Month: May 2023

As gaming expands its hold on entertainment and popular culture, the way that gamers engage with the medium is becoming more inherently social — and gamers’ spending habits are evolving as a result.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of consumers to hunker down at home, leading to an explosion of gaming activity between 2020 and 2022. As the world reopened last year, these newly minted gamers re-emerged, but retained their interest in connecting with others via games, both virtually and physically. 

The marketing data firm AnalyticsIQ describes social gaming as the tendency to meet someone in real life after first meeting them through video game interactions. These days, more people than ever make new friends through gaming environments and experiences.

To learn more about how the rise of social gaming has impacted consumers’ gaming and spending activities, Digiday worked with AnalyticsIQ to pull exclusive data from its upcoming Social Gamers Research Report, which polled roughly 8,500 self-identified social gamers about their motivations for gaming and spending money on games.

Who are social gamers?

Social gaming is very much a generational pursuit, as shown by the demographic data above. Millennials and members of Gen Z are much more likely than older gamers to develop real-life friendships via games. This means social gaming provides a window into how how gaming activity will take shape in the future. As more members of Gen Z age into brands’ coveted 18-34 demographic, the majority of them will be social gamers, so it is imperative for marketers to understand how this category of gamer thinks.

“Consumers are more than just the numbers of their demographics and their purchase behavior,” said Travis Meeks, vp of marketing at AnalyticsIQ. “These are the folks that have turned online friends into real-life friends, so maybe looking into live events, or more in-person experiences, is another way to reach them.”

Social gamers are relatively likely to play subscription-based games

Free-to-play and live-service games are on the rise, and social gamers account for a significant part of that shift. 62 percent of social gamers told AnalyticsIQ that they were likely to play subscription-based games, higher than the roughly 50 percent of gamers who told YouGov that they were interested in this category last year. This makes sense: These days, the most inherently social and massively multiplayer games, including titles like “Fortnite” and “Among Us,” are free-to-play to encourage more players to join in. As social gaming continues to rise, these free-to-play, massively multiplayer games will reap the benefits.

“In a multiplayer game, you are the content — the players are the content,” said Ivan Trancik, CEO of the gaming growth company SuperScale. “If you lose players, this is usually when you start turning off the servers.”

Social gamers game much more frequently than non-social gamers

Data from AnalyticsIQ’s report shows that social gamers are much more likely to play on a daily basis than non-social gamers. 59 percent of social gamers play daily, compared to 43 percent of non-social gamers. The data suggests that social interaction plays a key role in driving the most passionate gamers to fire up their PCs or consoles — which is relevant data for any game developer looking to capture the attention of increasingly fickle entertainment consumers.

Now and in the future, game developers that include more opportunities for genuine social interaction in their titles will be rewarded by higher engagement — a crucial metric as subscriptions and in-game purchases become developers’ primary revenue streams.

Social gamers are very open to new streaming and non-traditional TV services

80 percent of social gamers are in the market to purchases non-traditional TV services, and over 64 percent are highly likely to subscribe to new streaming services. Additionally, AnalyticsIQ’s report found that social gamers are 300 percent more likely to switch streaming services in the next 12 months than the average consumer. Social gamers are relatively fickle consumers, but they represent a ripe opportunity for streaming services looking to expand their user bases.

As gaming becomes a central battleground of the streaming wars and platforms such as Netflix step up their internal game development divisions, the streamers that encourage social interaction through their gaming content could be the ones best-positioned to secure the loyalty of the expanding social gaming demographic.

“These social butterflies are absolutely more willing to meet new people, more open to a conversation with someone else, more open to try new things,” Meeks said.

Roblox is still developing its advertising offerings — but data from its advertising beta test, shared exclusively with Digiday, indicates that the platform’s Portals advertising product results in considerable organic lift for brands, a metric that has encouraged both Roblox and its partners as it progresses toward the full rollout of ads later this year.

Roblox announced that advertisements would be coming to its virtual experience platform last year, with Roblox ads coming in the form of digital billboards, video ads and “Portals” that allow users to jump from one experience to another. Since the announcement, Roblox has been beta testing its advertising offerings with a select group of brand partners, including Puma and the NFL.

In a data poll that ran between Feb. 1 and March 12, Roblox worked with over a dozen brands across verticals such as fashion, sports, entertainment and retail to measure the organic lift generated by its in-game Portals. The test involved portal activity by millions of users across Roblox’s 180 supported countries and territories.

The poll discovered that nine percent of users who discovered a branded experience through a Portal later returned to that experience with a friend — in other words, that brands can generally factor in a nearly ten percent increase on the traffic and engagement figures they see through Portal ads. Roblox also found that up to 20 percent of users were redeeming digital items in experiences they joined via Portals.

“We also noticed an uptick in homepage discovery during the beta test, which further highlights the potential lift of the immersive ad unit,” said Ivan Dashkov, head of Web3 at Puma. “Overall, we’re happy with the results of the beta test, and we’re excited to explore more opportunities to collaborate with Roblox in the future.”

While speaking to this reporter during last week’s Digiday Gaming Advertising Forum, Roblox head of immersive media solutions Ashley McCollum described how the platform measured the organic lift capabilities of Portal ads.

“We used a common denominator — the total users — to come up with the aggregate percent of, one, Portal users organically returning to those experiences after they’ve been portaled, and then number two, Portal users’ friends who joined them in the experience,” McCollum said. “The brand didn’t have to pay for that — that was an organic exposure that came as a result of the paid campaign.”

Roblox’s organic lift numbers demonstrate one of the platform’s core strengths as it moves toward the full rollout of its ad offerings — that ads in Roblox, and particularly formats such as Portals, are couched inside engaging gaming experiences in which users actually want to spend meaningful time. Roblox and its beta advertisers are confident that simply “portaling” users into a branded experience is enough to get those users to connect with brands in a more long-lasting way.

“Experiences in Roblox have the opportunity to engage far more emotionally, and have the dwell time of those engagements be far longer than what an advertising one is,” said Malph Minns, managing director of the agency Strive Sponsorship. “But the investment of your time, and indeed the cost of those experiences, can be a lot more than traditional advertising.”

Roblox’s incoming ad offerings represent an opportunity for brands to take advantage of the deeper engagement of Roblox experiences without necessarily having to spend months and thousands of dollars developing their own custom-branded experiences. And for the brands that do choose to go the immersive experience route, Portal ads appear to be able to significantly increase traffic and engagement inside them, both via paid acquisition and organic lift.

“Portals have helped the NFL reach and convert a high percentage of new users into our experiences,” said Ed Kiang, vp of video gaming at the NFL. “As a direct result, we have witnessed organic return visits and a strong UGC item redemption rate, fueling NFL fandom across the entire Roblox ecosystem.”

The most insightful customer data sits at the heart of commerce media — but that doesn’t mean advertisers always get the insights they’re looking for. And even though agency holding companies have moved to bolster their positions in the retail arena, analysts agree the space is very much still in its infancy when it comes to the sophistication of data insights available.

“It is early innings for what brands are actually getting versus expectations in retail media,” said Jon Flugstad, associate partner at McKinsey & Co., who last year coauthored a comprehensive study on the topic. 

“The best media networks are actually measuring in a reasonably sophisticated way and running campaigns that deliver an incremental rollout as measurement,” he explained. “Others will provide a simpler ROAS measurement with some parameters around timing and attribution to when the ad was seen and whether it’s credited to the campaign or not. And others are, perhaps, in the early stages and have a channel level kind of last-touch attribution. So, there’s a spectrum of sophistication across media networks.”

Generally, brands would like more than the KPIs they currently get from commerce media, according to the analyst. For example, advertisers would eventually like the ability to meet commerce media operators in a clean room with their audiences to ensure they’re not duplicating audience or duplicating reach across multiple media networks.

“There’s what [advertisers] are asking for and then what they hold us accountable for, so it’s kind of an interesting intersection,” said Elizabeth Marsten, who, as group director of marketplace strategic services at the performance marketing firm Tinuiti, collaborates with retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Kroger on areas like service expansion, sales and marketing, and product development. 

The two areas marketers are most focused on now are incrementality for new brands and whether those brands can dedupe across retailers, said Marsten — who was quick to add, “No one is there yet.”

What clients demand may have accelerated along the commerce media timeline, but agencies seem to be catching their collective breath at the moment. “We’re catching up, in a sense, of where we’re at,” Marsten said. “There’s a little bit of looking around and going, alright, so what should we build next?”

Agencies’ ambitions seem to have met with the limited reality of the still-nascent space.

As Marsten explained, “When you do your audience planning and you go and activate with The Trade Desk or Walmart or [Target’s] Roundel or whatever, you can have a little more confidence in who you’re targeting and whether you’re reaching that audience. Then there are the data partners that are more about third-party measurement solutions. So, how do I bring all those things into one place and look at them together? I would say nobody really has a great answer for that. There are a lot of brands I’ve talked to that are kind of piecemealing it together right now because there’s no one solution.”

Advertisers are highly reliant on media and performance agencies to walk them through the myriad offerings.

Commerce media platforms are essentially walled gardens, said Paul Verna, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence — and brands need agencies to co-pilot. “Agencies that develop expertise in navigating the landscape can provide a lot of value, as I think a lot of marketers are overwhelmed with, what do I do, how many should I invest in, which ones, what makes sense?” he explained.

“Getting the most out of marketing spend on each of those networks requires a lot of data crunching, a lot of knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of each network — and actually it requires, in many cases, working around the limitations of the data that’s reported by the networks,” he added.

Jay Pattisall, vp and principal analyst at Forrester, noted that the flurry of acquisitions, startups and partnerships in the space in recent years — including Publicis with Epsilon, CitrusAd and Profitero; IPG with Acxiom, Dentsu with Merkle; and Omnicom with Omni — laid the groundwork for agencies’ robust presence in retail media. “They’ve acquired the technology to give them a robust understanding of their target audiences with third- and first-party data, and then be able to go out and activate those audiences in the marketplace,” he said.

Publicis has been especially ambitious staking its claim in the retail sphere, beginning in 2019 with the purchase of Epsilon (a deal valued at $4.4 billion), followed by the acquisitions of CitrusAd in 2021 and Profitero in 2022. “We’re continuing to benchmark a few of the really tremendous strides that retailers have been making and partnering on and developing the right kinds of integrations to improve how our agencies measure with integrity to help answer critical client concerns,” said Paul Williams, head of commerce product strategy and business development at Publicis Commerce. “We’re seeing the timeline move forward very quickly.”

That means an evolution from zeroing in on specific retailer datasets and capabilities to looking more at the macro level of how retailers are “dynamically related,” he explained, “and kind of threading the needle on managing across multiple retailers and sometimes disparate KPIs. So, it’s really tackling a bigger basket than how maybe we were compartmentalizing things in the past.”

Echoing Marsten, Dan Hagen, global head of media experience at Havas Media Group, said one of the most critical things to consider when it comes to commerce media is incrementality — or, as he put it, “Has our activity driven growth or are we simply targeting people who were already going to buy a product and claiming a great ROAS, with zero actual value?” That led to the creation of Havas Media’s Multi-Incrementality Modeling solution, a privacy-first, unified measurement approach that combines lift experiments, regression-based attribution and data-driven attribution approaches to produce daily, creative-level reports of digital ads’ incremental ROI.

While incrementality has always been a challenge, it is beginning to gain more traction because of the sheer growth of commerce media and the proliferation of marketplaces, DTC and social commerce, increasing the number of channels that need to be unpicked and understood from a contribution perspective, Hagen explained.

Do the holding companies that have invested heavily in the space have an edge? Clearly, owning huge datasets offers advantages to those agency groups in terms of easy access to customer information. But, Hagen argued, it can also be “a millstone around their necks.”

“For many categories, it isn’t flexible enough to deliver advantages,” said Hagen, who described Havas’ strategy as partnering and building “to ensure our clients have solutions that fit their objectives, their tech maturity and their geographical footprint.”

Havas Media partners with several clean room technical solutions, then fills them with the appropriate datasets on a market and client basis, Hagen explained, adding that clean rooms are being employed across several use cases ranging from audience segmentation and insight to enrichment, activation and complex analytics. 

“As the landscape becomes increasingly complex, the relatively simple concept of deduplication across multiple marketplaces is a particular use case for several of our clients and plays back to the idea of incrementality,” Hagen said. 

So, what of the future for agencies and retail media? 

Amy Lanzi, COO of Publicis Commerce, noted that the space tends to get “a bad rap because it’s related to a, quote, tax that a brand has had to spend.” That perception — like the evolution of the space itself — is changing quickly. Added Lanzi, “I think it’s now going to be much more of a fantastic opportunity.”

On the final day of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2023 NewFronts, social media and video platforms TikTok, Meta and Vevo announced new ad products and media planning tools, while Condé Nast showcased its exclusive access to popular live events.

The key details:

• Meta brings AR ads to Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels and Facebook Stories
• Brands can now buy ads on specific publishers’ TikTok content
• One of the few publishers presenting at the NewFronts this year, Condé Nast promoted live event coverage
• Vevo announced new ad tools and products, and teased its branded content studio
• Read Digiday’s briefings on Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3 of the NewFronts, if you missed them

Meta came to the NewFronts – but forgot the metaverse

When Meta took the stage on Thursday, executives spent plenty of time talking about the growth of Reels across Instagram and Facebook and how the company is integrating AI into various ad products. The company also touted the growth of its creator marketplace, which competes with one TikTok announced last fall and another that Snap announced at its own NewFront earlier this week. However, there was that “M” word that nobody used: “Metaverse.”

During its NewFronts event, Meta pitched a number of new ad products for marketers. Along with a new way to pause a Reel ad for in-app reviews — and ways for users to swipe through multiple product images within the same Reels ad — the company also announced it’s bringing augmented reality ads to Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels and Facebook Stories. The expanded AR ads offering follows Meta’s introduction of AR ads last fall for Instagram’ news feed and Stories, all pretty similar to what Snapchat has had for years as a pioneer of AR based advertising.

Brands can now buy ads in publishers’ TikTok content

TikTok announced a new ad offering to brands at its closed-door NewFront presentation on Thursday. The offering, called Pulse Premiere, will let advertisers buy ads placed directly after videos from TikTok’s publisher and media partners in over a dozen categories (such as lifestyle, sports, entertainment and education). The Wall Street Journal reported publishers will get a 50% cut.

For now, brands can only buy ads next to content from publishers including Buzzfeed, Condé Nast, DotDash Meredith, Hearst Magazines, NBCUniversal and Vox Media, as well as Major League Soccer, UFC and WWE.

Ads can also be bought on TikTok across publishers’ content tied to tentpole events and advertisers can run evergreen campaigns to reach publishers’ audiences.

David Cohen, IAB’s CEO, said only about 100 people were invited to TikTok’s NewFront session. The event was closed to the media, but a TikTok spokesperson provided information on the Pulse Premiere ad offering. 

Samba TV CMO Meredith Brace shared results onstage of a recent partnership with TikTok, where the measurement provider’s tools were used to study over 30 of TikTok’s tune-in campaigns. Samba TV found that 97% of TikTok campaigns drove incremental viewership from households that would not have otherwise watched the program, with an average tune-in lift of 159%. Households that tuned in after being exposed to TikTok’s tune-in ads watched each program for an average of 86 minutes – 26% higher than unexposed audiences, according to Samba TV. 

However, advertisers and publishers considering TikTok Pulse might also want to consider the quality of TikTok traffic, according to the CHEQ, an Israeli cybersecurity firm that helps companies detect and mitigate fake traffic. When it analyzed 30 million site visits originating from TikTok in first three months of the year, CHEQ found 8.5% of global TikTok-based traffic to customer websites was likely invalid, such as from bots, scrapers, or click farms.

The company — which tested the traffic by running several thousand real-time security challenges to determine if visitors were legitimate or malicious — also found that fake traffic accounted for 9.6% of U.S.-based TikTok traffic. (CHEQ has conducted similar analyses of traffic on other social networks such as Twitter.)

Doubling down on live

Condé Nast was the only true publisher to present at the NewFronts this year. Gone are the days when other large digital media companies like BuzzFeed Inc. and Vice Media Group would throw splashy gatherings for marketers as part of the IAB’s event.

The legacy publisher focused the bulk of its presentation on live events, especially Vogue’s coverage of the Met Gala red carpet (exclusive to that publication), Vogue World, Vanity Fair’s coverage of the Oscars and GQ’s coverage of sports events like the Super Bowl. This September, Vogue World will take place in London and stream live, after debuting its tentpole fashion show and street fair in New York City last year.

There were 329 million global video views of the 2023 Vanity Fair Oscar Party live coverage, up 80% year over year. Live coverage of the event also received about 2.2 billion social impressions, said Pam Drucker Mann, Condé Nast’s global chief revenue officer and president of U.S. revenue & APAC.

Condé Nast also pitched advertisers on new offerings including:

• Inside Story, a custom branded video offering
• Condé Nast Consulting, a new B2B service offering clients first-party insights and access to Condé Nast’s editors and creators
• The company also announced a new global contributors’ network

The main pitch to advertisers: “Culture is the new KPI,” said Craig Kostelic, Condé Nast’s chief business officer of global commercial revenue. “When you align with culture… consumers follow.”

Condé Nast’s video content (not just live coverage) reached 14.8 billion views across all platforms, up 10% compared to the previous year, according to the company. On YouTube, Condé Nast has over 65 million subscribers, up 12% year over year. Those subscribers spend over 1.5 billion minutes each month consuming Condé Nast content. 

The company said Vogue’s Beauty Secrets, GQ’s 10 Essentials and AD’s Open Door drive over 700 million combined views annually. 

New ad opportunities around music videos and artists

Vevo, which positioned itself as a music video network during its pitch to marketers, announced new media planning tools and ad products and teased an upcoming branded content studio.

The Vevo Intelligence suite of tools “combines audience and viewership behavior, contextual and creative insights, along with brand campaign performance to create custom media opportunities,” said Aneessa Steilen, vp of media and distribution marketing at Vevo. The initial set of tools analyzes visual and audio content to match ads with music videos that have a similar “mood,” she added.

Steilen also demonstrated a music trivia Q&A ad product on FAST channels that advertisers can buy and embed their brand within the format.

Vevo’s branded content studio, called “On Set,” will offer advertisers the chance to pay to appear within live performances, behind the scenes videos and interviews with music artists.

Ten million people tuned into Grammy Awards programming on Vevo this year, according to Bindi Patel, agency partnership lead at Vevo. TV inventory is up 40% year over year, noted Kevin McGurn, Vevo’s president of sales and distribution.

Vevo closed out the event with a performance by Colombian music artist J Balvin.

Lack of privacy talk

Meta and Snap executives quoted Steve Jobs during the NewFronts this week – perhaps ironic coming from two of the biggest companies in ad-tech, especially considering how Jobs had advocated for protecting users’ information and offering transparency with their data — topics that were mostly nonexistent during this week’s presentations.

On Thursday, without mentioning Apple’s former CEO by name, Alvin Bowles, vp and president of global partnerships & engineering at Meta, said Meta helps give “people what they may not realize they wanted” — a strikingly similar line to when Jobs famously said people “don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” On Tuesday, Snap Americas President Rob Wilk cued up an update about Snapchat’s new chatbot by offering “just one more thing” — similar to how Jobs often ended his Apple keynotes.

Interested in sharing your perspectives on the media and marketing industries? Join the Digiday research panel.

NewFronts week is coming to a close. And while publishers’ optimism around NewFronts and the TV upfront cycle is somewhat lackluster this year, they still have to tell buyers exactly which measurement providers they’ll be accommodating.

So Digiday+ Research asked 63 publisher professionals about the measurement providers they’re focused on this year.

Digiday’s survey found that Comscore and Nielsen will be the dominant measurement providers during this year’s NewFronts and upfronts — no surprise there. More than half of publishers (54%) said they will accommodate Comscore this year, and nearly half (48%) said they will accommodate Nielsen.

Interestingly, though, those percentages are jumps from last year for both measurement providers. Forty-six percent of publisher pros told Digiday they would accommodate Comscore last year (compared with 54% this year). And only 29% of publishers said they would accommodate Nielsen last year (compared with the much larger 48% who said so this year).

Honorable mention here goes to Oracle Moat. Nearly a quarter of publisher pros (24%) told Digiday they would accommodate the measurement provider this year, up slightly from 19% last year. But Oracle Moat ranked fourth among measurement providers, according to Digiday’s survey.

Third place actually went to the “other” category, which is why we can’t move on without mentioning the percentage of publishers who fall into it. Twenty-seven percent of publisher pros said they will accommodate measurement providers outside of our list during NewFronts and upfronts this year, down slightly from the 30% who said so last year. Some of the other measurement providers publishers said they’ll be accommodating providers that include Google Analytics, Lasso, Experian, Double Verify and Piano.

Beyond just accommodating different measurement providers, Digiday’s survey found that Comscore and Nielsen also account for most publishers’ primary currency for this year’s NewFronts and upfronts cycle.

Thirty-two percent of publisher pros told Digiday that Comsore will be their primary currency during NewFronts and upfronts event this year, down slightly from 36% last year. Just as Nielsen saw a big jump in publishers who will accommodate the measurement provider this year, it also saw a big jump in publishers who will use it as their primary currency. A quarter of publisher pros (25%) said Nielsen will be their primary currency during this year’s NewFronts and upfronts cycle, up from 15% who said so last year.

Oracle Moat also came next behind Comscore and Nielsen in this category, albeit much further behind. Ten percent of publisher pros told Digiday Oracle Moat will be their primary currency during this year’s NewFronts and upfronts event — a negligible difference from the 9% who said so last year.

Again, the “other” category accounted for a significant percentage of publisher respondents to Digiday’s survey when it came to publishers’ primary NewFronts and upfront currency. Twenty-nine percent of publishers said their primary currency would be something other than what was on our list, down a bit from 35% last year.

The weight of the “other” category both here and above goes to show how much is still up in the air when it comes to TV ad measurement and where it will go from here. And one of the most notable responses in the “other” category was a publisher who said their primary currency during NewFronts and the upfronts cycle this year will be “whatever the buyer chooses.”

Amazon and supply-side platforms may have come to a temporary arrangement on how to process cost increases for advertiser demand over the next couple of months, but in the meantime, some big decisions will have to be made.

Amazon’s rise in the ad industry is well documented with its suite of advertising services equipped to rival its Big Tech peer set with media-generated revenue up 21% year on year during the last quarter, nearing $9.5 billion.

Among publishers especially, Amazon benefits from the fact that it’s simply ‘not Google’ – very much the establishment figure in online media monetization. Although, as Wall Street’s demand for further revenue growth steepens, it too has to wield both stick and carrot in equal measure, according to sources.

Shifting the cost

To recap, last month Amazon Publisher Services gave SSPs (or “TAM buyers” to use its precise wording) a four-week notification of a price change for access to its buyers. The cost is moving from $0.01 CPM to 2.5% of spend with the sticker shock causing some rancor and confusion in recent weeks.

SSPs were prepared to ‘eat’ the $0.01 CPM, but a 2.5% of spend fee is too bitter a pill to swallow with sources estimating costs could increase 4-to-5%, ergo the consensus among sell-side ad tech was that the cost would now have to be shared. And it’s from here that things kicked off with publishers receiving conflicting messages from APS and SSPs in the subsequent weeks.

According to multiple pieces of documentation seen, and verified, by Digiday, SSPs (in general) proposed levying the cost increase on publishers by reducing the monthly check they make out to media owners.

Although, a subsequent note from APS appeared to paint such proposals as contrary to their contracts, claiming that TAM runs a first-price auction with net bids, which ensures the highest bid wins and requires buyers to pay the publisher what they bid.

Such an interpretation suggests TAM buyers are contractually required to submit net bids to Amazon, and would thus deem the ‘gross bidding proposals‘ outlined by the SSPs above as invalid. These developments generated a state of mass confusion, not to mention anguish, among publishers.

In short, an eleventh-hour compromise was reached, albeit temporary, with SSPs granted permission to bill publishers per their initial proposals, provided they have approval from individual media owners.

Although, multiple publisher-side sources questioned the likelihood of media owners granting SSPs permission to reduce their monthly paychecks. After all, who will welcome the prospect of earning less money?

Technical limitations?

According to one sell-side source, who requested anonymity as they were not cleared to speak with press, the actions of both APS and SSPs are disappointing and indicative of how the sector as a whole is at an impasse.

“You get to the point where you’re approaching the end of an innovation cycle of SSPs, and then everybody starts grinding for percentage points,” said the source, “when innovation stops and businesses don’t have as much value to bring this stuff starts to happen.”

Another source noted how most SSPs have grown used to “conducting an auction, and then just sending a price through.” Although APS’ proposals appear to require SSPs to adjust their prices in real-time, and this is “just not something that many of them [SSPs] have the systems to do,” added the source, who similarly was not cleared to speak with the media by their employer.

The development also raises the prospect of publishers migrating away from using APS’ monetization tools in preference for using PreBid, an open-source alternative to Big Tech as a whole that positions itself has been positioned as the ‘friend of the publisher.’ Although, how many publishers will be able to cope with a potential reduction in Amazon demand?

Other publisher-side sources fear that the latest price hike is just the tip of the iceberg with a separate source noting how some publishers have been openly questioning if this is a case of APS emulating Google’s widely disliked approach. “The fact that Amazon can increase rates like they do have people worried that the rates will go up again… and again… and again,” added the source who declined to be named due to clients’ sensitivities.

Multiple sources told Digiday that Amazon is engaging in discussions with multiple SSPs ahead of the July 31 expiration of its ‘gross-bidding dispensation.’

So it appears as though there is a will to reach a resolution, but with such scaled challenges to be addressed in that time, will three months be enough to find one?

It isn’t 2016 anymore. He’s older and out of political shape, and his absence would hurt his rivals.

Regulators stymie a midsize bank merger but help JPMorgan get bigger.