Oslo

Edition #455

From who won Cannes to Oslo with their campaign and closed pilots on attention.

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This week I promised some data on who won Cannes? Using our attention model on earned media, we took a look. With attention metrics getting adoption in the advertising mix, PR is also looking to adopt better measures of impact and quality. 

The idea is that, getting a mention isn’t enough, you want earned media that has impact. And in that regard Elon is the surefire winner, getting multiple write ups in the trades, but clocking in at an average of 50 seconds. 

The industry liked that he turned up, handled the criticism from his prior comments and got stuck in. And this naturally extended to X, who had slightly lower attention at 48 seconds. 

If AI was a person, they would be doing well too, clocking up an average of 58 seconds per mention. 

And of the social platforms, normally Meta or Snap or Google would dominate but they were more under the radar this year, at least compared to TikTok. Who come in at an average of 54 seconds. 

Also this week I had an edit on WITI on future money drops! Not the same topic as this newsletter but an interesting thought. And a result of me going down a rabbit hole starting with Benjamin Franklin and his will. 

Finally, we are running a series of closed pilots for analytically focused advertisers & agencies, who want to see the impact of page attention on their campaigns. The thesis being, that pages within a domain can vary in quality, so you need to go further than the domain to optimize to attention metrics. Anyway if you’re a regular reader, you’d be a great candidate to take part. Ping me and I can give the details. We will have others coming through the year for other parts of the eco-system too.

Notable stories this week

• WPP promises brands ‘exponentially more content’ with AI Production Studio.
• CNN CEO teases subscription product by year’s end.
• Publishers’ perplexing AI problem.
• Time dropped its paywall one year ago. Here’s what’s happened since.
• At Cannes, publishers attempt to quell marketers’ open programmatic apostasy.
• Internet forums are dying out.
• YouTube tests new kind of unskippable ad. Hint: server side.
• The beauty of Bandit Running’s Unsponsored Project.
• OpenAI and Time strike multiyear deal to improve ChatGPT.
• Advertising on Substack remains a Wild West for brands.
• The First Party for Martech <> Adtech convergence is in the cloud.
• Jay Penske: King of the Hollywood trades.
• IAS extends collaboration with Microsoft Advertising to provide third-arty measurement.
• Google adds AI Insights to GA.
• Robots.txt can’t find generative AI.
• Joy Robins on returning NYT to programmatic.
• Mainstream is the new niche.
• Why marketers aren’t cookie-free yet.
• Attention grabbers or action drivers? Heineken’s ad tests uncork surprising results.
• MediaMath was back at Cannes this year – but with a different story to tell.
• Cannes takeaways from IAB CMO.
• Putting four AI tools through a PR task test.

Deals/M&A

• A24 raises funding round led by Thrive Capital, valuing studio at $3.5b.
• Interpublic explores sale of R/GA to Tara Consulting Services.
• OpenAI acquires search and analytics startup Rockset.
• Nielson spinoff Claritas hires Jefferies to pursue a sale.

Campaign of the week 

• Is Oslo even a city? Epic from Visit Oslo. Does make me want to check it out.

View all 2024 best campaigns.

Smartest commentary

• “Brands are struggling to build a strong data foundation beyond third-party cookies, and risk hurting their business” –Adobe study.

Datapoints of note

• Marketers post-cookie preparedness has dropped by 23% since 2022.
• Threads MAU have grown to 160m.
• 73% of Entertainment and Marketing Creatives Think AI ‘Will Elevate Content,’
• 59% of marketers report new business opportunities from content marketing.
• 35% of ad revenue for Target comes from websites they don’t own.

Events

• Attention Happy Hour, come to the next one.

View all 2024 datapoints of note.

That’s it for this week.