digital advertising

Measured media spending is estimated by the Winterberry Group to reach $117.4 billion in 2018; offline media and marketing spend, $97.8 billion; and digital media spend, $100.8 billion.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau and American Association of Advertising Agencies on Thursday released new terms and conditions for long-form video — a significant update to the T&Cs, which were last updated in 2009

Amazon is hoping to more aggressively take on Google and Facebook in the digital advertising space, and video advertising may play a key part of that expansion.

Publishers have been enthusiastic about voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant this year, often undaunted by the fact that these platforms require bespoke content, and the route to monetization is still unclear. After promising levels of its audience returned each week to use its Alexa skill, CNBC’s global ad sales team will start selling audio sponsorship packages to advertisers in the next few months.

IAB reports that mobile took 54% of total digital ad revenue in the first half this year, up 22% from first-half 2016. Advertisers spent $21.7 billion on mobile during the first half of 2017 — up 40% from $15.5 billion in first-half 2016 and surpassing the $8.2 billion reported two years ago in first-half 2015.

Netflix and Spotify have turned their users’ habits into marketing campaigns to the delight of some. But not everyone.

Suffice it to say, it’s been a terrible year for some digital media companies that once dreamed of disrupting the content world. If that sounds harsh, remember what we’ve learned this year: It’s nearly impossible to build a big media business if you’re only making money through advertising; the pivot to video is costly and will fail for most companies that don’t know how to produce anything but short videos for Facebook; and consumer revenue requires building a brand that people care about, which is tougher to do when your content only appears in other people’s news feeds.

It says the addition of the digital video advertising infrastructure platform will be immediately accretive and “substantially broadens and diversifies Nexstar Digital’s portfolio with industry-leading, brand safe systems and technologies.”

News Corp is taking aim at the digital-ad dominance of Google and Facebook with a new platform to let advertisers reach audiences across all of its online properties. The new platform, called News IQ, will pull audience data from sites like The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and Barron’s and give advertisers a way to reach specific audiences around safe content.

We’ve been headed here for a while. But this was the year it actually happened: Advertisers spent more on digital than traditional TV. To be specific: Digital ad spending reached $209 billion worldwide — 41% of the market — in 2017, while TV brought in $178 billion — 35% of the market. That’s according to Magna, the research arm of media buying firm IPG Mediabrands.

Continued gains from digital media — and virtually unchanged results from national TV —helped lift the U.S. ad market to a robust 7% hike in October. Digital media grew 11%, while national TV inched up 1% and radio rose a surprising 16%, Standard Media Index says. On the losing end, out-of-home was down 3%, magazines slid 19%, and newspapers gave up 3%.

Hulu, the offspring of traditional TV companies, hopes to catch Madison Avenue’s eye with offers of new commercial formats that can be distributed to select cuts of audience based on program choices and other behaviors. Advertisers who sense a couch-potato migration from living-room TV to mobile screen might have interest.

The ad sales head of NBCUniversal is “leading the business in a lot more ways than just talking about measurement,” says one fan.

Every agency, platform and digital media player has been on high alert since Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard, who holds the strings to the conglomerate’s $2.4 billion annual U.S. advertising purse, threatened to yank his company’s spend if they fail to address the growing mess of issues in digital advertising like fraud, brand safety and transparency.

After eschewing banner ads for years, BuzzFeed is finally embracing them. BuzzFeed will introduce display ads that will be bought and sold using third-party ad technology on a global basis. The move is a bid to tap into its scale and monetize its owned-and-operated platforms more effectively.

The U.S. advertising market grew 3.8% in the second quarter of this year — largely due to an 11% gain in digital media. Standard Media Index says this followed a 2.8% increase in the first quarter. National TV brought down the overall results. In the second quarter, national TV advertising revenue was virtually flat — down 0.8%. This followed a weak 0.8% gain in the first quarter.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau today released the final version of the IAB Standard Ad Unit Portfolio. The specs include advertising units that allow for the creative to adjust to a variety of screen sizes and resolution capabilities. Based on HTML5 technology, a move Google pushed in 2016, the specs also offer guidelines for augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), social media, mobile video, emoji ad messaging and 360-degree video ads.

Comcast Advanced Advertising Group announced a new platform that will let marketers make ad buys in broadcast and streaming TV using blockchain technology. The platform will allow marketers to anonymously match their data sets with programmers and others in the industry to target consumers on any device without giving up proprietary customer info. Participants in the technology, dubbed the Blockchain Insights Platform, include Disney, NBCU, Altice USA, Channel 4 U.K., Cox Communications, Mediaset Italia and France’s TF1 Group, according to Comcast.

The new suite of data-driven products is designed to serve both the audio and video marketplaces in the digital ad marketplace.

Snap has more than its share of skeptics and critics. And if its stock price is any indication — Snap shares are now trading near their IPO price — it’s not come close to quieting them. One group Snap has yet to win over is the marketing industry. A mere 7% of marketers said they used Snapchat in the first quarter of 2017, according to a recent Social Media Examiner survey.

The $3.7 billion jump represents the second-highest quarter of all time and follows on the heels of the industry’s strongest quarter on record, which was $21.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2016.

Snap officially launched its self-service Ad Manager on Monday. The new platform boasts several features tailored for smaller brands, including auction buying and the ability to pay for ads with a credit card rather than a credit line. In Ad Manager, there is also no minimum dollar amount that businesses must spend. As part of a broader ad push, Snap also unveiled a Certified Partners program — offering advertisers help in planning, executing and improving their Snapchat ad buys.

Verizon wants to become a strong third choice for advertisers by adding Yahoo’s popular sites and billion users worldwide to its own media business, which includes AOL and Verizon’s home-grown go90 video service. It can place ads on those sites, and can also combine data from visitors to those sites with AOL’s ad technologies and sales teams, and possibly also personal data from Verizon mobile customers such as location and other information, in order to better target ads at individuals.

Snap Inc. acquired Placed, a startup that measures the offline success of digital advertising campaigns, for about $125 million, according to people familiar with the matter. Including stock payouts, the full value of the deal could exceed $200 million, said two other people with knowledge of the deal, who asked not to be named because the terms aren’t being disclosed. The acquisition will help Snap expand its efforts to show that ads on its photo and video-sharing app Snapchat are driving users to stores.

In presentations this week to promote programming for the 2017-18 season, sales executives from major cable and broadcast networks had to pull off a carefully orchestrated balancing act. Bigwigs from Fox, NBC and CBS took aim at Facebook, YouTube and other digital platforms in the hopes of wooing commercial dollars back to traditional media. At the same time, they talked up their own digital chops, as well as partnerships with and investments in digital companies.

Borrell Associates’ 15th annual Benchmarking Local Media’s Digital Revenues tracks the changes in local digital advertising versus that held by pureplay internet companies. This year marks a milestone for local advertising, the report says. “For the first time, local businesses will invest more of their marketing dollars in digital media than they will in community-based print and broadcast media.”

Marketers spent $72.5 billion on digital advertising last year, an increase of 22% from 2015, as Google and Facebook once again booked the lion’s share of new revenue, a report released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau said on Wednesday. The report underscored a migration by consumers away from traditional forms of media like television to online and mobile platforms, which has left digital companies competing for a larger share of advertising dollars.

Philippe Guay, EVP, SendtoNews: “Finding ways to scale your offering through partnering is an easy way to get advertisers and agencies to appreciate and buy your offering. We need to make sure audience is so easy to buy at scale that you are impossible to ignore when it comes time to allocate media budget.”

The WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers resumed contract discussions this week following a two-week hiatus that was initiated after WGA rejected an AMPTP offer. One main point of contention is over funding of health care plans. Barclays analysts wrote in a research note on Wednesday that if the strike moves forward, advertisers, viewers and ancillary revenues will likely reallocate toward digital platforms.

To kick off what should lead to more partnerships like it, the company’s Data Cloud division has joined with linear TV data firm Simulmedia. Oracle hopes the pair-up will coax advertisers still spending big bucks in TV to look to its platform and audience-linked transactional data offerings, typically employed for digital advertising, before planning TV media buys.

Marc S. Pritchard, chief brand officer for Procter & Gamble, is leading demands for more data on where ads appear and how views are measured.

While almost all of the TV media companies have been rolling out their own data platforms to transact more advertising based on metrics outside of the traditional age and gender demos, NBCUniversal is making the biggest push yet to transition brands into making targeted audience buys. Last month, the company announced it was committing $1 billion in 2017 advertising inventory to data-based, non-Nielsen transactions in this year’s upfront and scatter markets. That’s 10% of the $10 billion in ad revenue the company brought in last year.

The decision by a handful of high-profile consumer brands to pull advertising from Google’s YouTube over offensive content could threaten the site’s long-term strategy of stealing ad dollars from television, analysts and ad industry professionals said Thursday.

That’s how much advertisers stand to lose in 2017, says a new report, which notes programmatic sees a disproportionate share of fraud.

It’s no longer just traditional budgets that are under siege by the social media site. It’s pulled ahead of Google in local markets by offering simple products. Gordon Borrell talks about what makes the site so appealing to local advertisers, how much it stands to grow and why Facebook could stay relevant for years to come.

TV sales execs can make a strong case that TV offers greater reach, superior quality content, more accurate data, and greater audience engagement than digital video, along with longer-term and more embedded historical relationships with advertiser and agency executives. Yet, perceptions of digital video media among advertiser and agency executives are equal to or greater than both broadcast and cable TV networks across eight performance attributes, according to a new industry survey.

U.S. advertisers invested $17.6 billion in digital advertising during the third quarter of 2016, according to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report released Wednesday.

TV and the advertising it carries will, over the next 5 years, be completely digital. Our entire industry’s odd complex about digital and our strange organization and separation around it will be blown up because virtually all media will be digital. The gap between video and TV will be entirely destroyed as we realize it’s a divide of no merit or distinction.