Amazon Showcases Ad Strategy For Live Sports; Sprinklr Buys Nanigans' Social Biz

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Prime Sports Dollars

Amazon’s ad strategy for the England Premier League game, which it live streamed Tuesday night, sheds light into how the company is thinking about monetizing live sports. Amazon cut the amount of ad space during the game to 13 minutes per hour before, during and after the game while hiking the prices for each spot, Digiday’s Lara O’Reilly reports. Traditional UK TV soccer games include 20 minutes of ads per hour. Amazon is starting negotiations with CPMs at $51.76 for a broad, untargeted adult audience, which is two to three times the price Sky TV typically sells in Premier League games. CPG, auto and leisure advertisers are buying in, with closed-loop measurement as a big carrot. But many buyers are balking at the price. “If you’re an advertiser, you’ve got such [good] access to football anyway, why on earth would you want to pay that?” one buyer said anonymously. More.

Taking A Piece Of Nanigans

Sprinklr bought Nanigans’ social media management business for an undisclosed amount Tuesday. Post-acquisition, Sprinklr will manage $1.5 billion in social media spend per year across channels including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Nanigans originally helped marketers buy Facebook ads via its preferred partner program. The more expansive Sprinklr covers an even broader array of social media management. Sprinklr pitches itself as a martech hub for social media management, and its tools span customer experience, market research, engagement and advertising. As part of the deal, some Nanigans employees will join Sprinklr. And Nanigans will keep its incrementality business and rename it. Read more.

Policy Pals

Privacy for America, a coalition of advertising industry trade groups, released a new policy framework that it will push as a legislative solution for digital media and data privacy issues. Read the release. The framework is more business-friendly than GDPR or CCPA. The goal is to allow consumer privacy and data control without the “notice and choice model” (aka the stream of pop-ups and notifications that are part of the web experience in Europe). Privacy for America is the latest in a string of coordinated cross-industry ad policy initiatives. Stuart Ingis, Privacy for America’s coordinator, leads the marketing and ecommerce practice at the law firm Venable. He’s also general counsel at the Digital Advertising Alliance, one of the coalition’s trade groups, as well as counsel and board secretary of the IAB, another Privacy for America member. Venable has worked on other cross-industry collabs, like the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG). And Ingis oversees the Coalition for Better Ads, a nonprofit founded by the IAB, ANA and 4A’s, which created the ad format standards enforced by Google Chrome.

An Ad-centric Billionaire

Facebook makes 98.5% of its revenue from advertising. And that ratio probably won’t change much, even as the social media giant expands into new areas such as payments, commerce and hardware, because Facebook is using those businesses to connect with other companies and eventually turn them into advertisers. “If we can serve more businesses and serve all of them well with free tools, then in time, they can grow, hire and support more communities,” Facebook chief revenue officer David Fischer tells Axios. “Some of them will advertise in time.” Sticking with a full ad supported strategy is risky, as advertising generally tracks with GDP and predictions of a recession loom. Facebook will need to continue to scale massively to maintain current growth rates, release different types of advertising formats and eventually start to monetize some of its major acquisitions (lookin’ at you, WhatsApp and Oculus). More.

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