Welcome To AdTech Weekly
The Festival By The Sea
The festival by the sea graced us last week—but it didn’t exactly follow the planned schedule of glitz and yachts and the Snapchat Ferris wheel.
Instead, we saw a breaking point among publishers and advertisers fed up with ad tech’s slow approach to clean up fraud, set industry standards, and guarantee brand safety.
The discontent runs so deep that Index Exchange’s CEO predicted a “seismic shift” in digital marketing and called on ad tech to “take responsibility” in a kick-off column to Cannes.
He wasn’t alone. Throughout the week, other major advertisers and publishers spoke frankly about ad tech. Here are some sound bites:
- “The media supply chain is so murky and non-transparent, and so wasteful and even fraudulent – we’re wasting huge amounts of money.” – P&G’s Marc Pritchard
- “The world of digital advertising is a nightmarish joke… There are all sorts of creepy, borderline fraudulent middlemen, this thicket of strange companies, tracking pixels on everything. You couldn’t think of a more dangerous environment for a brand.” – The New York Times’s Mark Thompson
- “The cheapest media is on the lousy sites. You get what you pay for. If it’s too good to be true it probably is.” – Unilever’s Keith Weed
- “But in this age, utterly dominated by content distributors - the duopoly - at the expense of content creators - news organizations like ours - it is fair to say that the World Wide Web has not evolved in the manner that most civilised individuals had hoped, say, 15 years ago.” – News Corp’s Robert Thomson
I don’t know about you, but I’d be sweating if the world’s largest advertisers and publishers were speaking like that about my company.
Ad tech players should consider this a formal warning to clean up their act or move aside. Publishers and advertisers are united on what the future of advertising should be, and companies that can provide brand safe environments, third-party verification, and viewability assurances are already two steps ahead of the duopoly.
AdTech News And Editorial
A Seismic Shift Is Underway in Ad Tech
Even as ad tech players gear up to yet again take over Yacht Row at the Cannes ad festival and anticipate talking shop over glasses of rosé, they need to recognize the tone is going to be very different than when they first stepped onto the French Riviera.
New York Times CEO Calls For Ad Tech Reform
It's never a surprise to hear a high-end digital publisher lampoon the chaotic digital ad environment, but a sharp invective delivered by Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times, went beyond the usual sniping.
Ads.txt and Transparency’s Muddy Truth
Ads.txt could be a simple solution to a messy problem, giving publishers control of inventory and advertisers confidence in results. But its simplicity might also be its downfall, as it provides unprecedented transparency into an industry that relies on confusing processes and bloated supply chains.
Apple Treats The Disease. Google Treats The Symptoms.
In recent days, both Apple and Google have announced initiatives to deal with the problem. Google's solution is timid. Apple's solution is much better.
Time Warner Said to Invest $100 Million in Snapchat Shows, Ads
Time Warner will invest $100 million in producing TV-like shows and advertising on Snap Inc.'s Shapchat over the next two years, in a push by the the media giant to reach young audiences on the social network, according to a person familiar with the matter.
What to know about Europe’s antitrust fracas with Google
Google is expected to face fines from the European Union that top €1 billion ($1.1 billion) over allegedly abusing its market share in search, according to a report from the Financial Times.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Rethinks Ad Tech Acquisition Strategy
Twitter’s ad tech fortunes haven’t been great. Most recently, it took its 479-million-dollar acquisition TellApart for a long walk behind the barn.
Reddit Looks to Lure Advertisers With Video and Redesign
Reddit came to Cannes with a fresh pitch for advertisers. It is rolling out video ads, which will be available through its sales team and its existing self-service ad buying platform.
Publishing
Meredith increased revenue per visit 20 percent by getting ads to load faster
Cutting down the amount of code on its webpages has helped Meredith make more revenue per visitor.
Programmatic
Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard on getting partners to adopt industry standards: ‘We’re 40 to 50 percent there’
Procter & Gamble chief brand officer Marc Pritchard said at the beginning of 2017 that the digital ad industry needed to grow up and follow common measurement standards. Halfway through the year, Pritchard said nearly “40 to 50 percent” of P&G’s media, agency and ad tech partners are meeting the brand’s minimum standards.
Unilever’s Keith Weed says CMOs must take responsibility for brand safety scandal – ‘it’s not just Google’s fault’
Marketers need to shoulder more of the responsibility for the brand safety crisis that has engulfed the industry this year instead of pinning all the blame on Google, according to the CMO of the world’s second largest advertiser.
Extremist content, algorithmic angst and fake news: why tech giants must become socially responsible
The algorithmic alchemy of the biggest tech companies is redefining our commercial and social experiences, but like the alchemists of old, algorithms are also a charlatan’s charter, allowing claims of pure science when human intervention is clearly doctoring results to suit either commercial imperatives or political agendas.
Are Buyers Ready To Pull The Trigger On Ads.Txt?
The public comment period for ads.txt, the initiative by IAB Tech Lab to cut down on domain-spoofed traffic, is now over. But are marketers, their agencies and DSPs ready to adopt? Yes and no.
Why blockchain faces an uphill battle in fixing ad tech’s transparency problems
Most ad tech conferences these days feature at least one presentation on how blockchain will revolutionize programmatic buying, but blockchain must overcome a lot of hurdles before it can help ad tech with its transparency issues.
Vox Media’s Jim Bankoff: We’re eliminating ads from exchanges
Too often digital media brands are overly reliant on a programmatic ad system that allows bad ads to slow down their sites, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff said on the Digiday Podcast.
Privacy And Ad Tracking
Publishers’ and advertisers’ rights end at a browser’s front door.
Adtech’s surveillance breaks both the letter and the spirit of hypertext protocol. It gives us what none of us asked for and what most of us don’t want. And it does so simply because it can.
Podcasting
Audio to Action: Driving Leads through Podcast Ads
Audio ads aren’t created equal, and marketers shouldn’t write podcast ads as they would radio ads. Podcasts require interesting storytelling, a deep understanding of the target audience, and familiarity with the podcast the ad will appear on.
How NPR Continues to Develop Its Podcasting Ad Game With Data and Branded Content
NPR is monetizing the space with ad sales and strategic branded content partnerships. But what’s more interesting is that the organization wants to change how podcast advertising is sold by getting better data in front of brand marketers.
Future Of Advertising
The Race Is On to Challenge Google-Facebook ‘Duopoly’ in Digital Advertising
Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google tower so far above the rest of the digital advertising world that no company can claim the mantle of No. 3. But many are trying.
Omnicom’s New Chatbot Arms Its Network of Agencies With More Data and Analytic Tools
To arm its network of agencies with more data and analytic tools, Omnicom-owned Annalect is launching an internal chatbot called Annalect Utility Bot Interface (or AUBI) that spits out deep troves of data faster than the agency’s team of data scientists can handle.