Month: July 2024

System administrators and their teams sprang into action last Friday and worked tirelessly to get their companies back online amid one of the worst digital blackouts ever.

What does programmatic media have in common with toilet paper? A lot more than you might think. Consider the question of incentives, says Sherine Ebadi, managing director of forensic investigations at Kroll, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. Kroll was one of the  ANA’s research partners for its programmatic transparency report, released last year, […]

The post Three-Ply Vs. One-Ply Programmatic appeared first on AdExchanger.

Google has hit the brakes on its plan to eliminate third-party cookies.  Instead of phasing out third-party cookies by default, Google now says it will offer Chrome users new privacy controls, allowing them to opt into or out of cookie tracking at the browser level in a more straightforward way.  But the industry shouldn’t let […]

The post Google Backpedaling On Its Cookie Phaseout Isn’t An Excuse For Complacency appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. High Spot Spotify reported its second consecutive quarter of record-setting profit growth. The company’s Q2 profit margin of 29.2% was its highest to date. Spotify continues to make most of its revenue from paid subscriptions, which accounted for $3.6 billion for the quarter. […]

The post Spotify Is Starting To Sing; NBCU Needs To See Gold This Olympics appeared first on AdExchanger.

After a strong start to the year, venture capitalists’ interest in gaming and esports appears to have flagged in the second quarter of 2024.

The past year has been a challenging period for the gaming industry. On one hand, gaming is more culturally ascendant than ever before, with the number of gamers worldwide skyrocketing in 2023. On the other hand, game publishers have been forced to pivot their business models due to the rise of free-to-play games, resulting in a record-breaking wave of layoffs during which over 10,000 game developers lost their jobs in the first half of the year.

Given the mixed signals listed above, it’s not surprising that prospective investors have been inconsistent about their approach to gaming this year. In spite of venture capitalists’ present wariness around gaming, VC funding of game start-ups had increased by 81 percent quarter-over-quarter between Q4 2023 and Q1 2024. 

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how Netflix is going about bundling subscriptions to its streaming service.

• The streaming bundle playbook
• Netflix moves up the TV watch time ranks
• Netflix loses Naylor, Warner Bros. Discovery considers split, NBCUniversal wraps upfront and more

The streaming bundle playbook

As major streamers continue to combine sales efforts by packaging themselves into singular subscriptions a la the traditional pay-TV bundle, Netflix has drawn a line in the sand when it comes to streaming’s bundle bonanza. The company is not keen on combining sales efforts strictly with other streaming services like in the case of Disney’s and Warner Bros. Discovery’s Disney+-Hulu-Max bundle.

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Next week’s Paris Olympics isn’t only an opportunity for behemoth brands like Samsung and Nike. Smaller advertisers, such as granola and protein snack brand Kodiak, are also finding their way in.

In Kodiak’s case, it’s sponsoring USA Climbing, the sporting association that governs competitive climbing and mountaineering in the States (the U.S. Olympic climbing team is a different entity) announced ahead of the Games. There’s also a partnership with rock climber Natalia Grossman, who’ll represent the U.S. at the Paris Games.

“Rock climbing is a booming sport seeing incredible growth and indoor climbing gyms are making rock climbing accessible to everyone,” Boman Farrer, senior director of marketing at Kodiak, said in an email, adding that “the partnership with USA Climbing was a natural progression in our involvement in the climbing world.”

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Among the frustration and surprise over Google’s decision to sidestep directly eliminating third-party cookies in Chrome, one concern stands out for ad execs: Google’s evolving stance on privacy seems to be mirroring Apple’s, using it both as a shield and a sword.

To get why this is a big deal, it’s important to better understand what Google’s actually planning for third-party cookies. 

After four years of dragging its feet, Google finally said it will phase them out, but only if users give the thumbs-up. How it will make this work is still a mystery, but the early guess is that giving people the power to opt-out will mostly lead to one thing: users opting out. 

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Publishers’ cookiepocalypse preparedness plans are still intact, despite Google’s announcement on Monday that the tech behemoth would not be removing third-party cookies completely from its Chrome browser after all.

In fact, 11 publishing execs told Digiday that they would be maintaining or increasing their tests of cookieless targeting alternatives, including Google’s Privacy Sandbox, as a result of the announcement. 

“It’s still business as usual,” said Ryan Maynard, vp of programmatic sales operations at Raptive, which operates ad sales for thousands of publishers. “It’s just shifting it from Google deciding, ‘OK, we’re going to remove cookies on this day,’ to putting it in the hands of the user to decide.”

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Llama 3.1, created in partnership with Nvidia, is available in three unique versions – including one that marks Meta’s biggest open-source AI model yet – keeping Meta in direct competition with tech
giants and startups including Google, Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic.