Despite Elon Musk’s tweet to the contrary, his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter is not “on hold,” Twitter informed employees on Thursday. Musk had claimed he was pausing proceedings as he unearths details about the number of bots and spam accounts on Twitter, and suggested he might renegotiate his deal for the company. According to Bloomberg, executives told employees in the internal meeting that a renegotiation is not happening. Meanwhile, Musk responded to an Insider story alleging that in 2016 he offered to buy a horse for a SpaceX flight attendant in exchange for an erotic massage. The story is a “politically motivated hit piece,” and “utterly untrue,” said Musk.

Apple is making it simpler for developers to institute price increases. New rules for auto-renewing subscriptions in the App Store allow developers to inform customers they’ll be charged more without requiring the customer to opt-in to the higher price.

Attention shoppers: YouTube is introducing new features aimed at making it easier for viewers to discover and buy from brands. In one, two creators can go live at the same time to co-host a single live shopping stream, with each creator bringing their own fanbase to the stream. Another option on the way, “live redirects,” will enable creators to start a shopping livestream on their channel, then redirect their audience over to a brand’s channel for fans to keep watching.

Exeest, the marketplace for entertainment content, and Gracenote, provider of entertainment metadata, content IDs and related offerings, are introducing an enhancement to the Exeest platform enabling DE&I data on TV titles to be surfaced, making it easier for the industry to uncover and access inclusive content. The Exeest platform now uses Gracenote Inclusion Analytics to provide visibility into the gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation of cast appearing in content and the audiences watching it.

Roku’s operating system will power a TV made specifically for outdoor mounting, with the streaming licensing its software to Elemental Electronics for a 55-inch 4K/HDR all-weather smart TV. The device delivers 700 nits of sun-defying brightness and an “IP 55” rating, meaning its delicate circuitry is properly insulated to handle high and low temperatures, as well as moisture and dust.

Who’s making promises they can keep?
It’s been anything but business as usual this upfront season, as media companies and advertisers search for enhanced analytics and insights to better target and measure audiences. There have been promising partnerships and pilot tests, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Determining what’s right for your company means up close, interactive explorations of the latest tools and tech, with experts on hand to answer questions specific to your business. And that’s what you’ll find at the Cynopsis Measurement & Data Conference, reimagined to help solve for the new measurement landscape. It’s coming up soon – you can register here

ADVERTISING

TikTok is launching an ad solution, Branded Mission, that it says will allow advertisers to crowdsource authentic content from creators on TikTok, turn top performing videos into ads, and improve brand affinity with media impressions. Advertisers can develop a brief and release it to the creator community to participate in the Branded Mission. Creators decide what Branded Missions they are inspired by and choose to participate; brands will select their favorite original creative videos and amplify them through promoted ad traffic. Creators who are at least 18 years old with more than 1,000 followers will be eligible to participate.

Viamedia announced the launch of its new Parity ADS Platform, enabling MVPDs to regionalize streaming distribution by inserting regionally targeted ads on linear streams. “Our new Parity ADS Platform is one of the industry’s first transitional approaches and introduces the immediate next step to achieving fully dynamic advertising,” said David Solomon, President & CEO at Viamedia. “This presents an enormous opportunity for our MVPD partners around the country to essentially turn their linear inventory into connected TV (CTV) inventory, all while better serving their local communities, businesses and advertisers.”

Link AI for Digital, an AI-powered ad testing solution specifically for digital ad formats, is now available on Kantar Marketplace. The solution predicts a digital ad’s in-market performance within 15 minutes. Link AI for Digital was trained using Link, the normative advertising database which consists of over 230,000 survey-enabled ad tests and 30 million real human interactions.

TVision has unveiled Ad Scoreboard, a low-cost SaaS platform that allows marketers to measure and benchmark viewer attention to TV ads for their own brands as well as their competitors. “It’s simple – ads that capture attention are more likely to have a meaningful impact.,” said Yan Liu, CEO of TVision. “Ad Scoreboard is an important step toward making value-based Attention insights accessible for every TV advertiser.”

Google has authorized use of the Lotame Panorama ID within its supply-side platform. Panorama ID is a people-based, privacy-forward and interoperable identity solution for the cookieless open web. As of April 2022, the Panorama ID is now the second most adopted cookieless ID solution in the world, deployed by more than 18,000 publishers globally. “Panorama ID continues to unlock new opportunities to reach addressable audiences on cookieless browsers like Safari and Firefox, adequately equipping brands and publishers with a global, privacy-compliant and interoperable identifier to power their advertising,” said Pierre Diennet, Head of Global Partnerships. “By partnering with the most widely adopted media platforms, we’re making significant headway on the industry’s collective mission to provide an identity solution that improves the ecosystem for all.”

Viant Technology has partnered with data platform IRIS.TV to bring a solution integrating IRIS-enabled insights into the Viant Household ID, empowering marketers to leverage contextual, cookieless TV data to more effectively target and measure activations.

Fraud schemes have spiked over 70% globally, driven by CTV, where ad buys are more expensive and where there’s less transparency on where ads run, according to DoubleVerify’s annual report. On the bright side, video completion rate has improved, from 62% in 2019, to 71% in 2021, mostly due to CTV, where VCR climbed 3% year-over-year and is now at 95.6%. “This year’s report finds that media quality is table stakes,” said Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify. “No longer is it acceptable to assume that a portion of media dollars will be wasted on fraud, or potentially exposed to brand suitability concerns. Advertisers have demanded quality, understanding that it is a prerequisite to achieving performance.”

Despite making up only 4.1 percent of total ad spend in 2021, consumers associate OOH with a similar or greater share of action compared to competitive media, according to a survey from the Out of Home Advertising Association of America in partnership with Comscore. The data indicates OOH provides value compared to other mediums with higher price tags, like TV and video, radio, and banner ads. “OOH is one of the most impactful ways to reach consumers – and this survey proves that it is a tremendous value as well,” said Anna Bager, President and COO, OAAA. “Couple that with our recent OAAA-Harris Poll findings that people are annoyed by sponsored digital media content and feeling digital device fatigue, and the results of this research with Comscore should send a clear signal to advertisers: OOH is a vital part of the media mix.”

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STREAMING

YouTube shared results from a Google-commissioned survey: 86% of respondents believed YouTube delivers relevant and intellectual programming, compared with 73% to 79% for other platforms. Respondents were also 4.2 times more likely than the average to agree with the statement that “telling a good story” is more important than programming being “made by an established production company.”

Netflix laid off about 150 employees, out of a workforce of 11,000. The move comes after the streamer reported its first subscriber losses in the first quarter. “Our slowing growth means we are also having to slow our cost growth as a company,” said a Netflix spokesperson.

But it’s not all bad news for Netflix. The streamer takes the season’s crown for total minutes viewed, according to Nielsen. According to the measurement company’s Total Day minutes from September 20, 2021 through May 8, 2022, Netflix drew 1.33 trillion total minutes. CBS bested its network competition with 752.8 billion minutes, followed by NBC (596.7 billion), ABC (471.9 billion) and Fox (323.1 billion).

Disney+ is launching a new ad-supported tier, but it will be careful about which commercials make it to the service. In the interest of maintaining a family friendly environment, Disney+ will not take ads for alcohol or political campaigns, and will be cautious about advertisements played during shows aimed at young children and will. The ad-supported tier of Disney+ will “start slow,” with 15-second and 30-second commercials, said Rita Ferro, head of ad sales for Disney, during a conference hosted by MoffettNathanson last week. The ad load will be lighter than corporate cousin Hulu’s because “movies are the reason people come to the platform, and movies have a different ad load,” Ferro explained.

Imagicomm Entertainment has lassoed INSP, cable home of Western-themed programming, to launch a new FAST channel featuring content that celebrates the cowboy way of life. Cowboy Way, named after the INSP series “The Cowboy Way: Alabama,” will highlight INSP’s original content as well as other films and series. “We are enthusiastic about putting our content in the FAST channel space, and believe the modern day, Western lifestyle content on the Cowboy Way channel will be truly unique,” said Dale Ardizzone, COO of INSP. “This launch is another example of our broad corporate strategy to expand our content distribution across multiple entertainment platforms.”

Viewers who jump from one free trial to another are a challenge to streamers. What’s their profile? According to Helixa, free trial jumpers are more likely to be young (64% are ages 18-44), make over $70,000 (56%), and are less likely to be married (45%) and college educated (45%). They over-indexes for gaming (1.64x) and – no surprise – saving money (1.25x), and favor animated (1.4x), horror (1.37x), and comedy (1.21x) films. In terms of television shows, they prefer business (1.31x), streaming original (1.29x), and food (1.27x) shows.

Amazon Freevee, formerly IMDb TV, is now available through the App Store on Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD. Amazon Freevee features originals from Amazon Studios, as well a library of movies and series.

DMR, a subsidiary of Cinedigm, announced the launch of streaming service AsianCrush across Comcast’s entertainment platforms including Xfinity X1, Xfinity Flex and XClass TV. Joining AsianCrush on the platforms later this year will be RetroCrush, Midnight Pulp, and Cinehouse.

Cynopsis Team