Snap Starts To Rebound; OpenAP Partners With NCC Media On Audiences

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Adobe On A Cloud

Adobe bragged about its customer data platform Tuesday on the company’s second quarter earnings call. The marketing clouds are going for broke this week on the CDP front – Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle all made CDP-related announcements – but Adobe has an edge, claims CEO Shantanu Narayen. “We have the data and the content to differentiate us in terms of customer traction across different channel points,” he said, pointing to Adobe’s street cred with its audience management solutions and the DMP it brought on board with the acquisition of Demdex way back in 2011. But the enterprise cloud solution market is massive enough – worth somewhere north of $70 billion – that this isn’t a winner-takes-all situation, Narayen said. “There is just so much opportunity.” It was a strong quarter for Adobe, with 25% year-over-year overall revenue growth to $2.74 billion, including $784 million – a 34% YoY uptick – for Adobe Experience Cloud, which houses Adobe’s Marketing, Analytics and Advertising products. But who’s going to run it? Brad Rencher, a key executive in charge of integrating Adobe’s marketing cloud products, exited the company in January. Narayen is leading that business himself until a replacement for Rencher is found. There isn’t one yet. “The search continues, but we haven’t missed a beat,” Narayen said. “It is not hampering the progress at all in terms of what we need to do.”

Snap Is Back

Snap shares rose nearly 10% Tuesday after BTIG analysts increased their price target. Having lost ground – and the confidence of many investors – due to the popularity of copycat Instagram Stories, Snap has made a number of moves that shows its recovery plan is working, the analysts said. A gender-swapping feature increased daily active users, a gaming product could boost engagement and a forthcoming Snap ad network teased this April shows promise. But even without the boost from BTIG, the stock has been on a slow rebound this year. Read more.

Open For Business

OpenAP added a new partner on Tuesday – NCC Media – just a couple months after it lost founding member WarnerMedia (Xandr has plans of its own). NCC Media, the ad sales group co-owned by Comcast, Cox and Charter, has hooks into 45 million addressable US households. It will use the standardized campaign planning and measurement created by the TV publisher consortium across its addressable inventory. David Levy, OpenAP’s new CEO, called the partnership “the first major step in a transformative alignment between MVPDs and programmers.” And so hope springs eternal as broadcasters collaborate in an attempt to make cross-publisher audience targeting – backed by independent measurement – into a reality. Read the release, and Adweek has more.

Unleashing Libra

Facebook has launched its cryptocurrency initiative, dubbed “Libra.” The new currency is backed by a consortium of venture capital investors, ecommerce companies, mobile apps, including Uber, Lyft and Spotify, blockchain service providers, nonprofits and transaction processors, like Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Paypal. The Block, a crypto industry publisher, first reported the full list of Libra partners last week. Facebook needs a diverse network of partners to get Libra off the ground, to back the currency with actual cash, process payments and create ways to “cash out,” so to speak, by shopping, donating or booking rides and trips. Facebook is still looking to round out a group of about 100 financial backers, each of which is expected to contribute at least $10 million upfront, with annual costs of a quarter million or more. In exchange, each will manage a “node,” which allows access to the network, and have voting rights within the Libra governing association. “The internet has changed the way we communicate and access information. Why hasn’t it done the same for money?” wrote Kevin Weil, Facebook’s VP of blockchain product, in a Twitter thread about the launch.

But Wait, There’s More!