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Apsalar and Singular Merge With An Eye On Busting Mobile Data Silos MEC CEO Tim Castree: Media Planning And Buying Is A Commodity Jet.com Courts Premium Publishers With Competitive Affiliate Rates WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell Won’t Be Deterred By A Disrupted Market AI Had A Modest Showing At Cannes, But Here Are Some Notable Developments Cannes: Leo Burnett Gets Creative With Data Oath Is Born: AOL Execs Reveal Plans For Mashup With Yahoo Zenith And Magna: Total Ad Spend Growth May Be Soft, But Mobile, Search And Social Are Superstars Facebook Has Its Own Brand Safety Issues. Here’s How It’s Facing Up.

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Google Likely To Get Its $1 Billion-Plus EU Fine From This Week; Podcast Ad Spend Is Increasing Rapidly

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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From Me To EU

The EU is expected to hit Google with a $1 billion-plus fine this week – but the money isn’t even the part that matters. A statement from a Google spokeswoman focuses on the shopper search favoritism raised by EU regulators in this case: “We believe strongly that our innovations in online shopping have been good for shoppers, retailers and competition.” Luther Lowe, VP of public policy at Yelp, tweeted that “sources suggest opinion will be generalized to offer relief to other verticals.” European technology companies brought the case forward, but it was bankrolled by Yelp, Oracle, Expedia and TripAdvisor after failing to make their claims stick with the FTC.

Hear Me Roar

Marketers are heeding the call of the podcast. Podcast ad spend is set to top $220 million this year, an 85% year-over-year increase, according to a report by the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Two years ago, podcast ad spend was $69 million. Traditionally a heavy direct response medium, podcasting is gaining steam with brand awareness campaigns. Dynamic ad insertion (podcasting’s closest cousin to programmatic) also increased its proportion of category ad spend by 51% year over year and now accounts for 41% of the overall pie. Marketers, however, continue to prefer custom host-read ads, as they create a more intimate and authentic connection with the consumer.

Jet.com Courts Premium Publishers With Competitive Affiliate Rates

by Kelly Liyakasa // Posted on Monday, June 26th, 2017 at 2:01 pm.

Jet.com has been quietly pitching publishers on changes to its payment structure related to affiliate commissions.

The message is clear: Work with Jet and it’s prepared to pay you for the privilege.

Affiliate bucks often go to the more established players like Amazon or eBay.

But in order to incentivize publishers to send traffic its way, the younger Walmart-owned ecommerce company is increasing its affiliate commission rates to as high as 15% to 20% in certain product categories via its affiliate network partner Rakuten LinkShare.

It’s not uncommon for rates to dwell in the lower single-digit range across competitors.

Jet.com's affiliate rate increases are an obvious way to lure more premium partners to Jet.com. BuzzFeed is one publisher that’s taking advantage.

In an environment where one product may be sold on multiple ecommerce platforms, a competitive commission rate is one way to earn more business.

And not every advertiser, particularly those in the luxury vertical, has a presence on Amazon or eBay, so it's important for publishers to keep a diversified mix to drive new revenue opportunity, according to Tony Zito, CEO of Rakuten Marketing.

“We’re less than two years old at Jet.com, so we’re always looking for ways to get the brand out there and create deeper relationships with publishing partners,” said Sumaiya Balbale, VP of marketing for Jet.com. “It was clear to us that content-enabled commerce is a huge trend in the industry and an area of the business that’s evolving.”

Jet.com isn’t sharing which categories earn higher affiliate commission rates, only that it offers numerous variables in publisher cuts.

Will Cannes Look Any Different Next Year?

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Monday, June 26th, 2017 at 1:34 pm.

As agencies struggle to transform under continued fee pressure from clients, executives are reassessing whether descending on the French Riviera for a week of endless rosé and parties on yachts sends the right message about the state of the industry.

“If clients are using zero-based budgeting, let's use it for Cannes,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told AdExchanger in an interview. “Starting from scratch, would we do it in Cannes in the middle of June? We would come up with something different.”

Some agency CEOs agree. The most notable digression came from Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun, who announced last week that the group would not enter the Cannes Lions awards at next year’s festival and instead reinvest the savings in an artificial intelligence platform.

Agency and marketer executives attending the Cannes Lions festival last week contemplated the appropriateness of it all. Here their thoughts.

Keith Weed, CMO, Unilever
Tim Castree, CEO, MEC-Maxus
Nigel Morris, CEO, Dentsu Aegis Network Americas
Cindy Gustafson, Chief Strategy Officer, Mindshare

Digital’s Brand-Safety Woes And Lessons From TV

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, June 26th, 2017 at 11:00 am.

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

Today’s column is written by Kevin O’Reilly, chief technology officer at TVSquared.

Digital has borne the brunt of recent brand-safety issues. While there’s been a lot of talk about offline taking cues from online to improve ad measurement and optimization, in the case of brand safety, digital can learn a lot from TV.

TV advertisers still have enormous power and control. That was made abundantly clear earlier this year when Mercedes pulled its ad spend from “The O’Reilly Factor” following disturbing allegations of sexual harassment against host Bill O’Reilly. More than 50 other advertisers followed suit, and despite the program bringing in nearly 20% of the network’s ad revenue, Fox ousted O’Reilly after 20 years.

While digital continues to work out the brand-safety kinks, we may see some slowdown among advertisers migrating from TV to digital. In the short term, there might even be a reversal – with global brands following the likes of P&G coming back to TV after disappointing digital ad experiences.

But while “the death of TV” makes for a great headline, the reality is that the medium isn’t going anywhere. For advertisers, TV provides a guaranteed audience, along with content protection and, more recently, real-time measurement, targeting and optimization.

SAP’s CMO: Every Company Is A Technology Company

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Monday, June 26th, 2017 at 7:00 am.

As the marketing chief at a sprawling enterprise software company, SAP CMO Maggie Chan Jones has unique insight into marketer pain points. At the top of the list: fragmentation.

“There are thousands of marketing technology providers across different marketing functions,” Jones said. “One of the biggest headaches a marketer has is trying to sell one customer story across so many different systems that may or may not be talking to each other.”

Cross-channel communication is a “very tall order” for a CMO and, increasingly, the chief information officer, she said. The two roles are growing closer, both out of necessity and as part of a natural evolution within the C-suite.

“Multiple people in an organization influence a technology decision-making process and purchase, from finance to sales and marketing to human resources,” Jones said. “Today, everything touches technology, and in a way, that makes every company a technology company.”

AdExchanger caught up with Jones.

For Some Publishers, User Experience Trumps Revenue

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Monday, June 26th, 2017 at 5:00 am.

Removing a bad ad unit can mean that publishers take a big revenue hit.

The most intrusive ad units often please advertisers and drive large amounts of revenue. And a heavy ad load brings in more revenue per page view.

So how do publishers balance the two? And when do they decide to pull the plug on an ad experience that just isn’t working for their readers?

Publishers like The Washington Post, Fusion Media Group and Time Inc. have all removed ad units to improve the user experience.

And in some cases, the short-term pain leads to long-term gains.

How SunTrust Bank’s CMO Uses Data To Start A Movement

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Monday, June 26th, 2017 at 12:30 am.

Agency execs who grumble about marketing chiefs not understanding technology have likely not met SunTrust Bank's CMO Susan Somersille Johnson.

Johnson, who has a B.S. in engineering from Harvard and an MBA from the Wharton School, spent the early '90s at Apple, where she helped develop the PowerBook product and the pricing strategy for Japan.

From there, she went to other tech companies – Fujitsu, Nuance and Nokia – where she did both product management and marketing. But at SunTrust Banks, Johnson is working in a different world, and her latest campaign – onUp, which seeks to instill in consumers a sense of financial confidence – isn’t so much a campaign as it is a movement.

The ads for onUp, Johnson noted, don’t even showcase a product, but the company is bulling ahead. In April, SunTrust launched the second phase of the onUp campaign, at the same time the Atlanta Braves’ new stadium SunTrust Park opened.

Amazon Plans Ads Packages For NFL Games; Google Will Stop Scanning Emails For Ad Targeting Data

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, June 26th, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

Amazon’s Convergence

Amazon plans to charge up to $2.8 million for ad packages surrounding the 10 Thursday night NFL games it will stream live this year, Reuters reports. According to unnamed sources, “Buyers also get to run ads on Amazon.com throughout the football season, which runs from September to February.” Amazon paid $50 million for the streaming rights, and “It is unclear that the sale of ads will offset the cost of acquiring the rights to stream the games.” But profit is a secondary motive for Amazon’s entertainment platform. More.

B2B FTW!

Google will no longer scan Gmail users’ emails and use the data for ad targeting. The new edict comes from the enterprise cloud team – not the ads group. Bloomberg reports that “paying Gmail users never received the email-scanning ads like the free version of the program, but some business customers were confused by the distinction and its privacy implications.” Says Google cloud exec Diane Greene, “What we’re going to do is make it unambiguous.” More at Bloomberg.

WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell Won’t Be Deterred By A Disrupted Market

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Sunday, June 25th, 2017 at 3:39 pm.

“There are three big issues: technological disruption, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and activist investors,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told AdExchanger at the Cannes Lions festival.

“The first involves continuous experimentation," he said, and WPP has certainly walked the talk on that front. Under Sorrell's leadership, the company has invested in tech far more aggressively than its rivals, spending well over $1 billion on ad tech alone over the years. Most recently, it invested in Celtra alongside key client Unilever.

This interview kicks off on the topic of competitor Publicis Groupe's decision to pull out of Cannes next year.

AdExchanger: Today, you said a boycott of Cannes isn’t the answer, but its high cost, broad focus and location need to change. Do you expect these things to happen by next year?

The boycott disenfranchises the creative and client community. Clients like winning awards. They like to receive applause from their peers. It’s like the Oscars or the Super Bowl. All I’m saying is, I don’t think it’s going to work.

If clients are using ZBB, let's use it for Cannes. Starting from scratch, would we do it in Cannes in the middle of June? We would come up with something different.

You said the focus has been lost.