Month: January 2019

Freight trains take time to build steam. That’s your metaphor for what’s to come in 2019 for the General Data Protection Regulation. “I think people were expecting a massive fine on Day One,” said Forrester principal analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo, “[but] these investigations take time.” Data protection authorities (DPAs) across Europe have their hands full fielding… Continue reading »

The post GDPR Will Pick Up Momentum In 2019 appeared first on AdExchanger.

Andy Main, head of Deloitte Digital, is a little tired of hearing people say consultancies are trying to muscle the agencies off of Madison Avenue. “I’d actually say the agencies are trying to copy the Deloitte Digitals of the world,” Main said. “And when someone copies you, I guess you should be flattered.” Unlike Accenture,… Continue reading »

The post Deloitte Digital: ‘We’re Setting The Tone For The Future, Not Trying To Invade And Take Over Agencies’ appeared first on AdExchanger.

Over half of publishers said they are planning to increase their investments in programmatic ad technologies next year, according to Digiday research.

As more digital ad dollars are transacted programmatically, publishers are doing everything in their power to make their programmatic offerings as attractive as possible to buyers, and to ensure they’re wringing as much value as possible from their inventory.

The post Digiday Research: Publishers will boost spending on ad tech in 2019 appeared first on Digiday.

In pursuit of greater efficiencies, targeting capabilities and more control, advertisers will continue to grow their investment in programmatic buying next year.

Digiday Research surveyed 469 brand and agency media buyers in November to understand how their spending on programmatic advertising will change in 2019, and the trends and dynamics they expect to see across the market. The full results of the survey are available for Digiday+ subscribers below.

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The post Digiday Research Data Pack: The state of programmatic media buying appeared first on Digiday.

“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 Justin Scarborough, programmatic media director at PMG. Banner ads have reigned over programmatic for years. Although demand-side platforms have been furiously expanding into emerging formats such as connected TV (CTV), digital out… Continue reading »

The post Move Over, Banner Ads appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. F Is For Fake Last year was a point of “inversion” for the Internet, which has become oversaturated with malicious nonhuman traffic, ad fraud, fake news, falsely reported metrics and other forms of digital unreality, according to a New York Magazine story. It was… Continue reading »

The post The Industry Faces Fakery On The Internet; Amazon Cozies Up To The Government appeared first on AdExchanger.

The ad server, arbiter of which ad runs where, has become more important for TV networks in managing their widely dispersed digital inventory, unifying their traditional and digital ad sales and maximizing their revenue across both their linear TV channels and over-the-top streaming properties.

For Univision, the video ad server is central to the TV network’s push to migrate more of its direct sales to programmatic guaranteed in 2019. It was also instrumental in Univision adopting programmatic for its video sales in the third quarter of 2018, according to Matt Kaplan, svp of digital ad sales at Univision. In the spring, Univision began using Google’s Google Ad Manager ad server because it’s more capable of managing the network’s YouTube inventory than an ad server not owned by Google — “for obvious reasons,” Kaplan said. That move has enabled Univision to aggregate its digital video inventory across YouTube, third-party syndication partners such as Verizon Media Group (née Oath) and its own digital properties.

The post ‘The linchpin to the future’: TV networks look to video ad servers to manage traditional-digital convergence appeared first on Digiday.

Rob Goldman joined the growth team at Facebook in 2012, the same year that News Feed ads launched. Six years later, he’s a vp on the ads team and has focused his efforts on perfecting the ad ecosystem amid a year of problems. From ongoing backlash of the 2016 presidential election, Cambridge Analytica, 50 million accounts hacked and more, Goldman’s product roadmap got somewhat sidetracked with ad transparency efforts.

“All of our [work on brand safety] is in response to our dialogues with our big advertisers. We’re trying to work with them to give them the tools so they feel comfortable where their brand is,” Goldman said.

Goldman reflected on the changes they made in the next year, shared what’s left to build and predicted what we’ll see from advertisers in 2019. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Facebook had a year of scandals. You’re still in the midst of a bunch. How has it affected your job? Unlike YouTube’s scandals with advertisers, you don’t see pulling dollars. Why do you think that’s so?
We’ve invested huge amounts of resources in working on some of the problems. Not all of them are directly related to ads, but many of them are. One good example in terms of important work we’ve done over the last year is the work we did around ads transparency and election integrity. Facebook is leading the way in the industry on both those topics. All ads on Facebook are transparent now. That’s brand new. That’s a different kind of world than the world we lived in before. That’s currently all running ads visible on their page, and we’re going a big step beyond that into archives, searchable, keyword-based archives of all the ads that have anything to do with election or issues of national importance. The level of transparency there is extraordinary. We had to redeploy all kinds of resources and invest in getting that all together before the U.S. midterms. That’s just one example of how some of the broader events of the last 18 months have actually had a pretty direct impact on the ads team and our priorities and investment in our work.

When it comes to other brand-safety concerns, specifically trusting measurement and making sure that content isn’t next to anything scandalous, you’ve made some steps with accreditation and more third-party partnerships. What’s next? 
Protecting people and advertisers is the most important thing we do at Facebook. It’s ultimately what is going to rehabilitate our brand and our efforts in doing really good work in the areas that relate to safety and trust. We don’t want bad content, especially advertising bad content, on our platform. We think if people aren’t happy by the content they see, advertisers won’t be happy about the content they see. So huge amounts of investment across the company work to try to identify and remove bad content. Not all of that is happening on the ads team as you might imagine. A lot of that is happening in other parts of the company, but it’s really important that the bad content is off the platform. We’re working really hard on that, and we’re making good progress on that. Beyond that, though, we still want advertisers to have control and choice and third-party verification and vendors and all the support that they need to make sure that their ads run in places that they’re happy with that they get ROIs that they’re happy with.

More and more money is going into digital advertising. Facebook has a huge chunk of that. Obviously, there’s also Google and Amazon. How did we get here? 
Nobody wants to live in a world where you need to be a technically sophisticated person in order to be an effective marketer or an effective entrepreneur. That’s, unfortunately, a little bit of the world we’re in, and I think it’s going to change quite a bit in the near future. It’s going to be much more simple, and I think people will just start out with a good idea, bring it to a platform like ours or for some of other digital platforms and then very quickly know whether or not your idea resonates with people and why and sort of get a really good roadmap for how you can grow and build upon your idea into a business success.

We’ve seen the rise of direct-to-consumer brands, companies that have invested so much of their money on your platform. What’s next for companies that want to be the next Away, for example?
I think the direct-to-consumer boom comes very much from what I just described: measurability. The fact that you are able to measure your outcomes in this new way and the fact that digital technology is really enabling that. There’s a couple of misconceptions I want to clear up there. I think sometimes these are referred to as direct marketing as though they aren’t also awesome brands. There’s a dichotomy in people’s minds that there’s DR advertisers and there are brand advertisers and they’re different. It’s important to note that these direct-to-consumer brands are extremely strong brands in their own right. Just because they have a direct relationship with the consumer doesn’t mean they’re not new, powerful and effective brands.

What are your predictions for 2019?
I think new brands will break through, win consumers’ hearts and make their names using primarily Stories. More advertisers will get on board with the brilliant basics: measuring and optimizing to drive brand success. I also think globalization is the new launch. Brands will go global almost right out of the gate.

The post Facebook’s Rob Goldman: DTC brands aren’t just good direct marketers appeared first on Digiday.

When Walker & Company, the direct-to-consumer men and women’s health and beauty brand (formerly Bevel), sold to P&G this month, it was bittersweet.

The company will now have the distribution network, budget and resources of one of the industry’s biggest corporations, elevating a brand designated for people of color to much more mass exposure. But after raising $33.3 million in four rounds of venture funding, Walker & Company is said to have sold to P&G at a price that earned its investors the majority, but not all, of their money back, according to Recode.

The post ‘More like reality’: In 2019, hot DTC brands face pressures to prove profitability appeared first on Digiday.

There is no Santa Claus. If there were, then by now advertisers and media companies would have gotten the complete cross-platform measurement product they’ve been clamoring for: “The one impression to rule them all, defined one way that fits everywhere,” as described by Ed Gaffney, director of implementation research and marketplace analytics at GroupM. “Unfortunately it doesn’t exist.”

Industry executives continue to hold out hope that something at least approaching true cross-platform measurement is attainable. That hope is not unwarranted. After circling one another for years, the rivalry between Comscore and Nielsen to become the industry’s chosen cross-platform measurement provider has heated up. In 2018, both companies appointed longtime advertising executives to be their respective CEOs — Comscore with Bryan Wiener and Nielsen with David Kenny — and steer them past the corporate blunders that have dogged each company in recent years.

In 2019, both companies plan to roll out new measurement tools to give advertisers and media companies an equal look at cross-platform video audiences, whether people are watching a show or see an ad on linear TV or a streaming videos service.

Comscore introduced Campaign Ratings in September to measure video ad delivery across traditional TV, connected TV, desktop and mobile for advertisers. Early in the first quarter of 2019, Comscore will introduce a similar measurement product for media companies, which would be able to measure video content delivery using the same methodology as the ad product, said Comscore CEO Bryan Wiener. Nielsen, meanwhile, plans to syndicate data from its Total Content Ratings product, which measures video viewership across traditional TV and digital, to ad buyers, said Kelly Abcarian, svp of product leadership at Nielsen.

The two products signal how the two measurement companies coming from different backgrounds — Nielsen from traditional TV and Comscore’s from digital — are on a collision path.

“Where we are with cross-platform measurement is Comscore and Nielsen are sort of the only games in town from the traditional measurement side. They started from opposite directions, and cross-platform measurement is in the middle, and nobody’s made it into the middle yet,” said Jonathan Steuer, chief research officer at Omnicom Media Group.

Both companies racing to establish strengths in each other’s domain. Comscore is pressed to provide the in-depth person-based measurement that Nielsen’s panels provide, while Nielsen must aggregate more data to augment its panels and provide more minute measurement at the device level.

“Everything is queued up for something to happen,” said Steuer.

It has to because it needs to. For years, media companies ranging from NBCUniversal to BuzzFeed have argued that third-party measurement providers are unable to adequately assess the reach of their content — especially as that content spreads to even more platforms and places online. Similarly, advertisers have had to cobble together measurements from various providers to make their own calculations of who saw their ad and where.

Both media companies and marketers have been honest about the industry’s shortcomings, acknowledging that they are often trying to nail down a moving target as new platforms continue to pop up. They also recognize that both Comscore and Nielsen have dealt with corporate struggles — accounting issues at Comscore, a GDPR-related investor lawsuit filed against Nielsen and management upheaval at both companies — that may have detracted from their measurement businesses. Both companies “moved 20 percent of the way to the middle and stalled,” said Steuer.

“Because of our own self-imposed struggles and financial irregularities, nothing happened for years,” said Wiener, who spent 13 years as CEO and then executive chairman of Dentsu Aegis Network’s 360i. (Nielsen was unable to make its CEO David Kenny, the former Digitas CEO, available for an interview by press time.)

That’s not to say that nothing at all has happened to improve cross-platform measurement in recent years. For example, both Comscore and Nielsen now measure OTT video viewing.

“While it’s certainly not exhaustive or all-inclusive, it’s there in a way that we didn’t see in 2017,” said Eric Cavanaugh, svp of digital marketplace intelligence for data sciences practice at Publicis Media.

The progress in measuring streaming video is indicative of the incremental progress that industry executives expect to see from Comscore and Nielsen in 2019, as opposed to something major such as a move away from panel-based measurement. “To switch that to anything different, that’s a revolution that will be expensive and bloody,” said Gaffney.

Such a switch is unlikely while Comscore and Nielsen each remain public companies with investors that may not take kindly to drastic moves. But it would also be largely unwelcome among ad buyers.

Often derided in light of the ability to directly measure digital content and advertising through tracking pixels and other means, panels allow companies to gather information — including people’s age and gender while also connecting the dots on the content that an individual consumes — that a piece of code cannot collect. “You need the panel for the personification of large sets of household data,” said Gaffney.

For their parts, neither Comscore nor Nielsen is looking to eliminate panel-based measurement.

“We believe in panels. The biggest difference between us and that other company you’re going to talk about is we believe that we’re data-first and the panel is used to inform the data set versus the panel being at the crux and using the data at the outskirts,” said Wiener.

“The panel will continue to underpin measurement and be the truth set,” said Abcarian. Nielsen is collecting more data through cable TV set-top boxes and smart TVs through its acquisition of automatic content recognition company Gracenote. But as more people cut the cord, Nielsen sees its panel as playing “a critical role” in being able to estimate the entire viewing population, she said.

Given the differences in Comscore’s and Nielsen’s approaches and the work that both companies still need to do to address their respective limitations, the expectation that either will emerge as the one, true cross-platform measurement provider is fading.

“I don’t think we’re going to have one major provider going forward. I think it’s going to be more fragmented,” said Gaffney.

There’s no Easter Bunny, either.

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