Ben Young
Ben Young
March 11, 2022

Edition #360
Native awards, Microsofts new ad religion and elephant growth.


Congratulations to all the winners of the native advertising awards! Nice to see a few familiar names.

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.

Notable stories this week

Deals/M&A

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

Campaign of the Week

 

Smartest commentary

  • “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.

 


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