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One big thing
A by-product of consolidation, is the reduction in operations, both companies don’t need a finance team for example. But these teams are the lifeblood that keep organizations running, they hold the organizational memory and market knowledge.
The counter, is the rise in technology at scale to power and enhance processes. Consolidation is an opportunity to rejuvenate and refocus on what truly is most impactful.
As every other chat seems to be about the consolidation of the industry, keep this in mind and be a champion.
Notable stories this week
- Content marketing is advertising – an antipodean viewpoint.
- Personalized ads aren’t driving incremental revenue for pubs. It turns out after the take of the ecosystem, they *might* be better to just turn them off. Pushes off last week’s post too.
- ^ The outtake, it’s time to adjust the revenue split between supply and demand. And embrace content if you haven’t already. ?
- Ronan takes a look at ‘cookieless’ cookies. I predicted this as a likely outcome of GDPR two years ago.
- The attention economy is the new hotbed for investors. Attention is the natural step for brands moving towards outcome-based media.
- The Washington Post opens up its programmatic tools to other publishers.
- North Face blunders with their Wikipedia ‘hijacking’.
- ATTN hires Vox Media Exec Mike Hadgis.
- Splinternet, worth a read.
Deals/M&A
- Kapost acquired for $50m, 3x revenue.
- LinkedIn acquires DrawBridge to help unify LinkedIn identities. And how this might signal a return to advertising for Microsoft.
- Sports Illustrated sells for $110m. Meredith will continue to operate it for 2 years.
- The Trust Project raises $2.25m and becomes a non-profit.
Campaign of the week
- BMW saluting the retired CEO of Mercedes in a classy respectful way.
- HBO on The New Yorker on how silence and lies exacerbated the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, pushing off of HBO’s new miniseries ‘Chernobyl’. This piece highlights the propaganda and obfuscation that contributed to history’s worst nuclear tragedy. Also interesting how the modern observer is likely to notice the same distortions at play in today’s online landscape.
- Submit your own and view the best campaigns of 2019.
Smartest commentary
- “Nobody wants to call too much attention to how little attention they actually command.” –Ashlyn Gentry, Human Ventures.
Datapoints of note
- Arc, the WaPo CMS has 175 publishers onboard.
- With Lonely Planet, Nativo’s platform helped support sponsored content volume growth by as much as 300%.
- Bing now generates $7.5b/year from search advertising. Wow.
Thanks,
-Ben
Measurement and intelligence for content-first brands.
Nudge is built by marketers and aims to serve brands investing in content based media, across any category, looking to illustrate ROI, generate deep performance insights, and save time.
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