Month: May 2024

Major game publishers’ flirtation with in-game ads has yet to blossom into a full romance in 2024 — but the question of advertising has become nearly impossible for them to avoid, as shown by Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson’s endorsement of the revenue stream during the company’s earnings call earlier this month.

“Our expectation is that advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us,” Wilson said during the call. “We’ll be very thoughtful as we move into that, but we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how we do thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences.”

His comment on in-game advertising during EA’s May 8 Q4 2024 earnings call was an off-the-cuff response to a question from Goldman Sachs analyst Eric Sheridan, not a prepared remark outlining a detailed strategy for the future. As such, it’s not surprising that an EA representative declined to speak further on the matter when reached for comment. Still, Wilson’s answer provided key insight into the growing urgency of standing up in-game ad offerings as the gaming industry’s traditional business models falter.

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Pour one out for the programmatic marketers. They’re having a tough go of it, and not just because of the third-party cookie’s on-again, off-again deprecation.

There are the inventory quality issues raised by the recent controversies surrounding made-for-advertising sites, Forbes and Colossus. There’s the brewing measurement mess as third-party cookies eventually go away. And of course, there’s AI, which actually may be among programmatic marketers’ greatest potential allies in dealing with some of the other challenges — though AI poses its own predicaments.

At the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit last week in Palm Springs, California, agency executives participated in closed-door town hall discussions, in which they were granted anonymity for their candor. And they were quite candid about the challenges they are having to confront. Here’s a sample of what was said.

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There’s been a pendulum swing in the marketing industry, where marketers who were overly focused on performance have started investing in brand building — via streaming, audio and experiential — to stand out in the crowded digital marketplace. 

This has meant updating KPIs and client expectations when it comes to measuring campaign effectiveness, which is exactly why independent boutique agency Exverus Media is reshaping what KPIs look like in streaming, audio and experiential channels that aren’t necessarily direct response channels.

“Where the industry is going, what we’re seeing from all of our marketing clients is that they’re being held to increasingly revenue-focused metrics,” Talia Arnold, head of strategy and planning at Exverus, said on stage at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Palm Springs, California, on Wednesday. “How do we set up a measurement plan and KPIs that we can take action against and that go back to proving out a business outcome?”

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On Monday, The Washington Post added AI-generated audio to its three politics- and policy-focused newsletters to give readers the ability to listen to those emails.

Solventum and PhRMA are launch sponsors for the newsletters this week, which will also contain AI-generated audio ads for the first time. Each audio newsletter edition will have pre- and post-roll audio ads inserted dynamically each day.

The audio versions of the newsletters are available by clicking through from the emailed newsletters to The Post’s site — but the focus for the initiative is the experience of listening to the audio in the Listen tab in The Washington Post’s app, which debuted last November, said Renita Jablonski, The Post’s director of audio. The tab allows users to create a playlist of audio offerings from The Post, such as podcasts, morning briefings and other articles.

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On the surface, things seemed tense back then. 

CMOs were out there on stages and in interviews, wagging their fingers at Meta execs, accusing them of caring more about cash than the disharmony it fueled. But behind closed doors, it was all hugs and handshakes as they cozied up to the bigwigs, letting their concerns fade into the background.

Fast forward four years, and it feels like déjà vu.

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As the cable reporter for now-defunct Mediaweek from 1993 until 1998 when I became an editor, I learned about the TV ad marketplace down to a level of granularity I had no idea existed. It’s when I first heard the term “upfront” used in a way that had nothing to do with where I stood at a concert or in line.

In those days, hardly anyone knew what the Internet was, four broadcast networks dominated the upfront marketplace, and syndication (remember that?) and basic cable networks scratched out revenue totals that barely added to half a billion dollars — less than Google generates in less than two weeks today.

There was no programmatic selling — it was all about relationships between the ad sales chiefs and their teams, and the titans of the media agency world (when the likes of Irwin Gotlieb and Jon Mandel made or broke the business). And each of the sales teams had their own style — where the MTV Networks sales team in the late 1990s resembled a family straight out of “The Sopranos” central casting, the Turner sales team felt more akin to “Mad Men.”

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In cluttered and noisy industries, naming companies and products has often been part of the strategy for standing out. That continues to be the case when it comes to AI, but there isn’t yet the same depth of research that exists in other categories.

Lexicon — the naming agency behind numerous famous names like Blackberry, Apple’s Powerbook and Adobe inDesign — is hoping to change that as AI names become increasingly important.

Last week, Lexicon released its initial findings from a survey that explores what consumers and developers think about AI. Surveying 150 consumers in the U.S. and another 150 in Germany, the agency asked a range of questions about which industries people think will be positively impacted by AI. The top industries mentioned were telecommunications and health care — which were named by about half of respondents — followed by education, entertainment and security. The lowest were banking, hospitality and travel, retail, and legal services. Another 21% said none of the above.

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Universal Music Group has uploaded its artists’ music back on TikTok, including Billie Eilish’s discography. Upon the release of her new album, the singer-songwriter has launched a TikTok takeover.