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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 Sam Appelbaum, general manager at Yellowhammer Media Group. EMarketer predicts that nearly three quarters of all display advertising will be transacted programmatically this year. Programmatic video isn’t far behind, but the premium in price… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Getting To Yes? Tracking restrictions in Europe and on popular web browsers like Safari are putting retargeting companies in a bind – and “desperate times call for desperate in-browser messages,” reports Ross Benes at Digiday. Some retargeters now drop in-browser messages that opt in users… Continue reading »

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It’s impossible to avoid Google in Las Vegas this week at the Consumer Electronics Show. The company has a massive tent (complete with a slide and a ball pit) at the convention center; it has countless digital “Hey Google” billboards and other ads for Google Home and Google Assistant all over the Strip; and it even hired staffers to direct people to various Google events and meetings occurring at the hotels. For Google, it’s a full-court press as it tries to catch up with Amazon’s Echo and Alexa.

“The irony is that in the crowds of CES, it’s impossible for any company to effectively demonstrate their voice capability,” said Catherine Colwell, director of product management and strategy for Huge. “Google has gotten creative — their Google Assistant logo is by far the most prevalent, spread across a variety of marketplaces. Additionally, they’ve set up mini soundproof pods you can step into to enable demos.”

Throughout the week, both Google and Amazon have met with media companies, technology partners and marketers as they try to get more content for their virtual assistant products and expand distribution inside third-party devices, including connected TVs, connected cars and even smart glasses.

With marketers, the interest is high as clients ask for more information on how to approach Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. For Mindshare North America, its conversations with both companies focused on case studies and best practices for voice rather than any specific advertising product that might be in the pipeline, said Joe Maceda, Invention Studio lead for Mindshare North America.

“As frustrating as that can be for marketers, it’s good for the ecosystem of voice in the long run,” Maceda said. “Both [Amazon and Google] are entirely focused on making sure the user experience is as strong and utility-driven as possible.”

Amazon, for instance, pointed out the success of Domino’s Alexa skill, which allows users to quickly reorder their favorite pizza. The tech giant is looking for marketers to create skills like that. And Amazon is directly affecting marketers in their voice strategies.

“Given that Amazon is the first mover in the voice space and their end game is to sell stuff to people, the way we’re looking at voice is around how we can drive commerce through it,” Maceda said. For consumer packaged goods marketers, the focus is on “replenishment purchases” — the essentials people need to buy, Maceda added.

Admittedly, although Amazon is further along in voice, it still has some work of its own to do. Amazon plans to revamp the Alexa skill store, as users have not widely adopted it, according to a media executive who met with Amazon this week and has various voice partnerships in the works with the company. Amazon also recently hired a new team for the skill store for this effort, this executive said.

While both companies are focused on getting into connected cars — the next battle in the ongoing Amazon-Google voice war — Google’s best move to compete is to pay media companies to create original content, this exec said. A second media executive said Google has been more active in recent months talking to publishers about getting more audio content. It’s something he expects more media companies to focus on as Google continues to ramp up its voice business, he said.

“It’s very early and there are no commitments yet, but we’ve been pushing [Google] and others to pay,” said the first media executive. “It’s not going to be another YouTube; we’re looking to make a market here.”

The post Google is using CES to catch up to Amazon in battle of voice assistants appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers are getting noisier about the level of domain spoofing occurring against their inventory, with News UK the latest to talk openly about the results of its first programmatic blackout test. But few, if any, feel empowered to publicly name any supply-side platform that lets in large volumes of fraudulent inventory to their platforms — and for good reason.

For starters, lawsuits are messy, expensive and drawn out. Proving foul play when it comes to fraudulent inventory is extremely difficult, and publishers are wary of the legal ramifications. In some cases, confidentiality clauses in their contracts can bind them. Even vendors sometimes claim confidentiality clauses prevent them from sharing fraud insights with publishers, all contributing to the ring of silence. In some instances, the simple opacity of the programmatic supply chain renders it difficult to pinpoint who is responsible.

If publishers don’t have sufficient evidence of an SSP acting badly, they could be sued for defamation. “It’s unproven whether attempting to buy your own inventory would stand up in court as evidence of fraudulent behavior or malpractice on behalf of the SSP and whether the use of ads.txt and the public naming and shaming would bring a legal response,” said one publishing executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The publisher would also have to prove the SSP breached a duty of care by allowing the fraudulent inventory to appear, which is difficult when it’s often third-party suppliers pumping fraudulent inventory into the exchanges and SSPs. Plus, some SSPs are working to address the situation. Ad tech firm Adform identified a large-scale domain-spoofing scam last November and alerted all the ad exchanges affected. Other exchanges have promised they’re more regularly checking that the inventory coming into their platforms is clean after onboarding new publishers or publisher networks.

Still, months after the Financial Times went public with its own domain-spoofing investigation, millions of bids are still being made on inventory purporting to be premium publisher brands, with News UK estimating that marketers are throwing away £700,000 ($950,000) a month on fraudulent inventory on its own news brands. “I’m gobsmacked that not every single SSP has tightened up on this since the FT released its findings,” said Dan Wilson, CEO of startup London Media Exchange and ad tech exec. “Publishers should be kicking and screaming and demanding compensation.”

Aside from fear of backfiring lawsuits, publishers may be bound by confidentiality agreements with their vendors. “The confidentiality clauses in SSP contracts are usually quite broad and could conceivably cover not bringing the SSP into disrepute by releasing data linked to their name,” Wilson said.

Hiding behind contract terms seems to be a useful tool. At times when publishers have requested fraud intelligence from their SSP partners, the SSPs have declined to do so, citing their own contractual obligations with vendors, according to sources. “My immediate question [when told by an SSP it can’t supply fraud insights] is, which contracts? The ones with the perpetrators? It undermines the publisher’s understanding of the issue,” said another publishing executive who asked to remain anonymous. “Without understanding, it’s difficult [for us] to act.”

An additional gnarly point: Publishers may estimate how much money marketers are wasting on fraudulent inventory, but proving that money would otherwise have gone directly to the publisher is also difficult to argue in court, according to sources. And each SSP would require a separate lawsuit — a legal and financial nightmare. “It’s far from an easy, slam-dunk case,” said another publisher executive speaking on condition of anonymity.

For buyers, it’s a different scenario. Last summer, Google issued refunds to advertisers who inadvertently bought fake traffic. Other DSPs have followed suit, also offering to compensate buyers should there be a major breach. It’s a positive step — albeit with some less positive knock-on effects such as the DSP passing liability for issuing refunds for fraud back to the exchange, then the SSP, and it somehow ending up at the publisher’s door.

“This overlooks the source of [much of] the fraud issue, which is SSPs reselling and buying network traffic,” said another publishing executive. “It creates a disconnect between liability and responsibility. Onus should be on SSPs to adapt behavior to guarantee legitimate inventory — not to try and pass liablity.”

Others don’t believe contractual agreements should be binding when it comes to an issue as great as fraud. “The reticence of publishers to name and shame those ad tech platforms involved in fraud which are damaging their business is a typical case of Stockholm syndrome,” said Alessandro De Zanche, independent consultant and former News UK executive. “I highly doubt that in the case of fraud, any [contractual] clause would stand. It is more a case of publishers being passive and not being self-confident about their role and their value.

“Hopefully soon we will see end-to-end investigations with sore outcomes for the culprits, although we should differentiate from those platforms which discover fraud and react immediately and those which are not only caught with their hands in the cookie jar, but are also apparently refusing to disclose the details. It’s a duty for all of us to fight and wipe off certain players from the ecosystem.”

Of course, publishers stay quiet for other reasons. Some genuinely view their partnerships as relationships they want to maintain and prefer to put pressure on vendors privately rather than name them publicly. “It’s bad business [to name names], and the industry is small and they may mention someone that’s trying to improve,” said a senior executive for a major digital publisher.

The Association of Online Publishers is working with members to explore whether publishers can seek compensation in the future for severe levels of domain spoofing on their brands. “We’re seeking to renegotiate parts of the terms of agreement, to ensure a process exists to enable compensation where appropriate and warranted,” said Richard Reeves, managing director of the AOP.

But not everyone believes compensation is the answer. “We can’t fully blame SSPs for domain spoofing, as it is an exploitative hack of an emerging space in real-time bidding, said Amir Malik, digital marketing lead at Accenture. “Fraudsters look to commit these sorts of crimes in all digital industries.” However, he too believes that vendors can’t shirk responsibility. “More effective governance and fraud technology prevention needs to be developed,” he said, “and the SSP cut from those sold impressions should at the very least fund such initiatives.”

The post Why publishers don’t name and shame vendors over ad fraud appeared first on Digiday.

The growth of Amazon has meant brands now find themselves in a real predicament: If they don’t sell their wares on the site, they feel shut out. If they do, they’re subject to their customers essentially becoming Amazon customers. In this edition of Confessions, an exec at a fashion brand who has been selling on Amazon discussed dealing with the behemoth.

Edited excerpts appear below.

Why did you decide to sell on Amazon when you also do e-commerce?
We always knew we wanted to be very focused. We knew we wanted to be digital, have a two-way dialog with customers, which would be through a store but also an online channel, and that’s always been our focus. We started testing Amazon because we knew it’s a convenient way for customers to shop. I don’t think of Amazon as a place where our customers discover products.

Is that true for all platforms?
Not at all. The Asian platforms or marketplaces are much better for discovery. We are talking to Tmall; we are talking to Alibaba. They really have made an effort there to be more about discovery, which for a brand like ours is important. Nobody is remotely close to Amazon in the U.S., but in the world, it’s not the case.

Looking at Alibaba, we had been invited to join their Gateway summit, so we had the chance to meet with [founder] Jack Ma’s team. But we saw there how clearly people used it to discover new products, not just shop.

Do you make good money on Amazon?
Not at all. And the experience isn’t great. We don’t get the chance to really talk to anyone from there, and it’s a bit of a black box. They don’t share a lot of market intelligence with us, beyond how much traffic we get in our store. I want to know bounce rates, where people come from, what they purchase — all the basic, good intelligence I get through my own e-commerce. I can’t get that information from Amazon.

So why use it?
We made a conscious decision to use Amazon as a dumping ground. We do little discounting, so the way we get rid of slower-moving inventory that might be discontinued is on Amazon. We get some level of profit. Honestly, the only reason to sell on Amazon is if you’re a commodity or your competitors are on it.

What about advertising?
Amazon is aggressive. If you want to sell on Amazon, it’s almost like you have to do everything else. They’re going to find you if you have good reviews. They are always reaching out and saying, come and advertise. In the beginning, they weren’t aggressive. They reached out to us more from an angle like, if you perform well, we’ll invite you to advertise. When it first started, it felt a bit more genuine. Now, it’s becoming: You’re selling well; have you heard about our ad programs? It’s very frustrating. If I was dependent on Amazon as a sales channel, I’d have to spend so much on marketing it would be crazy. The way they’ve structured ecosystem is you almost have to advertise to do anything. I don’t have a lot of hopes for Amazon for us. In the U.S., it’s way more exciting for me to think about another platform. I think of Amazon as a bazaar.

The post Confessions of a retail exec: We use Amazon as a ‘dumping ground’ appeared first on Digiday.

If demand-side and supply-side platforms have found that venture capital funding is running dry, the reverse is true for customer data platforms, which tech executives and investors see as customer-relationship management platforms for business-to-consumer marketers. CDPs have gained momentum lately because they promise to offer a single view of a consumer across multiple devices, mainly based on a brand’s first-party data.

Much venture capital money is going into CDPs. For instance, Bluecore raised $35 million in series C funding last October, and mParticle raised the same amount last September, while Segment raised $64 million in series C funding last July.

Although the CDP market is being defined, John Matthews, managing director for Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips who advises on company exits, thinks CDPs will likely become acquisition targets for ad tech companies this year to underpin their targeting capabilities with richer and more unified targeting data, given the convergence of ad tech and marketing tech, with crossover merger and acquisition activities already taking place. “Overall, this moves ad tech companies toward being more CRM-focused for marketers,” said Matthews.

Eric Franchi, an early investor in mParticle, also said CDPs are hot right now and have “tremendous upside,” so they could grow into their own market. He doesn’t categorize CDPs as ad tech companies.

But as DMPs and CRM software evolve, they can do many things that CDPs claim to do. For instance, major DMPs that traditionally rely on third-party data have started processing first-party and second-party data, according to Matt Skinner, product marketing manager for DMP Adobe Audience Manager. “CDPs are an interesting emerging area. They talk about including PII [personally identifiable information] into their first-party data, which DMPs don’t do. But there’s lots of overlap in what CDPs, CRMs and DMPs can facilitate,” said Skinner. “I think CDP will be a big buzzword in 2018.”

Meanwhile, Matthews, who was a CRM industry analyst and consultant for 15 years, believes CDPs are just hybrids of DMPs and CRM platforms that incorporate online advertising data to enable some form of real-time analytics and targeting, across multiple offline and online channels. “[The rise of CDPs] also ties into the increasingly talked-about idea of people-based marketing, as in people as customers or prospective customers,” said Matthews.

Franchi also thinks CDPs are becoming the new darling in the investment community because consumer experience is fragmented across mobile, desktop and Amazon Alexa, among other devices, and CDPs can help marketers fill the gaps. “It’s time for CDPs to power marketing the way marketers want,” said Franchi. “DMPs are becoming less and less effective with cookies under GDPR, and there are more opportunities for CDPs to connect consumers across devices.”

But Matthews believes the challenge with CDPs — in addition to regulation and privacy issues — is managing customer data at high volume, regardless of whether a brand has allowed a CDP to mix its first-party data with other data sources. There’s also the question of whether brands are even willing to provide access to their first-party customer data in the first place, he said.

“There’s lots of value in using a brand’s first-party data, and I’m very supportive of that. But sometimes the industry tries to put different names on the same stuff,” said Jeffrey Finch, co-founder and chief product officer for DSP Choozle. “For me, CDPs and CRM companies are the same thing. If you try to raise money, it’s smart of you to put a new name on it.”

The post Move over DMP, DSP and SSP, CDP is ad tech’s hot new acronym appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers are finding that ads.txt has several indirect applications beyond combating domain spoofing and unauthorized reselling. Publishers are also using these Interactive Advertising Bureau-backed text files to organize inventory reports they share with advertisers, drive programmatic direct deals and shop for vendors. The benefits that publishers get from this simple tool are expanding as publishers, buyers and vendors increasingly adopt it.

Here are the secondary ways that publishers are using ads.txt.

Organizing reports
Like a national currency, ads.txt gets its value from people’s belief in it. Because ad buyers, publishers and vendors all accept the premise of ads.txt, it helps standardize how inventory reports are compared between these companies.

Without a centralized list of authorized sellers, it is more difficult for publishers and buyers to come to an agreement over which platforms are authorized to sell the publishers’ inventory. Having authorized vendors verified in an ads.txt file gives everyone involved in the transaction a good starting point on where to start looking for discrepancies when buyers and publishers come up with different impression counts in their inventory reports, said David Pond, director of programmatic at Vox Media.

Driving programmatic direct
Putting the spotlight on domain spoofing incentivizes advertisers to move their dollars from the open market to programmatic direct where they can set up deals directly with publishers. In 2017, programmatic direct accounted for 56 percent of total programmatic spend in the U.S., up from 53 percent in 2016, according to eMarketer.

The New York Times, in particular, benefited from this trend as its programmatic direct revenue doubled in the third quarter of 2017 over the previous quarter. The buzz around ads.txt helped boost the Times’ programmatic direct business, said Sara Badler, director of programmatic advertising at the Times.

Vendor shopping
Before ads.txt existed, publishers had less publicly available information at their fingertips to verify the claims of vendor salespeople. If a supply-side platform rep said it worked with a host of premium sites, the publisher either had to take the rep at their word or reach out to the other publishers individually to see if the claims were true.

But with ads.txt, if a SSP claims to work with a publisher like HuffPost, this claim can be fact-checked in seconds by visiting huffpost.com/ads.txt to see if the SSP is listed there. Since ads.txt categorizes vendors as either “direct” or “reseller,” publishers can also get a better sense of which vendors rely on arbitrage.

“Ads.txt is an amazing evaluation tool for a potential new partner,” said Emry Downinghall, vp of advertising at education site Chegg. “It’s not the end-all, be-all, but it’s a great start.”

The post How publishers are applying ads.txt beyond its original purpose appeared first on Digiday.