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TikTok’s Quite a Prize for Walmart and Oracle |
Image sourced from The Drum
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Although President Trump may have given the TikTok-Walmart-Oracle his “blessing,” the specifics of the deal seem not entirely worked out. It’s definitely not too early to ask, “What’s up with these odd bedfellows?” For Walmart, it’s an amazing opportunity to beef up both its ecommerce business and its advertising offering. TikTok offers Walmart an amazing amount of inventory for promoting products and expanding its Walmart Media Group network for advertisers. In addition, there will likely be exciting creative opportunities for regular Walmart advertisers, especially those trying to reach younger consumers. This news comes just as Walmart was reportedly starting to take a bite out of Amazon’s pandemic ecommerce dominance. For Oracle, that’s a whole lotta logged in users to prop up its data offerings, some of which appeared to be sagging under the weight of privacy regulations and the death of the third-party cookie. TikTok’s user base could seriously flesh out any identity program, and offer Oracle clients immense new insights. |
National security imbroglios aren’t the only thing bringing odd media companies together. We’re in for a great deal of consolidation as the Chrome third-party cookie cutoff date of 2022 looms closer. Don’t just expect ad tech companies to join forces—plenty of publishers and media companies may find themselves in marriages of convenience, sometimes with their tech partners. The real question is whether they can see past their differences and make it work for the long haul. After all, even partnerships and mergers that seem incredibly aligned can run afoul for any number of reasons. Speaking of which, anyone in the market for a secondhand Xandr? |
Quibi Is in Struggle Mode |
It sounded like a really great business proposition...former Disney studio head and DreamWorks co-founder, Jeffrey Katzenberg, wanted to reinvent television into a bite-sized mobile format—chapterized Netflix series for your pocket, if you will. It made a lot of sense too. Mobile traffic has been outpacing desktop for quite some time now. Besides banks and other investors, as well as major Hollywood studios and TV, telecommunications, and technology companies strongly believed in the venture, investing $1.75 billion. They were banking on Katzenberg's vision of people opting for A-list content producers and talent over amateur YouTube and TikTok videos made by bored teens and twenty-somethings with way too much time on their hands. |
While it’s not exactly the end of days for Quibi, the signs are blaring that a sale or another round of fundraising is imminent. But there was no way Quibi could predict just how dramatically COVID would change consumer consumption habits. Although internet usage has been surging and mobile also, people have been turning to their mobile browsers—more than apps—to keep in touch with people, as well as news and entertainment. |
Putting Ad Tech Under the Blacklight |
Image sourced from The Markup
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Nonprofit tech watchdog The Markup just released Blacklight, a neat tool enabling anyone to enter a URL and see how many trackers sit on a page and how many third-party cookies are being dropped. In addition, it lists all the companies whose code appears on the searched URL, with thorough descriptions of those companies (including relevant news stories) and links to their privacy policies. Blacklight is not a new concept by any means but deserves cheers for a very straightforward interface (no browser extension required!) as well as a glossary of terminology, the ability to report any of kind “worrying” information, and downloadable search archives. |
It’s extremely difficult to educate audiences about the technology we leverage in driving revenue and enabling targeted advertising. It’s a good thing for consumers to become more familiar with commonplace names in our industry. While there’s a lot of sensational language throughout the Markup, and Blacklight itself has some interesting ideas about the average number of trackers and third-party cookies dropped on “popular” websites, there are some highly informative articles around “The High Privacy Cost of a ‘Free’ Website.” Blacklight is the kind of site you might want to send to friends curious about how targeted advertising works, as well as take cues from when trying to inform users of the tools you use to monetize. Indeed, tools like Blacklight are useful as we determine what’s the best way to truly gain consent from our audiences. |
Blockchain Proves Programmatic Potential |
TAG says they’ve successfully completed a twelve-month cross-industry pilot program evaluating the potential benefits of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to bring trust and transparency to the digital advertising supply chain. Remember “The Mysteriously Missing 15%”? The pilot, which included major brands like Nestle, McDonald's, and Johnson & Johnson; agencies like GroupM, IPG, OMD, and Zenith, as well as over 15 prominent ad tech providers, demonstrated the potential of DLT for:
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Now back to the mysteriously missing 15% identified in the ISBA report some months back and the difficulties accessing much-needed data by advertisers, agencies, publishers, DSPs, and SSPs. In the DLT pilot, impression log-level data was harmonized into a common format, data access management was automated, and data immutability, security, and privacy were ensured. Certainly sounds like a method for making the unknowns known doesn't it? We’ve spoken with many blockchain players in the industry, including Richard Bush, president, NYIAX, Christiana Cacciapuoti VP Partnerships, MadHive & Executive Director, AdLedger, and Vanina Ivanova, CMO, AdEx Network and the consensus is that DLT, Cryptography, and other associated blockchain technologies have already shown they can solve for efficiency, transparency and tackling fraud. And applications that solve for identity are becoming more real every day. So, for the naysayers in the back, stop thinking that the blockchain brigade is touting the tech as a replacement to current ad tech. Instead think of it as a framework for bolstering that tech and making it stronger. |