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Going After Google’s Moneymaker: Facebook Taps Its Audience Data To Power Video Direct Deals Google Wants To Measure The Entire Path To Purchase Havas Launched A Dashboard That Makes Programmatic Buying More Transparent IBM IX’s Babs Rangaiah Says Agencies Need To Move The Needle On Business, Not Just Marketing Twitter Hires Ad Tech Vet Bruce Falck To Turn Its Revenue Team Around Turner: 'We’re Not TV. We’re Omnichannel.' Domain Spoofing Be Gone: Ads.Txt Will Filter Out Imposter Sites Intel Bets Its Chips On B2B Marketing The Ecstasy And Agony Of AudienceScience’s P&G Partnership

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Publishers Rely On Vendors To Fill Resource Gaps; China's Programmatic Supply Chain Is Rife With Rebate Schemes

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

Dependency Issues

While some publishers have the tech expertise to build products and replace ad tech vendors, they don’t have the bandwidth to continually update and monitor those products. When publishers decide to build something, it’s usually because it’s a product they use heavily that brings in a lot of revenue. “Could we make our own server? Hell yeah, we could,” said a rep from one comScore 250 publisher. “But it’s a volatile business that I don’t want to be a part of. I’ll leave ad serving to Google.” For most pubs, it’s just easier to have vendors on hand for a quick fix and suffer the revenue consequences. More at Digiday.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

The programmatic supply chain in China is “masking a long-running kickback or rebate scheme,” says Ivan Zhou, Sociomantics Labs managing director for China, in a Q&A with Campaign. He blames the state of affairs – with the vast majority of programmatic media budgets not going to media at all – primarily on advertisers for failing to audit their buys. Without trade groups or union protections, Chinese brands are “easily hoodwinked.” It’s an old story in a new setting. And it falls to brands to tell media intermediaries that “If you used to rely on rebates, rely on guanxi [a Chinese term for influential personal connections], rely on things that are not right, you do not add value and you will be pushed out.” More.

GroupM’s Lindsay Pattison On Transformation Within WPP

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2017 at 3:10 pm.

Maxus CEO Lindsay Pattison has a big job ahead of her as chief transformation officer at GroupM: transforming WPP’s mammoth services business into modern and agile solutions provider for clients.

In her new role, which she assumed on Thursday, Pattison will lead change initiatives across WPP to ensure it remains relevant to clients as they transform their own businesses for a digital-first world.

“The shape of our business in the next three to five years will look entirely different [from] what it is today,” she said.

Pattison will double down WPP’s “horizontality” initiative, which aims to break down silos and leverage talent more fluidly across the group. She’ll also help WPP’s agencies develop new service models for clients and get the most out of mPlatform, GroupM’s centralized technology stack and data repository for WPP.

Pattison spoke with AdExchanger.

AdExchanger: Why does GroupM need a chief transformation officer?

LINDSAY PATTISON: There are macroeconomic challenges on more traditional businesses. We need to understand and how GroupM and its agencies transform as we help our clients’ businesses transform. We have to be responsible for helping our clients through that. Having someone focused on that shows how seriously we take it.

Ecommerce Juggernaut TechStyle Tries On Facebook Ad Automation For Size

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2017 at 9:24 am.

Creating Facebook ads manually was wearing thin for TechStyle, the parent company of members-only fashion ecommerce sites ShoeDazzle, JustFab, FabKids and Fabletics.

When a brand spends nearly $90 million a year on digital marketing, automation is the key to sanity.

“Elegant, hard-working, effective advertising at scale is exciting – but the idea of doing that manually is terrible,” said Laura Joukovski, TechStyle’s SVP of media and analytics.

TechStyle, which handles all marketing efforts across its four brands in-house with the exception of TV media buying, allocated roughly 70% of its $125 million global marketing budget to digital last year, the bulk of which went to Facebook and Instagram.

In-house creative and video production teams at TechStyle tackle everything from design to development – dealing with multiple agencies for that stuff was a bit “like herding cats,” Joukovski said – but there’s only so much media creation and optimization the company can handle on its own.

Setting up campaigns on Facebook at scale and ensuring that the tracking works properly is tough, tedious, time-consuming and really important. Technology partners are de rigueur, Joukovski said.

What Will The Future Of OTT Look Like? A Lot Like TV’s

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2017 at 8:15 am.

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

Today’s column is written by Tal Chalozin, co-founder and chief technology officer at Innovid.

For years, some in the digital media industry have heralded the “death of TV” as an event nothing short of inevitable.

For them, the steady migration of video viewers to digital platforms only ends in one place: a world where the traditional cable television bundle is wiped out entirely, in favor of streaming services that allow customers to pick and choose the content they want to pay for.

Yet, for all this bluster, television is far from dead, and its future looks quite a lot like its present – but better. While consumers are slowly decreasing the amount of time they spend watching linear television, it’s much more accurate to say TV consumption is changing than it is to say it’s dying.

Despite all the talk of a la carte solutions, the economics of premium content suggest that the bundle is here to stay, even if it’s delivered through over-the-top (OTT) platforms rather than linear television.

So not only is TV not going anywhere, I see several reasons why the futures of OTT and TV will look a lot alike.

The ‘Shazam Of Targeting’

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2017 at 8:14 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 Lung Huang, head of strategic partnerships at 84.51°.

As a fan of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” there are always parallels to the digital advertising industry that make me laugh uncomfortably at the story lines.

In one episode, two of the characters presented their See Food app to investors, who called it the “Shazam of food,” which was completely counter to the original intent. This feedback enabled them to refocus their app to identify food types, but it ended up only being able to identify “hot dog” or “not hot dog.”

If I was as entrepreneurial as some of the characters on “Silicon Valley,” I would build an app called See Targets, and I would characterize it as the “Shazam of targeting.”

My pitch would go something like this: “What would you say if I told you there is an app that can tell you if you have a good advanced audience segment or a not-good advanced audience segment?”

Ancient History Sees Boost From Header Bidding Analytics

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2017 at 6:00 am.

While header bidding can increase publisher CPMs and revenue, the growing complexity of the implementations makes it harder to differentiate vendor partners.

Ancient History Encyclopedia, for instance, saw CPMs rise 75% after adding header bidding a year ago. The online encyclopedia operates as a nonprofit and relies on advertising for the majority of its revenue.

At the same time, Ancient History lost track of how its 10 partners performed within its Prebid wrapper.

“Compared to the traditional waterfall, where you have a good understanding of which ad networks are showing up in what ad slot, with header bidding felt more difficult to find the right data to optimize,” said Jan van der Crabben, CEO and founder of Ancient History.

The medium-sized publisher didn’t have the resources to build out a tool internally, as many larger publishers do. So when one of its demand partners, Roxot, started sending out rudimentary analytics reports in December, van der Crabben encouraged them to build a more robust reporting platform.

The idea for Prebid analytics was born.

Apple Continues To Dominate The App Store Market; Facebook Is Paying Make-Goods

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

Tip Of The Iceberg

Apple has faced opposition in China, but it’s still the single biggest market for the App Store, passing the US last year. “Now, its effort to wring more revenue from Chinese iPhone users may be setting the company up for more trouble,” writes The Wall Street Journal. Chinese social networks allow small mobile wallet transfers between a user and a site or content creator. Apple will now treat those mobile cash exchanges like in-app purchases, entitling the App Store to a 30% fee. The most popular mobile browsers and platforms in China come with default ad blocking, a trend driven largely by data restrictions, so the “tips” Apple is staking a claim to are a meaningful part of the homegrown Chinese mobile ecosystem. More.

Chipping Away

Facebook is paying make-goods to some advertisers after disclosing that, for over a year, it had miscounted a mobile video ad format. While the impact from a financial perspective was small – just 0.04% of ad impressions on the platform – Facebook’s public concession is a sign that it might be ready to give spenders a little more insight into what’s going on behind its walls. "It's just another little chink in the concrete of their walled garden," one advertiser tells Ad Age. "And it's an additional reason why they need to be compliant with third parties to measure them." More.

Video Scarcity Pushes Publishers To Consider Context – Not Just Reach

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Friday, May 19th, 2017 at 12:24 pm.

Publishers that sell out of video inventory quickly are trying to increase video engagement by improving the quality of the user experience – not just chasing reach at the most cost-effective CPM.

For example, Little Things dumped autoplay, mobile interstitials and outstream in favor of click-to-play.

“We wanted video views to be on the consumer’s terms,” said Justin Festa, chief digital officer for Little Things, at JW Player’s JW Insights event in New York on Thursday.

“By running autoplay, you might [reach your desired] fill rate, but the user is not engaged with the brand the way they would if they raised their hands to watch the video,” he added.

Contrary to what it believed – that losing moneymakers like outstream and autoplay would put a dent in its monetization – Little Things actually improved its CPMs as well as consumers’ average time on site.

Also, viewability rates – which had declined after Little Things moved its video player above the fold – improved when the publisher ran relevant article content before the video player.

In turn, engagement metrics that go beyond video views and completions, such as duration, attention and time spent, helps publishers like Vice determine the content they should produce or syndicate when pre-roll sells out more than a year ahead of time.

IBM IX’s Babs Rangaiah Says Agencies Need To Move The Needle On Business, Not Just Marketing

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Friday, May 19th, 2017 at 6:00 am.

Before he tried on agency life, Babs Rangaiah was a bit of a star on the CPG circuit.

After more than a decade driving media innovation for global CPG Unilever, a shakeup in Unilever’s marketing org last spring led Rangaiah agency-side.

Now, as a partner leading global marketing solutions for IBM’s in-house agency, Interactive Experience (iX), Rangaiah is working on the problems he, as a brand marketing leader, used to hire agencies to solve.

IBM iX recently acquired new capabilities like commerce and design, but Rangaiah predicts the next wave of agency services will focus on artificial intelligence and innovations like blockchain.

“We are very much about looking at a client or brand’s problem and seeing what we can do with technology not as this shiny object, but to really solve problems for consumers,” he said.

Rangaiah spoke with AdExchanger about his first year at IBM after a long stint at Unilever, the trend toward zero-based budgeting and the changing dynamic between agencies, brands and publishers.

AdExchanger: What’s the biggest shift moving from brand to agency-side?

BABS RANGAIAH: The big ad agency used to house everything and it even managed, to some extent, below-the-line agencies. It was fairly straightforward for CMOs and heads of marketing to manage the creative product that came out of the agency and all of the measures that were used to amplify it.

Over the last few years, because of the volume of digital, social and mobile agencies [under one umbrella], it became very difficult and highly complex to put together an integrated program for any brand.

B2B Publishers Need More Of Their Own Ad Exchanges

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, May 19th, 2017 at 12:05 am.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.

Today's column is written by Rob Rasko, founder and CEO at The 614 Group.

Online publishers, now more than ever, must juggle the demands of creating great content while driving revenue. At the heart of this balancing act are consumers, who turn to online publishing for specific reasons based on what they’re doing at that moment.

I recently had the opportunity to shift my focus from the B2C to the B2B side of publishing, which shed light on what I believe is an important topic that isn’t given enough consideration: the importance of having a unique environment for B2B publishers to monetize their inventory.

As marketers put increasing pressure on publishers to deliver targeted audiences, I think the value of B2B audiences will increase. And as that value increases, it must do so in a world where brand safety is paramount.