Rafat Ali, who founded paidContent and went on to create Skift in 2012, a highly regarded travel industry trade publication and events business, is reeling from the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the sector. With the industry in crisis, traffic to Skift has spiked as its events business has been put on hold and advertisers are scaling back investment. Having early indication [...]

Just as the financial crisis of 2008 lead to the rise of programmatic advertising, the current disruption of the television marketplace will likely become a watershed moment for advanced TV, says Mark Zagorski, who holds the titles of CEO of Telaria and President of Rubicon Project. With the cancellation of most of the TV UpFronts, and a hold on production, there [...]

Amid the coronavirus crisis, many ad buyers, deeming the news too negative to appear next to, are adding virus-related keywords to brand safety tools that let them automatically filter the hottest news story of the day out of their media plans. That is kneecapping the revenue of many news publishers at a precarious moment, and threatening to make many brands invisible. [...]

While TV viewership soars, available inventory is changing, notably a spike in news and the lack of live sports. All this changing where and how consumers watch TV. Helping brands navigate the market disruption,  Xandr is "leading in" with advanced TV products including reach and frequency management and addressable TV tools, explains Kirk McDonald, Chief Business Officer and Interim Lead of [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic will bring a recession unlike any seen before, one that will  see many brands cut advertising budgets - but it will also accelerate existing digital transformation trend lines and produce new ones. That is the view of Sir Martin Sorrell, executive chairman of his S4 Capital vehicle and former WPP CEO. Sorrell has a voracious thirst for economic data, [...]

Now that audiences have so many TV viewing options, advertisers risk duplicating or misdirecting their efforts to deliver the right ads to the right viewer. So companies like VideoAmp are aiming to build a more reliable way to gain a single, cross-device, cross-service profile of a viewer. In its latest such effort, the LA-based company has built a platform that unites two [...]

The merger of two major SSP's, Rubicon Project and Telaria, which was announced late last year, has been completed the companies announced today. Michael Barrett, CEO of The Rubicon Project will be CEO of the merged company with Telaria's Mark Zagorski serving as President & COO. The combined companies will keep their separate brand names until the new corporate name is announced [...]

The creative agencies are pivoting quickly during the crisis, scrapping advertising that is out of step with social distancing and other realities of the pandemic.  This shift is fostering a period of creativity where taped productions are not practical and the use of stock footage and other tools are being employed, says Marla Kaplowitz, president and CEO of the 4A's [...]

While television consumption is up during the current crisis, the engagement with TV ads is down as measured by EDO, says Kevin Krim, CEO of the TV analytics and data company. As consumer intent to purchase is soft, it is important for advertisers to quickly change creative to address the crisis and their role, suggests Krim. EDO measures engagement with advertising via [...]

The end of the cookie era poses a big challenge to marketers that have historically used the tiny client-side files to track their audiences. But the emergence of multi-device user modalities had already posed a challenge to that method, and to brands that wanted to gain a holistic understanding of consumers' cross-platform identity. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Greg Carr, who [...]

SAN FRANCISCO– Cadreon’s customer-first approach is based on addressability and measurement across all channels thanks to their activation of data. In an interview with Beet.TV’s Jon Watts, Nancy Hall, senior vice president of programmatic, east at Cadreon, details how they are using this data and how the industry could approach it going forward. Cadreon uses LiveRamp as a data source, and [...]

SAN FRANCISCO– The death of cookie has caused a stir in the advertising and ad tech worlds, as marketers are now figuring out how best to understand consumer behavior without the data collector. Eran Metzer, executive director of data and marketing strategy at Hearts & Science, believes the industry will be resilient to the change. “For some perspective, cookies were invented [...]

Stuck at home, television viewing is spiking and it will accelerate the adoption of streaming services as investment in most  linear programming wanes, says Richard Greenfield, industry analyst and partner with LightShed Partners in this video interview with Beet.TV In this segment he also outlines what he expects to be consumer habits around streaming services which he sees as "snacking" on [...]

VIA BEETCAM -- The brand safety leader at the world's biggest media-buying agency is urging advertisers - blacklisting ad inventory against coronavirus news stories could kill newspapers and, with them, democracy. Last week, Comscore said 22% to 30% of all ad impressions were appearing in coronavirus-related content. Such content is now being widely blacklisted by ad buyers, whose brand safety tools [...]

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- In the digital TV age, the old ways of measuring TV audiences often come under scrutiny. But should you throw the baby out with the bath water? No, according to iSpot.tv CEO Sean Muller. "Measurement is not broken per se," he says. "There's no reason to reinvent current age, and gender type of measurement. "But there is a need for new [...]

VIA BEETCAM -- COVID-19 has come as a black swan the communication industry could have done without, one that has sent companies of all kinds worrying and scurrying for answers. Amongst the questions brands are asking Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail - "What is everyone else doing?" and "Should I be cutting my advertising?" In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nail says [...]

VIA BEETCAM -- They often say it takes a crisis to really change. So how does coronavirus promise to change the technology industry? If and when COVID-19 passes: tech platforms will evade looming regulation. they will be unable to avoid categorization as editors. newly-remote workers will ultimately ditch Zoom and go back to the office. Those are the views of Kara Swisher, [...]

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Now that marketers can, finally, accurately measure their TV advertising, you would think they may be happy. But the explosion in new measurement techniques and providers is actually causing a headache for ad buyers who want an apples-to-apples analysis of their ad effectiveness. No wonder so many are actually now calling for fewer, more reliable ways of measuring that [...]

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- After 10 years of obsessively super-targeting audiences using digital profiling data, the ad industry pendulum is swinging a little back to an older method. Contextual targeting is the practice of aligning an ad with content, not with the individual audience member consuming that content. In truth, the outcome doesn't have to be an "either-or". Context and audience targeting can co-exist. The [...]

VIA BEETCAM -- The new president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) says he expects an encouraging response from advertisers and agencies whom he had asked to cease bypassing COVID-19 news content. IAB president David Cohen, who just joined from IPG's Magna, published an IAB article, How Brands and Agencies Can Save American Lives in The Coronavirus Crisis. Publishers' group Digital Content [...]