Month: February 2024

With the success of last weekend’s Six Invitational competition, video game publisher Ubisoft may have finally cracked the code to make esports a worthwhile venture for all involved.

Last weekend marked the eighth iteration of the Six Invitational, the year-end championship for Ubisoft’s popular first-person shooter game “Rainbow Six Siege.” As game developers look to adapt to changing times, the event’s record-breaking viewership (according to Ubisoft) could show that esports is the industry’s long-awaited savior after all.

The last few years have been a mixed bag for “Rainbow Six Siege.” After peaking at nearly 200,000 concurrent players in March 2021, the game’s player numbers began to decline post-COVID, according to the website Steam Charts, which tracks player counts on the popular gaming platform Steam. Some esports organizations exited the scene in late 2022 and early 2023.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at a connected TV ad fraud scheme uncovered by DoubleVerify and Roku that’s been siphoning an estimated $7.5 million per month from advertisers.

• “One the largest fraud schemes that we’ve seen”
• WTF are outcome-based measurement guarantees?
• Warner Bros. Discovery pulls back on Paramount purchase, Walmart-Vizio puts pressure on Roku, Charter eyes Altice acquisition and more

‘One the largest fraud schemes that we’ve seen’

As the connected TV ad market matures, so too does the sophistication of CTV fraudsters.

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Media buyers and publishers yesterday packed the halls of New York’s The Times Center, where The Trade Desk laid out its vision for alternatives to third-party cookies.

Dubbed Forward ‘24: TV’s Tipping Point, the event was hosted the same month as the industry’s largest independent demand-side platform revealed GAAP revenue of nearly $2 billion for 2023, up 23% from the previous year.

Although it is in the coming year, with the industry at a crossroads for the future of ad targeting and campaign measurement both on TV and online, where the answers to some of the industry’s most crucial questions lie.

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It’s been a debate for years: How can performance and brand marketing co-exist to push sales and boost brand awareness or affinity simultaneously? It’s a question Orangetheory Fitness is now asking itself after 14 years in business.

Today’s digital marketing landscape is increasingly more fragmented, making it more difficult for performance-focused marketers like Orangetheory to stand out online. To distinguish itself from the noise, the fitness brand is investing in brand building tactics to better balance its performance and brand marketing spend, according to David Chriswick, Orangetheory’s svp of brand and communications.

“There’s new brands popping up. There’s new concepts trying to earn your attention and your time. And Orangetheory, amongst that pack, is no different,” he said. He later added, “Performance will feed the final [bottom line] in the short term. But at the same time, we need to be sowing the seeds for the future and making sure there’s a healthy pipeline ahead of us.”

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Logic would dictate that if you, a media agency, just had a client or clients move some of their work in-house, you’d probably not need a client services head, right?

Traction, an independent that’s tried to reorganize itself away from traditional agency structures to one that serves clients however they need it, did just that back in 2019. Founder Adam Kleinberg opted to eliminate a client services head as he positioned the agency to become what he dubbed a “marketing accelerator,” a collective of liquid workforce talent that can be tapped on an as-need basis, rather than FTEs.

Kleinberg has since realized that client services remains an essential function as clients came to Traction for specific needs. To help address this, two years ago, he brought in Lauren Evans, a veteran marketer with experience at Royal Caribbean and Lululemon, to navigate the complexity and challenges within client companies.

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Gary Pilnick bombs by following the chant of the company’s spokes-tiger: “When I say cereal, you say dinner!”

“The Times’s suggestion that the contrived attacks of its hired gun show that the Fourth Estate is somehow imperiled by this technology is pure fiction,” OpenAI says.

In the spot, Kate Hudson and two female friends wear the same dress to an event and end up in the ladies’ room – a place for sharing secrets and chitchat about shopping.

Data from app analytics tracker AppFigures shows Threads’ global daily iOS downloads tripling those of X and more than doubling X downloads on Google Play.

“There are no two ways about this — the state asks this court to issue a decision that is unequivocally harmful to Ohio’s businesses,” the Ohio Chamber of Commerce says in a court filing.