AdTech News Round-up
Several notable names have joined Epic Games in taking a stance against Apple's decision to charge a fee for iOS payments made outside of the App Store. Meta, Microsoft, X and Match Group filed an amicus brief in the case, as The Wall Street Journal reports. That lends some heavyweight backing to Epic's cause.
Apple was forced to enable third-party payments on iOS due to the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) and a court ruling in the US. It also has to allow alternative app marketplaces on iOS in the EU. The company takes up to a 30 percent cut of App Store purchases. Perhaps fearing that it was about to lose out on a significant chunk of commission, Apple said it would charge a fee of up to 27 percent when developers process purchases outside of the App Store.
Programmatic DOOH is now available across the entirety of New York’s mass-transit system.
OUTFRONT and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) announced Tuesday that 3,800 digital out-of-home (DOOH) screens across the MTA’s network are now enabled for programmatic open auction.
These screens are installed on train platforms in 484 stations throughout the New York City subway, as well as Long Island Railroad and Metro North stations. The inventory joins the DOOH displays installed at the entrances to MTA stations, which OUTFRONT began making available for programmatic activation in December 2022.
Before OUTFRONT opened the displays for programmatic demand, ad placements on its MTA network had to be purchased through direct insertion order.
Now, advertisers have more flexible access to the MTA’s four million daily riders while they’re inside the stations, waiting for their trains. (Plus the 1,000 NYPD officers and 1,000 state police and National Guard members deployed to the system this year.)
Retail media is all the rage. But while industry dialogue around this market focuses on innovation (e.g., CTV/programmatic applications for retail data, measurement standardization), there is little talk about the high concentration of the market in national retailer platforms.
Continued low concentration in the mid- and long-tail retailer segments could pose an existential threat to grocery businesses, negatively impacting local communities.
Much of retail media to date has used repurposed trade advertising budgets, bringing more transparency and accountability to those funds. However, those budgets will plateau at a level commensurate with gross merchandise value at a particular retailer.
Thus, a retailer’s ability to drive sustainable growth in its retail media network (RMN) will depend on attracting share from brands’ media budgets. Currently, national retailers are in a stronger position to do this than regional retailers given their scale.
Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency, Bloomberg reported.
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While Apple or DarwinAI haven’t announced this deal, several members of the startup’s team joined Apple’s machine learning teams in January, as per their LinkedIn profiles.
DarwinAI had raised over $15 million in funding across various rounds from investors including BDC Capital’s Deep Tech Venture Fund, Honeywell Ventures, Obvious Ventures, and Inovia Capital. BDC Capital confirms on its website that it has received an exit from DarwinAI, whereas Obvious Venture has updated its portfolio to reflect that the startup has been acquired.
BDC Capital and Obvious Venture didn’t comment on the story at the time of writing. Apple didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
As Bloomberg noted in its report, apart from helping with manufacturing efficiency, DarwinAI uses techniques to make AI models smaller and faster. This could be useful for on-device generative AI features Apple hopes to introduce in iOS 18 this year.
Contextual targeting is getting a generative AI glow-up.
In the old days of contextual targeting, a media planner came up with a target audience and had basic segments (“fashionistas”) to choose from.
Now, a media planner can copy and paste a creative brief into a prompt field and watch a long list of potential URLs to target pop up.
If that experience feels reminiscent of ChatGPT, that’s because new contextual targeting tools by startups like Cognitiv and RTB House use generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) to build contextual segments. Because the GPT approach builds up a big pool of contextual information and uses natural language processing technology to more precisely find more relevant ad placements for advertisers, these companies believe GPTs can address some of the problems that plague contextual targeting.
If data is the oil of the media business, new repositories and refineries are popping up everywhere. Especially when the biggest oil field — third-party cookies — is drying up.
Just days after Stagwell launched a new consumer research product called Unlock Surveys within its Stagwell Marketing Cloud division, consumer research firm Disqo has moved to partner with TV set maker Vizio’s Inscape technology unit to generate a deeper set of omnichannel behavioral research in hopes of helping marketers and other media agencies get closer to achieving deterministic outcomes.
Through the partnership, Digiday has learned, Disqo will gain access to Inscape’s automatic content recognition (ACR) TV viewing data, to be paired with Disqo’s other products that measure brand lift and outcomes, which in turn help advertisers measure the cross-media and full-funnel impact of ad campaigns. Clients, which include marketers and agencies, can bridge the divide between brand metrics, like awareness, favorability and purchase intent, to performance outcomes, like search, site visits and shopping, across their whole multimedia campaign.
As brands and marketers become more familiar with esports, they’re less likely to be wowed by the sector’s flashy productions and high viewership. To keep sponsors interested, esports companies are leaning into soft metrics such as community engagement over viewership and the other traditional forms of measurement — for better or worse.
Esports companies might be struggling to turn a profit in 2024 — but esports, as a form of entertainment, is still growing steadily. Between 2022 and 2023, hours of competitive gaming content watched online increased by 160 million, according to Stream Hatchet’s annual esports viewership report. Interest in tentpole esports events such as February’s Six Invitational has also grown year-over-year, reflected in both rising ticket sales and ballooning streaming numbers — and yet none of this growth seems to be moving the needle with brands, which have only become more wary about committing marketing dollars to the space.