Author: rssmasher

Ad tech companies grew roughly five times faster than the digital advertising market from 2010 to 2016, according to an ad spend forecast released by Zenith on Monday. The forecast tracked the revenues of 14 publicly traded ad tech companies including Adobe Marketing Cloud, Criteo, The Trade Desk, Rubicon Project, Rocket Fuel (taken private under… Continue reading »

The post Zenith: More Money Goes To Ad Tech Than To Actual Media appeared first on AdExchanger.

Publicis Media’s Zenith unit has upgraded its advertising outlook for 2018, albeit a modest one-tenth of a percentage point. Zenith now projects global ad spending will expand 4.6% in 2018, up from
the 4.5% rate of growth it last projected in its December 2017 release. Importantly, Zenith’s upgrade mirrors improvements in the macroeconomic outlook, which Publicis Media CEO Steve King said was
the basis for the revision, when he hinted at it last week during Publicis Groupe’s investor update in Paris.

Fueled by a new business streak at its Carat unit, Dentsu Aegis Network dominated net new business gains in 2017 by a slight margin over No. 2, Group M. With $1.334 billion in incremental gains — the
sum of losses, wins and account retentions — Carat was the biggest contributor to DAN’s stellar results, but both Vizeum (+$1.159 billion) and dentsu X (+$0.641 billion) assisted to drive DAN to the
best net results among the big agency holding companies’ media operations in 2017, according to data released this morning by COMvergence.

ABC’s reality music show “American Idol” gave passengers on several Frontier Airlines planes the surprise of a lifetime during the weekend.

With the May 25 start date for GDPR enforcement approaching fast, companies across the digital media, tech and data ecosystem are in overdrive to finalize product changes and prep their data governance and legal teams for scrutiny by the European Union. Tech Technology upgrade costs will likely remain high for a couple of years as… Continue reading »

The post What GDPR Costs Digital Media And Technology Companies appeared first on AdExchanger.

These are tough times for digital publishers as they look for ways to diversify their revenue, with Google and Facebook eating up the lion’s share of online advertising. At the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, publishers shared their biggest challenges in branching out. Our events operate under the Chatham House Rule, which means all discussions are on the record, only without attribution of names and companies. Here’s a sampling of what people said about the shift to reader revenue, platforms and video:

Pivoting to subscriptions is hard
“You have to figure out who’s going to own subscriptions in your organization. Can your design team build a paywall? There’s an operational cost you need to take into account.”

“You can’t just pivot into a subscription. It’s a long, slow road to grow into a product and experience that’s good enough for readers to pay you anything.”

“Our subscription revenue is higher than our ad revenue — and both are growing double digits this year. But we are reaching a point with [the growth of] our subscription product where we either need to grab a greater share of wallet from existing subscribers, or we have to pivot into new markets.”

Commerce isn’t an easy flip of a switch
“You do need to think more like a merchant because the more merchandising expertise you have, the closer you can get commerce into being a meaningful line of revenue. It’s not as simple as slapping products up and hoping they sell.”

“If Amazon has [the product], we’re not going to touch it. We need to be one of the only companies on the internet that has that product. Our success is all off of our niche.”

There’s no love for or from Facebook
“We actually had an account manager and got dropped by them. Between how much we spend with them and how much we monetize on the [Facebook Audience Network] side, the fact that we can’t get an account rep just to answer questions is kind of ridiculous — but that’s Facebook.”

“Part of the reason we diversified to not rely on Facebook as much: These platforms change things up so much at any point, the more you do different things, the better.”

“We joke internally that now our traffic diversification looks a lot better because Facebook went down.”

Apple News is no savior just yet
“Right now, it’s purely a brand play for us. It helps us say we have more reach, and the editorial team loves it, but it hasn’t added to the bottom line in any way yet.”

“The tech lift and operational challenges of monetizing the platform is probably the biggest hurdle.”

“An Apple News rep told us that the RSS feed is kind of dead to them. We built custom integration of the WordPress plugin, so all of the articles are auto-syndicated into it. We were fortunate because they reached out to us. The rep told us that using their format is definitely preferred by them.”

“There are two people running publisher partnerships for everybody. So you almost have no possibility of inclusion in there. We were told that if you have a calendar planned out for the next year, that’s the best way to get inclusion and get bumped up by Apple News.”

“They gave us no performance data, no targeting data. I’m going to wait until someone I trust says they’re making a ton of money before I put a ton of energy back into it.”

The video landscape is confusing
“We recently have been approached by MSN, [which has] 500 million uniques worldwide and 120 million uniques in the U.S. Who still uses MSN?”

“Does video header bidding actually work? Some vendors say yes and some vendors say no — and I have no idea.”

“We just have to set expectations. If you want to be on the top 100 sites on the internet, there is only a quantifiable amount of inventory, and it’s not going to be $8 [CPMs].”

The post ‘You can’t just pivot into a subscription’: Overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit appeared first on Digiday.

At the Digiday Retail Summit last month in Austin, Texas, we sat down with 53 retail executives to learn about their mobile strategies. Check out our earlier research on which platform media buyers find hardest to advertise on here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Less than 50 percent of retailers in Digiday’s survey from the event have a mobile app for consumers.
• Retailers believe their apps most effectively drive purchases, collect consumer information and improve customer loyalty.

Mobile apps are essential to e-commerce, but less than half of retailers have them
Only 45 percent of retailers Digiday surveyed have a mobile app for consumers. However more e-Commerce sales take place on a mobile app than the mobile web or desktop. A report from Criteo found that mobile apps were the largest source of online purchases in 2017, with 44 percent of online purchases occurring on apps, 23 percent on mobile web and 33 percent on desktop computers.

The post Digiday Research: Most retailers don’t have mobile apps appeared first on Digiday.

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Lauren Wiener, CEO at Tremor Video DSP.  During commercial breaks, half of viewers reach for a device, posing a challenge for TV advertisers. Brand recall falls by nearly half, from 47% to 25% [PDF],… Continue reading »

The post Digital Can Amplify TV Ads And Stretch Spend Further appeared first on AdExchanger.