US Programmatic To Hit $80B Next Year; New Headaches For TV Ad Buyers

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Programmatic Billions

Programmatic advertising in the United States will account for about 84% of digital display in 2019, according to eMarketer. (EMarketer’s definition of digital display includes native ads, social network ads and advertising that shows up on pretty much any internet-connected device). “Over the next two years, continued investment in areas such as digital audio, social video, connected TV and over-the-top (OTT) advertising will drive US programmatic ad spending to nearly $80 billion.” EMarketer expects $57.3 billion in digital display will be transacted this year, more than half of which will go to social. And by 2021, US programmatic spend will reach $79.75 billion. More.

Disconnected TV

Buying TV advertising has gotten ridiculously complicated, Digiday reports. Some of the same inventory is now available through multiple ad tech partners, making it difficult for buyers to figure out the best route for buying inventory. And each possibility has trade-offs. For instance, companies like Hulu or Pluto TV aggregate programming and have useful audience data, but advertisers can’t buy based on specific shows. “That can be an issue for advertisers that are concerned about brand safety or overlapping ad buys but equally concerned about being able to reach enough viewers,” Digiday writes. More. Related: Check out AdExchanger’s review of various OTT offerings, industry efforts to consolidate inventory and why so many OTT content providers now own buying platforms.

Cat And Mouse

Some advertising and analytics companies have seized on a workaround for browsers that blocks user-level tracking, The Register reports. DNS aliasing, as the tactic is known, is when a publisher or site operator creates a subdomain that can pass browser information to third parties without alerting anti-tracking tech like Safari’s ITP. As far as the browser sees, the site and tag call isn’t sent to a vendor. Ad targeting and analytics companies like Criteo and Adobe use DNS aliasing (sometimes also called DNS delegation). The anti-tracking browser plug-in uBlock Origin, a particularly aggressive ad blocker, can block the practice on Firefox, but not Chrome or Safari. More

Trump’s Facebook MVP

If Facebook got Trump elected, then its former employee James Barnes deserves much of the credit, according to The Wall Street Journal. Barnes had embedded with the Trump campaign and, following Trump’s victory, was lauded as an “MVP.” Since then, he has left Facebook as well as his lifelong affiliation with the Republican party, and is on a mission to use digital advertising tools to get Trump out of office. When Barnes was helping Trump, he and his team introduced techniques that were innovative at the time, like targeting users who liked or commented on Trump’s posts over the past month with fundraising ads. Barnes was diligent in helping the Trump campaign experiment with format and messaging – the sort of attention that some have alleged was not bestowed upon the Democrats. Part of that might have been the way Trump’s people dealt with Facebook. “Trump campaign officials frequently threatened to go to the press if Mr. Barnes and other Facebook employees failed to address problems to their satisfaction, he said.” More.

Fukuokidding Me?

A small hotel in the Japanese city of Fukuoka has attracted attention for a new promotion: a $1-per-night room for visitors who agree to have their stay streamed on YouTube. There are two rooms hooked up with livestreaming cameras, which don’t include audio and the bathroom isn’t recorded. The hotel hopes to make up the revenue in other ways. The YouTube channel passed 1,000 subscribers late last week, when CNN covered the story, and has since jumped to more than 12,000. And the hotel’s YouTube channel passed 4,000 viewing hours, so it can monetize with ads. “Young people nowadays don’t care much about the privacy,” said Tetsuya Inoue, who runs the hotel. “Some of them say it’s OK to be [watched] for just one day.” More.