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Publishers like Axios, Eater, the Guardian, theSkimm and Snopes are either growing or revamping their newsletter offerings to engage audiences as a wave of generative AI advancements increases the need for original content and referral traffic declines push publishers to find alternative ways to reach readers.

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The hiring of Jeremi Gorman and Peter Naylor, two highly regarded digital and streaming veterans, is providing buyers with some answers, even if they don’t like them all -- like the shock of an asked-for $65 CPM.

Digital Media

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Finding a way to articulate why less means more in programmatic advertising is becoming a necessity for the largest companies in ad tech.

Digital Media

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With third-party cookies on the way out, publishers are becoming the gatekeepers of some of the largest authenticated audiences online.

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MailOnline has begun to experiment with alternative ways to target Apple Safari users outside of the third-party cookie.

Digital Media

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Media agencies have long favored buying audiences at scale and for cheap rates on platforms like YouTube, but that mentality is shifting with some agencies claiming they prefer to pay more for a risk-free buy. “Higher CPMs means lower risk,” said an employee at a media buying agency. “Buying from content owners on YouTube/Networks is certainly more expensive but can be accessed programmatically and represents a far safer buy.” The pressure should only grow. Last week, Disney, Nestle, McDonald’s and AT&T pulled their ads from the platform after revelations that their ads had appeared next to videos of young girls that were marred by inappropriate user comments. To avoid the issue entirely but still benefit from YouTube’s audiences and scale, agencies are buying premium publisher audiences directly. Media owners have trumpeted their brand-safety credentials to advertisers ever since the YouTube brand-safety scandal in 2017 in order to win a greater chunk of the ad revenue pie from the major platforms.

Digital Media

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Outstream video ads — commercials that autoplay within article pages — have grown in popularity with advertisers. The format is an alternative to scarce, expensive in-stream video placements like commercials that play before videos. But some buyers are concerned they’re not always getting an accurate look at how their campaigns are performing: They’re particularly concerned that their video ads will continue to play to completion while out of view and that these out-of-view plays are being counted toward an ad’s completion rate, messing with one metric that brand advertisers in particular monitor to evaluate an ad’s effectiveness. In recent weeks, an advertiser bought outstream video ads from several outstream video ad vendors running on mobile web and found that, in some instances, the ads’ completion rates exceeded their viewability rates. That led this advertiser, who asked to remain anonymous, to conclude that the ads continued to play even after a person had scrolled them out of view, which compromises advertisers’ ability to evaluate an ad’s performance based on completion rate. It’s a conclusion that did not surprise agency execs interviewed for this article.

Digital Media

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On Aug. 2, a trio of longtime digital media executives, including former HuffPost CEO Betsy Morgan and former AwesomenessTV president Brett Bouttier, launched Magnet Companies, a new holding company focused on investing in, buying and building digital media businesses. It’s the latest high-profile digital media venture — after AT&T’s Otter Media, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo and Group Nine Media — that has been set up as a holding company. Magnet Companies, which also counts former Whalerock Industries president Jeff Berman as a principal, is backed by an unnamed multibillion-dollar private equity fund in New York, which has invested a “significant amount of money” into the venture, said Bouttier. The idea is to either find or build digital media businesses that can achieve greater success by working under a holding company structure rather than on their own. This includes the usual “shared services” such as accounting, legal and HR, but also establishes centralized teams for content production and ad sales, Bouttier said. “When you have a holding company, you have the ability to scale operating expenses that can be costly when you’re still trying to build a new business,” said Bouttier. “And at such an early stage, you generally don’t have access to skilled and experienced executives — and if you do, it creates a lot of expenses that divert money away from things like product, creative and marketing. If we can scale that and offer those types of services, it’s a benefit that can accrete to the companies in our portfolio.”

Digital Media

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The arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation’s enforcement May 25 has hurled the digital media and advertising industries into a tailspin. Since the early hours of May 25, ad exchanges have seen European ad demand volumes plummet between 25 and 40 percent in some cases, according to sources. Ad tech vendors scrambled to inform clients that they predict steep drops in demand coming through their platforms from Google. Some U.S. publishers have halted all programmatic ads on their European sites. Google contacted DoubleClick Bid Manager clients over the last few days to warn them that until it has completed its integration into the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe and IAB Tech Lab’s GDPR Transparency & Consent Framework that publishers, ad tech vendor partners and advertisers should expect a “short-term disruption” in the delivery of their DoubleClick Bid Manager campaigns on third-party European inventory, starting May 25.

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The blame game between advertisers and agencies is stalling the former’s efforts to uncover what happens to money spent on programmatic ads. Transparency was unsurprisingly the recurring theme at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit Europe in Estoril, Portugal, where it was clear the issue is far from solved. Advertisers blamed poor guidance from agencies more concerned with protecting margins on programmatic buys, while agencies challenged advertisers to pay more to understand how those investments work. Both sides want the other to take more responsibility for programmatic’s problems of hidden fees, fraud, viewability and brand safety, but neither are willing to take the lead.

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Axel Springer is on a mission to cut down on its dependence on Google ad tech — and it’s making progress. In January, the German digital media giant, owner of Business Insider, Bild and other titles, completed the shift from its former waterfall-based ad tech stack used with Google in favor of using AppNexus as its ad server, into which it can plug in a variety of demand partners (including Google). It’s a strategy it began last spring. The result: Programmatic revenues rose 10 percent compared to the same period last year, while eCPMs jumped 28 percent. The publisher won’t disclose what percentage of its digital ad revenue comes from programmatically bought ads. Axel Springer is pleased by the revenue jump, but it’s also looking at the overall benefit of being less beholden to Google’s ad technology developments and agendas — and to gain more transparency over the programmatic bidding process. With its new setup, it can still benefit from Google demand, but is more in control of any changes it wants to make to its programmatic strategy. Axel Springer now wants to encourage other publishers that are concerned they’re also overreliant on Google technologies to follow suit. Two weeks ago, Axel Springer published a white paper showing the nuts and bolts of what changes it made and why, with an eye toward encouraging other European publishers to take similar steps. “The strategic objective is to get more independence from Google’s technology and have full transparency on how our mediation works,” said Carsten Schwecke, chief digital officer of Axel Springer’s sales house Media Impact. “With this white paper, we want to motivate other publishers to think the unthinkable: that there is some life and independence around Google technology.”

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Manas says platforms are blurring the line between media and retail while retailers are behaving like media.

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"The question is whether the paper can really commit to the strategy."

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The Seattle-based company is thinking beyond product advertising.

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"The industry is in a holding pattern currently."

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Execs said they use engagements, in-house research and just good judgment to measure data-driven storytelling.

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Here's what is really happening to advertising's pulled budgets.

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Google and Facebook swallowed 20 percent of the entire global media advertising pie in 2016, per Zenith.

Digital Media

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Agency executives at the 4A’s Data Summit talk about their biggest challenge with data.

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Confessions: If online display ads disappeared tomorrow, no one would notice. So why do marketers continue to waste billions on it?

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The mobile Web is dead. Long live the mobile Web.

Digital Media