The most sophisticated marketers want direct deals with exchanges; it’s hard to wean yourself from Google; and Facebook’s political ads policies continue to roil the public.
This week on The Big Story, it’s all about relationships – both building them and moving on from them.
First, we look at how some big brands – including P&G, L’Oréal, T-Mobile and Bayer – are trying to strike deals with exchanges to get log-level data. For the brands, it’s a way to get smarter about their bidding strategies. For exchanges, they get closer to marketers, and possibly stave off the threat of being shut off in an era when everyone’s trying to whittle down their vendor list.
But just because you have log-level data doesn’t mean you’ll know what to do with it, and accommodating this changing relationship status requires an outlay of resources for brands.
Speaking of companies that want to control their own destiny, it’s not hard to find brands and publishers who are uncomfortable with their reliance on Google. But there’s no denying that Google’s integrated ad stack works really well and can do things that other vendors’ tech simply cannot.
Quitting Google, as Spotify recently realized, will result in a revenue hit, even if the Google offering in question is a relatively small component of the overall stack. Should Spotify’s misadventure migrating off of Google’s now defunct order management system deter others from trying something similar – or did Spotify just lose out because it failed to properly prepare for the change?
In many ways, Spotify’s misadventure is a cautionary tale, especially for those looking to move on from Google’s ad server – a much more crucial piece of a company’s ad tech stack than order management. On the other hand, it’s possible that Spotify simply made a last-minute decision and was ill-prepared for the move. We discuss.
Finally, the Facebook political ads saga continues. On Wednesday – before this podcast was recorded – Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey dunked on Facebook when he announced that Twitter will soon stop accepting political ads. Meanwhile, filmmaker Aaron Sorkin – and screenwriter of “The Social Network” – penned a scathing takedown published in The New York Times pointing out the hypocrisy of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s free speech stance.
