Month: December 2023

With a business stretching from short-form video to traditional TV programming, YouTube presents something of a Rorschach test for the TV, streaming and video industry. That role can be best represented in two of the Google-owned video platform’s biggest moves in 2023: rolling out a revenue-sharing program for Shorts and carrying the NFL Sunday Ticket package. 

In light of YouTube’s big year, Digiday spoke with YouTube chief business officer Mary Ellen Coe about how the platform’s business evolved in 2023 and what it has in store for 2024. 

The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

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Having received pushback from ad buyers, YouTube decided to push back its co-viewing ad measurement plans.

The Google-owned video platform had originally planned to start transacting against its own co-viewing measurement — i.e. accounting for multiple people in a household watching together — in the first quarter of 2024, but it has delayed that start to the fourth quarter of 2024, according to agency executives who have been briefed on the matter by YouTube. The agency executives said they hope the delay will provide opportunity for YouTube to address some of their issues with its co-viewing measurement plans, fine-tune its methodology and share details of that methodology with ad buyers.

“It was supposed to roll out first quarter [of 2024], and then all of a sudden now it’s rolling out fourth quarter, and there’s no real answer except they’re not ready, which I get. If you’re not ready, you’re not ready,” said one agency executive.

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As the generative AI boom took off in early 2023, there were plenty of predictions about how soon — and to what extent — companies would start using generative AI in their marketing. Nearly a year later, it’s clear many are feeling increasingly comfortable. 

Just last week, the global hotel search company Trivago released a new ad campaign as part of a broader rebrand. But instead of casting actors in each country across Trivago’s global footprint, it chose just one and then used AI to translate his voice into nearly a dozen languages.

According to Trivago CEO Johannes Thomas, the company used to do 35 productions with 20 actors to reach 40 different markets. But that was a “very costly and a long endeavor,” so the company decided to explore how AI might help make “something that is equally punchy” but also would scale.

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April 2007 is regarded as a pivotal month in ad tech’s development as it kicked off a spiral of events that embroiled some of the most well-known names in Big Tech.

The New York Times on April 4 noted how DoubleClick – a company “which delivers marketing messages to Web sites and monitors how many clicks they get” – planned to launch an ad exchange.  

Journalists described the technology as “a Nasdaq-like exchange” for the buying and selling of digital advertisements,” taking in aspects of eBay and “the airline reservations system that travel agents use.” 

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Joanna O’Connell is one of the most recognizable names in ad tech, a fame she built over the course of three decades as an industry analyst, and marketer, among other roles. O’Connell is now evp of innovation at R3.

In this episode of Digiday’s Oral History of Ad Tech, she speaks with Seb Joseph about her role in helping to build one of the media industry’s first agency trading desks at Publicis Groupe during her role at Razorfish in the mid-to-late 2000s.

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