digital advertising

With tech companies like Google tightening their grip on third-party data sharing with advertisers, advertisers are eager to glean insights from retailers like Target, according to representatives from four advertising agencies specializing in consumer goods. Shoppers make more than 250 million visits a year to Target stores and its website.

AdTheorent uses machine learning to deliver value for programmatic advertisers. Combined,  the companies said they will become one of the largest independent omnichannel audience activation platforms for buyers and sellers of advertising.

Facebook “Watch” looked like a Netflix killer in 2017, but antitrust prosecutors claim it was shut down to protect advertising deals.

Closed ecosystems benefit; smaller publishers face daunting and costly challenges.

The e-commerce platform’s parent company spent nearly $2 billion at Meta last year and it was a top advertiser at Google.

The Super Bowl is not just a big moment for television. With the big game approaching YouTube has a few new tricks in its playbook for advertisers to engage its millions of viewers. YouTube is offering First Position Moments, which ensure that a brand’s ad is the first one seen when audiences watch the platform at the times most relevant to its business.

Video watched out-of-home (OOH) comprises more than one-third of programmatic OOH spend on video-enabled screens. Place Exchange, an OOH programmatic SSP, expects more investment in video as advertisers increase their use of short-form vertical video content from social campaigns on larger screens.

The travel brand will start up a worldwide campaign on Netflix’s ad-supported plan for the entire 2024 year — a multi-country advertising effort to reach more than 23 million global monthly active users.

At last week’s CES conference in Las Vegas, Amazon was already talking to advertisers about next season and planning to upgrade the advanced advertising products that appeared during the game, Amy McDevitt, sports brand partnership lead at Amazon Ads, said. The company is also thinking ahead to streaming the National Women’s Soccer League in the spring and NASCAR next year as Amazon expands the sports programming it can offer advertisers.

Netflix is seeing strong growth of its advertising-based plan, having recently eclipsed 23 million global monthly active users, president of advertising Amy Reinhard said Wednesday. “The thing we’re really excited about is the engagement,” she said. Of Netflix’s customers on ad-supported plans, 85% are streaming on the platform for more than two hours per day, she said.

Meta Platforms is pressing a federal district court judge to stay a Federal Trade Commission administrative proceeding that could result in an order prohibiting the company from monetizing teens’ data. In papers filed late last week, Meta tells U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly it will face “irreparable harm” unless he halts an administrative hearing at which the company “will be forced to litigate before its litigation adversary, and without the procedural protections inherent in federal court litigation.”

People and groups had harnessed the tool to scrutinize content on the site related to the Israel-Hamas war and other topics.

Hub Entertainment Research’s annual 2023 report TV Advertising: Fact vs. Fiction found that of 3,000 surveyed U.S. consumers between 14-74, the majority are softening their stance on cheaper, ad-supported streaming options to keep their monthly streaming bills under control. The findings come as several streamers have raised prices on ad-free tiers and introduced lower-cost plan options that have commercials.

With television making the transition from a linear medium to a digital one, GroupM has formed a group designed to give advertisers a stronger voice in how TV advertising evolves. The GroupM Ad Innovation Accelerator consists of a combination of traditional media companies, streamers and tech companies. Initial participants are BrightLine, Disney, Kerv, NBCUniversal, Roku, Telly and YouTube. Other interested parties will be able to join.

The search giant plans to remove a technology seen as critical to the digital-ad industry.

Las Vegas trade show CES always kicks off the new year in gadget-happy style, showcasing the innovations that will (sometimes) define the future. Alongside all of the autonomous vehicles and 8K drone cameras at this year’s January confab, something less tangible but just as significant will take up space: streaming advertising. Disney, which launched an ad-supported tier of Disney+ a year ago and now fully owns veteran ad purveyor Hulu, will have a sizable presence, as will players like Roku, Paramount Global, NBCUniversal and Amazon. Netflix, which entered the ad game just before Disney, will have its first-ever booth on the CES show floor.

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers say their study’s findings show a need for government regulation of social media since the companies that stand to make money from children who use their platforms have failed to meaningfully self-regulate. They note such regulations, as well as greater transparency from tech companies, could help alleviate harms to youth mental health and curtail potentially harmful advertising practices that target children and adolescents.

Prime will include ads beginning on Jan. 29, the company said in an email to U.S. members this week, setting a date for an announcement it made back in September. Prime members who want to keep their movies and TV shows ad-free will have to pay an additional $2.99.

Amazon announced in September that ads were on the way for Prime Video‘s entertainment content. Now we have a date. On Jan. 29, 2024, commercials will be introduced to series and movies airing on the service in the U.S., UK, Germany and Canada. That will be followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year. The move was announced in a letter sent to subscribers that described the addition of what was termed “limited advertisements” to allow the service “to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.”

Digital pros on the buy side of programmatic advertising view the potential for ads being delivered alongside risky content or misinformation as the biggest media challenge in the year ahead, according to the latest annual U.S. Industry Pulse survey from Integral Ad Science/IAS and YouGov. Adjacency concerns were cited by 28% of brand, agency and ad-tech executives, although that was closely followed by decreased access to consumer data/cookies (27%), challenges in assessing campaign results (26%) and difficulty/confusion in buying/selling programmatic media (24%).

Democratic candidates, including Elon Musk’s most vocal critics, have spent over a million dollars to run thousands of political ads on X.

The social media platform has had preliminary talks with Amazon to sell ads through the e-commerce giant’s ad-buying software.

X boss Elon Musk called on Disney to “immediately” fire CEO Bob Iger on Thursday for allowing Mouse House ads to run on rival social media platforms that allegedly allowed child predators to target underage users. Musk’s escalated his feud with Iger — whom he told to “go f–k yourself” last week after Disney pulled its advertising from X — following a disputed report that its ads were running next to antisemitic content on the site formerly known as Twitter.

Walmart said on Friday it is not advertising on social media platform X, one of the latest brands to say it has dropped the Elon Musk-owned site. “We aren’t advertising on X as we’ve found other platforms to better reach our customers,” a Walmart spokesperson said.

Mixed economic signals continue to cloud the visibility of the near- and long-term advertising marketplace, including just released data from OAREX Capital Markets showing a rise in the percentage of digital media payments that are made late or are underpaid. The data, the first of a new quarterly snapshot developed by OAREX for MediaPost, complements its more granular semi-annual reports, and does not break out payments made by agencies vs. the programmatic supply chain, but it shows that the demand-side overall is keeping its cash close to its vest.

Advertisers said on Thursday that they did not plan to reopen their wallets anytime soon with X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, after its owner, Elon Musk, insulted brands using an expletive and told them not to spend on the platform.

Elon Musk’s “Go f–k yourselves” statement to advertisers leaving X was defended by the social media platform’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, who said that the owner “offered an apology, an explanation and an explicit point of view about our position.”

Vidhya Srinivasan — an ad exec who previously led product and engineering for Google’s core search, maps, and shopping formats — will step into Jerry Dischler’s role to spearhead Google’s advertising efforts around the Chrome web browser as the company phases out third-party browser cookies.

The decision follows owner Elon Musk’s bizarre embrace of the utterly debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory on Tuesday.

A new report from Frequence finds frontline workers would benefit from better tech.

The latest analysis of the effects of invalid traffic/IVT estimates that the problem will result in $72.37 billion in wasted ad spend in 2024 — up 33% from an estimated $54.63 billion wasted in 2022. The report, from marketing efficiency platform Lunio, was based on an analysis of 2.6 billion paid ad clicks and 104 billion impressions from more than 60,000 ad accounts across Lunio’s clients — all resulting from paid media campaigns — conducted between May 2022 and May 2023.