AdTech News Round-up
Netflix’s ad business is scaling its audience and inventory faster than its ability to monetize inventory, CEO Greg Peters told shareholders during the company’s earnings call on Thursday.
Although ad revenue won’t be a primary driver of revenue anytime soon, Peters and CFO Spencer Neumann said they are confident that a slower growing ARM (average revenue per membership) in the short term will give way to long-term success.
Overall, revenue grew 15% to $9.8 billion YOY during the last quarter – down slightly from 17% YOY growth in the previous quarter, but close to double the growth rate from 2023. Operating margins hit almost 30% compared to 22% last year, an increase of over 6%.
In its antitrust suit against Google, the US Department of Justice is portraying the company as a monopolistic giant, but the reality of Google’s ad tech business – and its future – is far more complex and evolutionary.
The courtroom drama is drawing attention away from the real changes already reshaping the industry. These shifts are driven not by legal proceedings but rather by evolving market dynamics, changing advertiser demands and Google’s own strategic priorities.
The world’s long list of large language models now includes a macropod.
On Wednesday, Walmart debuted a new set of retail-specific AI models to help power the company’s “Adaptive Retail” era of personalized shopping and customer service. Called Wallaby, the LLMs were trained on decades of Walmart data with company-specific knowledge about customers, employees, Walmart terminology, its corporate values and other brand-specific data. Walmart also plans to integrate Wallaby with other AI models based on the goals for each application.
Despite their dependence on Nielsen, programmers love complaining about the TV ratings titan.
But Paramount Global recently went beyond griping when it announced its contract with Nielsen had lapsed. Now, the broadcaster is relying on VideoAmp for its viewership numbers, which is once again sparking
Paramount’s move represents a serious shake-up because TV publishers that use Nielsen alternatives (like VideoAmp, iSpot and Comscore) typically do so in tandem with Nielsen, which has been the foundation of TV ad measurement for decades. In this case, however, Paramount and Nielsen failed to come to an agreement in time for their contract renewal.
In-game advertising company Frameplay has launched its own ad exchange intended to simplify the gaming advertising landscape for brands and marketers.
The platform, which opened for business yesterday, Oct. 9, is meant to be a primary point of exchange for media buyers in the United States and other key markets looking to access intrinsic in-game advertising inventory.
It’s a familiar tale: A new media channel becomes the ad industry’s shiny object, touted as a silver bullet only for concerns about return on investment, performance and transparency to arise after marketers have already shelled out ad dollars to invest in said channels.
Most recently, it was a scene from the programmatic space, in which the Association of National Advertisers released its Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study, kicking up questions around transparency — or the lack thereof — and ultimately revealing $22 billion in wasted programmatic ad spend.
On Tuesday, Meta announced that it’s testing several new generative AI tools, including one that can animate static images and turn them into full-blown video ads.
Another test involves adjusting the aspect ratio of a video by automatically generating the unseen pixels within every frame. That way, a video made for Facebook can be easily repurposed by advertisers for Instagram and vice versa. (Meta already has a similar expansion-style tool for static images.)