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The Big Story: Falling Down

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When the world changes, sometimes you need to change with it.

But evolution doesn’t always happen – or sometimes you just end up moving in the wrong direction.

This week on “The Big Story,” AdExchanger looks at RockYou’s bankruptcy and, on a much larger scale, the major pain at Kraft Heinz.

With RockYou, the publisher-slash-ad net wasn’t able to maintain its three lines of business as marketers started demanding quality, viewable inventory. The AdExchanger team takes a look into how the call for better inventory hit RockYou’s revenues as a publisher, as a Facebook game developer and, most notably, as an ad network.

Meanwhile, in marketer land, Kraft Heinz has its own problems. A few years back, the Brazilian investment firm 3G Capital blew into town with the bold strategy of … cutting back on everything. With sharply reduced marketing investment, Kraft Heinz failed to grow. It took a $15 billion write down on its iconic Kraft and Oscar Mayer.

AdExchanger sifts through the empty bottles of ketchup and expired boxes of mac and cheese to see where the CPG giant went wrong and what its future holds.

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