Month: February 2024

Google is bringing its ChatGPT-style chatbot Bard and some other key AI features under the banner Gemini. A new, more powerful version of the chatbot, Gemini Advanced, is subscription-only.

The Ad Angles Three unrelated companies all reported earnings on Wednesday: Uber, The New York Times and Roblox. But they do have something in common. They all have ad businesses, albeit in different flavors. The New York Times is an age-old ad seller, unlike Uber or Roblox. Yet its ad revenue is down YOY. The […]

The post Uber, Roblox And The Gray Lady Walk Into A Bar; Give TV A Sporting Chance appeared first on AdExchanger.

Super Bowl LVIII has nearly arrived, and with it, the expectations of the first broadcast by TelevisaUnivision — entirely in Spanish. 

The opportunity has expected potential for big brands this coming Sunday; the 2022 Super Bowl, for Spanish-speaking audiences, achieved a record of 1.9 million viewers for the Telemundo network.

One of those brands is Nissan and the company’s CMO in the United States, Marisstella Marinkovic, said in a statement that the automotive giant seized the moment “to air an in-language spot that reignites the love of Nissan among bicultural Latinos,” adding that the collaboration with TelevisaUnivision was vital to unite music and sports to create a commercial in both languages. 

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There has always seemingly been two Super Bowls for brands to participate in: The game day broadcast with standard (and expensive) 30-second ads, or so-called hacking everything happening around that broadcast, from second screens to experiential events, to build buzz around the Big Game.

With a $7 million dollar price tag for a single, 30-second spot, a hacking strategy is a compelling argument for brands that want to be part of the Super Bowl, while simultaneously cognizant of their ad spend. (Here’s what a $7 million, 30-second Super Bowl ad can purchase in digital media this year.)

For the last five years, Danone has successfully hacked the Big Game with its yogurt brand brand Oikos via digital buys, in-store displays, sweepstakes and other tactics. This year, the company is expanding that playbook to two other brands, Silk and STōK Cold Brew Coffee. (Inside Danone’s Super Bowl hacking strategy here.)  Per the company, it’s a strategy that nearly doubled brand sales at one point.

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Take a deep breath. What a whirlwind start to 2024 it’s been.

And it’s clearly not going to slow down anytime soon. This month alone, there’s been more job cuts, ambitious ad tech initiatives launching, the heat turning up between advertisers and platforms, and the ongoing debates about the future of in-depth tracking.

To put it bluntly, uncertainty is the name of the game, and it seems like it’ll hang around for most of the year. In many respects, 2024 might as well be labeled a transition period — a time when marketers will gain clarity on the structural transformation the industry is currently entangled in, and learning what they do and don’t know.

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In this week’s Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine whether TikTok will replace X as the dominant second screen during the Super Bowl, how deprecation of the third-party cookie is publishers’ top concern this year, and how publishers maintained full-time staff and published titles despite a drop-off in traffic last year, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.

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The MFA panic is over?

The mania around made-for-advertising sites (MFAs) has calmed down, according to five agency executives – though MFAs are anything but forgotten.

“In terms of priorities for 2024, MFAs are currently about a 4 out of 10,” said Deva Bronson, evp and global head of brand assurance at Dentsu, via email. “We see this as important, but we are confident that our current approach is successful. Given this, combined with the community efforts over the past 6-12 months, we see this as waning compared to others priorities in the space.”

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During a time of layoffs and buyouts at large news organizations, The New York Times is one of the few that has continued to grow its business. However, its 2023 fourth quarter earnings report published on Wednesday showed the company isn’t entirely immune from the volatile ad market. In fact, the company doesn’t expect to improve in the first quarter of this year.

“We continue to experience limited visibility in the advertising market,” CFO William Bardeen said in a call with shareholders on Wednesday morning.

The Times missed its Q4 outlook on advertising sales, with ad revenue decreasing by 8.4% year over year to $164.1 million. In its Q3 earnings report, the company’s guidance expected ad revenue in Q4 to change between a decrease in the mid-single-digits to an increase of low-single-digits. The Times doesn’t seem to expect this to get better in Q1 2024, with an outlook of an expected decrease in the mid-single-digits for total advertising revenues year over year.

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Like a well-disguised blitz on third and long, traditional television was sacked for a loss of yards Tuesday night when Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney announced they’re forming a joint venture to offer a “skinny bundle” of all sports content among them beginning this fall. 

Sports has been the last bastion of solid ratings for linear television, so this hit feels particularly acute — coming only weeks after Netflix stole away WWE rights from basic cable. Even if those ratings aren’t moving off linear TV, it’s the implication of it that hurts.

“This deal is yet another signal of traditional TV’s impending demise as live sports becomes streaming’s latest shiny object,” said Forrester’s vp, research director Mike Proulx. “But without sports properties from networks including NBC and CBS, the new sports streaming service is incomplete out of the gate.” 

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“There is only one Christopher Walken” according to this BMW spot, which shows him reacting to a slew of Christopher Walken imitators.