Adform Is Cutting 8 Percent Of Its Workforce; Verizon Lays Off 155 From its Go90 Service

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Trimming

Adform will cut 8% of its workforce, including senior execs across 15 markets. Among those out is CMO Martin Stockfleth Larsen, who was on board as the company grew from 80 to 800 employees. The cuts come just a year after the company raised $22 million and poached Rubicon execs for its C-suite. “As Adform has taken little outside investment and bootstrapped its expansion over the last decade, this rightsizing exercise maintains its ethos of fiscal prudence and gives the company a solid financial position,” said CRO Jay Stevens. More at The Drum.

Verizon Turbulence

Speaking of layoffs, Verizon will cut 155 staffers from its Go90 streaming service. The team will be rebuilt with employees from Vessel, an online video subscription service for short-form content that Verizon acquired in October. Verizon’s strategy for Go90 will remain unchanged, citing that the cuts were to eliminate “duplicative resources.” Go90 has failed to engage its target audience from the start, but Verizon is hoping that Richard Tom, former Hulu CTO and Vessel co-founder, can turn the sinking ship around. Variety has more. Related: Verizon is still evaluating the viability of its pending Yahoo deal. The WSJ reports Verizon “needs more time to monitor the impact before making a final determination.” Read that.

The Slow Boil

Google is making big market share gains in flight booking, but airlines aren’t thrilled. The search engine has taken an aggressive tack with flights, directing queries like “United flight to Chicago” to Google Flights instead of to the brand’s own site (as it would with a search like “Marriott hotels in Chicago”), reports Skift. “By redirecting a branded search term to a Google-owned property, Google creates a more refined search result (a set of specific flights on specific dates) before handing the consumer over to the airline,” said Brian Clark, a partner at the travel consultancy Hudson Crossing. “They are keeping the frogs in the pot (airlines and hotels) and raising the temperature step by step.” More.

The Forgotten Customer

Vendors spend too much time talking about features and not enough listening to their customers, writes Rocket Fuel CMO Eric Duerr in a Medium post. As a result, marketers – the very people ad tech is supposed to help – have become overwhelmed by their unwieldy tech stacks with little understanding of what they’re being offered. The problem? Engineers communicate to the product team, and product teams communicate to marketing. But, Duerr asks, “If the customer feedback dies with the sales and marketing teams, was there really an action or effort taken to improve a product or service?” More at Medium.

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