Author: rssmasher

Albertsons’ website lists 128 products with the word “banana” in them, and to adapt a phrase from Arrested Development’s George Bluth, there’s always money in the digital banana stand. On Thursday, Albertsons unveiled a program called Albertsons Performance Media that works with consumer-packaged-goods brands to place ads all over the web and track the promos…

How long has this Walt Disney/21st Century Fox deal actually been percolating behind the scenes? A year? More? Is it possible the deal has been in the making for nearly a decade? Lay out a timeline of
events and start to connect the dots, and the surprise mid-December announcement of the Mouse that ate the Fox doesn’t seem like a surprise at all. The signs were there.

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Paris-based ecommerce analytics platform ContentSquare has raised a $42 million Series B round from a series of investors including US VC firm Canaan and Highland Europe. ContentSquare previously had raised $20 million, bringing it to a total of $62 million after this round. The company will use the financing to support research and development of… Continue reading »

The post ContentSquare Raises A $42M Series B To Democratize Data Analytics For Ecomm Brands appeared first on AdExchanger.

YouTube star Logan Paul. Pizza magnate John Schatter. Fox News provocateur Sean Hannity. Brands looking for safe harbor have had a tough time finding it in this multimedia landscape.

Most recently, YouTube put Paul’s Red projects on hold and axed him from its top-tier Google Preferred ad program after one of his videos featured the body of a man who committed suicide. No ads ran against the video, which got six million views before it was pulled from the platform, but YouTube’s action shows that it at least wants to be seen as taking brand safety—not to mention viewer safety—more seriously.

Brand safety, once shorthand for making sure your banner ad isn’t served alongside vulgar content, has become one of digital media’s most pressing issues. Brands are more concerned than ever with how they are perceived online, while platforms struggle with how to police user-generated content and digital publishers balance news coverage and advertiser interests.

“Of all the concerns within the digital media supply chain, brand safety may be the most pressing,” says Bob Liodice, chief executive officer of the ANA. Marketers spend years and millions of dollars building a reputation with its customers. “In one fell swoop, that reputation, that equity, that loyalty could be damaged or severely disrupted.”

To gain more insight into this matter, we partnered with Digiday Media to survey 300 industry executives about how brands, publishers, and platforms can mitigate their risks — and adequately deal with potential fall out.

To get the full results, download our report on brand safety, “The New Brand Safety Crisis.”

What we found: A brand safety crisis can have serious effects, but preventative measures are available.

If you’re a brand safety survivor, you’re not alone
According to our study, an alarming 75 percent of those surveyed reported at least one brand-unsafe exposure, any one of which could potentially lead to loss of revenue. Despite this high number, however, 15 percent of brands still do not use brand safety protection.

Brand risks are front page news
When asked about their biggest brand safety concerns, survey respondents named hate speech, pornography, and violence as prominent perceived risk factors. But when asked what hazards their brands have actually encountered recently, bad news and divisive politics were frequently mentioned.

 

You may experience brand confusion
When a brand has spent time and money building relationships with consumers who support and share their message, an incident of unfortunate association that opposes a brand’s moral alignment can be a devastating blow. Thirty-seven percent of marketers polled say that this has been a problem for their brands.

 

Prevention is possible
Savvy agencies and their brands use a combination of protective measures to prevent unwanted brand associations. 53 percent of brands surveyed use keyword detection to help mitigate risks, a method which allows advertisers to filter out content they don’t want to associate with at the category and article level.

But when it comes to image safety, fewer are employing the right tools. That number is staggering, considering the world is already awash in professional and user-generated images, far more than can be screened by an army of social media managers. AI-powered computer vision uses neural networks to screen millions of images for triggers like nudity, guns, crashes and swastikas.

Currently, just 15 percent of respondents reported using computer vision to scan before placement, while 11 percent said they employ it as corrective technology. Plenty of room for improvement here, especially considering that LDV Capital estimated by 2020 there will be an estimated 45 billion cameras in the world.

For the full results, download the GumGum report to learn:

• How the issue of brand safety has evolved in recent years
• Valuable insight from programmatic experts and advertisers
• The most effective ways to protect your brand against a brand safety incident

The post ‘In one fell swoop:’ 75 percent of advertisers say they’ve been endangered by risky content appeared first on Digiday.

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“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view. Today’s column is written by Belinda J. Smith, global director of media activation at Electronic Arts.  I realize I’m late to the game with the year-ahead predictions, but this year the annual ad tech soothsaying has hit a nerve. The slow… Continue reading »

The post What’s New For 2018? Nothing appeared first on AdExchanger.

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“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Dominique Netto, head of client services at [m]PLATFORM – GroupM. After the brand-safety sagas of 2017, Alphabet appears to be using some of that $27.7 billion Q3 revenue to further develop brand safety across YouTube. There… Continue reading »

The post Grading YouTube’s Latest Brand-Safety Safeguards appeared first on AdExchanger.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Swiss Cheddar Of the $50 billion or so WPP spent on media in the past year, about $5 billion went to Google and $2 billion to Facebook, according to CEO Martin Sorrell, speaking to Fox Business Network at the World Economic Forum in Davos,… Continue reading »

The post Sir Martin In Davos; Amazon’s Ad Business In Context appeared first on AdExchanger.

At the Digiday Marketing Summit in December, we sat down with over 30 industry executives from major brands across the country to discuss developing trends such as branded content. Check out our earlier research on brands’ social media spending here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Advertiser aren’t sure if branded content works
Brands are spending a lot of money on branded content — $10 billion in 2016, to be exact, according to Forrester’s most recent report. Given how much is being spent, marketers might expect branded content to perform exceptionally well, but that’s not necessarily the case. Respondents to Digiday’s survey were split on the effectiveness of branded content. Although no one thought branded content was completely useless, marketers we surveyed were just as likely to consider branded content incredibly effective or just somewhat effective.

The post Digiday Research: Advertisers are divided over branded content efficacy appeared first on Digiday.