How Indeed Is Growing Audience and Revenue With Disney’s Data Clean Room


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For jobs site Indeed, its efforts in using data clean rooms to reach audiences—and ultimately, grow revenue—are paying off.

Indeed’s revenue comes from employer sign-ups advertising job vacancies on its site. Thanks to its integration with Disney’s data clean room, the company has grown new audiences to convert to using its services, driving revenue that substantially exceeded campaign costs.

Via running ads on Disney’s Hulu platform, Indeed tested two separate audiences: job seekers and small, medium businesses (SMB) or employers. In doing so, the job site saw a 41% lift in job seeker audience converting to using its site, compared with control tests, and a 33% lift in SMB or its employer audience converting to using its site, compared with control tests. It wouldn’t share specific numbers.

“We wanted to understand if Hulu ads drive incremental users that those two teams care about, on top of what would happen in a baseline case,” said Joseph Zucker, senior manager, marketing analytics, Indeed.

Marketers are figuring out ways to manage signal loss as the clock ticks down on Google’s plans to deprecate third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users early next year. Further, regulatory changes have made reaching audiences across the open web even harder for marketers. Disney’s data clean room sits within Snowflake’s technology and is interoperable with Habu’s software. By mingling its first-party data with that of Disney without disclosing personally identifiable information (PII), Indeed was able to access new audiences.

All agency holding companies and over 100 brands have used Disney’s clean room technology to match audience insights in a privacy-focused way, for planning, buying and measurement, a Disney spokesperson told Adweek.

Precision targeting drives audience growth

Indeed’s primary audiences are people creating profiles to apply for jobs, and businesses posting job listings, the latter making up its primary source of revenue.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Indeed ran two campaigns for both of these audiences via Disney’s data clean room, targeting the relevant cohorts at user-level data.

The job seeker campaign lasted the entire quarter, while the SMB campaign was live six weeks before Thanksgiving.

For its SMB campaign, Indeed entered its first-party data into Disney’s clean room tech to create look-a-like audiences across Hulu users.

In our other clean room experiments, the data transfers, audience set up, and the mechanics of getting it to work were not as smooth.

Joseph Zucker, senior manager, marketing analytics, Indeed

Meanwhile, for the job seeker campaign, Indeed used Disney’s first-party data of Hulu users and split them into test and control groups. The test group was exposed to an Indeed ad on Hulu, while the control group wasn’t. After the campaign, Indeed integrated its job seeker conversion data into the clean room and matched it against the predefined audience at the user level.

In both cases, Indeed looked at the conversion rate among users who saw the ads on Hulu and compared it to those who visited the site without seeing the ad and calculated the audience lift.

“Because the two groups were identical with the exception of receiving an Indeed ad, we are confident the Indeed ad caused the difference,” said Zucker.

Meanwhile, the conversions were correlated with the generated revenue to calculate ROI from each campaign.

“And those were quite successful from Indeed’s perspective,” said Isaac Dinner, director of econometric modeling, marketing analytics, Indeed.

Further, an unintended outcome of the campaign was its spill-over impact, meaning that the job seeker campaign attracted a certain number of employers to the platform, while the SMB-focused campaign also drew in a portion of job seekers to Indeed.

“We observed a consistent occurrence of both,” noted Dinner.

Simultaneously, the data clean room lets Indeed deploy user-level data targeting, offering more refined demographics compared to geo-level targeting.

“We achieved this at a fraction of the cost [compared to geo-targeting] and got much cleaner and more precise results,” Dinner said.

Expanding tests to ESPN

While the industry is solving for interoperability capabilities within clean room technology, Indeed primarily encountered operational hurdles related to aligning and coordinating among numerous teams prior to the campaign launch.

The key teams included Indeed’s analytics team, media partners responsible for overseeing creative outputs for both campaigns, its agency partner EssenceMediaCom, Disney’s data science team, as well as teams from Snowflake and Habu to set up the clean room.

“All of those were critical for the success of the project,” said Zucker.

Indeed is currently exploring additional clean room capabilities within Disney’s other properties like ESPN.

However, this wasn’t Indeed’s first foray into data clean rooms.

“In our other clean room experiments, the data transfers, audience set up, and the mechanics of getting it to work were not as smooth,” said Zucker.

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How to Manage 6 Generative AI Weaknesses That Impact Brand Experiences


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No CEO wants to lose $100B of market value because of an AI mishap. Is now the right time for brands to jump in and fully invest in ChatGPT and other generative AI experiences?

To make that decision, brands should consider the six weaknesses of generative AI and to what extent these disadvantages impact brand goals.

The 6 Weaknesses

Misinformation

ChatGPT has the potential for misinformation, depending on the data source used or the topic in question. One example may be due to a lack of data freshness (i.e: a stroller recall). This information may not be factored in if the LLM is trained on 2021 data sources. For brands where consumer safety is dependent on current information, this can be a deal-breaker.

Hallucinations

In AI, a “hallucination” refers to information that the LLM perceives to be true, but in reality fabricated or nonsensical due to the bot’s lack of real-world understanding. One example is with targeted advertising, where an AI algorithm may incorrectly assume a user’s interests based on their online behavior or search history.

For instance, an AI algorithm may associate a person’s online searches for camping gear with an interest in hunting, even if the person has never searched for hunting-related content. As a result, the algorithm may display ads for hunting equipment, which may not be relevant…and could even be offensive.

Questionable ethics and legal liability

Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the way content (text, images, videos, computer code, legal contracts and architectural drawings) is created, but it also comes with several risks, including plagiarism and infringement of copyright, which is particularly important when it comes to intellectual property (IP) rights. While plagiarism is an often-cited concern with regard to generative AI tools, another area of questionable ethics is misleading vulnerable customers.

Information may be influenced by biases that are present in the training data, resulting in a customer purchasing items that don’t align with their beliefs or philosophies. Think misleading responses to product questions on sustainability, animal rights/testing, etc. Whether these responses could be made as purposely misleading and blamed on AI remains a gray area.

Expensive training costs

Training AI models is time-consuming and costly. The cost of a single training session for GPT-3 is estimated to be around $1.4 million and, for some larger LLMs, the training cost ranges from $2 million to $12 million. Even in basic scenarios, ongoing training of AI models requires infrastructure that supports ingesting and feeding the right context into LLM models so they can generate high-quality answers while remaining cost-effective at a large scale.

This can be a challenge, especially for smaller brands. Think about how often your product SKUs are updated, the new iPhone launches and the new line of Nike’s. Keeping up isn’t as easy as you may think.

Lack of personalization

LLMs are not designed to get to know customers better over time. In an in-store scenario, a sales clerk can “read” the customer’s intent based on the choices they make and what items they are gravitating towards in a store. Some of these can even be nonverbal signals, such as the shopper’s facial expression or body orientation during the selection process.

Generative AI tools may be stumped by complex problem-solving situations, such as a distressed customer, but beyond that, they also cannot factor in the history of the customer’s interactions to make contextually relevant recommendations. LLMs have a vast amount of linguistic knowledge, but they lack behavioral data, which can result in opportunity costs or be off-putting. Unless a shopper specifically shares their preferences, there is bound to be a lack of personalized interactions, which can negatively affect the brand experience.

Privacy and security vulnerabilities

Customers may be sharing sensitive information, such as personal or financial information in an ecommerce interaction. Where is the shared information stored? Where might it pop up next?

A lot can go wrong here if the proper data protection measures aren’t taken. A company would need to have the right security infrastructure in place (i.e.: a cloud play with a common data source, ingestion and secure framework).

A cautious balance of pros and cons

So, how should brands weigh these downsides in the context of making decisions to leverage what generative AI has to offer their customers?

Consider the sensitivities in your brand’s space. If your brand has to contend with strict standards, regulations and other elements where sudden changes can impact customer safety (i.e.: medication, safety equipment, etc.), it is important to consider the lack of data freshness seriously in your decision-making about generative AI tools. An antique jewelry company may find the freshness of information less critical than an aircraft or car parts manufacturer, though both could theoretically utilize the LLM’s linguistic abilities for customer service without relying on their internal memory.

Identify your ideal use cases for generative AI interactions. Whether generative AI will be used largely in customer support, commerce, website, workplace search or in some other way, is a key determining factor for whether it makes sense for a brand to jump in early or wait.

If the use case can tolerate the potential for hallucinations and fabrications, perhaps with a layer of human-guided reinforcement learning applied post-op to teach the model and/or coerce it into compliance with your business rules and objectives, then this use case is worth considering.

Assess the risk of your IP or other sensitive information leaking out into the public domain. There is always a possibility that sensitive information (i.e.: IP, personally identifiable customer data) could emerge online via security breaches, but now there’s another avenue for that with the use of company content to “train” chatbots. LLMs are certainly susceptible to data extraction attacks but also there’s a degree of uncertainty with regard to responses that may deviate from the company’s official position on various matters, despite their access to extensive repositories through training data.

Brand decision-makers may not feel comfortable experimenting with AI until the unknowns have been addressed. And this technology is evolving daily, most recently with OpenAI adding new privacy options to avoid information being used to train their public models.

It’s no wonder that there has been so much buzz around generative AI; it has created a true paradigm shift, providing the business world with incredible potential. As more brands and technology companies dabble in this realm, it’s entirely possible that we will find new ways to address the brand experience challenges that are currently inherent in generative AI. This will open up the arena to more brands in industries where the challenges are presently prohibitive.

Ultimately, a focus on relevance, accuracy and security will empower brands to take the leap.

https://www.adweek.com/media/how-to-manage-6-generative-ai-weaknesses-that-impact-brand-experiences/




PubMatic and Playground xyz Partner to Solve Scale Woes for Attention-Seeking Marketers


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Getting consumers’ attention is about to get easier.

Supply-side platform (SSP) PubMatic and attention vendor Playground xyz have struck a commercial partnership, offering marketers easier access to high-attention ads. It’s the latest in the industry’s lunge toward transacting on attention, a potentially more viable success metric compared with measures like viewability.

“We’re hearing more and more from buyers, through RFPs and larger pieces of business from advertisers or agencies, that [attention] is an increasingly important component,” said Peter Barry, vp of addressability and commerce media at PubMatic. “We’re seeing this as up and to the right in terms of demand and revenue.”

A broader push toward attention should, in theory, realign some of the more broken incentives between consumers, publishers and advertisers that have led to clunky user experience and cluttered webpages, since ads with high attention scores are proving to be more effective both in driving performance and brand objectives.

Plus, inventory that scores high on attention, often found on premium, uncluttered sites, typically emit less carbon. Naturally, transacting on attention leads to brands paying a small premium.

Despite that logic, it’s been a long time coming.

“We are asking clients to completely reconsider how they value media,” said Jonathan Waite, global managing director at Havas Media Group. “It’s a much bigger conversation,” he added, pointing to changes in KPIs and how contracts are written. All clients are at least thinking about attention, he noted. 

Attention-based metrics focus on placement and context, a preference as signal loss increases with the looming deprecation of the third-party cookie. There’s also more movement from trade bodies and industry groups: The Advertising Research Foundation received 40 responses to its request for information to vendors for attention-based solutions, according to sources.

Boosting brand and performance

Using panels collecting eye-tracking data plus predictive models, Playground xyz measures the attention on ads through time spent, applying it to PubMatic’s inventory to create private marketplaces for buyers via its Attention Intelligence Platform (AIP).

This lets demand-side platforms and agencies buy packages of inventory categorized in the top 10% or top 30% for attention, for instance.

While some vendors measure based on proprietary attention scores, Playground xyz uses time spent in the hope that it’s more familiar to ad buyers.

“We’ve found [attention] to be extremely valuable when understanding advertising effectiveness, presenting innovative opportunities to optimize campaigns towards what matters most to our clients: outcomes,” said Amit Maniar, head of solutions and global investment at Omnicom Media Group.

Past campaigns measured by Playground xyz found that campaigns running in marketplaces curated by high attention on average drive 61% more awareness and 65% more unaided recall than non-curated marketplaces. Looking at performance goals, marketplaces with ads driving high attention lead to 389% increase in conversion rate compared with other marketplaces.

In time, advertisers might identify a 3-second ad that drives consideration, whereas a 5-second ad works better at driving awareness, for instance.

While many attention-based advertising solutions offer measurement, this also lets buyers make adjustments to campaigns based on attention.

“Measuring is one part, but optimizing is the goal,” said Playground xyz CEO Rob Hall. “There is strong demand, but we want to make attention actionable.”

That demand is growing. More than 400 global brands have used the vendor’s AIP for managed display campaigns, as well as a standalone measurement and optimization tool on channels like YouTube. The attention platform has been used across more than 8,000 campaigns.

Solving for scale

Despite a flurry of news and partnerships around attention-based ads, this integration sits on PubMatic’s supply-side platform. Being so close to publishers’ supply makes it easier to identify high-attention formats, and increases the scale for buyers. As opposed to integrations with certain DSPs, all buyers working with PubMatic—which has SPO agreements with four of the five agency holding companies—will have access to these high-attention marketplaces.

Over 35% of PubMatic’s total activity in the first quarter of 2023 comes from its SPO efforts, an area it expects to grow.

Agencies welcome the consolidation of pure play providers with well-established ad tech, said Waite, since it reduces complexity and additional ad-tech costs.

Similarly, Phil Tolliday, global head of marketing science at GroupM Nexus, believes the partnership is a sign of the space beginning to address market fragmentation and consistency challenges.

“It’s clear from our consultancy work that there are differences in what attention means to different businesses and verticals,” Tolliday said.

But that fragmentation is enough to put some off.

At least one large CPG advertiser is avoiding all attention-based metrics until industry standards are established, a cautious approach that misses out on early potential gains of bagging high-attention inventory with lower costs, said Waite.

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Ad-Tech Job Openings Crater in 2023


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After initial public offerings and breakneck hiring in 2021 and early 2022, job openings for ad-tech roles have dramatically slowed in the past year, according to recruiters and industry sources.

New jobs are down by approximately 60% since June 2022, when hiring first began to slow, said Josh Marmer, managing director of digital recruiting at recruiting firm AC Lion. Avi Mally, CEO of recruiting firm Three Pillars, where ad tech is a focus, said job openings between January and May were down around 50% since the third quarter of 2022, though noted hiring has begun to start again in the past month.

Rob Beeler, CEO of Beeler.Tech, which operates a job list focused on publisher ad operations and ad-tech roles, said openings were down 30% in the second half of 2022 compared to the first half of 2022, a trend that has continued into 2023.

A senior ad-tech executive who was laid off in February told Adweek their job search is still ongoing. The timeline for middle management to find a new job has grown from four months to around 12 months, said Shiv Gupta, CEO of digital marketing education firm U of Digital, who regularly helps refer job seekers.

“It’s been a drought,” Gupta said. “I know smart senior folks that cannot get jobs still. They have worked at the best companies and they are scraping and clawing for every opportunity.”

The lack of job opportunities coincides with a wave of layoffs throughout the industry at the end of 2022 and the beginning of this year. Companies like Yahoo, Integral Ad Science and Innovid all laid off around 10% or more of their staff. MediaMath filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this month, sending some 300 employees into the job market. Following the February bankruptcy of Big Village, owner of supply-side platform EMX, which had over 300 employees. Media and news companies cut over 17, 000 workers as of May, the highest year-to-date on record, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

What roles are (and are not) open

Sales is one of the more reliable sources of jobs, with Marmer saying it’s the number one area of recruitment for the firm right now.

“The salespeople have direct ROI,” Gupta said, in comparison to some engineering and product roles. “In a tough time, do you want to be building stuff that may or may not pay off three years from now?”

Senior roles tend to be less plentiful than more junior ones, and when they do exist, they can incorporate several roles.

You’re paying gold prices for copper. You knew it was going to break and it broke.

Josh Marmer, managing director, AC Lion

The senior ad-tech executive, who requested anonymity to discuss the job process freely, said he noticed three instances where the hiring managers revealed—often well into the interview process—that the open role was really two roles combined. In one case, a single role existed for both a head of new business and a head of existing growth.

“When they eventually admit it, they’re meek about it,” the source said, noting these roles don’t come at double the pay. “We’ve all seen this movie before. Three to six months [that new hire] either quits or the company is doing well enough to” hire another person for the second role.

While these combined positions are frustrating, they might turn into two openings when the market picks up. The more dire situation is the roles that are gone for good as the industry pursues automation. Beeler said that already publishers are pruning some roles in data entry that involve the manual management of direct campaigns.

Déjà vu or something new?

Sources said that, so far, this downturn seems milder than previous ones, like the 2008 recession or the rapid layoffs at the start of the pandemic in 2020.

“2008 was a little more sudden. There was a big shock to the economy,” Mally said, noting that this time around, the impetus for layoffs has been slower-moving forces like inflation, interest rates and the decisions of the biggest tech companies. “It’s caused a lot of companies to slow roll their decision-making processes. I don’t think this is as bad.”

But Marmer noted that in 2008, ad tech was still a young industry, poised for growth. Advertisers were only projected to start spending more on online ads than newspaper ads in 2010, per a New York Times report at the time. This time, the layoffs feel more localized to the tech sector.

It’s not clear yet whether this downturn is more emblematic of macroeconomic conditions or industry-specific challenges. Either way, companies are overcorrecting for their massive hiring sprees in 2021.

“I knew it wasn’t good when it was happening,” Marmer said. “It’s not good to overpay. You’re paying gold prices for copper. You knew it was going to break and it broke.”

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https://www.adweek.com/media/ad-tech-job-openings-crater-in-2023/




This Is the Year of ‘Brandformance’ for Instacart, Says CMO Laura Jones


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Instacart’s chief marketing officer Laura Jones calls this the “year of brandformance” for the 11-year-old online grocery platform.

The amalgam comes from two functions of the marketing department, brand and performance. Those teams had reported to separate leaders, but Jones, who joined from Uber two years ago, felt they would perform better for clients and customers as one.

“This year has been about finding platforms that can really work across the funnel, and then a lot of experimentation because we’re still early in this journey,” Jones told Adweek during a conversation at Cannes Lions last week. “From a creative standpoint, we know the value we deliver and we’re about nourishing the modern household,” she added.

Following the success of “The World is Your Cart” brand campaign featuring Lizzo, Instacart aimed to grow awareness among consumers about the platform’s ability to aid discovery and inspiration across grocery outlets.

As a result, Instacart’s integrated marketing team will focus on raising brand awareness and brand focus. Jones says this will include a certain amount of “stretchiness” to find the right channel mix for upper, middle and lower funnel outcomes.

Jones says the online grocery category is still “massively under-penetrated,” even after online retail boomed during the pandemic. Grocers saw 20 to 30 percent of their business shift online at the peak of the pandemic, according to McKinsey, with another 14 to 18 percent shift expected by 2026.

“There’s a strong need here, so it’s really just helping people habituate and realize that this is a replacement for the routine that I think many of us had, which is spending Sunday going to the grocery store,” said Jones.

The Retail Media opportunity

Instacart is also benefiting from the explosion of retail media, where brands work with stores to create ad campaigns for the retailer’s digital and in-store channels. 

According to eMarketer, ad spend for U.S. retail media will grow to $40.81 billion (+31.4%) this year and reach $61.15 billion next year. Of the major retail media outlets, Instacart was predicted to have the largest growth, up 44.5%, with the nearest competitor, Walmart with 39.7% growth.

Chris Rodgers, chief business officer for Instacart, told Adweek the company currently has around 6,000 brands advertising through its retail media network. The “giant movement” he has seen over the last couple of years is the effectiveness of retail media buys, where the media is directly tied to increased sales.

Rodgers highlighted the presence of major U.S. retailers, including Kroger, Albertsons and Roundel (Target), all having their senior retail media leaders at Cannes Lions taking meetings.

And while Instacart is still “a retail enablement company,” building solutions to facilitate online sales, it has also been developing its own ad tech stack built for mid-sized grocers such as Sprouts Farmers Market. Sprouts, with 401 outlets in 23 states, will leverage Instacart’s Carrot Ads to power its new retail media network.

Sprout joins Califia Farms, General Mills, Primal Kitchen and Siete Foods to be among the first brands to leverage the Carrot Ads service.

Future areas of growth

Forgoing a temptation to go global, Jones and Rodgers say the focus will remain on North America where they still see “a lot of opportunity” in the U.S. and Canada.

Growth, they say, will come from its Connected Stores platform, introduced last September. Smart Cart and Smart Checkout Technology will allow shoppers to move seamlessly between a retailer’s app and its in-store experience with personalization at the fore.

“We can start to digitize the shopping journey, we can do wayfinding, we can make recommendations, we can use all of that personalization on the screen,” says Rodgers who sees that as “a massive opportunity” in the short-term.

The tech is delivered through Caper AI which Instacart acquired in 2021.

Instacart has also announced a new partnership with one of America’s fastest-growing retailers, ALDI.

ALDI Express is a virtual convenience store that delivers ALDI-exclusive products to customers. The tech is powered by Instacart. It offers access to nearly 2,000 of the chain’s best-selling items, delivered in 30 minutes. “Together with Instacart, we’ll continue to find ways to innovate and make the online grocery experience even more effortless and accessible,” said Scott Patton, VP of National Buying at ALDI, announcing the deal earlier this month.

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Why Big Tech Is Embracing Neutral Buy-Side Infrastructure


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The brightest minds in marketing and tech converge at NexTech, Nov. 14–15 in NYC. Get your pass for the latest on generative AI, gaming and more.

The clamor for regulatory reforms targeting Big Tech companies stems from a fundamental issue deeply embedded in the advertising industry. Within this complex landscape, tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon reign supreme, wielding control over data, platforms and buy-side ad tech.

However, the very nature of their dominance poses a challenge, as they find themselves facing conflicts of interest. The imbalances they helped create have sparked the neutrality debate surrounding buy-side infrastructure, driving calls for change. 

Grading your own homework 

Talk about a stacked deck. These companies’ walled gardens are designed to collect and activate audience data. But by owning the data, the platform and the buy-side ad tech, these Big Tech players are grading their own homework.

Buy-side and sell-side are fundamentally at odds: Buyers want to maximize return on ad spend, while sellers want to maximize yield. There is no fair way to play on both sides simultaneously, and the intensifying regulatory pressure on Big Tech makes neutrality an existential question for these companies.

Several years ago, Big Tech bought up all their own ad-serving technology and with it, the mechanisms for reporting on viewability and verification. In the vacuum created by that consolidation, a trifecta of companies created what became a multibillion-dollar market just to handle brand safety and verification, because these checks can only be provided by an impartial third party.

Brands have come to appreciate that the same is true of other core capabilities, everything from ad serving to identity solutions to dynamic creative and audience intelligence. With ongoing fragmentation in supply, omnichannel marketers need these essential tools to be centralized under their control.

As it turns out, Big Tech is feeling the same way and increasingly embracing the idea of media-neutral buy-side infrastructure.

The incentives to do so are strong. First, it’s just what marketers need. Dollars will flow where advertisers can target their audiences and track their investments, and walled gardens still need those dollars. Second, there is an increasing demand on Big Tech to connect third-party ad tech to owned supply.

The walled gardens know they need a healthy independent ecosystem in order to survive, and they are becoming better partners in building it.

The case for independent tech

Here are some key reasons an independent buy-side solution remains an essential part of the mix, regardless of whether marketers also rely on Google, Amazon and Facebook: 

  • Transparency. Marketers will not backtrack on decades of innovation in data-driven marketing practice. They want insights, data and transparency into fees and access to unbiased measurement. Nobody should grade their own homework.
  • Consolidation. Marketers would prefer to work with fewer, more strategic partners. A multinational brand that has 13 agencies in 10 markets doesn’t want 13+ dashboards to rationalize. They want reporting and they want real-time results, not waiting a few months to see what’s happening in markets. An independent third party that works across walled gardens can offer that. 
  • Fragmentation. Consumer attention and inventory supply are fragmented across channels and devices. The shift toward omnichannel media consumption has forced marketers to seek new ways to plan, buy and measure media with a single view of their audience.
  • Creative. Creative personalization and optimization represent one of the last great value plays in advertising. After more than a decade of focusing on targeting, planning and measurement (all worthwhile), a new set of AI-enabled capabilities are returning marketers’ attention to what can be done with creative personalization. These tools can only be leveraged effectively when they are communicating with contextual and behavioral signals.

Marketers want the best tech to move dollars fast and reduce friction, and that’s reason enough for Big Tech to open its doors and take a more collaborative approach with neutral buy-side tech. But, as mentioned, the big three are not the only ones.

Tightening the screw

The goals and incentives of the buy side (to maximize return on ad spend) are fundamentally at odds with those of the sell side (to maximize yields). To date, Big Tech has gotten around that conflict by virtue of sheer scale, good campaign performance and unrivaled data, but the conflict is still there.

Now that the DOJ is aiming specifically at these conflicts within Google’s ad-tech business, and with serious talk about divestiture and breakups, all the Big Tech players in advertising are looking at things differently.

For them, it appears increasingly that embracing an independent ecosystem is imperative for resolving the conflicts of interest now at the center of the regulatory debate. The question for Big Tech is less whether or not to embrace it, but how to control the process so that it isn’t done for them by the state.

It wasn’t long ago that Big Tech and independent tech were pitted on either side of an issue, but things change quickly in a fast-paced environment. Today and moving forward, neutral buy-side infrastructure is more of a common cause for the industry.

https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/why-big-tech-is-embracing-neutral-buy-side-infrastructure/




Yahoo’s SPO Push, Backstage, Gives Marketers Direct Access to Publishers Without the SSP


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The brightest minds in marketing and tech converge at NexTech, Nov. 14–15 in NYC. Get your pass for the latest on generative AI, gaming and more.

Yahoo is letting advertisers buy publisher inventory directly from its demand-side platform via a new product called Backstage, the tech company’s answer to the industry movement toward supply-path optimization, Yahoo executives exclusively shared with Adweek.

Advertisers using Backstage, which will be available in the third quarter, will not need a supply-side platform to access publisher inventory, the traditional buying route for the programmatic supply chain.

At launch, Backstage includes over 100 publishers, including A+E Networks, Dotdash Meredith, Raptive, The Arena Group, Vizio and Newsweek, and Yahoo’s owned and operated media properties.

“This is something [clients] have asked for and now we’re delivering it,” said CRO Elizabeth Herbst-Brady, later adding, “The goal of enabling this product is in service of the advertiser.”

Yahoo’s embrace of the sell-side is a pivot after the publisher closed its SSP in February to focus on its demand-side platform earlier this year, laying off more than 50% of its ad-tech staff in the process. At the time, CEO Jim Lanzone told Adweek that Yahoo didn’t want “spread our resources too thinly across every part of the stack.”

As buyers ask for shorter supply paths, passing fewer ad-tech firms along the way, tech vendors are fighting to prove their relevance and prevent disintermediation, often by cozying up with previously untapped sides of the market. Last year, The Trade Desk launched OpenPath, which like Backstage, gives buyers a direct route to inventory without an SSP. In the past few months, both PubMatic and Magnite launched tech that lets advertisers buy premium video inventory without a DSP.

More quality, less tech

Yahoo may be pivoting back toward the sell side, but it’s not recreating its SSP. Most of the SSP tech has been deprecated, save for some features that are useful for Backstage, like the Deal ID creation tool and the Pre-Bid Adaptor. Yahoo will not provide yield optimization for publishers, and critically, only buyers using Yahoo’s DSP will have access to this inventory and not the entirety of the programmatic buying universe.

Also unlike most SSPs, Yahoo Backstage will be offering an intentionally limited selection of inventory.

“This is a rare product launch that on Day one is at the level of the scale,” Yahoo aims to stay at, said Adam Roodman, svp of ads products and strategy at Yahoo Advertising. “There’s not aspiration to make it as big as possible. We want to focus on what inventory our buyers have been asking for.”

At launch, private marketplace deals will be available with single or multiple publishers.

Through Backstage, Yahoo can benefit from its sell-side relationships more efficiently, without the costs and uncertainties of running an SSP business.

“It’s a different business model,” said Ari Paparo, CEO of Marketecture Media. “It’s much less tech and much less responsibility.”

Lifting all boats?

Theoretically, programs like Backstage and OpenPath benefit both publishers and buyers. By removing the SSP fee from the equation, the publisher makes more money and the advertisers’ ad dollars are spent more efficiently.

Yahoo says buyers are not charged an additional fee to use Backstage inventory, and publishers are still free to set their own prices.

Don Marti, vp of ecosystem innovation at publisher network Raptive, said that programs like OpenPath, which give publishers direct access to buyers, show promise.

“Publishers need to be able to capture more of the value for the content they create,” he said.

Ad-tech firms like Yahoo have been careful to frame the new connections they’re providing as helping the market, and not bumping against new competitors. But some in the industry are skeptical of the waning distinction between SSPs and DSPs.

Index Exchange’s CEO Andrew Casale wrote an open letter addressed to SSPs in April reaffirming the SSP’s commitment on the sell side. In an interview on Marketecture TV last week, CEO of DSP Viant Tim Vanderhook said he thought DSPs should stick to the lane of representing the buy side.

“SSPs want to be DSPs. DSPs want to be SSPs. I personally don’t believe in that,” Vanderhook said, later adding, “If you look at the Google antitrust suit or any of these, anytime someone gets in that position where you’re representing buyer and seller, that conflict of interest proves too much and usually their own profit margins skyrocket.”

And the jury is still out on how much these solutions can scale, as the incentives for tech that represents both the buy side and the sell side are not always aligned.

“[A DSP’s] entire job is to drive prices down … whereas an SSP’s is to get the best possible price,” said a sell-side ad-tech executive who requested anonymity to discuss industry relations. “You can’t please both of those sides at once.”

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Google Opens Access for Transparency Tool Amid Industry Debate on Ad-Tech Fees


Google is introducing a tool throughout its ad-tech products today that is designed to help publishers and buyers track ad-tech fees, a contentious area of programmatic where Google has not always been seen as an honest broker.

While the tool thus far has not revealed any hidden fees, programmatic execs would like to see more features that incentivize positive change.

The tool, called Confirming Gross Revenue, lets publishers see the gross revenue from a particular buyer. If that matches the media cost on the buyer’s end, both sides of the market should be more confident there are no hidden ad-tech fees.

“It offers checks and balances to ensure reported working media on the buy side aligns with the revenue actually received by the publisher,” said Mediavine VP of ad operations Brad Hagmann who has been using the tool. “For those snapshots of campaigns in progress, decisions could be made based on the findings.”

Confirming Gross Revenue was first launched to select firms in July 2022 and will now be available to all publishers using Google’s SSP Ad Manager 360 and all advertisers using Google’s DSP Display & Video 360.

The company said the tool is designed as an industry solution to be implemented by other ad-tech firms, and it is working with the industry trade group the IAB, of which Google is a paying member, to help with standardization.

Ad-tech fees have come under increased scrutiny after research has shown how they have swallowed publishers’ revenue. A report in January from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers found that 65% of advertiser spend reached publishers, and 3% could not be accounted for. Other research from independent ad-tech research firm Adalytics found instances where middlemen pocket the majority of media revenue.

Google has, at times, come up unfavorably in conversations about the fairness of ad auctions. A 2020 lawsuit from a group of attorneys general against the company alleged that it rigged auctions in such a way that buyers were systematically overcharged and publishers underpaid. Publishers have also been frustrated that Google won’t give access to log-level data, which would help shed light on potential auction irregularities.

With the Confirming Gross Revenue tool, Google said it is not offering log-level data and instead providing aggregated gross revenue amounts, citing user privacy concerns.

Publishers still powerless to take action

Mediavine, which served as an early tester of Confirming Gross Revenue, said that, so far, it has only used the tool on behalf of buy-side clients and that the tool has revealed no hidden fees.

Others, like head of programmatic sales and data at Prisma Media Paul Ripart, are quoted in the press release also saying the tool revealed no hidden ad-tech fees.

However, some are less bullish on the tool’s efficacy.

“Publishers are doubtful this will do much to alleviate concerns,” said Jason Kint, CEO of publisher trade body Digital Content Next.

Early testers of Confirming Gross Revenue only gave publishers information about the endpoints of a campaign and not the hops along the way in the notoriously murky supply chain, Kint added.

I’m not sure how [the tool] incentives or even vaguely encourages change.

Anonymous publisher ad-tech source

“If a publisher and advertiser find a discrepancy, our team can check common causes, such as currency and time zone differences and invalid traffic detection mechanisms,” Dan Taylor, vp of global ads told Adweek. “If there’s still missing information, we will help the customer dig deeper to uncover the issue.”

A publishing ad-tech source, who was not authorized to speak to the press, said that no matter what the tool reveals, publishers are often powerless to take action.

“[If] your spend disappears with 50% gone between you (buyer) and me (publisher)…now what?” the source said. “Is that relevant to the buyer if they got all the ad impressions they wanted to the right place at the right price?”

“I’m not sure how [the tool] incentives or even vaguely encourages change,” the source added.

Taylor said Google’s advertising partners have also asked for fee transparency.

“Buyers want to make sure their entire media cost reaches the publisher and they’re getting the full value of their spend,” Taylor said.

The news comes on the heels of new roadblocks within an industry initiative from trade body the Association of National Advertisers to conduct a transparency audit of the programmatic supply chain.

The ANA parted ways with PwC as auditor, Digiday reported, and there are reportedly challenges getting the requisite data. Google said it only had access to buy-side data and could not share sell-side information.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Confirming Gross Revenue tool includes the fees of the demand-side platform.

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Using Attention Metrics, Publishers Aim to Prove Their Ads Work


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Transforming your ad sales process just got a lot easier. Learn how to extract more value for existing technology and ultimately drive revenue, ratings and retention in Slack’s new ebook.

Publishers have long struggled to prove the efficacy of their digital ad products to brand partners, but in the last year, media companies including Condé Nast and Insider have begun experimenting with attention-based ad metrics to more clearly quantify their value, ultimately looking to drive more ad revenue.

Using attention-based metrics—devised often by a mix of eye-tracking software, machine learning and feedback from focus groups—to determine the value of specific ad products can help publishers better tie brand marketing campaigns to outcomes, a measurement capability that could lead to larger direct deals and higher yields in programmatic auctions.

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https://www.adweek.com/media/attention-metrics-publishers/




Categorizing Attention Tracking Partners: What Marketers Need to Know About This Ad Metric


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The ad industry is now brimming with vendors claiming they can track and measure ad viewers’ attention. Hungry to strike partnerships with agencies and their clients, these vendors want to prove that running engaging ad campaigns is not just an art, but a science.

The trouble is, attention-tracking and measurement vendors are still developing their (mostly unvetted) offerings.

Because the attention economy is so young, most media buyers aren’t yet familiar with their partnership options in the category—let alone up to speed on how one vendor is different from another.

#paywall-subscribe { margin:0; padding: 1rem 2.4rem; } #paywall-subscribe .holder { background-color:#eee; border:15px solid #f2f2f2; padding:30px; margin:0 auto!important; text-align:center; } #paywall-subscribe a.underline { color:#000; text-decoration:underline; } #paywall-subscribe img { margin-bottom:10px; width: 140px!important; height: auto!important; } #paywall-subscribe h3 { font-weight:bold; font-size:16px; text-transform:uppercase; width:80%; margin:0 auto; margin-bottom:20px; text-align:center; } #paywall-subscribe h3 span { display:block; font-size:14px; } #paywall-subscribe h2 { font-weight:800; font-size:24px; text-transform:uppercase; } #paywall-subscribe p { font-size: 16px; color:#000; padding: 0; } #paywall-subscribe .cta { margin-top:20px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size:14px; text-transform:capitalize; color: #fff; background-color: #E50000; border:none; padding:12px 28px; text-decoration:none; -webkit-transition: .3s ease; -moz-transition: .3s ease; -o-transition: .3s ease; -ms-transition: .3s ease; transition: .3s ease; } #paywall-subscribe .cta:hover { color: #fff; background-color: #181818; transform: scale(1.02); } #paywall-subscribe .already-a-member { font-size:14px; } @media (max-width: 1024px) { #paywall-subscribe .holder { border:12px solid #f2f2f2; padding:25px; } #paywall-subscribe img { width: 120px!important; } } @media (max-width: 768px) { #paywall-subscribe .holder { border:10px solid #f2f2f2; padding:20px; } #paywall-subscribe img { width: 100px!important; } #paywall-subscribe h3 { font-size:14px; } #paywall-subscribe h3 span { font-size:12px; } #paywall-subscribe h2 { font-size:18px; } #paywall-subscribe p { font-size:14px; } #paywall-subscribe .cta { font-size:12px; padding:10px 24px; } #paywall-subscribe .already-a-member { font-size:11px; } } AW+

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https://www.adweek.com/agencies/categorizing-attention-tracking-partners-what-marketers-need-to-know-about-this-ad-metric/