AdExchanger | News and Views on Data-Driven Digital Advertising and Marketing

Must Read

Tracing The Timeline Of Sizmek, Ad Tech Rollup And Duopoly Alternative Buyers Run Into Roadblocks In OTT Trackability Performance Agencies Take On Big Brands As Measurement Moves Up The Funnel Sizmek Buys Rocket Fuel For $145M Facebook Shares More Audience Data Via Carefully Controlled 'Clean Rooms' Android And iOS Updates Pump The Brakes On Location Data Rubicon Project Acquires NToggle For $38.5M To Clean Up Bidstream Traffic The Hearts & Science Way: CEO Scott Hagedorn Details 5 Agency Tenets The Mobile App Space Needs Standards, But Post-View And Post-Click Attribution Are Major Speed Bumps

Latest

Internet Brands Paid $2.8B For WebMD; The MRC Could Tighten The Display Viewability Standard

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, July 25th, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

The WebMD Is In

Your heart will palpitate after seeing the price KKR-owned Internet Brands paid for WebMD: $2.8 billion in cash. “Internet Brands aggregates traffic across a range of sites, which it in turn monetizes by way of an advertising network [and it] provides a large number of services to help health businesses find more customers…” writes Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch. And according to The New York Times, 75 million hypochondriacs – er, monthly unique users – visit WebMD, which nets about $700 million in ad revenue. It’s a nice exit for the site, which survived the dotcom boom and bust of the 90s. More.

Flexing

The MRC could toughen its display viewability standard – 50% of pixels in view for at least one second – to match the baselines set by industry heavyweights like GroupM and Unilever that require 100% of pixels to be in view. MRC Senior VP David Gunzerath is noncommittal about changing the viewability stance but told Ad Age’s Jack Neff it will consider viewability for a project on cross-media measurement later this year. “We're constantly reviewing the measurement standards we've written to assess their continued relevance and effectiveness," he said. If the MRC were to use a 100% in-view viewability standard, it would close the gap between definitions of a view floating around the industry. More.

Alphabet Running At Full Steam Despite Heavy EU Fine

by James Hercher // Posted on Monday, July 24th, 2017 at 5:23 pm.

Alphabet continued its hot growth streak in the second quarter of 2017 with more than $26 billion in total revenue, up from $21.5 billion during the same period last year.

The ad giant saw its operating income decrease from about $6 billion in Q2 2016 to $4.1 billion a year later due to a $2.7 billion fine from the European Union that accrued in the previous quarter.

It’s a heavy enough fine for even Alphabet to feel, but hardly dampens Google’s roaring engine. The company’s search, ad network and YouTube ad revenues were up $2.5 billion from the previous year, and headcount grew almost 15% to more than 75,000 employees.

Of the 9,000 new employees, the “vast majority” fill engineering and product roles, with a heavy focus on services for the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), according to CEO Sundar Pichai.

In Q2, the company tripled the number of GCP customer deals worth more than $500,000 compared to last year, a sign of the business’s enterprise growth and focus.

A Call For Brands: Time To Get into The Weeds On Media

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, July 24th, 2017 at 11:13 am.

"Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer's point of view.

Today's column is written by Belinda J. Smith, global director of media activation at Electronic Arts. Belinda will present "EA's Programmatic Arts" at AdExchanger's upcoming PROGRAMMATIC I/O New York conference on October 25-26.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to brands that are considering “going in-house.”

Some want to know what the best first step is. Others want to understand how deeply they need to invest in time, money and organizational change. And some want advice on the best “programmatic consultancies” that can come in and set up shop for them.

To each question my answer is the same: Irrespective of the setup, if you don’t build deep digital media-buying expertise into the core of your business, you are about to waste a lot of time, energy and money.

Many brands rely on a champion/consultant/agency/media geek to “figure it out” while everyone else’s day-to-day is largely unchanged. This can be caustic because digital media buying touches every part of the organization and has widespread implications for how your business operates.

Let me pose a few questions to demonstrate the far-reaching impact of how you buy media:

Should your buying be consolidated onto one demand-side platform or do you need multiple? What percentage of your buying should be direct or guaranteed vs. using real-time bidding? How does that change from country to country?

Apple On Where App Install Discrepancies Come From And What It’s Doing To Fix The Problem

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Monday, July 24th, 2017 at 10:47 am.

Apple sits on a trove of first-party customer data through its App Store, everything from credit card information to time-stamped app downloads tied to specific device IDs.

Yet there are inconsistencies between the install counts and engagement metrics developers see in Apple’s UI and what they’re told by their third-party measurement partners – and that’s “not acceptable,” said Todd Teresi, VP of advertising platforms, speaking at Tune’s Postback on Friday in Seattle.

“We can’t have an industry and a marketplace that doesn’t understand what’s going on,” said Teresi, who leads the teams focused on Apple News advertising and App Store search ads. Teresi previously spent four years as VP of Apple’s ill-fated mobile ad platform, iAd, the programmatic portion of which was shuttered in early 2016.

Apple is notoriously discreet and discerning about privacy, data collection and sharing user information.

But Teresi acknowledged that Apple can stick to its privacy guns while still giving developers better information to help them make smarter, more data-driven business decisions.

“We want to be transparent,” he said. “But we’re going to honor privacy requests.”

With transparency in mind, Teresi and his team decided to figure out why developers were seeing discrepancies in their install numbers, and found three culprits: Limit Ad Tracking (LAT), app open latency and re-downloaded apps.

Mattress Startup Purple Wakes Up, Uses Creative To Drive Better Prices

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Monday, July 24th, 2017 at 8:00 am.

The mattress space went from sleepy to startup hot in just years.

Utah-based Purple is one of those bed-in-a-box startups trying to gain a foothold in a space that’s becoming crowded with new entrants, including Casper, Leesa, Tuft and Needle and Saatva.

Purple is getting the word out with a social video-heavy strategy that focuses on constant testing and creative iterations. A YouTube video where Goldilocks drops raw eggs on a Purple mattress (spoiler alert: the eggs remain intact), for example, has amassed 53 million views.

The company pays particular attention to Facebook and YouTube’s algorithms. If it creates quality ad creative, the cost of distributing ads goes down and performance goes up.

The mattress startup booked $75 million in revenue in 2016, the year it launched. Its run rate is multiples of that figure. But while Purple started via Kickstarter, its venture-backed competitors have raised hundreds of millions in funding, giving them access to vaster marketing budgets.

Purple’s marketing must run leaner than the competition.

Purple does most of its marketing in-house, and the creative and media teams interact with each other frequently. In contrast, many large agencies keep creative and media departments in silos. The company also is not afraid to spend on creative production, because it knows that quality ads drive results and lower media costs.

Outstream Ads Can Solve The Premium Video Ad Unit Shortage

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, July 24th, 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 Dario Diament, vice president of product and strategy at Headway.

Video advertising has become the marketer’s top choice for reaching and engaging consumers, with pre-roll ad units being the most favored format. But as anyone who has tried to launch a pre-roll ad campaign at scale knows all too well, the pool of available pre-roll inventory can’t keep up with advertiser demand.

To be sure, publishers are keen to meet the demands of advertisers and have responded by creating as much pre-roll inventory as they possibly can. But despite their heroic measures, publishers have needed to embark on new sources to create ample supplies, such as inserting video units into traditional banners.

But are in-banner video ads the right solution? True, they offer high viewability rates and respectable play times, but they come with certain challenges.

To begin, a video ad that plays automatically in a 300x250 banner will be viewable if it appears above the fold, but it isn’t guaranteed to get a consumer’s attention. The longer playtimes could be due to the time it takes for the user to find the X that stops it. In worst-case scenarios, in-banner videos, particularly those with autoplay, may annoy the consumer, consequentially leading to a poor brand experience for both the advertiser and publisher.

A Cybercriminal Goes On Trial; Amazon's Pricing Model Is Scrutinized

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, July 24th, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

The Long Arm

A federal trial beginning Monday in Brooklyn will be the first case in the United States brought against an alleged click-fraud operator. Prosecutors hope to prove Fabio Gasperini, an Italian extradited from Amsterdam last year, managed a number of websites that, despite having content, actually existed to collect bot traffic from infected computers and devices. These bots gathered cookies around the web and either accumulated ad views or became sourced traffic through third-party linking services. Law-enforcement officials see the case as a way to convey their “heightening concerns that US laws lag too far behind cybercriminals,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “The primary computer-hacking statute in the US, which was used to charge Mr. Gasperini, was passed in the 1980s and hasn’t been amended since 2008.” More.

A Steal At Any Price

Recent studies have Amazon in hot water – or maybe lukewarm water – over its pricing practices. An analysis from Retail Dive found Amazon back-to-school prices “changed hour-by-hour, state-by-state and shopper-by-shopper.” School supplies turned out to be an average of 15% higher on Amazon than on Walmart, Walmart-owned Jet and eBay. A report last month by the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog argues Amazon set higher price floors by showing higher list prices. An Amazon spokesperson called the report "deeply flawed, based on incomplete data and improper assumptions." Amazon operated at a loss for more than a decade as it secured market share by offering the lowest prices. Now price-matching is commonplace, and Amazon has relaxed its pricing dogma in favor of advantages in fulfillment, consumer Prime offers and stickiness to the site. More.

Uber Is Upping Its Ad Spend And Doubling Down On Data

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Friday, July 21st, 2017 at 2:25 pm.

Uber’s rider-focused ad spend has increased twentyfold in the last year and a half.

“The onus that puts on us to be really clever in our targeting and thoughtful is incredibly high,” said Kellyn Kenny, Uber’s VP of marketing, speaking at Tune’s Postback conference in Seattle on Thursday.

Although user acquisition is still a top priority (as of last year, the app had 40 million monthly active riders worldwide), at Uber’s scale, re-engagement drives efficiency.

“[We] need to harvest as much business from existing customers as humanly possible,” Kenny said.

Although static mobile display worked well in the past to gently remind users hovering in the high-intent category to begin a trial, “when you 20x your investment, you need to do more than nudge people to move down the funnel,” Kenny said.

For example, Uber is getting smarter about customer lifetime value by monitoring the particulars around different acquisition scenarios.

A Few Good Reasons To Confront Digital Advertising’s Essential Truths

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, July 21st, 2017 at 2:15 pm.

“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 Julia Amorim, CEO at MediaNet.

In the famous scene from the 1992 movie “A Few Good Men,” Jack Nicholson’s character asks Tom Cruise if he wants answers, to which Cruise’s character roars, “I want the truth!”

“You can’t handle the truth!” Nicholson barks back.

That scene illustrates how some truths are so complex, some decisions so difficult, that people might be inclined to keep them secret or act in ways that aren’t in their own best interests. It’s sort of like what’s happening in digital advertising right now.

For example, the truth is that there are some bad actors who have taken advantage of marketers by manipulating fees and rebates, as the ANA’s study of media transparency in the US has revealed.

Some marketers have “handled” that truth by being justifiably outraged – but also by taking a potentially superficial approach to mitigating future risks. This includes distancing themselves from longtime agency partners, cutting back on their overall spending or choosing to work with vendors who are in a race to the bottom with pricing.

Podcast: Don't Call MDC Partners A Holding Company

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Friday, July 21st, 2017 at 1:58 pm.

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

"I don't even use the term 'holding company,’" MDC Partners CEO Scott Kauffman says in the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. "We don't even think of ourselves as a parent company."

What, then?

Kauffman says MDC's investment philosophy is about "partnership" rather than "ownership." The idea is to enable growth at marketing services businesses rather than taking them over.

"We look for teams of people that are looking for escape velocity, and who are looking for a partner that will not be a heavy-handed, centralized, domineering, mandating entity in their lives," Kauffman says.

He calls MDC the "No. 1 smallest" of the seven agency groups. Of course, "smallest" is still pretty big in the case of MDC, a publicly traded company valued at $560 million which employs more than 5,000 and reported 2016 gross revenue of $1.3 billion. Its agencies include 72andSunny, Anomaly, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Assembly, The Media Kitchen and Varick Media Management.

Joining Kauffman for this episode is Michael Bassik, MDC's president of global digital operations. He talks about the company's data approach, and its efforts to pry loose its customers' first-party data.