Ahead of the 2024 elections, Microsoft-owned ad-tech firm Xandr will no longer allow political ads to run on its platform, according to an email obtained by Adweek.

The policy will go into effect in October 1.

In an email sent to clients, Xandr’s ad team said it will ban political ads as well as ads for alcohol, gambling, tobacco and vaping.

Top line

The change comes as Microsoft aligns Xandr’s advertising policies with its own. Microsoft acquired Xandr last year. Xandr’s full ad-tech stack, comprising both demand- and sell-side platforms, had allowed political ads since 2016.

“At a time when many state and local news outlets are dying on the vine, political ads could be the only way voters learn about candidates seeking public office in their communities,” said Mark Jablonowski, president and chief technology officer at ad tech company DSPolitical.

Jablonowski added that “a lot of publishers are going to potentially miss out on revenue from political advertising.”

Between the lines

In January, Xandr laid off its Head of Political, Erik Brydges, as well as a senior political sales staffer, indicating the sunset of its political ads business.

Adobe pulled the plug on political ads in 2020. Display and video ad platform Google DV360  doesn’t allow for targeted ads based on voter file, which are digital databases that include information such as who is a registered voter and who cast ballots in past elections.

Meanwhile, The Trade Desk is actively filling roles in its political ads team. These titles include Director, Business Development (Political & Issue Advocacy),  Programmatic Trading Specialist (Political) and Account Manager (Political Focus).

“This further consolidates the space to a handful of players going after those political budgets,” an industry leader who requested to speak on background told Adweek. “The Trade Desk appears to be the major player.”

Bottom line

Political ad bans tend to sting Democratic candidates more than Republican candidates. Targeting is a key element to Democratic candidates compared to the more monolithic electorate of Republicans, according to Jablonowski.

Ad bans also tend to hurt political newcomers struggling to break through and get noticed.

“They benefit corporations like Exxon, who can continue running ads about their supposed work to help our environment, and hurt advocates like Sierra Club, who can no longer run ads setting the record straight about Exxon,” said Jablonowski.

Figuring out how to show up on a new media channel and speaking authentically to that platform’s audience can feel like a tricky puzzle for most brands. But when The Home Depot entered Roblox in March, cracking that nut was not the first major priority.

Instead, the brand was seeking how to best create a campaign around the 25^th anniversary of Kids Workshops, a monthly program Home Depot offers where kids can go to stores and work on mini-home improvement projects for free. Roblox, which has 66.1 million average daily active users per its recent earnings, made sense as the best place to execute, despite the retailer having never been there before.

“It was less like, ‘Hey, let’s let The Home Depot figure out where we can be in Roblox.’ I think it was more okay. We’ve got the workshop component. We got Roblox out here … let’s give it a try,” said Marshall Weiss, director of brand development and marketing at The Home Depot.

Brands want to try platforms to reach new audiences, especially as cookie deprecation makes tracking people across the internet more challenging. But they often worry about how to weigh the investment in doing so, especially for a platform like Roblox. Home Depot provides a blueprint of how to tackle this problem.

Roblox is a platform for young people to play, not unlike Home Depot’s Kid Workshops, creating a logical fit for the activation, which was designed by creative agency BBDO and Gen Z-focused agency IF7.

The Home Depot gave the green light on an activation inside Redcliff City, already a popular Roblox game offering a virtual version of the real world. A Home Depot made sense in the world, which already offers a mall and a beauty studio, though no other brands are present there, according to IF7’s CEO Harley Block. When people enter the Home Depot store, they can complete three different workshop activities; building a swing set, a camping tent or a pool.

So far, Home Depot’s campaign-first, media-second approach is resonating. Over 7 million users have entered The Home Depot on Roblox since its debut in March, including 1 million in the first week. Further, 1.4 million projects have been started within the game, and 85% have been completed, meaning most people who start the Home Depot’s experience were immersed enough to finish the games.

The number of visitors are in line with other brand activations on the platform — Walmart Land drew 3.3 million visitors within its first two weeks, Adweek previously reported. Still, other activations have performed exceptionally well — after more than a year on Roblox, Alo Yoga’s space surpassed 80 million visits, a Roblox told Fortune in late June.

“[Home Depot] had a real opportunity to have a gaming experience, which is rare,” said James Drake, EVP and head of brand partnerships at IF7. “It would make perfect sense to have a Home Depot [in Redcliff City] and once you enter and participate in their store in-game, it’s truly immersive.”

The company experimented with a new channel that felt native for very little cost. Home Depot only had to pay its agency partners and has not spent much on paid promotion of the activation. Roblox only started offering paid advertising opportunities last year. Earlier this year, Roblox said it will no longer allow advertisements aimed at children under 13 as part of a set of standards.

On the back of this success, Home Depot will be working to design new games for summer and Halloween in partnership with IF7 and BBDO.

“We saw the initial results, and probably within the first month, we recognized that there’s there is engagement here. This is real,” Weiss said. “We weren’t looking for a straight ROAS number on it. We were looking more for a test and learn. … What can we gauge from it without a significant investment?”

A previous version of this articles stated that Home Depot’s Roblox activation had 4.5 million visitors.

Financial services giant Intuit is launching a small business-focused media network, letting advertisers target customers across the web and tapping into a new revenue line, executives exclusively told Adweek.

The venture, called SMB MediaLabs, will let advertisers target the customers of accounting firm QuickBooks on a range of digital media properties, including audio, online publishers, social platforms like Meta, and connected TV. Intuit is working with Vizio as its exclusive CTV partner. QuickBooks had 7.1 million customers at the end of the fiscal year 2022.

Small business owners use QuickBooks to help manage their accounting and pay employees, among other tasks. Intuit also owns email marketing business Mailchimp, whose customers the company plans to eventually make available to advertisers for targeting, said Dave Raggio, vice president of U.S. acquisition marketing for Intuit’s small business and self-employed group.

“There are not that many good small-business data sources,” Raggio said, noting many data sources on small businesses come from government sources or are scraped from the web, making them less up-to-date and inaccurate. “I just looked at what we had and noticed that we could provide a lot of value for other advertisers that were trying to reach this audience.”

Intuit joins a growing number of corporations, often retailers, that have been retooling themselves as media networks in response to the proliferation of digital interfaces and the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, which has made advertisers hungry for new sources of first-party data. The bet has paid off: Retail media will attract $45 billion in U.S. ad spend this year, a 20% year-over-year increase, per Insider Intelligence.

Most entrants into the space start by serving ads on their e-commerce websites, including Marriott, a non-retailer that launched a media network last year. By contrast, SMB MediaLabs will not start by serving ads on its owned and operated (O&O) properties but on other digital channels.

Hailing from the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) world, Raggio joined Intuit to market QuickBooks to small business owners. The challenges Raggio faced there spurred the idea for SMB MediaLabs.

“The creep of the scope is not novel, but the focus is,” said Nikhil Lai, senior analyst of performance marketing at Forrester, of the rise of commerce media.

Intuit also owns tax filing service TurboTax and personal finance company Credit Karma, but these business lines will be separate from the media venture.

Filling a niche

Intuit is betting the small business audience could be a lucrative area to target for all kinds of advertisers, both business-to-business and business-to-consumer.

For example, it can be more efficient for CPG companies to ship products directly to shoppers if they are in bulk, and small business owners would be the ideal customers for bulk orders, Raggio said.

“If you’re trying to sell homeowners insurance, the fact that [someone] owns a small business makes it much more likely that they own a house,” said Eric Perko, founder of media agency Apollo Partners, which worked with Intuit to launch SMB MediaLabs.

Unlike a lot of traditional retail media networks that only run on O&O properties, we are running ads in environments where [buyers] are already investing

Dave Raggio, vice president acquisition marketing, Intuit

SMB MediaLabs will start as a managed service available via insertion orders. Intuit will place the buy with a demand-side platform (DSP) and any audiences are isolated to individual campaigns. In order to be able to deliver this offering, Intuit made several hires in data science. It’s also worked with agency Apollo Partners and has integrated tech from LiveRamp.

QuickBooks customer data is anonymized and aggregated, and advertisers cannot access customers’ personally identifiable information or financial data. The company is also letting customers opt out.

Getting on the media plan

The managed service offering may offer more privacy, but it could deter some buyers who want to test a new media channel easily, preferring the synergies in reporting and frequency management that come with buying directly via a DSP, said Janine Flaccavento, executive vice president of the retail, CPG and QSR vertical at Dentsu-owned data agency Merkle.

“Automation and self-serve are where some of these newer [retail media] brands find scale,” she said. “It’s easier for us buyers to test and learn, and the more the effort that has to go into that, the more it costs the brand that’s buying.”

Raggio said SMB MediaLabs is more open for buyers to test than most retail media networks by not acting as a walled garden.

“Unlike a lot of traditional retail media networks that only run on O&O properties, we are running ads in environments where [buyers] are already investing,” he said.

Because buyers can already execute granular targeting on Meta and other social platforms, QuickBooks will also have to prove to buyers that their audience is non-duplicative, Flaccavento said.

“I can go to Facebook and target small business owners,” she said. “What else makes it richer?”

Raggio said that along with offering basic data points like industry, location and age off-the-shelf, SMB MediaLabs can put together a bespoke targeting plan for buyers, based on when a customer is up for renewal on services, if they’re overpaying for products or their existing brand loyalties, among other attributes, for an additional fee.

“It’s about driving efficiency through finding the highest value subset of audiences within the vast SMB landscape,” Raggio said.

Meta launched its Threads app late Wednesday evening in July, a day earlier than expected. On Thursday at 8 a.m., Converse claimed its handle, marking its entry on the Twitter-clone app.

The brief for appearing on Threads was a quick text exchange between the company’s CMO Sejal Shah Miller and her social media team: Keep it organic and playful, and maintain the Converse-vibe.

“The appeal of threads is you’re able to have a conversation,” Miller told Adweek. “There’s a lot of creative license and space to experiment and tinker—and that was invigorating for our social team.”

Despite its 1 million Twitter followers, the brand stopped posting on the platform in October last year. On Threads, the American footwear brand saw a massive follower spike in the first 24 hours. At the time of writing, it has 473,000 followers, which continues to grow but is comparatively less than its 10.8 million followers on Instagram.  

Since its launch, Threads saw a staggering 100 million user sign-ups in its first week. Brands such as Wendy’s, with 270,000 Threads followers, McDonald’s, with 350,000 Threads followers, and Spotify, with 1.2 million Threads followers, quickly flocked to the new app despite it lacking performance data and discoverability tools.

However, Threads lost its top ranking in the Top Overall charts on Google Play last Thursday and on Apple’s App Store earlier this week (it’s still number one in the Social Networking category on iOS), according to app intelligence provider Apps Figure. Despite stuttering growth, brands are formulating their Threads’ strategies.

Converse is testing Threads to hone in on cultural moments and closely monitor user interaction. However, unlike its presence on other platforms like Instagram, the brand is not actively seeking to directly link these efforts back to sales. To that, the brand social media team—half a dozen people—works closely to shape the brand’s voice on this platform.

“There’s been a desire and a pent-up demand to find a new platform to shift to and have a different type of conversation,” said Miller. “[Threads] has the potential to have longevity, as long as Meta continues to do what they do best, which is bring on new features.”

Building cultural relevance

Converse’s social media strategy lies in each platform playing a role in effectively interacting with its audiences in different ways.

The shoe brand isn’t using Threads as a space to talk about product launches or run campaigns. Instead, the social media team convenes to discuss cultural moments and approach the platform with a conversational and humorous brand voice, which it attributes to increasing audience interaction on Threads.

For example, playing on its customizable feature, Converse By You, the brand invited its Threads followers to interact in its shoe-making process, choosing the laces, logo patch, threads and soles to co-create a Converse shoe.

The idea is to drive brand audience interaction and provide its followers with an opportunity to comment and share photos, which the brand considers a success metric. To that, Converse cross-pollinates what resonates on Threads, like the shoe co-creation, across more established platforms such as TikTok, where it has nearly 832,000 followers.

“We want to lean into a strategy that reflects creativity, cultural relevance and brand engagement,” said Miller.

Tracking success through comments

For Converse, measuring audience metrics is more than tracking follower growth and likes.

“We can look at likes, but that’s a passive form of engagement,” said Miller.

Instead, the brand focuses on building interaction with its audience via comments and analyzing the sentiments, categorizing them as positive, neutral, or negative. When it comes to Threads, Miller notes that the comments are positive, optimistic, and filled with a sense of playfulness.

The brand doesn’t have a daily post limit. However, the cadence of posting varies on what’s trending on Threads and whether it’s participating resonates with the brand voice. In the audience shoe co-creation moment, the brand posted 19 Threads, said Miller.

New e-commerce features to lure ad dollars

Although driving sales via Threads is not on Converse’s immediate plan, new shopping and e-commerce features on the platform alongside performance tools will let the brand establish its sales strategy and spend on the platform.

A majority of its ad spend is focused on digital media and social platforms, according to Miller, who will include Threads in the brand’s marketing mix once paid ad formats are made available on the platform.  

“We will test and learn, and then we scale from there if we start to see movement,” she said.