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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

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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.

PricewaterhouseCoopers Built A $3 Billion Relationship With The CMO

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Friday, July 21st, 2017 at 7:00 am.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), like other management consultancies in its competitive set, wants to grow its services to meet the needs of the modern chief marketing officer (CMO).

“The role of the CMO is changing so much,” said Chris Vollmer, global advisory leader for entertainment and media at PwC. “It’s not just messaging anymore, but architecting the customer experience. That involves a lot more than just great communications.”

PwC, which already works with Fortune 500 companies on IT, business strategy and consulting across verticals, began ramping up digital and design expertise in 2013. It’s since acquired upward of seven agencies to build the Experience Center, a roughly 13,000-employee marketing specialty practice under the PwC Digital Services umbrella.

The Experience Center leverages expertise across digital, design and customer journey pathing to help CMOs meet their business objectives. Design talent is often brought into a project by one of PwC’s vertical groups.

“We want a Venn diagram with industry experts focused on strategy and business transformation and folks that are really good at designing, building and scaling digital products,” Vollmer said. “The Experience Center has the skills and expertise to make the strategies come to life for the client.”

How Emerging Sales Channels Complicate Account And Campaign Management

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, July 21st, 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 David Hills, managing director of strategy at The 614 Group.

There’s no place where complexity and the need to innovate is starker than at the intersection of campaign and account management.

As publishers increasingly use new and different sales channels, each requires different approaches to managing customer satisfaction and reporting in a way that demonstrates that publishers understand and respond to customer needs.

Campaign management is the management of ad pacing, quality and performance at the campaign level to meet client KPIs. It is often performed by campaign management or ad ops teams.

Account management is the overarching management of the agency or client relationship with the goal of generating revenue. Often defined as a sales function, account management is the reporting of campaign results and using customer feedback into inform future campaigns as part of a productive cycle of effort, reporting and interpretation.

Comic: Summer Fridays

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, July 21st, 2017 at 12:04 am.

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

Upfront TV Ad Sales Expected To Rise; Facebook Offers More Measurement To Publishers

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, July 21st, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

The Going Rate

Industry analysts expect upfront TV ad sales to be up 3-4% from last year, a solid rise considering ratings dipped for broadcasters as a whole, according to The Hollywood Reporter. TV nets see the result as an endorsement of their primacy – in the minds of marketers, at least – over digital video rivals like YouTube. “The inability of companies of that magnitude to guarantee brand safety was truly the straw that broke the camel's back,” says NBCU ad sales Chairwoman Linda Yaccarino, whose upfront haul this year was up 8% over 2016. More.

Instant Measurement

Facebook is rolling out an analytics tool for publishers that shows how their posts perform on Instant Articles compared to the mobile web. Facebook previously shared an aggregate lift number across all publishers for Instant Articles, but will now let media companies monitor data on individual article performance validated by Nielsen. Read the blog post. While publishers who have gone all-in on Instant Articles (e.g., Wired and the Daily Mail) are excited about getting more granularity from Facebook, others that have stopped using Instant Articles due to low monetization rates (e.g., LittleThings) want to see more before returning to the platform, Digiday reports. More.

Tracing The Timeline Of Sizmek, Ad Tech Rollup And Duopoly Alternative

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2017 at 4:04 pm.

The ad tech rollup is real, and its name is Sizmek.

On Tuesday, the 18-year-old company revealed its intent to buy public ad tech company Rocket Fuel for $145 million.

If the purchase finalizes, Sizmek’s acquisition spree (excluding the earliest iterations of its evolving stack) will round out to about five companies acquired in less than three years.

Like Oath, which bolted years’ worth of technology acquisitions from AOL and Yahoo under parent Verizon, Sizmek, now owned by private equity firm Vector Capital, faces some of the familiar integration and go-to-market challenges.

Here’s how it got to where it is today.

Down Memory Lane

1999 Sizmek originates as the rich-media ad server Eyeblaster.

2010 Eyeblaster rebrands as MediaMind – a company focused on digital ad delivery and dynamic creative.

2011 Texas-based DG, a content management and distribution platform, acquires MediaMind for $414 million in cash and stock to combine with its broadband distribution network Unicast. Shortly after, it acquires rich-media company EyeWonder for $66 million.

2012 DG purchases a semantic technology tool for programmatic platforms called Peer39 for $15.5 million.

2013 This is a big one. DG offloads its TV assets to Boston-based Extreme Reach for $485 million in a bid to reduce its debt – and ramp up its digital capabilities.

2014 DG officially rebrands as Sizmek and doubles down on as a public digital marketing and advertising solutions provider. Sizmek goes on an ad tech shopping spree of its own, snapping up mobile tracking tool Aerify.

Dynamic Yield Raises $31M To Drive Machine Learning For Retail Marketers

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2017 at 3:52 pm.

Dynamic Yield, a personalization platform for publishers and ecommerce brands such as Under Armour and Sephora, has raised $31 million in Series C financing, the company announced Thursday, bringing its funding total to $45 million.

New investors Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners and La Maison joined existing investors like Baidu to help the company expand its offices globally and ramp up headcount with 30 new data engineering, sales and marketing roles.

No investors took money off of the table, according to Dynamic Yield CEO Liad Agmon, who quipped that he would “buy more shares” if he could.

“It was a heavily oversubscribed round for us, so we’re lucky,” he said. “One reason we added Deutsche Telekom is Germany is a strong market for us and it opens a lot of new opportunities through their network to expand our product and fast-growing offices in Berlin and Singapore.”

Dynamic Yield, which described itself as an “ad server for onsite content” in its earliest iteration, claims it was early to the race to tackle web personalization for retailers.

Publicis And Omnicom Preach Business Transformation In H1 Earnings

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2017 at 12:34 pm.

Both Publicis Groupe and Omnicom focused on the need to transform their clients’ businesses and their own during their respective Q2/H1 earnings on Thursday.

“We want to be the leader in marketing and business transformation,” Arthur Sadoun told investors on his first-ever earnings call as Publicis Groupe CEO. “Our clients need to transform.”

Publicis saw organic growth of 0.8% for the quarter and -0.2% for the first half of the year. Revenue for the quarter was $2.9 billion and for the half it was $5.5 billion.

At Omnicom, global revenue decreased 2.4% to $3.8 billion this quarter and 0.1% to $7.4 billion for the half-year, largely due to the deceleration of the British pound.

New Regime

The biggest growth engine for Publicis Groupe will “come from our ability to be positioned not as a communications partner, but as a partner that can bring digital business transformation,” Sadoun said. That will involve leveraging data and technology to deliver on clients’ business objectives and help them transform to regain control of the customer journey.

It also requires Publicis agencies to work together more fluidly. Sadoun will continue to break silos across the group at the country level, co-locate and incentivize cross-agency teams based on client needs, train employees on business transformation skills and scale specialist practice areas to support global agency brands.