AdTech News Round-up
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Reach’s Post-Cookie Strategy is Helping it Deal with Gen AI Threats
Shortly after Google announced its plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome back in 2020, UK news publishing group Reach announced a new ‘customer value strategy’, designed to prepare the company for a post-cookie future. The strategy centred on capturing customer insights and data in order to serve audiences more relevant content, while using that same data to target ads and drive up digital ad revenues.
While third-party cookies no longer look set to disappear from Chrome entirely, Reach executives say the strategy has delivered strong results for the publisher regardless. Reach’s full year financial results show that while total revenues fell by 5.3 percent, to £538.6 million, digital revenues were up by 2.1 percent. And within digital, its data-driven revenues which are driving growth.
Data-driven revenues (i.e., digital revenues fuelled by Reach’s first-party data) rose by seven percent year-on-year in 2024, more than offsetting a two percent drop in non data-driven revenues. Forty-five percent of Reach’s digital revenues now come under the ‘data-driven’ banner.
Amazon just raised the walls of its walled garden.
Last week, the company finally pulled back the curtain on its long-awaited Alexa overhaul, a chattier, more personalized and supposedly more useful version of its voice assistant. Generative AI powers this new version, called Alexa+, which is available beyond just Echo devices, spreading across car infotainment systems, connected TVs and anything else running Alexa.
Viant announced that it acquired Lockr, a consumer and business service for managing email inboxes and data opt-ins, during its Q4 earnings call Monday. The goal is to connect the identity Lockr gets from its publisher tech with Viant’s identity graph.
The company reported fast growth in its TV-focused DSP business in Q4, earning $90 million total in Q4 and $289 million for all of 2024, good enough for 40% and 30% year-over-year growth, respectively. Viant’s net income more than doubled from Q4 2023, though it remains narrowly profitable at $7.7 million in Q4 2024.
Terms of the Lockr deal were not disclosed.
Paramount’s pitch to advertisers: Premium TV like Yellowstone trumps social
Paramount’s hit western, Yellowstone, is must-watch TV for millions of people — worlds apart from the passive doom-scrolling of social media. For advertisers, the choice of where to invest should be clear.
That’s according to John Halley, president of Paramount Advertising, who touted the unmatched scale and quality of the company’s TV offerings at Forward ’25 on Thursday. The event, hosted by The Trade Desk, gathered media leaders to explore the growing power of connected TV (CTV) advertising.
“Broadly speaking, we want to unlock the value of our programming to brand advertisers,” he said. “We need to be sure that they’re capturing all of the value of the attention that we’re commanding globally.”
Seeing Through The Hype: The Difference Between AI and Machine Learning in Marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) is inescapable nowadays.
There’s generative AI to create an ad and AI platforms to manage campaigns. Your refrigerator and maybe even your toothbrush have AI embedded in them. Or at least that’s what it says on the box.
There are many open questions for marketers who want to implement AI-driven ad tech – and for customers considering the new AI-powered Oral-B. What does it even mean when a vendor touts its AI capabilities? Does it matter if they feature AI or not?
Are you a marketer, agency exec or ad tech developer who wants to integrate AI and/or ML solutions for your business? Read on for a handy guide of what to look for (and look out for) from the tech.
Beyond ‘Gaming for Gamers’: Why Non-Gaming Advertisers Are Flocking To Gaming Apps
As the lines between the gaming and non-gaming worlds continue to fade, gaming publishers are unlocking a massive opportunity: non-gaming advertisers. We’re already seeing a surge of in-app advertising (IAA) spend from non-gaming advertisers, but we’re about to see the flood gates opened by a major tech innovation: modern machine learning (ML) algorithms that turbocharge the formerly slow, resource-intensive and relatively unscientific process of finding audience overlaps.
Today’s neural networks will redefine partnerships, helping publishers and advertisers efficiently tap into new user bases.
Unlocking the Potential of pDOOH: Why Creative Agencies Need to Step Up
In the first of our series on pDOOH and independent agencies in association with JCDecaux, we met Laura Jordan Bambach of Uncharted to discuss the potential of OOH and why creative agencies need to harness it properly.
How has the rise of programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) influenced the targeting and personalisation capabilities in outdoor advertising?
As yet pDOOH is a very under exploited medium. Given the myriad data sources that could be leveraged to create dynamic, contextually interesting creative, it’s a bit disappointing that the opportunity is still not being maximised. There is SO much technology underpinning OOH now, and the potential is only really beginning to be realised.