Month: January 2024

If you asked publishers last summer which alternative identifiers presented the most promise for replacing third-party cookies, most would have responded with a fatigued shrug. But now some are able to quantify the cookie replacements’ revenue impact.

In a test of Unified ID 2.0 — which was developed by The Trade Desk and is now managed by Prebid — Justin Wohl, CRO of Salon, Snopes and TV Tropes, recorded a 200% increase in CPMs compared to ads served to an authenticated audience with third-party cookies present. The testing started in early Q4 2023 and specifically focused on TVTropes.org’s logged-in user base, which represents about 5% of the site’s 150 million pageviews per month. The cookieless test group was confined to Apple’s Safari browser, which enabled the publisher to evaluate the alternative ID’s revenue impact in an environment isolated from third-party cookies.

After confirming those results with The Trade Desk, Wohl said his team “pretty much locked in our commitment to go all-in on UID 2.0.” 

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Aliens and robots are both synonymous with sci-fi, but one marketing agency decided to design something more extraterrestrial to manifest its AI. 

To show off its new AI platform, S4 Capital’s Media.Monks created an “Alien AI advisor” called Wormhole. With an aesthetic and personality inspired by the worm-like Annelids from “Men In Black,” Wormhole is covered with silicon skin rather than anything metallic or plastic like many other robots. Operated by animatronics hidden inside a wooden box Wormhole sits atop, the alien bot can bend its body, tilt its head and sip coffee from a diner mug as it thinks and chats. 

“He has an edgy humor,” said Iran Reyes, vp, global head of engineering at Media.Monks. “He has a specific communication style. Its answers are short [and] there are some personality traits…He knows how to answer things. It’s not scripted. It just gets an idea of how to answer things and and based on that he’s able to .”

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You’ve probably heard this before: The best creative in the world will have little impact if it’s not in the appropriate media channel — and the best media channel is likely a waste of ad dollars if the creative stinks. 

That maxim holds truer than ever, and is playing out across the agency landscape as creative shops add to or enhance their media side offerings, and media agencies partner up with creative and other agencies to return to full service for clients. As Digiday coined 15 months ago, lo-fi rebundling is upon us. 

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Sanofi is playing eco-detective to sniff out just how green its advertising really is.

And no, this doesn’t sound like the usual corporate green spiel; the pharmaceutical giant appears to be actually strapping in for the heavy lifting in cutting emissions. 

Prasad Sridhar, Sanofi’s head of media, spells it out: marketers there are doing more than just adding up the carbon emissions of its advertising, it’s setting sights on actively reducing them too, he said.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to address the semiconductor chip shortage he expects at the end of the decade, and is looking to raise capital for a chip venture that will build out chip facilities
worldwide to support the boom in AI.

New Mexico real estate company enters social media hell with its stupidly named model house layouts.

Meta’s next steps toward investing in AI include a focus on plans to open-source the emerging technology, build an infrastructure, fuse its two leading AI research groups and connect Meta’s efforts to
its ongoing metaverse development vision, Zuckerberg says.