advertising

Google has built an ad-measurement tool that connects with marketers’ first-party data and is designed to work without browser cookies and other data tools that measure performance based on old methods. Google Ads Data Manager — the measurement tool announced Wednesday — will become available in Google Ads early next year. The product roadmap includes rolling it into other Google platforms as the company continues to streamline the management and use of first-party data.

Dentsu has struck deals with seven major media companies to do deals on the basis of its own, proprietary currency, dubbed “DELTA.” Importantly, the deals aren’t just with the biggest players, such as NBC Universal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which have been pushing the adoption of alternative advertising currencies, but smaller network suppliers, including Hallmark and A+E Networks, Dentsu SVP U.S. National Video Innovation Brad Stockton said during a presentation at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement in New York City Wednesday.

Toyota and the National Football League have entered into a multiyear sponsorship agreement designating Toyota as the official automotive partner of the NFL. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, other than it is “multiyear,” says David Christ, Toyota group VP-GM. The deal was announced on Toyota social media this morning via a 30-second video from AOR Saatchi & Saatchi.

The station group moves him up from senior director of Spanish media sales after guiding advertising sales growth for GrayTV Telemundo Station Group in 42 markets.

The measurement integration will enable transactions covering linear and total cross-platform reach for Paramount’s portfolio of networks and platforms.

With live sports TV programming taking on more importance with TV advertisers, Walt Disney says its upcoming NHL season on all its TV networks and streaming platforms is “nearly sold out,” inking 26 deals for presenting sponsorships. Disney Advertising was to get five new sponsorships: Chewy, GoDaddy, Kohl’s, Procter & Gamble and T. Rowe Price. This adds to the list of 21 presenting sponsorship brands from American Express, Apple, Mercedes-Benz USA, Taco Bell, Verizon, Fidelity and Kohl’s among others.

With the strike by the Writers Guild of America over and talks progressing between the studios and the actors union, sales-tracking platform MediaRadar estimated that television ad sales were down 10% to $14.4 billion from May to August, compared to a year ago when there was no strike. MediaRadar expects ad revenue to also be lower in September.

Vizio’s Travis Hockersmith: “Today, TV viewers are going in many different directions, but they’re all starting from the same place — the smart TV home screen. Advertising technology, budgets and strategies need to catch up to meet viewers where they now live.”

Amazon will shutter its ad-serving business in the fourth quarter of 2024, the company announced Tuesday. The delay is intended to give brands and agencies extra time to transition business to another ad server, as well as support employees worldwide who might be affected by the decision.

Companies like Danone went from investing sporadically to continuously in Hispanic media.

Fox TV Stations wants to help even the smallest local advertiser make an appearance on TV. The Fox Corp. division, which includes 29 stations, has struck a deal with Waymark, a technology firm that uses AI to help local and regional advertisers that might not have the expertise to make video commercials create some for TV.

Semafor reviewed the rates the network shared with one prospective ad buyer for both the first and second GOP primary debates. For the first debate, the cost of a single 30-second spot topped $495,000. But the same 30-second spot during Wednesday night’s contest cost just over $200,000.

Despite heavy time commitments to trying to optimize performance of converged TV campaigns, many advertising professionals admit that they’re not fully achieving this objective. Nearly 90% of 250 senior-level brand and agency executives surveyed in August by Innovid agreed that a unified view of performance across converged campaigns — defined as linear, connected TV and digital — is important, and 91% said that standard KPIs across converged TV advertising are important at some level.

Independent media agency Known has been named media AOR for the CW Network, part of Nextstar Media Group.  The appointment came without a formal review although the agency essentially auditioned for the role after piloting several campaigns on a project basis earlier this year. The timing is aligned to the CW’s new slate of programming which includes an increasing amount of sports, including ACC football and basketball, Inside The NFL, LIV Golf and more.

In a sign that the volatility of the U.S. ad economy may be stabilizing, the U.S. Ad Market Tracker posted its first consecutive month of growth in August since June 2022. While the growth was modest, rising just 1.2% over August 2022, the U.S. ad market expansion follows July’s 6.2% increase and is the third month this year to show some growth.

Wunderman Thompson has unveiled a new artificial intelligence testing tool for advertising and other brand assets. The test platform, known as Reveal, was developed in-house to measure audience attention and emotional responses to brand content through real-world environments, via PCs and phones.

Krishan Bhatia, a key architect of NBCUniversal’s recent forays into new kinds of advertising revenue, is leaving the company, and has informed his direct reports of his decision to exit at the end of 2023. Bhatia helped develop new revenue systems and infrastructure at NBCUniversal’s ad-sales unit, which for a time was very vocal about its efforts to strike e-commerce and data partnerships with advertisers.

Amazon Prime Video, one of the last mainstream streaming services to eschew the injection of regular commercial breaks into its movies and shows, plans to start letting them run early next year. Amazon follows a host of other streaming hubs — including Disney+, Netflix, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max — that also offer ad-supported tiers, a move that suggests the world of streaming may just eventually mirror the world of traditional television in the not-too-distant future.

That total will be bolstered by political and increased auto and legal ad spending. BIA CEO Tom Buono addresses television’s share of the local advertising marketplace for key ad spending verticals.

A Google executive on Tuesday admitted to changing the price of advertisements during the auction process to meet revenue targets. The company frequently changes the auction price for search ads and reserve pricing by as much as 5% on average. Jerry Dischler — Google VP-GM who oversees the company’s ad business — during Google’s antitrust trial told the U.S. Justice Department that for some queries, the company may have increased prices as much as 10%.

AdImpact, an ad intelligence service, said it has extended its relationship with TelevisaUnivision for two additional years. The Spanish-language programming giant licenses AdImpact’s political spending and competitive tracking tools. The companies have worked together for eight years.

SRDS (Standard Rate & Data Service), which for more than a century has been the primary reference tool for media planners and buyers researching media rate cards, is getting into the software business, launching a new campaign management system in partnership with Comcast’s FreeWheel’s Strata platform. The application, dubbed AdwOne, was originally developed by new SRDS owner, Paris-based Adwanted Group for agencies in France, but this week will begin beta testing a U.S. version with a mid-size independent agency and the in-house team of a consumer brand marketer.

The U.S. ad market showed improvement in the second quarter, but the main beneficiary was digital advertising, leaving the outlook for linear TV ad spending stagnant, according to Magna, the forecasting and intelligence unit of IPG Mediabrands.

At TVB’s Executive Summit this week, advertising experts pointed to encouraging signs from political and automotive (except the current strike), tempered by continuing concerns over measurement.

The deal brings the ad measurement firm’s total available TV device footprint to 82.7 million, adding set-top box data from 16.6 million homes.

Data can help streaming services reach customers and lapsed subscribers.

Fall’s upfront would have been a lot worse were it not for leveraging NFL packages with advertisers, and the league continues to pull them in in all sizes.

The streamer is hoping younger, more affluent viewer demos and ad customization will give it an edge on the field against its broadcast competition.

Google today announced a new approach to improving ad clarity, with a “get-to-know-you” program that affects advertisers Google is less familiar with. The policy, Limited Ads Serving, aims to reduce the risk of scams and help prevent confusing and misleading ads.

Mark Marshall has been named chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal after filling in on an interim basis. Marshall has been acting as interim chairman since May, when Linda Yaccarino departed the company to serve as CEO of Twitter. He stepped in to lead the team through its upfront, a day after Yaccarino’s departure, which NBCUniversal said resulted in cash commitments roughly in line with last year’s upfront, which was the company’s highest grossing to date, in the midst of a tough advertising environment.

TelevisaUnivision said it is restructuring its local advertising sales unit to better align with client demands and streamline relationships with buyers. The new setup features three units, one that deals with the big media agency holding companies; a multi-market unit with regional hubs in eight major cities and a local sales team. “The industry has been evolving rather quickly,” said Antonio Roman, executive, local media sales at TelevisaUnivision.

Selling commercials for the Super Bowl, once one of the least complicated processes in modern media is growing infinitely more complex. In 2024, Paramount Global will air Super Bowl LVIII on CBS and, in a first, on a separate kids-focused broadcast on Nickelodeon. In doing so, the company has created a few new wrinkles that TV networks in charge of televising the game typically don’t have to face.