digital advertising

The approval should be good for four years, but the EU Commission warned it will revoke that if it discerns problems threatening EU citizens’ data privacy rights

There is much discussion in the broadcasting world around digital ad sales, as evidenced by panel sessions at MFM’s annual conference, Media Finance Focus 2021. While one school of thought is that digital sales is still taking a back seat to traditional ad sales, one very astute ad sales leader is all in on digital ad sales. Here are some of its challenges and opportunities.

In a shift that could help Google’s YouTube sidestep future political controversy, as well as make it more attractive to a broader audience, the social video site has announced that it has stopped taking ads related to elections and political content, alcohol, gambling and prescription drugs in its masthead ads.

Premion, Tegna’s connected TV advertising company, said it expanded its relationship with IHS Markit to use Polk Automotive Solutions data to target ad campaigns and measure their results. Automotive advertisers using the Premion platform to create regional and local streaming campaigns will be able to incorporate Polk audience segments and data on sales, make and model, price and vehicle type.

Executives from E.W. Scripps, Cox Media Group, CBC and Disney told attendees of a TVNewsCheck virtual conference that advertisers are warming to the fact that neither a linear- nor digital-only approach can be as effective as a multiplatform buy. Above, Maggie Drake, Scripps senior director, OTT revenue, said she is starting to see advertisers gravitate toward digital and away from linear ads.

Google said today it would make changes to its global advertising business to ensure it did not abuse its dominance, bowing to antitrust pressure for the first time in a landmark settlement with French authorities. The deal with the French competition watchdog could help rebalance the power over advertising in favor of publishers, which held sway over the business in the pre-internet era but lost control with the rapid rise of Google and Facebook

Innovid and Digiday’s State of CTV Advertising report surveyed brand marketers and agency execs to determine where industry stands in the CTV advertising picture.

In her new role, Oh will be responsible for driving innovation and continued engagement while overseeing Gamut’s day-to-day over-the-top advertising businesses and their functions.

The nation’s big media companies are on a new mission: finding ways to unite thousands of individual binge-watchers into a cohesive mass audience. To get more advertisers to move their dollars to streaming, the TV executives are working furiously to gather all the streaming fans for the same advertising experience. It’s not going to be easy.

Facebook can make ad campaigns sit in limbo for days while it goes through a stringent review process, leaving marketers to wonder if they will ever publish.

The back and forth over a very new type of media shows just how quickly streaming video is hooking consumers who have a yen for high-quality dramas and comedies — and the advertisers who need to reach them to keep revenue flowing. “It’s the first time that we are in a marketplace where it’s being led by our streaming conversation, and not being led by our linear conversation,” says Rita Ferro, president of Disney’s advertising sales.

Scripps’ Octane OTT sales team and Amazon Advertising will work together to sell Amazon OTT inventory across IMDb TV, livestreaming service Twitch, top-tier network and broadcaster apps and Amazon’s News apps to local businesses.

From augmented reality shopping experiences to “Choose Your Own Adventure” journeys, the new ad formats and products “offer marketers compelling ways to reach consumers around the world while driving interactivity for viewers,” the company says.

Tegna offered a pitch to advertisers at IAB 2021 NewFronts that amounted to: Trust us, because our viewers already do. The station group — among the first-time presenters at IAB’s annual gathering — emphasized how its local roots intertwined with a renewed interest among Americans in their local communities.

Twitter is acquiring Scroll, a subscription service that removes ads from participating news sites. Scroll, which charges $5 per month, is going into private beta with Twitter in preparation for being incorporated in a broader subscription service later this year, Scroll CEO Tony Haile said in a blog post.

Among new original show announcements for ad-supported video platform YouTube, its connected TV ads will now offer new functions for advertisers. Viewers can click to go to a brand’s website while still watching a video. The announcement came during YouTube’s IAB NewFronts presentation on Tuesday.

Digital video advertising sellers are pretty full of themselves as the annual NewFronts start today and run through Thursday. After a pandemic that accelerated streaming in general and connected TV usage in particular, digital video sellers are no longer pitching their products as just targeting vehicles or reach extenders. No, they’ve gone mainstream, insisting that digital video is now the primary way to reach viewers.

The deal creates the largest independent CTV and video ad platform. Clients include A+E Networks, AMC Networks, Crackle, Discovery, Fox, fuboTV, LG, Roku, Samsung, Sling TV and Vizio.

The robust first quarter advertising growth announced Tuesday provides the latest sign that advertisers are expecting the economy to roar back to life as more people get vaccinated against COVID-19 and burst out of their pandemic cocoons.

In the newly created role, Rick Mandler will be responsible for formulating growth marketing strategies across the Comcast Advertising portfolio.

Media buyers are more optimistic in 2021, but they said they’re looking to spend less upfront and more programmatically, according to a study by the IAB. The group said that optimism among buyers has increased in just the past five month when its last survey was taken. In the new survey 21% were very confident and 40% were confident. Just 11% of buyers said they were not confident.

Subscriptions may be the rage, but businesses of all sorts are pouring money into advertising — digital most of all.

Despite — or maybe because of — the COVID-19 pandemic, internet ad spending soared 12.2% during 2020 to $139.8 billion, according to a just-released annual report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PwC.

To tap into the burgeoning online video streaming marketplace, Facebook today introduced a new advertising unit formatted specifically to promote subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services via Facebook’s feeds. The new units, dubbed “Dynamic Ads for Streaming,” or DAS, are aimed at film and/or TV streaming advertisers, enabling them to automatically generate unique ads for each of their titles without the need to configure individual ads.

After a dip in the second quarter as spending paused in the early days of the pandemic, advanced TV ad impressions rebounded as 2020 went on, according to a report from Google. Advanced ad impressions fell 18% in the second quarter, despite a 14% increase in viewing. By the third quarter, advanced TV ad impressions were up 40% from the second quarter lows and continued to increase in the fourth quarter.

Google this week began testing its controversial cookie-less tracking and targeting system, which relies on placing Chrome users into audience segments based on their web-browsing history, and then transmitting data about those segments directly to publishers. The company has enrolled “a small percentage” of users in the United States and other countries in tests of its new, so-called “Federated Learning of Cohorts.”

Several new companies will be presenting to media buyers at this year’s NewFronts, including A+E Networks, Amazon, Entrecom, Estrella Media, Penske Media and Vizio. This year’s event showcasing digital video uses the slogan “living the stream” to capture changes in media behavior that were accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The event will be conducted virtually, like last year, and take place May 3 through May 6, the week before the major TV companies are scheduled to  make their upfront presentations.

In what will likely be one of the fiercest haggles in the recent history of TV, NBCU will seek primetime TV rates for ads that run on its Peacock streaming-video service, says Laura Molen, president of advertising sales and partnerships, in an interview.  NBCU has invested heavily in Peacock, believes it gives advertisers the broad reach they need and has worked to make sure commercials on the service stand out, says Molen, noting Peacock runs only five minutes of ads per hour and features a host of special commercial formats.

Connecticut is the latest state to take aim at the big pockets of Big Tech with a proposed digital ad tax, and it is not sitting well with advertisers. The Association of National Advertisers has come out strongly against SB 821, a bill that would levy a 10% tax on digital ad services in the state on any business with annual gross revenues (worldwide) of more than $10 billion.

As ad-tech companies consider AI alternatives to cookies and other third-party trackers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau is releasing new guidelines and best practices for the use of machine learning at every level of digital advertising production.

Roku’s deal for Nielsen’s advertising video business boosts the size of its potential market and makes it more valuable to programmers going directly after consumers, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets said Wednesday. Earlier this week, streaming platform Roku said it was buying Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising unit, which includes technology that makes it easier for advertisers to target specific audiences.

Facebook will resume allowing political advertising on its platform starting Thursday, ending a freeze that was put in place around the general election. “We put this temporary ban in place after the November 2020 election to avoid confusion or abuse following Election Day,” the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday.