Hot Takes from Advertising Week

Coming off a busy Advertising Week we have a lot of news to discuss.

Live from Advertising Week: Inmobi and Kochava

Marketecture Vendor interviews are free for a week, then require a subscription. Read more about subscription options at marketecture.tv.

Podcast: Brian and Neal from Amazon’s DSP team

Hot Takes from Advertising Week

I don’t know about you but I’m feeling pretty drained after Advertising Week. Not just the panels in the sub-basement of an abandoned shopping mall, but also the dinners, parties, constant stream of announcements, and the DOJ asking for Google to be split up. Here are some hot takes from the week.

Also, in my annual tradition, I have selected the official Startup Gourd (once written-up in BusinessInsider). She’s a beauty:

Reaction to DSP and curation

Last week’s newsletter ruffled some feathers by suggesting that DSPs should muscle into the market for curation to avoid being disintermediated by SSPs. The reaction to this post generally ranged from “yes, obviously”, to “no, idiot.” Which is a nice spread.

The arguments for why I was an idiot were mostly in two categories:

1. DSPs cannot possibly curate because we define “curate” as what sellers do. Ipso facto, no deal. This is obviously stupid semantic stuff that doesn’t belong in a family newsletter.

2. DSPs cannot curate because they don’t have enough signal from sellers to do so. This is an interesting argument!

In my post I specifically joined the argument that DSPs should be in the header to the opportunity for curation. People don’t read. But this is begging the question of what signals, exactly, do DSPs lose by buying through SSPs vs direct, and isn’t this just a more compelling argument that DSPs should be moving upstream to the publishers?

What signals does a party in the header get that a downstream bidder do not? I’m spitballing here, and don’t have direct experience, but here’s what I can think of:

• Environment data like screen resolution, installed fonts, etc. that can be used for fingerprinting and (arguably) fraud detection.

• Network traffic artifacts (TCP/IP bit-level fields) that can be used for the same reasons.

• Identity signals that are more raw than those passed to DSPs. For example, you might get passed arrays of alternative IDs that are not contracted at the DSP level, and thus are not passed in oRTB.

• Page context, such as the number of ad slots on the page, or the aggregated time of the session, which are not passed in oRTB.

• Others? Dunno.

Nothing in this list tells me that DSPs cannot execute curation — unless you’re basically saying that you need to fingerprint to do it. Which might be what some people are saying, though not publicly.

Readers, do your thing and tell me why I’m wrong.

Merger (and funding) Mania

Last week saw two major M&A transactions (Zeta-LiveIntent, JW-Connatix), and another two three major funding announcements (Human, Scope3, Crisp). Happy days are here again!

Hot take lightning round…

Zeta-LiveIntent: Zeta is a data company, they make money managing and activating data for premium brands. To stay relevant, they can’t lose signal, and relying on third parties like LiveRamp is not a long-term tenable position. LiveIntent had been trying for years to compete with LiveRamp and become an alternative provider of an identity spine, but it was an uphill climb. God bless.

JW-Connatix: JW has been at it for over a decade with a hybrid model of a SaaS video offering and an ad enablement layer. But without a full ad suite (network, exchange) there was limited revenue leverage. Connatix has been supplementing an ad model with syndicated content and a video player, but likely struggled to develop long-term relationships with video publishers. Seems like a good fit.

Scope3 raises $25 million: Don’t bet against BOK. Scope3 has been running a masterclass on the “aura of inevitability” strategy, essentially defining the carbon-in-advertising space, then dominating that conversation, and now raising enough money to scare off the competition. Also, add “AI” to your pitch deck and collect the $$.

Human raises $50 million: For years Human (f/k/a WhiteOps) was the odd-man-out in the ad verification/fraud/safety game as DV and IAS racked up the broad acceptance and revenue. Human didn’t want to become a broad offering of various measurement products and wanted to remain pure to its founding culture of uber-geek security types.

So when AdExchanger published this piece indicating that the company would use the money to build their own ID and do verification work I was pretty intrigued. Well based on the correction at the top of the piece it looks like a but of a PR disaster, as this is exactly what they will not be doing with the money.

Antitrust won’t stop, can’t stop

The big news this week was the DOJ filing their proposed remedies in the Google Search case (not the ad tech case). I think a lot of people, including myself, had high hopes that this doc would outline specific outcomes we could cosplay about, like an Android spin-out or a Google Ads compatibility layer. Instead the filing was a kitchen sink that certainly could include those things, but also could not.

There’s really four things to watch IMHO:

1. Cancellation of the distribution deals. How to do this without it becoming a windfall for Google and a death sentence for Mozilla?

2. Will Google be forced to share data with competitors, and how would that work without privacy issues? It’s been suggested that a separate company could be created to own and distribute Google’s data — this seems like crazy-pants to me.

3. Advertising interop — e.g. competitors bidding on Google search. This is my favorite remedy.

4. Spinouts of Chrome and Android.

Meanwhile, Google employees are winning the Nobel Prize.

But wait, that’s not all. Ryan Barwick of Marketing Brew pushed the publish button on this one on Friday afternoon:

After a string of mini-scandals, bad press, and general grumpiness among the industry at these solutions, a DOJ investigation is certainly the cherry on top. I don’t know anything, or even suspect anything, but discovery will be fascinating.

Reading list

• Zeta buys LiveIntent for $250 million (link)

• JW and Connatix merge (link)

• Scope3 raises $25 million from Google Ventures, Venrock, others (link) 

• Human raises $50m (link)

• Are Traasdahl’s start-up, Crisp, raised $72 million “B” round (link)

• Big WSJ report on Google’s declining search share, projected to fall under 50% next year when you include Amazon, etc. (link)

• Tik tok launches their own pmax…smart+ (link)

• Chalice has URL-level optimization through Index exchange curation using metadata powered by Sincera (link)

• Microsoft shuttering retail media biz, offloading to Criteo (link)

• Dave Morgan is back as CEO of Simulmedia (link)