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VPAID May Improve Video Measurement, But Gaps Remain In Mobile And OTT How M&A Impacts The Remaining DSPs 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

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VPAID May Improve Video Measurement, But Gaps Remain In Mobile And OTT

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Monday, August 21st, 2017 at 4:09 pm.

Although the Video Player Ad-Serving Interface (VPAID) was meant to create better measurement in online video, it’s not that compatible with mobile video or OTT.

“Everyone wants to measure [viewability] and they’re giving us VPAID tags, but VPAID doesn’t work in all environments,” said Soo Jin Oh, VP of client strategy for Cox Media Group’s ad tech group Gamut.

And even if VPAID is better for viewability, third-party measurement providers can’t always prove it. Most still support Flash, not HTML5 or JavaScript.

“The verification vendor needs to be within a mobile SDK to measure viewability (using VPAID) – and if they're not, they can't tell us much,” said Nick Frizzell, senior director of brand safety and inventory operations for the video ad server and SSP SpotX.

Also, while some verification providers hook into connected TV and OTT on a custom basis, gauging viewability there involves more guesswork.

“It's assumed to be viewable, just like cable and broadcast environments,” Frizzell said.

Tickld Makes Content Promotion A Science With Better Analytics

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Monday, August 21st, 2017 at 11:48 am.

Publishers paying to promote content on social platforms need to determine the return on their ad spend, just like marketers.

The sites Tickld, Clipd and Knowable, part of the “Pulse” division at publishing company Gateway Blend, rely on social platforms to distribute content. Gateway Blend used to optimize the ad campaigns for Pulse content with day-old revenue data and proxy metrics like page views.

The day-old revenue numbers predicted what articles made money with 90% accuracy, but the margin of error forced the company to be conservative about how much to spend on an article to achieve a positive ROI.

The lack of real-time data also meant it was slow to react to change. Some articles started out earning more money post-click than the publisher spent, but fizzled out. Other articles took off, but the social amplification team couldn’t quickly ramp up spend since it relied on day-old data.

So Gateway Blend joined Sortable’s private beta test 18 months ago for an analytics product designed to eliminate constant report pulling and, in the words of Sortable CRO Ryan Fuss, “bring content, marketing and revenue into one consolidated place.” Sortable Analytics became generally available earlier this month.

How M&A Impacts The Remaining DSPs

by James Hercher // Posted on Monday, August 21st, 2017 at 6:45 am.

For the independent demand-side platform (DSP) market, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times.

On the one hand, it’s unlikely any new scaled DSPs will enter the market. The costs to build a competitive platform – nine digits off the bat and another eight digits per year in operational costs – combined with supply-side trends like header bidding that disadvantage smaller companies leave incumbents unassailable by startups.

On the other hand, scaled, independent DSPs face mounting cost hurdles of their own and many are losing market share, or have been sold to non-independent media owners.

“It’s a challenging business model for new stand-alone DSP entrants to be just considering getting into,” said Julian Baring, Adform’s general manager for North America. A DSP often fronts the costs on inventory until the agency is reimbursed by the brand, “which requires a meaningful float and then only a percentage of that float is realized as revenue.”

The cost of maintaining platform upkeep alone can be prohibitive without sufficient scale, Baring said.

Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) is the runaway leader in the category and Amazon has surged into a comfortable second place on the back of its must-have status for many brands. Trailing those tech giants are seven or eight closely packed DSPs, said Kevin Mannion, CSO of the advertising market research firm Advertiser Perceptions.

Mannion compared the independent DSP market to a horse race, where a large field entered and a handful are now approaching a finish line where three or four will end up “in the money.”

TV Advertising Is Challenging, But Measurement Offers A Lifeline

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, August 21st, 2017 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 Laura Joukovski, senior vice president of media and analytics at TechStyle Fashion Group.

Many claim TV advertising is dead, or at least dying. As digital alternatives emerge for advertisers and content consumption patterns shift from TV toward digital and on-demand services, advertisers may be reluctant to enter TV advertising or question the efficacy of TV investments.

But TV can be a very healthy and meaningful part of the media mix for modern advertisers. That includes marketers who are relentlessly and unapologetically in search of direct-response signals and ROI. The key is to embrace the test-and-learn strategies that are so widely implemented in digital advertising.

When Measurement Strategy Aligns With Business Results

Whether marketers want to drive website traffic, app installs or ecommerce transactions, they should try to surface connections between TV spot airings and outcomes.

From a bottom-up perspective, many third parties and most TV agencies today can provide analysis of the lift from the normal curve of non-TV traffic that can be attributed to specific TV spots. Separately, but simultaneously, marketers can test different levels of TV advertising spend and use top-down modeling to determine how much the TV media channel as a whole contributes to the outcomes that matter most.

Audiences Flock To Social Video; MEC Poaches Amanda Richman

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, August 21st, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

Cord And Discord

Millennials may abandon old-school TV, but there’s a healthy appetite for social video beyond 90-second clips and recipe run-throughs. In its first month, NBC’s “Stay Tuned,” a twice-daily news program on Snapchat, has been seen by 29 million people and passed 1 million subscribers, a source tells Axios. Meanwhile BuzzFeed has laid claim to a broadcast-sized tune-in audience. "Early on, we were building a business around 'non-intentional' videos, or videos that people were not necessarily seeking out," BuzzFeed’s Matthew Henick tells Mike Shields at Business Insider. "But all of a sudden, over the past six to nine months … people are setting aside time for shows and coming back."

Poached

Starcom investment head and 12-year Publicis vet Amanda Richman is heading to MEC as US chief executive. Richman will oversee the US merger of MEC and Maxus, the two media-buying agencies consolidated by parent GroupM in June. At the new entity, Richman will be tasked with meshing two distinct agency cultures while smoothing the transition for clients. “Creating a culture and a united culture has got to be our first focus,” she said, but a close second priority is “to define what your brand is, what you stand for and how you differentiate yourself in this very cluttered marketplace.” She’ll report to MEC global CEO Tim Castree. More at WSJ.

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...