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The Pendulum Swings
Things have gotten mighty dark in the corners of Ad Tech. You don’t have to toss a stone very far to hit an editorial eschewing the demise of the industry. We can’t blame people either. Everyone seems to be fighting in the streets, or on Twitter at least.
The thing that always seems to go unnoticed is that a handful of technologies have been largely responsible for the malware and data mess we find ourselves today. Those technologies are largely on the outs with consumers. The pendulum has finally started swinging away from their corners and towards more responsible alternatives on the market. The market has started to make a correction. People are trying to hold the industry — typically bereft of responsibility — accountable.
Several of the articles listed below share that common theme this week, and it’s an important one to ponder. The discontent isn’t a bad thing. Smart people are asking important questions, and together we’ll determine what the next ten years of advertising looks like for everyone.
As we get back to our advertising roots (so long private data pilfering), the future of the industry couldn’t be brighter.
Todd Garland, CEO, and Founder at BuySellAds
AdTech News And Editorial
We’re Living In The World Wide Ad Honeypot
Publishers shouldn’t be surprised that most people now get their news from headlines, instead of the detailed information in an article. They also shouldn’t be surprised that people no longer want to leave the confines of the platform for these news websites. Media companies have designed a system where the cost of clicking a link is too big of a burden for readers.
The Branded Content Studio Experiment Is Over
The tide is going out on the majority of so-called “native studios,” the feeding frenzy for publishers to rapidly build in-house offerings to leverage the native advertising trend.
The reason? Many are still using native content as a lure to sell more display. But as many marketers assert, it is about the quality and context of the content.
Marrying Programmatic And Direct Is No Fairy Tale
Premium content publishers have a reputation for not being very technical. Any time a new digital channel arises, the more technical it is, the more likely publishers are to outsource or underfund it.
The result is that publishers are beholden to third parties, revenue is depressed and the company loses ground as the world innovates around it. The big threat to publishers’ digital advertising business today is unsold inventory handed to supply-side platforms (SSPs) and other programmatic partners, either directly in a publisher’s header or elsewhere.
If it weren’t for retargeting, we might not have ad blocking
The ad industry’s calls this kind of stalking “retargeting,” and it is the most obvious evidence that we are being tracked on the Net. The manners behind this are completely at odds with those in the physical world, where no store would place a tracking beacon on your body and use it to follow you everywhere you go after you leave. But doing exactly that is pro forma for marketing in the digital world.
A Tech Mogul’s Fight to Keep Control of a Newspaper Empire
Excellent feature on Michael W. Ferro Jr. and his vision for Tribune Publishing, now known as Tronc.
3Qs: The cat-and-mouse game of blocking digital ads
In the future, it is likely that makers of ad blockers will continue perfecting web-based techniques to filter out ads. However, this will probably be hard to achieve without substantially (and negatively) altering the seamless, personalized, and optimized content that users are accustomed to seeing. So, ultimately, consumers will have to choose. Some will prefer a seamless, user-friendly interaction with publishers and social network sites, and accept the cost of being exposed to ads, while others may sacrifice some elements of that experience—or even reduce their content consumption by not visiting anti-ad-blocking publishers—but enjoy zero ad exposure.
Scrolling in the Deep
How readers are moving around on your pages — particularly, how far down the page they’re scrolling — can tell you a lot about how to make your pages more engaging.
Video: Death of the Industrial Advertising Complex
In his talk at L2’s Digital Leadership Academy, Scott Galloway argues that advertising is becoming less essential to brand building as consumers are discovering products with tools like Google, Amazon, and TripAdvisor. The brand is no longer on the tip of the tongue, it’s what Google says it is.
SimilarWeb's Top US Media Publishers and Publications as of July 2016
A total of 9 publications grew their Facebook traffic by more than 50% while 22 publications saw Facebook traffic drop at least 50%. This could be ominous news for publishers who may be forced to look at other channels in order to maintain and increase page-views.
Haha n00b, learn to hack!
From adtech, brands get roughly the same message that a WordPress user with a security problem would get on a phpBB site tricked out with a black background and rotating ASCII-art skulls. haha pwned n00b! Better learn 2 h@ck nxt t1m3!!!1! The IAB puts an ideological committment to unlimited third-party tracking ahead of the interests of its honest members' customers.
Econet Wireless signs ad blocking deal with Shine
Econet Wireless, a mobile carrier based in South Africa, has announced it plans to deploy network-level ad blocking for its 40 million subscribers across the African continent.
Acquisitions
Univision is buying Gawker Media for $135 million
Univision has won the auction for Gawker Media. The TV network and digital publisher has agreed to pay $135 million for the bankrupt blog network, according to a person familiar with the deal.