AdTech News Round-up
That’s a wrap for Netflix’s first full fiscal year with an ads business.
And, luckily for Netflix, its first livestreamed earnings call on Tuesday didn’t fail.
Netflix finished 2023 with a 12.5% jump in revenue year-over-year thanks to subscriber growth, a far cry from the mere 2% YOY revenue increase it reported this time last year.
The streamer credits more subs for this year’s revenue spike, CFO Spencer Neumann told shareholders during the earnings call. It grew its member base by 12.8% YOY, compared to just 4% last year.
It may take years for ads to have a material impact on revenue, according to Co-CEO Greg Peters, but Netflix’s ad-supported plan is helping boost subscription growth, in part because the platform kicked more moochers off shared accounts throughout the course of last year. (Can confirm from firsthand experience.)
Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab on Wednesday reached a settlement in a patent infringement lawsuit over chips that power the company's artificial-intelligence technology, according to a filing in Massachusetts federal court.
The settlement comes the same day that closing arguments were scheduled to begin in a trial on Singular Computing's lawsuit, which had sought $1.67 billion in damages for Google's alleged misuse of its computer-processing innovations.
Details of the settlement were not immediately available. Representatives for Google and Singular confirmed the settlement but did not provide more information about it.
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said that the company did not violate Singular's patent rights and that it was "pleased to have resolved this matter."
Singular, founded by Massachusetts-based computer scientist Joseph Bates, claimed that Google incorporated his technology into processing units that support AI features in Google Search, Gmail, Google Translate and other Google services.
The 2019 lawsuit said that Bates shared his inventions with the company between 2010 and 2014. It argued that Google's Tensor Processing Units copied Bates' technology and infringed two patents.
Given the focus on cookie deprecation changes this year, agencies and clients will increasingly seek more transparency with campaign insights and data across retail media. So commerce shop The Mars Agency in early January introduced two new products for its commerce marketing platform, Marilyn.
Mars added the self-serve dashboard and commerce media benchmark database to help brands unite their commerce media measurement and planning in a single place. (More on the the demise of cookies here.)
Rob Rivenburgh, global CEO of The Mars Agency, said he sees these developments as part of an effort to go beyond pure media metrics and “get a full view of program performance” for commerce marketing. As part of Mars’ commerce strategy, Rivenburgh said Marilyn lets clients analyze all aspects of commerce, from e-commerce to analytics.
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French data watchdog CNIL said on Thursday it had imposed a 10 million euro ($10.86 million) fine on U.S. web services provider Yahoo! for failings linked to the company's cookie policy.
The watchdog accused the company of "failing to respect the choice of Internet users who refused cookies on its main website and for not allowing users of its e-mail client to freely withdraw their consent to cookies".
Yahoo EMEA Ltd., the Ireland-based European subsidiary formally subject to the fine, is reviewing the decision to decide on "appropriate next steps", it said when contacted by Reuters.
The French regulator said its investigation found around 20 cookies, small amounts of data used for advertising purposes, were left on an user's device when visiting yahoo.com, despite the absence of any expressed consent.
Long considered the red-headed stepchild of in-game advertising, mobile gaming inventory is shaping up to be increasingly attractive in 2024.
Over the past year, as in-game advertising companies have looked to muscle their way into brands’ ad budgets, some marketers have focused on their ability to secure so-called premium inventory — ads inside the big-budget console titles published by major game developers such as Nintendo and Electronic Arts. Historically, the bulk of most in-game ad firms’ inventory is inside casual or hypercasual games, which brands consider less effective than the major console titles enjoyed by core gamers.?
But as 2024 ramps up, it turns out the returns of mobile gaming advertising are getting pretty good. Q4 2023 was the best season on record for mobile gaming advertisers, according to data shared with Digiday by the mobile marketing platform AppLovin, bolstered both by advances in artificial intelligence and a better understanding among marketers of what makes mobile gamers tune in.
Google kicked off the year with a signal that, yes, the third-party cookie is actually going away by starting to disable third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users on Jan. 4. While questions — many of them — about what happens next remain, it’s clear that Google is no longer kicking the can down the road.
Marketers have already been working over the last two to three years to prepare for the long-awaited death of the third-party cookie. Even so, the readiness of the industry for said exit isn’t as certain as some would hope. How prepared a marketer is to manage this shift will vary. Trends of the last few years including a push for more full funnel marketing efforts, a recognition of the importance of owned channels vs. paid as well as a need to amp up loyalty programs to continue to collect first-party data will continue in the coming months.?
“The conversations that have happened with the last two years are how do we prepare for the cookie-less future? What do we need to do?” said Leah Sand, executive director at VML. “A lot of companies invested in [customer data platforms] aligning their data first-party and zero-party data collection strategies trying to get a single view of the customer.”
CES this year was a petri dish of news and gossip (and hopefully not COVID) among the CTV ad industry just as much as it was a breeding ground for headline-grabbing gadgets and gizmos, like see-through TVs and self-translating ear buds.
The main topics of interest in the advertising sphere (not that Sphere) were the forthcoming launch of Prime Video ads, new streaming ad formats, measurement and programmatic – a continuation of trends that dominated CTV in 2023. (Also overheard: what happened behind the scenes at VideoAmp after the company’s CEO stepped down amid massive layoffs last week.)
The major streamers also flocked to Las Vegas to peacock themselves before brands and agencies (yes, pun intended).