Measurement redux

A trend you may not have seen in the tea leaves is that a lot of measurement companies are being acquired right now. Oribi, Tunity, TVSquared, Playground XYZ & Shareables. And that’s just since December.

What’s driving that? The instigator was Apples tracking changes. Forcing many firms to either throw our their existing technology or seek to add deep capabilities. The other area is connected TV, finding better methodologies, now that it can be linked to the wider digital marketing mix. Nielsen losing their accreditation forced everyones hand. These shifts in measurement happen every five years or so, this has been building for a while with GDPR, CCPA and the death of third party cookies.

• Can TikTok save the Olympics?
• Survey shows content-led marketing budgets expected to rise in 2022.
• New content analytics coming soon to LinkedIn.
• 2 minutes with Chris Bruss, Head of Roku Brand Studio.
• Majority of marketers moderately successful or less with content marketing in 2021.
• ^ This isn’t that surprising given the turmoil of 2021.
• Wire service Stacker aims to solve content crunch for newsrooms and brands.
• Spotify wants to beat YouTube at audio.
• ^ Related, Twitter is working on a new podcast tab.
• CNN+ to launch at $60/year.
• AirBNB CFO: We were right to shift spend from performance to brand building.
• Will Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad really change the landscape of TV QR codes.
• End of an era of ad targeting.

Deals/M&A

• Linkedin acquires marketing analytics company Oribi.
• iSpot.tv acquires analytics company Tunity.
• SEO firm BrightEdge acquires Oncrawl to Future-Proof Web3 Strategies.
• NBCU invests $17m in to in-game ads firm Anzu as part of a strategic partnership.
• Nativo announces partnership with Cision PR Newswire.

Campaign of the Week

• Equitable with The Atlantic on building resilience in your portfolio.

• “Primary-engagement media will gain. As I’ve written, I believe the next phase of digital publishing will favor quality over quantity in terms of audiences. Those publishing brands that put community at their core will thrive since it easily lends itself to a direct relationship that will make those audiences far more valuable than a random collection of people who mindlessly tapped a link on their Facebook feed.” –Brian Morrissey, The Rebooting

Datapoints of note

• Roblox had an average of 49.5m DAU in Q4 21.
• Spotify reportedly paid Joe Rogan at least $200m to bring his podcast to the platform.
• OTT ad spend reaches $1.3b as budgets shift to streaming content.
• 64% of marketers still struggling to execute virtual events.
• Most valuable tv shows, TheOffice $498k per episode. The Simpsons more valuable but more episodes so price per episode is lower.

That’s it for this week.