The Brands Are Back On YouTube; Amazon Launches A Self-Serve Audience Match Tool

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

I Wish I Could Quit YouTube

So much for the boycott. Most of the advertisers that paused their YouTube spend due to brand safety concerns have now paused their moral outrage and are back on the platform, according to Axios. Read more. Google exec Allan Thygesen revealed this mass return during the Rutberg FM conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and also revealed that Google has introduced more intricate content filters and a two-hour timeframe to remove “bad content” following a report. Meanwhile, Ross Benes at Digiday has Pathmatics and MediaRadar crunch some numbers which reveal that, indeed, the brands are back on YouTube. More.

Amazon Customer Match

Amazon’s multibillion-dollar (and growing) ad business may grow even bigger soon. The company revealed in a blog post its launch of a self-serve tool called Advertiser Audiences, which lets advertisers match (anonymously, of course) custom audience lists against Amazon’s subscriber list – both on the commerce platform and in exchange-based buys. Though the tool feels a heck of a lot like Facebook’s Custom Audiences and Google’s Customer Match, it’s a substantial move for the ecommerce giant, which hadn’t provided a comparable offering.

Hey, Nice Pivot

Under Jeff Bezos’ ownership, The Washington Post’s tech team went from being a help desk to engineering technology for its editorial team and advertisers, according to an NPR profile. By creating faster-loading ads and reducing ad load, the Post was able to increase the number of readers engaging in ads by a factor of five. A MediaCom client doubled its ad spend with the Post over the past two years because of strong results. Now it’s sharing the tech wealth: 22 other newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, license what the Post built. “We are 100% a technology company,” product and engineering director Jarrod Dicker told NPR. Listen (or read) on.

Growth-ery Shopping

At Walmart’s annual shareholders meeting this week, Jet.com President Liza Landsman talked about the company’s new grocery initiatives. Grocery shopping is a priority because it forms “rinse and repeat” shopping habits, according to Supermarket News. When Walmart began offering discounts on products ordered online and picked up in stores earlier this year, a Jet.com source told AdExchanger that a goal for the store program is “to marry the kinds of products typically bought online – like electronics, tools and furniture – with the high-volume grocery and packaged food sales that still happen primarily in stores.” More.

Content, Not Commerce

Condé Nast, the publisher of fashion titles Vogue and Vanity Fair, has pulled the plug on fledgling ecommerce site Style.com following its expensive rebrand and launch nine months ago. It’s now redirecting Style.com visitors to ecommerce marketplace partner Farfetch. Style.com was a giant ecommerce experiment for Condé Nast, in which it invested more than $100 million, reports The New York Times. While Condé saw a lot of parallels between the high-fashion editorial content it produces and Style.com’s role as a driver of commerce, the publisher acknowledged the skill sets for creating quality content – and those required to run an ecommerce site – weren’t so similar. More.

AR You Ready To Rumble?

Remember when Facebook thought it had a future as a gaming platform, only to be slapped aside by Apple? TechCrunch’s Josh Constine posits that the same might happen with Facebook’s entry into augmented reality. Because as powerful as Facebook is, it doesn’t own the mobile operating system. Meanwhile, game developers, publishers and others who develop content meant for Facebook’s walled garden already have whiplash from accommodating the social giant’s constant changes. Why should they work with Facebook when they can much more easily leverage Apple’s newly unveiled AR developer kit, ARKit? As Constine writes, “[I]f developers side with Apple and the idea of putting AR in their own apps, it could deprive Facebook of AR experiences it’s relying on to help it outdo Snapchat.” Read more.

But Wait, There’s More!