AdTech News Round-up
On Tuesday, the Writers’ Guild of America began a strike after six weeks of negotiations broke down between the guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — which includes Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, Discovery-Warner, NBC Universal, Paramount and Sony.
Marketers and agency execs say that they are watching the strike closely to understand what the impact may be for advertisers in the coming weeks but that it’s early days and difficult to read the tea leaves. Advertisers are already asking questions about the length of the strike, according to agency execs, who say they hope it can be resolved soon.
The new hot trend in platform advertising is to put the machines in charge of everything.
It’s true of Google, true of Meta and, even more so as of this week, it’s true of Amazon.
On Thursday, the Amazon DSP rolled out a system-wide upgrade to its machine-learning and predictive algorithms, Neal Richter, the group’s director of data science engineering, told AdExchanger.
Richter said the upgrades include new capabilities with data fed by large language models (Mmmm … that’s some yummy jargon), which are in turn built on prior machine learning-based tech developed for the Amazon ad business. These models were already in use to expand online advertising addressability, but will now also support predictive analytics and campaign planning.
Marketers, agencies and publishers/platforms are still in the early stages of testing live shopping features, but they believe it has the potential to shape commerce media and video content — especially for younger consumers.
The idea is similar to QVC shopping channels, but across social media platforms and oftentimes are hosted by content creators. In recent years, giants from Meta to Amazon have experimented with live shopping features.
In 2022, 20% of people in the U.S. participated in a livestream shopping event — which ranked second after Denmark, with 24% of participants, according to Statista. More than a third in the U.S. have heard of a live shopping experience but have not participated.
Check out our blog post: What Is Retail Media & Retail Media Networks (RMNs)?
Streaming giant Netflix is turning its attention to South Korea as other media giants look to invest in the country’s entertainment industry. The California-based company is investing USD$2.5bn (~£1.9bn) in the East Asian nation over four years to produce dramas, reality shows, and films, doubling Netflix’s spend on content from South Korea so far.
As brands increasingly look to reach gamers in their natural habitat, stakeholders in the gaming advertising world are coalescing into two camps: those porting programmatic adtech into games via intrinsic in-game ads, and those integrating brands into more immersive gaming experiences. As these two sides increasingly compete for marketers’ gaming budgets, the tension between them is mounting.?
Last month, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney caused a stir by coming down hard on in-game ads in a Q&A with Digiday. But for many executives and observers in the space, Sweeney’s comments disparaging in-game billboards came as no surprise; it’s a drum he has been beating for years. But despite Sweeney’s statements that he “hates advertising in games,” Fortnite is arguably chock-full of ads in the form of brand integrations, the equivalent of Hollywood product placement for gaming.
Check out our blog post: What Are the Challenges and Opportunities of In-Game Advertising?
As of tomorrow, Microsoft Advertising and “Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform will no longer support Twitter.” The move comes four days before the social media platform will begin charging enterprise users at least $42,000 a month to access its API.
This wasn’t a cost-saving move by Microsoft. It could easily have afforded the $42,000+/month Twitter wants for its API. This is a further indication of Twitter’s declining relevance to marketers.
The action means users can’t access their Twitter account through Microsoft’s Digital Marketing Center’s social media management tool. They also won’t be able to view their past tweets and engagement on the Microsoft Advertising platform.?
A bug or error in Meta’s ad system caused campaigns to overspend by more than double their daily spending cap during the wee hours of the morning on Sunday.
Due to the nature of cost capping, some brands lost only hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. But for some larger brands, Meta overspent by hundreds of thousands.
The ad serving issue was resolved as of midnight, according to Meta's ads manager status page.
What advertisers do know is that the overspending occurred primarily on Facebook and via the Audience Network, with only a relatively small amount on Instagram.
Meta shut down the Audience Network on Sunday as it dealt with whatever fire had gotten out of hand in its backend code.