Author: rssmasher

Ad fraud — or “filtered bot traffic” — has declined 31% in the digital video ad marketplace over the past year, according to just-released findings from Extreme Reach’s annual “Video Advertising
Benchmark Report.” The share of ad fraud fell to 6.2% of all video ad inventory sold during the past year, according to the report.

While conventional “showrooming” has grown significantly, many consumers now also comparison shop at Amazon before making a purchase at another online retailer — a finding that comScore previewed
as part of the forthcoming release of its “2018 State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy Report.”

Tesla is entering one of the most critical phases in its history, as the auto maker must boost production of the Model 3 or possibly face severe financial consequences.

Pay-TV providers are increasingly investing in paid media to promote new and original programming on their streaming video services. To offset the pricy programming costs, these SVODs must attract a steady stream of new subscribers. Entertainment advertisers have always relied on tune-in tactics to promote new shows. But streaming video services now are also leveraging… Continue reading »

The post Paid Media Becomes Table Stakes For Subscription Video appeared first on AdExchanger.

Adidas is using apps to meet its goals for e-commerce sales.

A focus on Amazon and online retailers drove €1.5 billion ($1.9 billion) in online sales in 2017 for Adidas, a 57 percent increase on what it made in 2016, according to Adidas’ latest earnings report. Speaking to investors on March 14, Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted said it is on track to hit €4 billion ($4.9 billion) by 2020. Hitting that target, however, will be as dependent on the likes of Amazon and Foot Locker as on Adidas’ owned channels, particularly its apps.

Apps, according to Adidas, are a way to strike a direct relationship with consumers. In other words, they establish an online business that doesn’t require the company to pay a tax to Amazon to sell its products. Rather, Adidas can use its ever-widening portfolio of apps to push rarer — and therefore more expensive — products, while using Amazon and other online retailers to sell its cheaper products. Adidas and rival Nike are in a race to evolve their distribution channels and manufacturing technologies in order to get their products to market faster, which could also safeguard their businesses from brick-and-mortar killer Amazon.

In November, Adidas launched its first shopping app, which has been downloaded more than 1 million times, according to the company. The app’s news feed, which features content such as new product updates and events, prioritizes content the user has told Adidas they are interested in. The app mirrors the efforts of Nike, which has a similar app that launched in 2015 and started selling its products on Amazon last year. For both Adidas and Nike, selling on both owned and third-party channels equates to a pricing strategy spread across premium, mid-tier and lower-tier customers. Both brands stand to generate higher profit margins from online sales compared to those made via traditional channels. Last year, Adidas said e-commerce had become its most profitable point of sale channel.

Rorsted said e-commerce is helping the business improve its profitability. “We’re finding the right balance to focus on revenue when it delivers margin,” he said, “but we’re not focusing on margin if we don’t get any revenue on it.”

The arrival of Adidas’ shopping app ended a two-year period in which it didn’t launch any major apps. Although it launched the Glitch app in 2016, it deemed the app a low-key test for micro-influencers rather than e-commerce. Prior to Adidas’ hiatus from apps, there were launches “coming from everywhere in terms of markets and categories,” said one agency executive, who shared details of the advertiser’s mobile strategy on condition of anonymity. Adidas has assessed all of its apps, scrapping those it no longer needs. Now, according to another agency source, Adidas wants its newest app to kick-start its customer relationship management plans. The business spent part of 2017 outlining a strategy that could link all future apps together.

The executive said the intention is that whenever people sign into an Adidas platform, they use the same profile, allowing the brand to get a clearer picture of its more lucrative customers. In turn, that system will eventually start serving content to customers based on what they’ve previously viewed or bought.

For more on e-commerce, retail and marketing, subscribe to Digiday Media’s weekly Amazon Briefing.

The post How Adidas is using apps to fuel its e-commerce ambitions appeared first on Digiday.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Jay Friedman, chief operating officer at Goodway Group. Imagine it’s 2016, and a marketer is programmatically targeting EU consumers with behavioral data and buying those impressions on a second-price auction. When… Continue reading »

The post How To Survive In A First-Price, GDPR World appeared first on AdExchanger.

Much has changed since Outbrain was founded in 2006. Clickbait is no longer in favor but supply chain hygiene is, your in-laws are sharing fake news and whenever Facebook stirs, many of the little pubs worry about getting crushed. But Outbrain seems to still be going strong. Co-CEO and co-founder Yaron Galai declined to share… Continue reading »

The post Can Outbrain Move Away From Clickbait? appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Take That Rubicon Project reported Q4 and full-year 2017 earnings Wednesday. As expected, eliminating buy-side fees took a serious bite out of its revenue. For the quarter, revenues were $31.4 million, down from $72.7 million in Q4 2016, and full-year revenues fell to $155… Continue reading »

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Amazon’s focus on advertising is picking up steam. One sign: In the last few months, agency media buyers say they now hear from the company at least twice as often as they did last year. And more agencies say Amazon is now creating teams to service specific brands — a common tactic for ad platforms as they mature.

Here are the major developments, according to media buyers:

• Amazon is running a series of attribution tests to see how its advertising stacks up against the Facebook-Google duopoly.
• Amazon is testing an application programming interface for Amazon Advertising Platform with a small group of agencies that will let marketers manage more of their programmatic campaigns on their own, enabling Amazon advertising to scale. 
• Amazon has significantly grown its agency development group into hundreds of staffers, in a move modeled off the growth of Google and Facebook as advertising behemoths.

The moves all indicate that Amazon is taking its ad business, which is estimated at $2.8 billion, according to latest J.P. Morgan estimates, as a serious growth engine.

In what could be a significant move, Amazon is running a series of attribution tests with at least two agencies to figure out how ads drive action on Amazon.com, in an effort to prove its long-running pitch to marketers that Amazon offers, unlike Facebook and Google, what it calls a “total wallet perspective.”

Amazon’s pitch to advertisers is simple: CMOs hate unscientific attribution methods. If you’re an advertiser, theoretically, at least, you should be able to know how many people clicked on ads, and also know whether a sale happened. And the addition of brick-and-mortar capabilities through the company’s acquisition of Whole Foods, plus the launch of Amazon Books, means the company should be able to also attribution online to offline conversion.

Late last year, Amazon began offering more self-service options for Amazon Media Group, its in-house team that sells ad products. Now, buyers say they expect that to reach new levels: an API for AAP, its programmatic solution or demand-side platform that is the only way brands can reach Amazon’s audience segments off of Amazon properties. 

Speaking at Digiday’s Media Buying Summit in New Orleans last week, Tod Harrick, vp of product at WPP’s Marketplace Ignition, said this move is coming and gives agencies and marketers a better understanding of how Amazon works.

One of the biggest complaints from marketers about Amazon last year was a lack of “support” — one buyer told Digiday last year that he feels it’s a “sinkhole.” At the time, the argument was simple: Media remains, despite everything, a people business. And even as Amazon staffed up AMG and grew its sales teams, it’s not like the company to mimic other ad platforms. Instead, it’s always been about self-service. “They want to run lean and just provide tools to the marketers,” said Harrick.

In the last few months, if marketers have paid for managed services, they tend to run into the sinkhole problem. But if they want more data and metrics, they are encouraged to stop asking for managed services and shift entirely to self-service, said Harrick.

Another buyer at an Amazon-focused agency said an API for AAP essentially indicates to her a phasing out of AMG proper.

Kris McDermott, who heads up media at Omnicom’s Resolution Media, said she also expects all of the display and video inventory to eventually be managed programmatically, which would mean a significant shift for AMG. “AMG was kind of a stopgap media solution to allow brands to sign an [insertion order],” she said, “but I think it’ll be eventually phased out.”

“We’re always evolving our tools and products to better serve agencies and advertisers. Our API program is a key part of this, and measurement has long been a focus area for us,” said an Amazon spokesperson.

In the last two months, Amazon has made it a point to address buyer concerns about data as well. A third buyer told Digiday that the need to examine reporting from campaigns in its paid search product, Amazon Marketing Services, by day — a major request from buyers — has finally been addressed, along with bulk management of campaigns through AMS.

There are also moves from a support perspective. The in-house agency specialization group has grown. The agency development group, which includes “hundreds” of employees (Amazon declined to disclose the exact size of the team), is largely based in New York. Late last year, the Seattle-based company signed a lease downtown for an office space that can house up to 2,000 employees, mostly in the advertising division. That adds to its existing administrative office in midtown Manhattan and a fashion photography studio in Brooklyn.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the group now also has people working in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain, as well as in Tokyo and Toronto. The team’s main goal is e-commerce education and training, along with supporting adoption of the company’s self-service offerings.

It is unclear how the group is organized, although a search on LinkedIn shows multiple profiles of agency development managers dedicated to WPP and other holding companies. Amazon is also looking for a manager for its Europe team dedicated to driving agency partnerships there.

“Agency relationships are extremely important to us, and we’ll continue to expand our efforts, working back from their needs,” the Amazon spokesperson said.

For more on Amazon’s impact on media, marketing, retail and e-commerce, subscribe to Digiday Media’s weekly Amazon Briefing.

The post Triopoly time? Amazon preps new attribution tool and courts ad buyers appeared first on Digiday.