Owned stacks

One big thing

Kevel (formerly AdZerk) has built a nice business, with a build your own ad stack type solution. And it seems, that Google is now gingerly testing this space with retailers. With the view of, in a privacy-centric world, centralized ad technology has less room to grow.

This is a new growth vector for the industry, helping brands & retailers grow the sophistication of their own stacks. To improve their experiences for customers. And the reason for this is the same as what Netflix called out. They compete against everything beside tv.

Every single player that has meaningful scale, is competing on nearly the same basis. At the margin, a consumer could spend an hour shopping on Walmart or they could spin up Netflix. It’s not true for all use cases but with digital time continuing to grow, attention is that fickle resource.

• Bidtellect launches proprietary engagement score to enable better native promotion of content. ????
• Apple and Google are spelling the end for user-tracking and advertisers must adjust. From Taboola CEO.
• Google has talked to retailers about helping them build their own ad networks.
• Disney+ to launch cheaper ad-supported tier later this year. If you recall early on Disney+ suggested they might have mini films/branded content instead of ads.
• The new silent majority: People who don’t tweet.
• Substack launches their own app. It also includes a podcast player, hinting at an audio play.
• Are we at peak subscription?
• Why doesn’t Wall Street like advertising?
• 10 most innovative companies in branding in 2022.
• [On Microsoft] Why advertising is the company’s “newfound religion”.
• [Long read] The Elephant in the room: the myth of exponential hyper growth.

Deals/M&A

• Topsort, an auction based advertising startup, now valued at $110m after seed round.

Campaign of the Week

• Small Space Secrets, IKEA with MyDomaine. Nice mix of video as part of the experience.

• “Connected television is not linear…the number of ads a viewer is willing to endure is in a streaming service is a fraction of what they are willing to endure in linear.” –Ari Lewine, Chief Strategy Officer, TripleLift

Datapoints of note

• A typical hour long show in linear TV has about 15 minutes of ads. An hour in streaming? Less than 5 minutes.

That’s it for this week.