Happy Friday 02.11.18
Google Swipes Right On Tinder & Amazon Launches Search Remarketing
Happy Friday!
Another big news week!
Our first story is that Google have swiped right on Tinder & are partnering for programmatic guaranteed, the key question is will they be able to convince advertisers it’s a premium context worth the price increment? Next we look at a business in the ascendancy; Amazon, who are going to allow advertisers to remarket people searching for their brands in the open marketplace & just in time for the holiday season, this is huge news!
On Wednesday GroupM released their second state of video report, it’s an epic 32 pages of insights on a market that’s being disrupted by cord cutting & declining linear audiences, I’ll cover off some of the key points, it really is a must read. Finally we round off this weeks newsletter in the weeds: My analysis of a Digiday report that found some buyers are struggling to deliver their campaigns on ads.txt authorized inventory…
Google Swipes Right On Tinder
In Tinder users swipe right if they like the look of a user profile left if they don’t, it’s phenomenally popular, there’s been over 100m downloads of the app & it sees over a 1.6 billion swipes per day. This week the dating giant announced they would be launching Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) with Google:
Tinder is available in 196 markets in over 40 languages & last year they announced a partnership with the Facebook Audience Network to monetize. Despite this partnership the majority of their revenue is said to currently come from direct bookings, PG will help Tinder automate this & finally swipe left on a manual processes that are inefficient.
PG is typically used for premium ad slots that have high sell through rates & I see the challenge for the Google Tinder partnership being two fold 1) convincing clients dating is premium not risky 2) that the inventory is indeed scarce; users are typically on the platform 90 minutes per day so balancing ad loads to achieve this will be important.
More significantly there is an underlying challenging of convincing buyers that programmatic guaranteed is a viable transaction type, many view it as applying an old mental model to a new way of transacting & unnecessarily expensive in an age of abundant quality supply. That said earlier this week when I asked, 52% of buyers said they would “Swipe right” on PG so I guess for Google the job here is halfway done.
Amazon Launches Search Remarketing
This week @JamesHercher from AdExchanger broke a huge story: Amazon is launching a program that will let advertisers re-target users searching for their products across the web:
This is huge news as 56% of UK based product searches start on Amazon & additionally post GDPR buyers can no longer re-market to Google search intent they were once able to build.
The Google & Amazon data that defines whether someone is interested or in market for a product, is increasingly driving clients into these platforms, what’s interesting about the Amazon product is it will work across multiple exchanges and not just on Amazon owned an operated inventory, a welcome change from Google audience segments which only work on Google Ad Manager (AdX).
I think buyers will jump on this product, which lands just in time for the run in to Black Friday & Christmas. I see this as a savvy move from the Seattle based giant to further grow their advertising business which it was announced this week had grown 123% last quarter. My big hope is that Google take a leaf out of Amazon’s book by 1) making their audience segments exchange agnostic 2) making their search specific segments available to buyers.
GroupM’s State of Video
On Wednesday GroupM released their second State of Video report, it is 32 pages of immensely well researched insights, that can be downloaded here
In their first report published in 2017 GroupM noted that declining in linear TV ratings especially amongst younger audiences was an existential threat to TV economics. Fast forward a year and they’ve observed more of the same; ratings continue to fall. The only solace for those selling broadcast is that sustained demand whilst audience supply is falling, has inflated CPMs.
In the US in general broadcasters are increasing ad loads to offset audience drops, but others like Warner (now owned by AT&T) are gambling that fewer better targeted ads are the route to success:
On a positive note GroupM see the ranks of television advertisers swelling with new advertisers mostly D2C businesses that have exhausted all the reach and awareness search, social, programmatic affords them. They note this is reminiscent of the dot-com boom for television in the late 90s. This market dynamic as important as it means even the most data savvy advertisers view linear television as effective, despite the absence of the deterministic measurement “performance media” offers.
One can only imagine that D2C players will push for increased addressability meaning in the long term auctions of unbundled impressions will become the norm, however in many markets broadcasters have observed the negative impact programmatic has had on publisher’s yields, so I suspect this will take longer than some advertisers would hope.
Are Buyers Not Using Ads.txt Targeting?
After a slow start the adoption rates of ads.txt on the supplyside has been staggering, the file listing authorized sellers of the publishers inventory is on around 85% of top US sites. My own research has found the majority of impressions have an ads.txt file associated with it across the major exchanges:
Whilst not a silver bullet ads.txt is having a material & positive impact on advertising fraud. Because of this & the above statistics I was pretty shocked by a Digiday report that found only 23% of buyers were totally sure that they were only buying ads.txt verified inventory. Another 40% of buyers were not sure either way which is somewhat worrying…
The journalist found many were struggling to deliver campaigns when targeting authorized sellers & a quote in the article attributed to a head of activation in the US really stuck with me “We need to go where our audience is, and things like ads.txt can limit our ability to do that”.
Given the vast majority of quality impressions have ads.txt, delivery issues are really quite surprising, I’ve not seen any but I’d be interested to hear from traders reading this if I’m an outlier here; @SimonJHarris on Twitter.
Finally just wanted to flag this article is fantastic & part of a slew of interesting content on Digiday for subscribers only currently. If based on the above you’re keen to read the full article (& I think you should) you can sign up here
Okay that’s another newsletter done thanks for reading I really appreciate it! If you want to connect you can find me here:
Twitter: @SimonJHarris
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/simonjulianharris/
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Thanks & have a lovely weekend
Simon