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NBCUniversal Joins OpenAP Consortium, Licenses Its Audience Graph To Other TV Nets Facebook’s Fischer On Adjusting To Life In A Post-Cambridge Analytica World Will Martin Sorrell’s Successor Be A Media Mogul Or Financial Outsider? WPP CEO Martin Sorrell Steps Down Uber, Ubisoft And Bayer Fine-Tune Their Approach To In-Housing Ad Rate Impact And Possible Regulation: Facebook Addresses Data Privacy Fallout Zuckerberg Faces Congress: We’re Sorry, We’re Responsible For Content, We’re Not There Yet Zuck’s Pledge To Congress: Political Ad Transparency, An App Crackdown And Big Security Investments How Broadcasters Hope To Make Money From Live Online Newscasts

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Podcast: Kavata Mbondo Stays In The Picture

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2018 at 6:42 pm.

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

Kavata Mbondo presided over Time Inc.’s ad business during a period of dramatic upheaval for traditional media companies. When she started there, the iPhone didn’t exist, Facebook was a young scrapper and programmatic wasn’t quite a thing.

Mbondo recently left Time Inc. for a new venture: helping Getty Images launch a consumer-facing media business called FOTO. In this episode, she reflects on her years in digital media and describes the new publishing venture.

Getty Images is a B2B destination, but more than 95% of its visitors weren’t there to buy its assets. They were arriving primarily through searches for news, sports and celebrities.

“We have this large population of consumers who are showing up at a site that isn’t designed for them,” Mbondo says in this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “The goal of FOTO was to create a destination for those Getty Images visitors who come in to be entertained.”

The site launched with programmatic monetization and is now expanding into sponsorship sales linked to events. In the episode she goes deep on the ad model, distribution and data assets.

AT&T’s Stephenson Takes The Stand In DOJ Suit, Citing Need For Data-Driven Ad Business

by James Hercher // Posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2018 at 5:20 pm.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson testified on Thursday in defense of the company’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, which is being contested as an antitrust violation by the Justice Department.

Stephenson reiterated AT&T’s defense that without strong content to incorporate into its mobile, streaming and linear distribution, the telco is being left behind by online platforms like Google and Amazon.

“If you miss one technology cycle, it may not kill you, but it will make you sick for a very long time,” Stephenson said.

With improved data-driven targeting across AT&T’s TV and mobile networks, Stephenson said a stronger advertising business will allow AT&T to bring down the price of subscriptions, which is the potential consumer blowback the DOJ is targeting in this case.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who testified Wednesday, said online video players dealt his business a “double whammy” by pulling subscribers out of TV bundles and ad dollars into digital.

Stephenson, during his testimony, said the DOJ’s argument that AT&T would leverage Time Warner content by restricting it from competitors doesn’t make sense, since Time Warner’s value is tied to its wide distribution.

Publicis Sees Opportunity In Facebook SNAFUs And GDPR, Despite Unknowns

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2018 at 2:05 pm.

Despite consumer outrage aimed at Facebook, Publicis Groupe’s sentiment about the platform is status quo.

“The impact is not material on our business in the short or medium term,” said Steve King, CEO of Publicis Media, on the holding company’s Q1 2018 earnings call Thursday. “Facebook is a very important partner to us. They have incredible technology capabilities, fantastic engineering and great leadership.”

Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun agreed and posited that Facebook’s mishaps are a boon for agencies, which have an even more important role now in policing content and helping clients leverage their first-party data.

“Facebook is a great company and very important partner to us,” he said. “It’s legitimizing our role as agent by making sure our clients own their own data by building individual profiles, which we all know is the future.”

But Facebook’s trust issue with consumers could hurt advertisers in the long term, King acknowledged.

“There is a big challenge for Facebook to reestablish that trust post-Cambridge Analytica,” he said. “I suspect the next few months will determine whether that trust is reestablished.”

NBCUniversal Joins OpenAP Consortium, Licenses Its Audience Graph To Other TV Nets

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2018 at 6:00 am.

NBCUniversal has joined the TV consortium OpenAP.

Launched just over a year ago, OpenAP is a joint effort by broadcast networks Fox, Turner and Viacom to create a common data standard and provide a more accurate representation of advanced TV audiences across platforms.

Through a multiyear agreement, NBCU will license its data platform Audience Studio and audience graph to the consortium's founding members.

The data in Audience Studio isn’t just NBC’s data. Marketers can use it to match their own CRM records with NBC’s viewership data. They can also pull in third-party data.

Now, that capability will be available across Turner, Fox and Viacom.

As a result, marketers will now be able to target audiences more consistently across a larger inventory footprint – about 50% of the total TV landscape, to be exact.

“It’s a significant advancement in terms of the custom data segmentation advertisers can do,” said Krishan Bhatia, EVP of business operations and strategy for NBCUniversal.

Comcast, NBCUniversal’s parent company, will also avail non-personally identifiable set-top box data to any OpenAP member network that has an agreement in place with Comcast through a system called FreeWheel Shared Insights.

Redefining The User Experience In The Connected TV Era

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2018 at 12:05 am.

"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

Today’s column is written by Tal Chalozin, co-founder and chief technology officer at Innovid.

Fifty-six percent of the US population uses connected TV devices, and with this number growing rapidly, it has never been more important for the television industry to get the user experience right.

In our current Netflix world, we have seemingly endless content choices and ways to watch them. As Netflix continues to explode with more subscribers and content, more people are spending time consuming the content they love on their own terms.

What has been the secret to Netflix’s success? I’d argue that Netflix hasn’t reinvented television because the core element of watching television didn’t change. When you tune into a show, it’s exactly the same on Netflix as it appears on linear, whether it’s scripted television, a drama or a movie.

Netflix, however, has improved the user experience and the elements that surround the act of viewing. This includes discovery, access across devices, streaming, binge watching and more. Netflix brings user experience to prime time, helping to advance user expectations and puts pressure on the traditional television and advertising industries and other content providers to follow suit quickly.

Who Will Survive The Machine-Learning Revolution?

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2018 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 Rémi Lemonnier, co-founder at Scibids.

Machine learning (ML) is a very trendy term, raising huge expectations on one end and creating fantastic fears on the other.

Even if there is a lot of “ML-washing” among the ad tech industry, there is no doubt that it is and will continue reshaping the digital advertising ecosystem. A recent Juniper Research study predicted machine-learning algorithms would generate some $42 billion in annual ad spend by 2021, up from an estimated $3.5 billion in 2016.

Following the steps of quantitative finance, real-time bidding is transitioning from a manual data analysis domain to a purely mathematical one. I am not referring to single cost-per-click or cost-per-action optimization at the campaign level, but holistic solutions that will take into account multiple KPIs and media plan constraints for a given advertiser.

Ad Buyers Dig Twitter Video; More Facebook Vulnerabilities

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2018 at 12:03 am.

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

Time To Shine

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes took the stand today during the federal antitrust trial to defend his company’s $85 billion sale to AT&T. His rationale for the merger? Without powerful data and distribution across mobile and streaming media, Time Warner was boxed into linear television. Bewkes spoke about two changes in the industry that have left Time Warner behind: internet streaming and the emergence of targeted digital advertising. Bewkes said targeted advertising in particular is “really bad for TV companies,” according to Variety. As always, Facebook and Google prove the convenient boogie men. Read more.

We Got A Live One

Although Twitter’s video consumption pales compared to that of Facebook and YouTube, advertisers are hungry to be more involved with its live news and media programs. Those partnerships include ad packages and in-program sponsorships with streaming news like the financial network Cheddar, Bloomberg’s 24-hour TicToc news channel and the BuzzFeed “AM to DM” morning talk show. “AM to DM” and TicToc average between 500,000 and 1 million daily viewers, according to Digiday. “While it may not be on the same scale of other platforms, Twitter is traditionally a way to reach an audience that’s engaging a bit differently,” says Jessica Richards, North America managing director for the Havas social agency Socialyse. More. And check out AdExchanger on how publishers are monetizing live news online.

With Sorrell Out, How Can WPP Get Back To Growth?

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2018 at 4:18 pm.

No other holding company has had its CEO as ingrained as WPP.

Now WPP must keep its massive organization, with so many disparate agencies and pieces, together without Sorrell.

“He was important not only as the voice, look and feel of WPP, but he was very much involved in the day-to-day operations,” said Rebecca Lieb, analyst and founding partner at Kaleido Insights. “WPP is made of so many different brands and agencies with different agendas, personalities and leaders, it’s going to dissipate that glue at the top that holds them all together.”

While many employees within WPP have strong opinions and leadership qualities, Lieb said she doubts the new leader will have the “charisma, influence and power” Sorrell had.

“Martin was the personality of WPP in every sense of the word,” agreed David Jones, CEO of brand tech group You & Mr Jones and former global CEO of Havas. “He was an outspoken character in a fairly bland holding company. Now that he’s gone, you’re just left with the fairly bland holding company.”

Jones likened WPP’s future without Sorrell to a steering a ship through icy waters without its captain.

“The shareholders and clients are all still on board, you have two people holding the steering wheel who've never captained a ship before and there isn't enough time to avoid the iceberg anyway,” he said.

Why Rovio Is Testing Whether Virtual And Augmented Reality Ads Are For Real

by James Hercher // Posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2018 at 11:34 am.

Marketers use augmented reality and virtual reality primarily for entertainment industry stunts, but programmatic AR and VR advertising are showing early signs of life.

The Finnish mobile games developer Rovio, of “Angry Birds” fame, focuses on performance marketing to drive app downloads, but the company is running pilot campaigns with the AR/VR programmatic tech vendor Adverty to experiment with branding in new channels and mediums, CMO Ville Heijari told AdExchanger.

AR and VR inventory is too limited for scaled campaigns, Heijari said, and Rovio doesn’t produce AR or VR games yet, but the game developer is keen to bring it into the marketing mix as a first step “in learning about how users interact with ads in the environment and what we can expect from VR in the future.”

But scale isn’t the only hurdle to entering programmatic.

The IAB, for instance, doesn’t have standard units or measurement specific to AR and VR ads. So Adverty embeds two-dimensional IAB units in its supply, said company co-founder and CEO Niklas Bakos, sometimes bending the creative at an axis to place it on a cylinder.

“Another challenge, especially in programmatic, is that everything is built upon conversion rates and click-through rates,” Bakos said. AR and VR aren’t equipped to handle those metrics since game developers don’t allow features that send users to other content, as websites and other apps do.

Rovio’s AR and VR advertising, however, is different from its usual mobile campaigns, Heijari said, because it’s not about capturing a short window of potential interest or based on a call to action (like clicking to download or learn more).