AdTech News Round-up
Among the frustration and surprise over Google’s decision to sidestep directly eliminating third-party cookies in Chrome, one concern stands out for ad execs: Google’s evolving stance on privacy seems to be mirroring Apple’s, using it both as a shield and a sword.
To get why this is a big deal, it’s important to better understand what Google’s actually planning for third-party cookies.
After four years of dragging its feet, Google finally said it will phase them out, but only if users give the thumbs-up. How it will make this work is still a mystery, but the early guess is that giving people the power to opt-out will mostly lead to one thing: users opting out.
In other words, Google’s not exactly killing third-party cookies; it’s just handing the job over to the users.
Meta’s latest open source AI model is its biggest yet.
Today, Meta said it is releasing Llama 3.1 405B, a model containing 405 billion parameters. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.
At 405 billion parameters, Llama 3.1 405B isn’t the absolute largest open source model out there, but it’s the biggest in recent years. Trained using 16,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, it also benefits from newer training and development techniques that Meta claims makes it competitive with leading proprietary models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet (with a few caveats).
Google no longer plans to deprecate third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, the latest development in a twisting saga after the company faced mounting industry criticism and regulatory pressure.
Google’s VP of Privacy Sandbox, Anthony Chavez, wrote in a blog post on Monday that instead of deprecating third-party cookies, the company would “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.”
“We expect that overall performance using Privacy Sandbox APIs will improve over time as industry adoption increases,” Chavez wrote. “At the same time, we recognize this transition requires significant work by many participants and will have an impact on publishers, advertisers, and everyone involved in online advertising.”
James Rosewell, co-founder of the Movement for an Open Web, says that the heel turn “is a clear admission by Google that their plan to enclose the open web has failed.”
A year and a half after launching ads, ads are finally making a meaningful contribution to Netflix’s bottom line.
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Last quarter, Netflix grew its overall revenue by 17% year over year – a huge jump from Q2 last year, when that number was just 3%. Now that the platform’s ad-supported membership is hitting a certain level of scale, ad revenue is becoming a source of profit, CFO Spencer Neumann told shareholders during the company’s earnings call on Thursday.
Netflix’s operating margins last quarter grew 5% YoY, and “we see a lot of room to continue to grow profit margin,” Neumann said, pointing to the sign-up rate for the ad-supported plan.
Currently, 45% of new member sign-ups are for the ads plan, up from 40% in April.
Although it’ll take at least another two years before advertising is a primary revenue source, Neumann said the recent growth in profit margins is an indicator that advertising will make
Digital video ad spend is becoming more performance-driven.
Business outcomes – tangible metrics like sales, store visits, leads and website actions – are now the most important KPI for determining success with digital video, according to the IAB’s annual Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy report released Tuesday. Advertiser Perceptions ran a quantitative survey in February of ad industry leaders involved with media buying, which the IAB commissioned.
While the first installment of the report revealed that total digital video ad spend is projected to grow 16% in 2024, this complete version also digs into the buy-side rationale behind investment decisions related to digital video.
It seems businesses are bent on making every surface shoppable, transforming everything that can be an ad network into one. It looks to be a growing trend this year, proven by the growth of the retail media network space, in which even companies beyond traditional retailers like Chase Bank and United Airlines have recently unveiled their own ad offerings to challenge more conventional retail media networks from the likes of Amazon, Walmart and Target.
No surface is safe as retail media moves off-site, into brand awareness channels. This shift is fueled by partnerships like the one between Instacart and YouTube, making YouTube ads shoppable for CPG brands, or Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio, that will add streaming capabilities to the retailer’s ad offering. By the end of this year, U.S. advertisers are expected to shell out $54.48 billion on retail media, according to eMarketer.
OpenAI is a leader in the race to develop AI as intelligent as a human. Yet, employees continue to show up in the press and on podcasts to voice their grave concerns about safety at the $80 billion nonprofit research lab. The latest comes from The Washington Post, where an anonymous source claimed OpenAI rushed through safety tests and celebrated their product before ensuring its safety.
“They planned the launch after-party prior to knowing if it was safe to launch,” an anonymous employee told The Washington Post. “We basically failed at the process.”
Safety issues loom large at OpenAI — and seem to just keep coming. Current and former employees at OpenAI recently signed an open letter demanding better safety and transparency practices from the startup, not long after its safety team was dissolved following the departure of cofounder Ilya Sutskever. Jan Leike, a key OpenAI researcher, resigned shortly after, claiming in a post that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” at the company.