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The Crawl, Walk, Run Guide To Frequency Management How LG Works Advertising Into Smart TVs Democrats, Left Behind Online, Push For More Digital Dollars Publicis Spine CEO Lisa Donohue Dishes On The Holdco’s Latest Data Centralization Strategy How Getting Back To Its Roots Helped KFC Navigate Its Future As A Brand Google’s ‘DMP-Like’ Measurement System Gains Steam UK CEO Of Hearts & Science: “Earning Your Keep By Buying Media Will Drag You Down” Facebook’s Post-Russia Ad Policy Changes Have Implications For All Advertisers How Clorox Brought Its Brand Back To Life On Digital

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Comic: GDPR Compliance

by Nate Neal // Posted on Friday, October 20th, 2017 at 12:04 am.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...

Amazon Offers Glitzy Brand Pages; Fraud Found On Sports Sites

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, October 20th, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

Welcome Shopper Marketing Dollars

Amazon is letting brands enhance their product pages with widescreen videos and interactive displays, Ad Age reports. The new feature, called Premium Pages, costs $500,000 per year, per brand, and allows marketers to take advantage of a full-screen video experience on the platform. "The industry talks a lot about virtual shelf space," said Evan Hanlon, VP of strategy and platforms at GroupM. "They have to make sure to optimize that presence like they would at any grocery store or retailer. People have to take that deathly seriously now at Amazon." Bose is already buying. More.

Lost In The Jungle

In other Amazon news, the company has officially started its partnership with Kohl’s, where store locations will accept Amazon product returns, and will also include in-store space dedicated to Amazon products like the Echo speaker. Walmart, meanwhile, gave a peek at a product it’s working on to offer other retail brands dedicated space on its site. Walmart is pitching the idea as an anti-Amazon coalition, though Lord & Taylor is the only seller not owned by Walmart known to be considering a deal, reports The Wall Street Journal. More. The new retail battleground is, uh…the old retail battleground.

Podcast: Who Doesn't Envy Hulu?

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2017 at 4:39 pm.

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here.

As big brands seeking younger audiences move TV budgets online, some have been put off by digital's triple threat: brand safety, viewability and fraud.

Hulu is there for them.

Hulu basically offers the benefits of TV in a digital buy, according to Doug Fleming, Hulu’s head of advanced TV. Seventy-seven percent of Hulu viewing happens on a TV device, offering advertisers the creative impact of television with the data advantages of digital.

"Because we've always been able to talk TV, that money is moving toward us," Fleming says in the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. "We are the first stop for those replacement dollars."

Hulu is group owned by network rivals ABC, Fox, Turner and NBCU, and the joint venture's durability (it's nine years old) testifies to the seriousness of their project. Hulu now reaches 47 million people, and 32 million see its ads. Once known as "the best of last night's TV," the company is now winning accolades for its original programming, including eight Emmys this year for “The Handmaid's Tale.”

Senators Crack Down On Facebook And Other Platforms With A Bill To Regulate Online Political Ads

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2017 at 3:54 pm.

If lawmakers have anything to do with it, political ads on Facebook, Google, Twitter and other online platforms may soon be subject to the same disclosure requirements as traditional political advertising.

Senators introduced a bipartisan bill on Thursday to do just that, prompted by revelations of Russian meddling before and during the 2016 US presidential election. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) are sponsoring the bill with support from John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Dubbed the Honest Ads Act, the proposed legislation aims to make online platforms disclose paid political ads. Broadcast, radio and print publishers have long been required to publicly share this information.

Identical companion legislation was introduced in the House by Representatives Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) and Mike Coffman (R-Colo.)

The goal is to pass the bill by early next year, well before the next midterm election, although it’s unclear exactly when Congress would vote on it.

“Americans deserve to know who’s paying for the online ads and, honestly, even if the Russian interference had not occurred, we should still be updating our laws,” Klobuchar said during a press conference Thursday. “Our laws should be as sophisticated as those who are trying to manipulate us or to break the law.”

Almost Three Years Later, Publicis Is Still Explaining Its Positioning With Sapient

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2017 at 12:43 pm.

Publicis is still clearing up confusion among its employees, clients and investors about its offering and value prop since it acquired Sapient in early 2015.

“We are currently making sure our model is clear for everyone,” CEO Arthur Sadoun said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call Thursday. “We have to start with our people so they understand what we do.”

Despite recently winning accounts from McDonald’s, Lowes and Walmart, Publicis’ journey to transform from marketing services provider to a partner helping clients through disruption has been slow to catch on. Publicis wrote down its $3.7 billion purchase of Sapient by almost half its valuation in 2016 because it was dragging down the business.

Investors on the call asked multiple questions about Publicis’ business model and how they should measure its success. Sadoun told them to focus on organic growth and client stickiness, metrics investors typically use to evaluate advertising holding companies, and suggested that its change in direction warrants a change in valuation.

“I want to believe that, at one point, somebody will realize it will change our valuation,” he said.

Publicis has made some progress convincing clients of Publicis.Sapient’s new position. The firm in August beat Accenture for McDonald’s retail transformation account, on which it will team up with IT consulting firm Capgemini to build a digital retail experience for the fast food chain. (It will be interesting to see how the two firms work together, as Capgemini has hinted at its own intentions in the advertising space.)

Fraudsters Have Media Plans, Too

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2017 at 12:38 pm.

Like any good media planner, fraudsters are attuned to time of year, seasonality, demographics, ad formats and trends in consumer behavior.

With football season and the MLB playoffs in full swing, they seem to have turned their attention to pro sports sites.

“We see a lot of sophisticated invalid traffic targeting premium sites,” said Amit Joshi, director of product and data science at fraud detection company Forensiq, which recently uncovered a bot that’s targeting sports team websites.

All 32 NFL team domains are affected. The bot appears to hijack a browser and loads ads without the site being aware of it. It’s unclear exactly how Sports Bot, as Forensiq calls it, gets deployed, but it’s likely through malware.

Forensiq was tipped off to Sport Bot’s shenanigans when the company’s machine-learning traffic detection algorithm identified likely fraudulent activity among roughly 75% of pre-bid requests to NFL team sites.

After cross-referencing the NFL data with other sports team websites for the NBA, NHL and MLB, it became clear that team domains were particularly exposed, having yet to implement Ads.txt, the anti-spoofing method introduced by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The volume of invalid traffic to team sites is higher than to larger websites, like nfl.com or espn.com, both of which have published their Ads.txt files.

Forget Everything You Know About Your Customers

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2017 at 9:25 am.

"Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Chris Peterson, managing partner at R2C Group.

We marketers love to imagine our customers. We want to see them, understand them and get inside their heads. We make PowerPoint slides with stock photos of them. They’re millennial, they prefer kale to bibb lettuce and they value peer opinion. They agree with the statement: “Technology is an important part of my lifestyle.”

Who knew that for decades these efforts have been suppressing business results?

As humans, we crave anecdotal narratives about our customers. They solve an important problem of our marketing imaginations. How do you market to someone you don’t know? Our customer stories assure us that we know what we are doing. As NPR radio personality Ira Glass said, “The power of anecdote is so great that it has a momentum in and of itself. No matter how boring the facts are, you feel inherently as if you are on a train that has a destination.”

The “facts,” of course, can be right or wrong. Jonah Berger, author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On,” describes narrative and storytelling as a potential Trojan horse, where any set of apparent facts can be set into motion with a small amount of storytelling. Start with facts – or just make some up – and wrap them up with an interesting story, and voila, you rally people forward into a bold new future based on half-truths.

Marriott Brings Customer Hospitality To Inhospitable Digital Media

by James Hercher // Posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2017 at 6:01 am.

Marriott is reshaping its marketing strategy around a customer identity graph called Flywheel the hotel chain developed to turn its segmented customer funnel into a single pipeline.

Marriott began working on Flywheel last year to map its 100-million member loyalty program to Facebook audiences and targeting signals, like travel searches or when people are in the airport. Andy Kauffman, who developed Flywheel and will be promoted to Marriott’s SVP of global marketing optimization beginning in January, said he hopes to extend Flywheel into Marriott’s broader marketing and operations.

“The focus is on bridging customer experience into the traditional marketing funnel,” Kauffman said. “We can’t look at Marriott’s needs in silos anymore.”

For instance, Marriott’s loyalty team, its brand marketers and a team tasked with filling empty rooms could all be disconnectedly chasing the same people.

Flywheel has helped Marriott’s marketing department de-emphasize the objectives of specific teams by providing a more comprehensive view of customer identity.

The new approach “starts and stays with the individual and should map to what we understand about that person,” Kauffman said.

Fill Rates And Other Issues With Video Header Bidding

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2017 at 3:00 am.

"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

Today’s column is written by Ed Shannon, chief revenue officer at SpringServe.

The “I won the lottery” element of display header bidding is not the same with video.

As others have noted, there is no actual header in video, making the tech even more of a hack, which hurts customer experience on a publisher’s most important content asset. Video inventory is a scarce and valuable product to be held close to the vest, some have warned, and video header bidding latency and data leakage may occur.

Despite these risks, publishers eagerly ask me about it all the time. But aside from latency and data leakage, there are a few different, but equally important, arguments why video header bidding is more myth than truth.

Iponweb's Boris Mouzykantskii Offers History Lesson; Wal-Mart Plans More Acquisitions

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

Dr. Boris

Ad tech "godfather" Boris Mouzykantskii recounts the early days of Iponweb in a conversation with Gartner Research VP Martin Kihn. He describes the work he did for Brian O'Kelley, who was then pulling all-nighters writing code that would become Right Media. Later he became the go-to source for “work for hire” ad tech coding. "Right Media was a great business development tool," Dr. Boris remembers. "We got a lot of gigs out of people who left and started other companies. … Yahoo at the time wasn’t very good at retaining talent, either on the tech or the business side. This was the moment that RTB was exploding. … [Recently] I looked through a list of all the companies that had given us at least $1 and it was 150 ad tech companies." More.

Stored Up

Last year when Walmart signaled ecommerce M&A plans, it followed through with a multibillion-dollar string of acquisitions including Jet.com, Bonobos, MooseJaw and ModCloth. So people are taking notice now after Marc Lore, former Jet.com chief and current Walmart ecommerce CEO, declared at a Wall Street Journal tech event that the company will extend that acquisition spree. The idea of Walmart acquiring an ad tech company, and not just pure ecommerce markets as it has done so far, is a particularly interesting prospect. It works with programmatic startups like AppNexus, Kargo and Criteo to buy and sell consumer data-rich media.