Google's Programmatic Video Impressions Have Doubled; Yet More Facebook Measurement Flaws

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Going Direct

Google’s monthly video ad impressions served via programmatic direct deals have doubled since January, the company told Ad Age. Agencies like the data opportunities with programmatic direct, but some still think of it as an experimental buy. “I absolutely think this will be big in 2017, but we are in early stages,” says Erica Schmidt, managing director at Cadreon North America. “It is a philosophical change when you are going direct and there is going to be an adjustment period.” More.

Fed Up

The drip-drip of Facebook measurement fumbles continued last week, when the platform revealed it had been undercounting iPhone traffic to Instant Articles. The flaw was identified by comScore, and Facebook says it has a fix in place. “People will take a step back and certainly look again where Facebook sits in their marketing mix,” GroupM digital chief Rob Norman told Bloomberg. And yet, as AdExchanger reported last week, buyers are largely unfazed.

Don’t Call It A Comeback

“Microsoft is shaping up to be the only pre-internet tech giant to escape the decline of its legacy product,” writes Jay Greene at The Wall Street Journal. Greene chronicles a steady diet of acquisitions by CEO Satya Nadella since he took over Microsoft in 2014, which he says has rejuvenated a company that over-relied on its own engineering for decades. Nadella bought 36 businesses in the past 30 months (triple the number bought by his predecessor over the same time window), and investors have loved it. But it’ll be a while before the integration process plays out, especially for LinkedIn, which, at $26.2 billion, was the company’s biggest purchase ever. More.

Header Wars

AppNexus has added support for video to its header-bidding tech Prebid.js, in partnership with the video platform Playwire. Publishers can run multiple transparent auctions across demand sources so that a page loads as soon as a user hits play on a video, said Eric Hoffert, SVP of video technology at AppNexus. “Everyone wins – publishers, advertisers, and consumers – when the industry transitions away from closed algorithms and black box methodologies to header-bidding’s open-auction approach,” Hoffert said, in a dig at Google’s AdX. More at The Drum. Also, read the AppNexus blog post.

Scraping The Barrel

Consensus says that Verizon will significantly reduce its $4.8 billion offer for Yahoo, or even scrap it entirely, in the wake of the digital network’s latest hack. But the telco hungers for differentiated digital media, data and scale – which Yahoo still has, in spite of everything. Are there strong alternatives? Bloomberg asks a couple analysts and finds a thin catalogue for digital media positions that could move the needle for Verizon. Pandora and Twitter fit the bill, but each is its own issues. “Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of big properties out there to be had. At a time when Google and Facebook so thoroughly dominate the ad-supported online business, it’s the nature of the game,” says MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett. More.

But Wait, There’s More!