Welcome To AdTech Weekly
Sail On Ad Tech; Hello Rev Tech!
I’m going to be honest. I think we’ve lost the plot. Somewhere along this wild ad tech ride, we've managed to forget that the industry exists as a tool for premium content providers. The goal of that tool is to earn them revenue. That's our mission. That's our end game. Giving content creators the ability to maximize revenue through advertising is our core focus. Or, at least it should be. Call me a skeptic, but increasingly it doesn’t look that way anymore.
It's time premium content providers stop thinking of our industry as “ad tech” and instead start thinking of it as revenue technology. The ad industry needs a makeover, and the core principles that govern our industry needs a realignment. An evolution from ad tech to revenue tech would shake up the entire ecosystem for the better.
Instead of focusing on all that's wrong with the industry (woah boy, there's a ton we can point to -- also, pot meet kettle), we can start focusing on maximizing revenue for content providers instead.
What would a shuffle of this magnitude result in?
- Premium content providers would realize that it's absurd to outsource their primary revenue to third parties.
- Premium content providers would start to realize that they need to take full control of their revenue streams, whether that’s developing in-house solutions or aligning themselves with more responsible partners.
- Premium publishers would realize that "ad tech" exists to serve them. Not the other way around.
- Premium publishers would start demanding different pricing models and increased transparency from “ad tech” companies.
- Ad tech would clean up its act in a hurry.
The push is already well underway.
At the risk of belaboring my point, here's a list of premium content creators who have purchased "ad tech" companies over the last couple of years:
- Time Inc. purchased Adelphic.
- Time Inc. purchased Collective.
- Time Inc. purchased Viant.
- Ancestry purchased AdPay.
- Yellow Pages purchased Juice Mobile.
- New York Times purchased Hello Society.
- News Corps. purchased Unruly
- AOL purchased Millennial Media
- LinkedIn purchased Bizo
- Scripps purchased Midroll Media.
- Alibaba purchased AdChina.
- 21st Century Fox purchased True[X]
- The Washington Post is building its own ad tech tools.
There are a lot more I’ve probably forgotten too.
Lower and mid-tiered content creators will always need to bootstrap their advertising revenues in some capacity, but the top A-list publishers? Well, it’s increasingly obvious that they’re over the idea that they need to string together dozens of advertising technologies just to survive. Convoluted ad tech stacks are a thing of the past. A-list content creators are looking for tools that help them sell advertisements directly to audiences, not funnel inventory through arcane systems that do nothing but devalue premium audiences.
Publishers are about to own ad tech. Just wait and see.
AdTech News And Editorial
Rubicon Project is shutting down the division associated with its $122 million Chango acquisition
Ad tech company Rubicon Project is closing down the division it created following its $122 million acquisition of Toronto-based "intent marketing" company Chango after its performance did not meet expectations.
CPV and the In-App Bidding War
Up until recently, brand and performance advertisers typically walked two separate paths: brands bought media on a CPM/CPV basis; performance advertisers bought on a CPI/CPA basis. But with more than 50% of consumers' time spent on digital media spent in-app, the war for in-app traffic is heating up. Specifically, a rivalry is emerging between brands and increasingly sophisticated app advertisers, both of which are buying on a CPV basis to secure in-app inventory.
From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece
Interested in the journey a fake news article makes around the web? This is a must read.
Report shows publisher revenue from Google, Facebook, Snapchat
The report, from premium publisher trade body Digital Content Next (DCN), claims that the (mean) average premium publisher generated $7.7 million in revenue from distributing their content on third-party platforms in the first half of 2016 — equivalent to around 14% of their overall revenues in the period.
Readability & The Website : How Advertising Can Steal from a Visitor’s Experience
If the experience on your site causes someone to be interrupted while reading your piece, you are contributing to them having difficulty spending time there, which causes detachment. When detachment happens, especially during something as emotionally connecting as reading a story, you’ve lost your audience with little chance of getting their attention back.
Adform to cut 8% of global workforce
The Denmark-based company has cut back on approximately 8% of its total headcount (thought to affect just under 70 people) with exits understood to have taken place across various tiers of the company, including a number of senior executives.
Privacy And Ad Tracking
European Commission proposal will kill 3rd party cookies
A proposal this month from the European Commission to reform the ePrivacy Directive (ePD) requires mandatory privacy options and educates users to distinguish between 1st and 3rd-parties in a way that will make 3rd-party cookies extinct.
Podcasting
Three Reasons Every Company Needs an Audio Strategy
Audio content is in a place where blogging was before Blogger, Tumblr and, subsequently, Twitter for microblogging. Today, there's a similar opportunity for companies in audio. Experiential audio content is easy to create and share, and, on the consumption side, the user experience is improved with content built around people telling stories through voice conversations.
Future Of Advertising
Time Inc. to Acquire Automated Ad Buying Platform Adelphic Inc.
Time Inc. said the ad tech firm will complement Viant, a data-driven marketing company it acquired last year that has a database of more than 1 billion registered users. Adelphic enables agencies and clients to buy advertising on their own, a self-service capability that Viant currently lacks.
Header Bidding
How second-price auctioning can create headaches for publishers
The second-price auction design of header-bidding partners can create inefficiencies for publishers that don’t maximize yield. Sources told Digiday that moving server-to-server would allow publishers to more easily collect all bids from SSPs or switch to a first-price auctioning model that would allow them to overcome this problem.