutions, the company said Friday.

With Kosmala, who started in late July and will report to chief revenue officer Ed Montes, DataXu hopes to grow its self-serve business with agencies.

“This is about forging even stronger relationships with a channel that’s always been very important to DataXu,” Kosmala said. “A large percentage of our self-serve customers base are agencies.”

Kosmala will oversee a team that provides self-serve customers with technical support services. He hopes to make DataXu more visible in the agency market, particularly among independent agencies, some of which are still getting up to speed on programmatic.

“Some of these agencies are entering programmatic for the first time,” Kosmala said. “We’ve built a good presence, but it needs to be extended and those relationships [need to be] lengthened.”

Kosmala is well connected given that the 4As, where he was SVP of government relationships, is made up mostly of small to mid-size shops.

“That’s where a lot of growth and innovation is,” he said. “It’s a community I’m very familiar with.”

Podcast: Programmatic For The B2B Marketer

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Friday, August 18th, 2017 at 3:42 pm.

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here.

"B2B always kind of follows B2C, whether it's the use of video, social media or commerce," Dun & Bradstreet CEO Bob Carrigan says in the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. "And programmatic is moving aggressively now into the B2B space."

The problem: It's hard for B2B marketers to do programmatic at scale, owing to the more granular data sets involved.

Dun & Bradstreet is helping easing that pain by making its enormous business dataset available across ad buying platforms and data marketplaces. Looking for a mid-sized department store in-market for an inventory management system? D&B has you covered.

CNN And Volvo Hope Their Upcoming VR Ad Campaign Eclipses Conventional Advertising

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Friday, August 18th, 2017 at 6:00 am.

It’s still unclear how 360-degree video or virtual reality will affect media and advertising long-term since many brands and networks are still in the experimental stage.

But CNN and Volvo hope to up the ante during next Monday’s solar eclipse.

The news broadcaster and automaker collaborated on four pieces of branded content that will live-stream Aug. 21 on CNN.com, CNN’s mobile apps, the Oculus headset and CNN’s Facebook Live 360 channel.

Each stream will feature a different influencer – Explorers Club President Richard Wiese, “The Martian” author Andy Weir, Egyptologist Kara Cooney and former astronaut Cady Coleman – trekking to an eclipse viewing location.

That 360-degree content will also feature interactive commercial breaks shot in 360-degree video and 4K VR, showcasing Volvo’s luxury XC60 SUV – which conveniently comes with a 360-degree camera.

“We shopped this idea around to different [networks] and some had the technology, but [lacked] the scale or the newsworthiness,” said John Militello, director of marketing innovation and strategy for Volvo. “We had partnered with CNN before on media, and knew we didn’t just want to create an ad. We wanted to add value.”

2>3: Why Second-Party Data Is More Valuable Than Third-Party But Activated Less Today

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, August 18th, 2017 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 Ameet Shah, senior director of global technology, publisher and data strategy at Prohaska Consulting.

Marketers and publishers want access to more quality data to scale beyond their respective first-party data, yet they often overlook second-party data.

Sure, using third-party data is always an option, but it is often of an unknown quality and a commodity where the decent segments and individuals get overbought and overused. Second-party data is far more valuable but traditionally has been harder to activate and manage.

Data-centric ad tech solutions have not traditionally focused on second-party data, so the management of second-party data connections has been challenging. It can be difficult to find partners, assess data attributes, physically make the data connections and then figure out the financials. Those are certainly sizeable barriers that require deliberate efforts to overcome. For most, the trade-off has not been worthwhile, so far.

Comic: Media Totality

by Nate Neal // Posted on Friday, August 18th, 2017 at 12:04 am.

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

The Persistence Of Last Click; SoftBank's Spray-And-Pray Tech Investments

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, August 18th, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

The Right Touch

Why do marketers still rely on last-click attribution to measure purchases? Well, because multitouch attribution is hard. Buyers have trouble bringing together the data they get from multiple demand-side platforms, which often have duplicative insights. And walled gardens leave huge gaps in the customer journey, making it difficult to see the full picture of what might have driven a consumer to buy something. While MTA is getting more advanced, the lack of data is causing marketers to fall back on last-touch, even if they know it’s not the best proxy. “Everybody likes to throw stones at [last-touch], but very few are willing to make a change,” said Travis Lusk, VP of analytics at Integral Ad Science. More at Digiday.

Bank On It

SoftBank is reshaping global technology through its “spray and pray” approach to investing in media and technology, reports The Information (subscription paywall). The holding company announced a new $93 billion fund in May, and it’s already plowed billions into a vast range of technology, including AI, biotech, virtual reality, computer chips, robotics and satellites. “They will make mistakes and overpay, but that’s not the point,” says Benson Tam, an Asian investor and equity analyst. “[SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son] sees the whole thing as a battle zone. If he has to sacrifice some pawns, so be it. Some deals will be pawns.” China has been the source of inflated investments for many ad tech firms [AdExchanger coverage], but the Japanese SoftBank may be doing more than any source to juice the costs of global technology, whether it works or not.

GroupM Sets Its Own Viewability Standards For Social In-Feed Ads

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2017 at 1:57 pm.

WPP’s media-buying unit GroupM on Thursday unveiled its own global viewability standard for display and video ads on social media feeds.

Display ads must be 100% in view for one second before a user scrolls past to count as viewable. Video ads still have to be 100% in view, but can be initiated as autoplay with the sound off. That differs from GroupM’s non-in-feed viewability standard, which requires a video to be user-initiated and played with the sound.

GroupM updated its standards after noticing the different behaviors users exhibit when scrolling through in-feed environments.

“People are consuming social video on autoplay with the sound off,” said John Montgomery, EVP of brand safety at GroupM. “Social video looks nothing like TV used to, so we have to understand this as a completely new medium.”

So far, clients including Unilever, Campbell Soup Co., Church & Dwight, Shell, Subway and Volvo support the new standard, as do content hubs like Hulu and Spotify and the video ad marketplace Teads.

GroupM is working with its four preferred measurement partners – Moat, Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify and comScore – to measure in-feed viewability. But video specifically poses a challenge.

Facebook Lets Advertisers Unbundle Their In-Stream Video Buys

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2017 at 11:00 am.

Facebook is giving advertisers a bit more control over how they buy in-stream video ads within the news feed, through Audience Network and on Watch, its newly launched video tab.

In the past, advertisers that wanted to purchase in-stream placements delivered into ad breaks were required to run them in the news feed.

Starting Thursday, Facebook will decouple the buy, enabling advertisers to run ads only through Audience Network. They can also choose to bundle inventory or only buy in-stream video in news feed.

It’s something advertisers have been asking for, said Kate Orseth, a product marketing manager at Facebook.

Now that video supply is starting to catch up with demand – and Facebook is doubling down on its video investment – Facebook is in a position to nix the bundling requirement.

It’s common practice for Facebook to bundle inventory buys while waiting for demand to scale. For example, advertisers and agencies can now only buy Messenger ads, which rolled out in July, as part of a package deal with news feed inventory, not as a separate placement.

“Advertisers want the flexibility and control to buy ads in a way that makes sense for whatever their campaign goals and objectives are,” Orseth said.

But there’s another motivation behind the move: user behavior.

Grindr Is Using Its Massive User Base To Launch A Publication For LBGTQ Millennials

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2017 at 9:32 am.

The LGBTQ dating app Grindr’s 3 million daily users spend almost an hour per day on the platform, according to the company. But some advertisers steer clear of dating traffic due to concerns of brand safety. And Grindr’s audience includes subscribers who pay for ad-free experiences.

So Grindr branched out by creating lifestyle publication Into, targeted at millennials who want to see coverage about queer culture. Initial advertisers include the TV show "American Horror Story: Cult," Halo Top ice cream and the HIV antiviral medication Truvada.

“We hear from brands that know their audience is on Grindr, but simply don’t advertise within any sort of dating environment,” said Michele Tobin, the company’s VP of brand partnerships and advertising. “This is very much a brand-safe destination, and offers opportunities for a broader swath of advertisers to reach the LGBTQ audience.”

The company had plans to launch Into even before game developer Kunlun Tech paid $152 million for a 100% stake in the company in May. (It spent $88 million the year before to acquire a majority stake in the app.)

The publication entered beta in March before its official launch this week. Since March, Grindr has tested a number of ways to grow its audience through the app. While users saw display ads and sponsored inbox messages alerting them to the magazine, Grindr wanted to showcase articles relevant for its users all around the world?

Grindr decided to take a “global approach with localized context,” said marketing VP Peter Sloterdyk.

RetailMeNot Shifts Its Linear TV Spend To Digital Video

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2017 at 6:00 am.

After years of investing in brand-building tactics on TV, RetailMeNot, which was acquired for $630 million by payment processor Harland Clarke and went private in April, is moving its working media budget into digital video.

That’s not to say RetailMeNot is entirely abandoning TV, since the broadcast medium drives brand lift during periods when there are more companies competing for share of voice. (For instance, it might make sense to reinvest in an integrated approach including digital, TV and radio, as RetailMeNot did during last holiday season.)

But for now, the shopping deal aggregator is doubling down on digital as it seeks to reach two key demographics in the build-up to back-to-school shopping. First are millennial moms who use their phones to search, and the second are slightly older moms or “household enthusiasts” who use Facebook.

“We’ve put all our eggs in one basket with a heavy focus on digital video in particular,” said Marissa Tarleton, the CMO of RetailMeNot.

RetailMeNot is dedicating about 96% of its working media budget to digital and mobile activations, with the remaining 4% going to channels such as email, according to Tarleton.