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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 YouTube To Suspend Third-Party Ad Serving In The EU

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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).

Facebook’s Fischer On Adjusting To Life In A Post-Cambridge Analytica World

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2018 at 10:27 am.

Most consumers are only just learning about the inner workings of the ad-supported internet – and they don’t like what they see.

David Fischer, Facebook’s VP of business and marketing partnerships, understands their frustration.

“A lot of the discomfort people have is when they feel like they don’t actually know what’s going on with the ad system,” Fischer told AdExchanger. “That can make people nervous.”

That nervousness is manifested in the dogged notion that Facebook sells data. It doesn’t. But the nuance – that Facebook profits off advertisers using its data to target ads rather than selling data outright – almost doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that Facebook is far from the only company collecting data on people as they trip around the web. Facebook deserves the hot seat it’s sitting in right now, but ignoring Google, Amazon, Twitter et al. ignores reality.

Facebook made that point, somewhat testily, in a blog post Monday, noting that it’s not alone in collecting data from users and non-users alike.

But, regardless of what others do, Facebook must mind its own store and take it on the chin.

“The more that we can effectively communicate about what we do, what we don’t do and the types of regulation and legislation we think would be helpful out there – that level of transparency and accountability can only help,” Fischer said. “Not just for us, but for the industry as a whole.”

AdExchanger met with Fischer at Facebook in Menlo Park.

How Vevo Stays At The Top Of The Charts On YouTube

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2018 at 12:05 am.

Vevo uses YouTube for a large chunk of its distribution and viewership.

A joint venture between Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, Vevo creates and distributes more than 330,000 music videos across YouTube and its owned-and-operated channels. Vevo gets access to YouTube’s massive audience, and YouTube gets a cut of the revenue.

With 30 million viewers per day and 116 million per month in the US, according to comScore, Vevo has a valuable audience to sell.

“We package up the top stars in the world and sell that to advertisers,” said Kevin McGurn, chief sales officer at Vevo. “The mass majority of what we do is on audience and the media around it.”

Vevo’s valuable audience and artist relationships have allowed it to thrive through YouTube’s brand-safety debacle. It sustained reach and traffic on the platform, even when YouTube consolidated Vevo subscribers under artists’ accounts in January.

Vevo has maintained 20-30% growth for the past few years, and its inventory recently became available to a broader base of buyers through Googled Preferred.

“We’re a growth story in what is otherwise a massive amount of shrinkage in TV,” McGurn said.

Martin Sorrell's Legacy, WPP's Future

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2018 at 12:03 am.

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

WPP Breakup

What will WPP do without CEO Martin Sorrell? One school of thought, highlighted by Bloomberg, predicts a board-led breakup of WPP’s more than 400 operating companies as it “loses the man holding the empire together.” Kantar is the most obvious target for divestment, The Independent reports, as Sorrell has said himself that the $4.3 billion custom research unit has been slow to realize synergies with the rest of the holding company [AdExchanger coverage]. Kantar has always been a core part of Sorrell’s vision, so divesting it would be a huge strategic shift for the company. But with WPP Chairman and corporate cost-cutter Roberto Quarta, aka “Bob the Knife,” at the helm, it’s unclear whether WPP has the patience to wait out Sorrell’s long-term vision in favor of short-term growth, WSJ reports. According to The Guardian, breaking up the group could net shareholders $27 billion. All of the uncertainty caused WPP’s stock to drop 6.5% on Monday, wiping $1.2 billion off of WPP’s market value, reported The Times.

Big Shoes To Fill

Meanwhile, WPP’s search for a new leader begins. The company has brought on recruitment firm Russell Reynolds to replace Sorrell, The Guardian reports. While many industry observers are speculating that Sorrell’s successor will come from within the WPP family, hiring an outside firm may help the holding company expand its search outside the company. But what’s next for Sir Martin, who “is almost never incommunicado, he replies to emails at lightning speed and is a consummate networker,” asks Sky News. That’s unclear, but he’ll have to channel that restless energy somewhere – and without a noncompete clause in his contract, he may do just that. More.

E.W. Scripps Sees Portfolio Sales Potential

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2018 at 3:48 pm.

In August, E.W. Scripps reorganized its business into two parts: one division focusing on local media – its bread and butter – and the other on national media channels.

The move unified Scripps’ digital video service, Newsy, with podcast network Midroll, digital audio service Stitcher and satire and humor brand Cracked, under the national media umbrella.

Scripps expanded its national footprint even further in October when it acquired the Katz broadcast networks, which include specialty stations like African-American network Bounce TV and multicast comedy network Laff.

“Now that I’ve started to work more closely with each of these brands and businesses as a whole, we’re looking at ways we can do more portfolio selling,” said Laura Tomlin, SVP of national media for E.W. Scripps.

Although it’s early, Tomlin foresees merging opportunities across digital and cable.

“When you consider the direct-response (DR) advertisers we have with the podcast network or with Newsy, we see an opportunity to bring those digital brands into cable,” she said.

Brands Think Outside The Box With OOH-Triggered Retargeting

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2018 at 12:35 am.

Billboards aren’t a one-to-one media, unless we’re talking about “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri.”

But advertisers are starting to inform their online retargeting efforts with offline exposure data.

Established out-of-home media companies, like Clear Channel Outdoor and Outfront Media, geofence their billboards to retarget consumers online, while platforms like Facebook let retailers use offline purchase data to create Custom Audiences through an offline conversion API.

Newer players, like car-wrapping startup Wrapify, are also popping up to help bridge the gap.

Wrapify pays people to encase their vehicles in branded vinyl graphics and drive around town – so its tactics are completely old-school – but it launched a tool in February that lets advertisers extend their OOH impressions online.

Through a partnership with out-of-home analytics company Mira, Wrapify captures all the device IDs near wrapped cars during a certain time period in a geofenced area. Mira passes the IDs to attribution provider Barometric, which matches them to cookies. Advertisers can use the combined data set to create online segments of people exposed to wrapped vehicles on the road.

A New Beginning For In-App Measurement

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 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 Eric Picard, vice president of product management at Pandora.

Last week, the IAB Tech Lab released the Open Measurement (OM) Software Development Kit (SDK), a universal SDK to support standardized, multivendor measurement for in-app inventory across all measurement types, starting with viewability. This will radically improve nearly all aspects of the digital advertising ecosystem where mobile in-app is part of a buy.

Those working in digital advertising know third-party measurement of viewability and other quality metrics is critical. But the quick adoption of viewability as a key metric created some unintended market friction, complexity and barriers to scale, especially for mobile in-app environments.

Each vendor must create its own SDK and expects each app publisher to integrate it. An SDK is a piece of software that allows it to be incorporated into another piece of software, such as a mobile app, to achieve a goal or add functionality.