Monday May 24, 2021

Shopping was also a topic at Google’s developer’s conference. The company announced a partnership with Shopify will bring users more merchants within Google Shopping, and in Photos, users can use Lens in a Photo to find places to purchase items. The company also said it plans to go carbon free by 2030, with a geothermal project serving data centers and dragonscale solar panels to work with it for heating and cooling. Also in the works is Project Starline, upgrading video conferencing with life-size people generated by 3D imaging, as well as better capture and computational photography algorithms for darker skin tones.

Instagram is hosting a development event series, Creator Week, aimed at helping creators grow their following and increase revenue with sessions like “How to Supercharge Your Community,” “How to Start a Podcast,” and “How to Get Discovered on Instagram.” The June 8-10 event is invitation-only, but some content will be made available publicly.

New tools on TikTok allow creators to delete comments and block users in bulk, rather than one by one. The update is meant to help creators more easily deal with online abuse.

German media company Axel Springer is reportedly in talks to buy news website Axios, according to The Information. What’s the appeal? It’s all about the death of the third-party cookie, says Kerel Cooper, CMO of LiveIntent, noting, “Axios has proven that by investing in the email channel, you can build an audience of logged-in, engaged audiences who sit outside of the walled gardens. That email audience represents a trove of first-party data, the key to Identity in the new world. Axel Springer isn’t just adding one of the best collection of journalists in the industry, they are adding a publisher who understands they key to the future of addressability by virtue of their dexterity with email.”

What do allegations about the workplace behavior of Microsoft founder Bill Gates say about the company’s workplace culture? “The Microsoft of 2021 is very different from the Microsoft of 2000,” Satya Nadella told CNBC. “To me and to everyone at Microsoft, our focus on our culture, our diversity, our inclusion, in particular, the everyday experience of our people is super important, it’s a huge priority.”

IRI, a provider of solutions and services for consumer, retail and media companies, announced the launch of an automated insights and decision-making suite of products enabling CPG, retail and media companies to identify execution gaps and growth opportunities. The alerts and predictors leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to process data points and uncover patterns, converting data into prescriptive actions in near real time. Opportunity Alerts and Opportunity Predictors provide recommendations based on granular analysis of data and analytics, enabled by B2B technology and data platform, IRI Liquid Data.

The FTC has filed a lawsuit against Frontier Communications for not delivering promised speeds to customers. In the complaint, the FTC says Frontier provides DSL internet service, which is slower than newer networks, to 1.3 million customers in mostly rural areas. Frontier maintains its internet speeds “have been clearly and accurately articulated, defined and described in the company’s marketing materials and disclosures.”

Microsoft is putting web browser Internet Explorer to rest on June 15, 2022, in favor or Microsoft Edge. Internet Explorer was launched in 1995, but in recent years has been sluggish compared to rivals like Google’s Chrome. The Edge browser was launched in 2015.

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Brands with a restricted view of their consumers’ journeys could actually drive customers away from the very destinations where they are most likely to buy, according to a report from audience insights platform DISQO. “X-Ray Specs for Path to Purchase Attribution” notes that because of the increasing limitations on third-party, identity-based measurement, brands may choose to optimize their consumer engagements based on the first-party data they do have — and drive people to their own websites. However, DISQO’s data shows that the best sales drivers are specific actions on the exact third-party retail marketplaces that are the hardest to measure. “In the face of more data being siloed within media and e-commerce partners and the depreciating viability of cross-platform identifiers like cookies and device IDs, many brands have planned to invest in and lean harder on their owned assets,” said Anne Hunter, VP of Product Marketing at DISQO. “DISQO’s analysis raises a flag of caution on how brands’ first-party activity should be used for campaign optimization.”

The Out of Home Advertising Association of America released new guidelines that recommend a move toward an impressions-based measurement system that will provide forecasted and reconciled-as-delivered daily impressions. The “OAAA OOH Impression Measurement Guidelines” set forth a new standard that uses Opportunity to See as the core metric for measurement. It also proposes a refined and enhanced definition of OTS that more closely aligns with the same metric used by all other measured media combining predictive audience models with a clear measure of observed audience exposures at OOH displays across all formats. This is the same metric used for data inputs into Marketing Mix Models and Multitouch Attribution Models. Under the new definition, OTS will encompass circulation as a measure in conjunction with “view-sheds ” which factor in ad display size, placement, view angles and other traditional OOH attributes that impact audiences.

Channel Factory, the brand suitability and ad performance platform for YouTube, announced the launch of The Conscious Project, to address internet bias using proprietary software, strategic services, education and awareness. The project comes after a study conducted by CHEQ found that 93% of LGBTQ+ friendly channels are blocked by industry standard block lists. The technology from Channel Factory will help brands identify and spend advertising dollars with creators within impacted communities.

The E.W. Scripps Company is collaborating with Amazon Advertising to bring its OTT advertising offerings to local businesses. Scripps’ Octane OTT sales team and Amazon Advertising will work together to sell Amazon OTT inventory across IMDb TV, Twitch, network and broadcaster apps and Amazon’s News apps to local businesses.

In more Scripps news, the company has selected Magnite to serve as the its preferred sell-side platform across its connected TV inventory. Scripps also will leverage the Magnite platform to give buyers access to its programmatic inventory across all channels.

Stitcher Ads has launched Flexible Payment Promotions, a new solution allowing retailers to promote buy now, pay later installments across ad units on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. “In this challenging economic climate, shoppers are tightening their purse strings, and brands need to consider ways they can lower the barrier to purchase,” said Declan Kennedy, Co-Founder and CEO of StitcherAds. Retailers can apply BNPL creative and pricing data directly to product images featured in Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat ad campaigns, making it easier for shoppers to see potential payment plans for items.

TVsquared is expanding its data coverage with the integration of Foursquare’s location data within its ADvantage platform. TVSquared users can now connect linear and OTT/CTV ads directly to physical outcomes, including store visits and foot traffic, to get a same-day view into how campaigns impact offline consumer behavior. The integration allows brands to tie ad exposure directly to location visits in a privacy-compliant way across 95 million global points of interest and 500 million devices.

Advanced contextual targeting platform Quintesse announced the general availability of its solution that analyzes the global bidstream to provide Curated Brand Marketplaces for precise contextual pre-bid targeting at scale. Advertisers and agencies can create custom semantic lemma maps to define content requirements at the brand, campaign and placement-level. Using natural language processing and computational linguistics, Quintesse then analyzes the bidstream to create Custom Brand Marketplaces, which include only specific URLs and pages of content that match a brand’s safety and suitability preferences as well as domain inclusion and exclusion lists. The platform then creates Deal IDs that are used to activate contextually targeted display, native and video campaigns on more than 240 different DSPs.

STREAMING

Streaming service DistroTV will launch two curated on-demand channels from Ovation TV. Ovation’s travel-entertainment network Journy and Mystery Alley, which offers an international library of thrillers and dramas, will be available free to consumers via DistroTV via Apple iOS, Android, Amazon Fire TV and Roku.

Outdoor Sportsman Group’s SVOD service MyOutdoorTV is joining the lineup at Comcast’s Xfinity X1 and Xfinity Flex. MOTV features Outdoor Channel, Sportsman Channel, World Fishing Network and Sportsman Channel Canada series, plus the Hunters Video library and Major League Fishing programming, and other acquired content and originals.