Month: April 2019

Inside the Democrats’ Plan to Fix Their Crumbling Data Operation

Turns out that the art of being a venture capitalist means never saying no, even if you rarely say yes.

Xaxis technology and partnerships director Nishant Desai will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO San Francisco conference on April 29-30, 2019. Agencies aren’t first-party data owners, cookie trackers or data processors, but they must still keep a handle on online identity while the tech ecosystem shifts underfoot. “The notion of how advertisers identify audiences and what identity… Continue reading »

The post How Xaxis Is Navigating The New Online Identity Landscape appeared first on AdExchanger.

“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 Jodi Daniels, founder and CEO at Red Clover Advisors. Customer data platforms (CDPs) are the latest shiny new thing in marketing technology, helping companies create a single view of their… Continue reading »

The post When Selecting A CDP, Marketers Must Keep Privacy In Mind appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Direct Deposit In a conversation with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, Mark Zuckerberg suggested creating a dedicated Facebook news tab and paying publishers directly to publish there. Watch the video. It’s not the first time Facebook has floated launching a dedicated feed for news… Continue reading »

The post Zuck Ready To Pay Pubs For Content; Alibaba Ad Growth Highlights Amazon’s Opportunity appeared first on AdExchanger.

This article appears in the latest issue of Digiday magazine, a quarterly publication that is part of Digiday+. Members of Digiday+ get access to exclusive content, original research and member events throughout the year. Learn more here.

It’s taken Heineken two years to get to a point where it feels confident enough to dictate terms to the middlemen in its supply chain. From resetting its agency structure to owning its tech stack, the business has put those online media platforms and ad tech vendors on notice in 2019: Deliver better measurement and creativity or lose revenue as middlemen in the advertising ecosystem.

“Previously, we’ve relied on our agencies to do more than what is in our best interests,” says Ron Amram, global media lead at Heineken. “That’s not to say we don’t need agencies; we still do, but we’ve taken more control of those relationships, which means having real-time access to our Facebook buys and getting access to Moat or other campaign data, for example.”

If the last two years were about building a digital capability across Heineken’s marketing teams, the next 12 months are about putting that knowledge to use across all the businesses that handle its budget, says Amran, who outlined his priorities for 2019.

Are you happy with the level of transparency you get?
It’s improved quite dramatically, but we’re not there yet. We’re still seeing dramatic shifts in the levels of quality throughout the opaque marketplace. We have to put more energy into the programmatic world, which involves investing in real-time tracking and real-time optimization. Just because we like a vendor doesn’t mean that vendor stays good — that’s the problem.

What should advertisers do to put more pressure on the industry?
Advertisers need to push toward sourcing the information from vendors that allows them to make better decisions. We have the right to ask for it even though it seems hard to get. There should be an expectation when it comes to both verification and targeting data.

How accommodating have Facebook and Google been?
I don’t think the platforms have been very accommodating, as the issue of duplicated reach is something that can be solved relatively quickly, but those businesses won’t allow it. Whether it’s a data-management platform or other tools, the technologies exist to help address the problems of reach, and yet the platforms have said we can’t use them. We have to balance those frustrations with the need to keep those platforms close even though those businesses keep measurements fuzzy and blurry.

Has that made you reluctant to spend?
The reality is that that stance has gone back and forth. There have been bumps in the road in our relationships with both Facebook and Google, but they are important platforms for us and we’ve seen progress over the last year. Facebook has been strong from a creative perspective, and they’ve helped us to really understand mobile advertising. As an alcohol company, our relationship with Google has been different as they’ve always kept us at arm’s length. There’s a list of products that other advertisers can use that we can’t. That’s been hard for us, but we’ve made progress with Google, specifically when it comes to brand safety and the use of its programmatic stack. We’re building a relationship with Google that’s tied to our transparency agenda and our focus on third-party verification.

Does that mean having a shorter supply chain?
We see our supply chain as multilegged stool. There’s Facebook, Google and YouTube, but we also have good relationships with Adobe’s DSP. We’re looking at how we build more private marketplace deals as part of a wider effort to lock in more of the inventory that we prefer. It means focusing not just on the cost of our programmatic media but also looking at the quality of it. That’s been our focus for less than a year now. Most people walk into programmatic and the primary KPI is cost, which can’t be the case because that’s what leads to the lack of transparency. We’re starting to see other KPIs, whether that’s viewability or using technologies like Grapeshot that allow you to see the content you’re advertising on, that give us a better barometer of quality that we can compare to the cost.

How has the way you buy third-party data from middlemen changed in the wake of the General Data Protection Regulation?
Our focus is on pivoting toward the data that we’re legally allowed to use. For a company that doesn’t have a lot of first-party data we’ve put an increase on it. In some countries, either there’s no third-party data market or it’s starting to dry up. It’s still very usable and accessible in the U.S., but even that may change in the face of GDPR-like legislation. It is clear that we need to own our own data set, and that has to be accurate and usable. We’ve moved toward becoming more of a data company. We’ve not gotten to a place where that data is big enough to have an impact on our programmatic spend. It’s an ambition.

The post ‘We’ve taken more control’: Heineken’s media chief on building capabilities across all its businesses appeared first on Digiday.

Alisha Marie should have been riding high last May. A month earlier, the YouTube star celebrated the 10-year anniversary of her main channel, which at the time had more than seven million subscribers. Instead she was running on empty.

Over the course of the previous decade, Marie’s YouTube channel had grown from a high school hobby into a lucrative livelihood that enabled the 25-year-old to afford to buy her own house. But in building that business, Marie had burnt herself out. Taking a day off was not an option because she felt she needed to be constantly producing the videos that paid her bills. She pushed herself to attend industry events because of the networking opportunities that could lead to a brand deal that might spawn a long-term partnership and sustainable income. But by May 2018 she had pushed herself too hard.

The post ‘Do brands ever check on the welfare of influencers?’: YouTube stars confront mental health issues appeared first on Digiday.

Ad tech has had another casualty. The news of Sizmek’s bankruptcy filing has shaken digital ad executives, who regarded the company’s ad server business as an important contender to Google’s. But the company’s vision of becoming a fully integrated buy-side tech stack was built on a crumbling foundation, according to ad tech sources. What didn’t help is the growing power of big tech in the ad tech space, as well as the likelihood of more brands taking parts of their media buying in-house.

Overall, Sizmek’s bankruptcy filing is a chilling reminder that it’s a challenging time for the overcrowded ad tech market where independent vendors face serious cost pressures to their pricing structures.

Rather than build its own tech Sizmek made a string of small acquisitions from 2011 to 2017, ranging from semantic tech tool Peer49 in 2012, mobile tracking tool Aerify in 2014, and mobile DSP StrikeAd in 2015, to its acquisition of Rocket Fuel for $145 million (£110 million).

“Sizmek was incredibly slow and incompetent entering the programmatic ad space,” said Ari Paparo, CEO of ad tech vendor Beeswax. “While their primary competitors [Google] DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager became a powerhouse solution, Sizmek was on the back foot for years and did a number of small, crappy acquisitions buying two or three DSPs, and didn’t make it work.”

The strategic vision was to build a cohesive buy-side ad tech stack combining DMP, DSP and ad server. Yet the reality of stitching together numerous disparate tech businesses is a tall order. It requires deep pockets to finance the integrations, and huge engineering investment — the kind not many businesses (aside from Google) have.

Sizmek didn’t respond to a direct request for comment but issued a statement on its website: “Importantly, Sizmek is open for business. The U.S. Chapter 11 process – unlike bankruptcy schemes in other geographies – is specifically designed for companies like ours to operate as usual while working to resolve financial issues. Rest assured, we are committed to serving our clients to the same high standard you’ve come to expect from us and are working diligently to ensure our platforms experience as little interruption as possible.”

In 2016, Sizmek was acquired by private equity firm Vector for $122 million (£93 million). A year later, it bought Rocket Fuel — a business that had been dogged by controversy for allowing fraud onto the platform. But which also became known for its insertion order-based, non-transparent ad network model, which raked in massive margins running a managed service business.

Many of the 11 digital ad executives from ad tech vendors, agencies, and consultancies interviewed for this article believe it was the purchase of highly controversial DSP Rocket Fuel in 2017 that sealed Sizmek’s fate. “I consider the acquisition of Rocket Fuel a primary driver of this demise,” said Ruben Schreurs, CEO of digital media consultancy Digital Decisions. “Debranding it and consolidating it into Sizmek didn’t yield the results they expected, and they never managed to effectively compete with the likes of The Trade Desk and others.”

Others were more blunt in their criticism. “The Rocket Fuel acquisition was a massive mistake,” said an ad tech executive who requested anonymity. “It was a poisoned chalice. It’s public record how much dodgy shit they [Rocket Fuel] were doing.”

Of the 48 businesses Sizmek listed as creditors, the top seven are SSPs — including Index Exchange, Rubicon Project, OpenX, and Pubmatic — collectively owed just under $40 million. BidSwitch, which connects SSPs and DSPs was at No. 8. That inventory would have been bought via Sizmek’s DSP Rocket Fuel, albeit branded as Sizmek.

Compared to the glory years of ad tech mergers and acquisitions, Rocket Fuel was sold for a song at $145 million (£110 million) in 2017, a fraction of its peak $2 billion valuation. “They were desperate, and so they acquired RocketFuel, which was clearly on the way down, so it was a bargain,” added Paparo. “Rocket Fuel itself was a tragedy. It went out with a very aggressive salesforce and a non-transparent model. But then agencies realized it wasn’t transparent and probably selling them fraud.”

That loss of trust among some agencies wouldn’t have helped. Agencies have been shedding ad tech partners in order to clean up their ad supply chains, while an increasing number of advertisers have brought larger parts of their media-buying operations in-house.

“The company seems to have lost its way regarding its own identity since the acquisition of certain non-disclosed managed service businesses,” said Craig Tuck, managing director of publisher tech alliance Ozone. “That may have damaged its quest for a transparent way of working.”

Large overheads was another major challenge for the company. Sizmek has a very large workforce spread across three continents, with 14 offices in the U.S., 22 across EMEA, and a further 20 in APAC regions, according to its website. LinkedIn lists more than 1,000 staff to the company.

“That shiny object status is wearing off from ad tech,” said an agency executive who requested anonymity due to the fact their clients use Sizmek. “It’s not as easy as it once was to start an ad tech company and then exit with a huge amount of cash. In the past two years, you could have used the excuse of a soft IPO market but 2019 isn’t profiling itself as such.”

Some agencies fear that there is more bad news to come. After all, Sizmek’s ad server is prevalent among advertisers and transitioning is no simple task. “We’ll have to wait for details and see if them going out of business is an actual risk,” said the same agency executive. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if brands and agencies were already starting to think of a plan B.”

Still, several agency executives spoken still root for Sizmek as an important independent solution that provides necessary competition in a market dominated by Google. “Sizmek is one the few viable partners for ad serving who offer a fuller stack instead of just a point solution,” said a director at a major agency holding group. “It would be good for competition in the market if they found a path through their financial difficulties.”

Even Sizmek rivals, like Adform, haven’t welcomed the news despite the fact they may benefit.

“It does reduce the breadth of choices outside of the walled gardens,” said Jakob Bak, CTO of Adform. “So from an industry point of view that is not welcomed, particularly as this then can lead to an even more dominant position of Google.”

The post ‘It was always a problematic child’: What went wrong for Sizmek appeared first on Digiday.