Roll out from the AT&T merger continues and Google begins to consolidate its ad offerings. A key theme, getting the data + insights as close to the ad buying as possible to remove the silos. Makes sense.
Notable stories this week
- How AT&T’s AppNexus acquisition may be as much about Comcast as it is Google. Great write up, looking at how addressable TV is impacting this decision.
- ^ I wonder if we’ll see anything over the next month or so related to their prior ad fraud problems… as things get cleaned up for the deal closing.
- Inside CNN Reach, their content consultancy.
- From Cannes, the need for separate teams for ad and branded content. A conversation between Theodor Arhio of TBWA and Jan Livingston of Fox.
- [From us] Our interview with Lexi Jarman from the Financial Times. Growing a global branded content business is not easy.
- Fatherly CEO on how to raise a new kind of publisher.
- Facebook has built a new war room team to hack the system and preemptively find loopholes.
- The real impact of GDPR a month in.
- How unexpected partnerships can fuel brands.
- Spotify hiring a Chief Content Officer, Dawn Ostroff -> watch this space.
Deals/M&A
- AT&T buys AppNexus for $1.6b.
- Fanology acquires Roster.
Campaign of the week
- IBM Watson Marketing + Business Insider, on ‘How AI is changing marketing’. Loving the format; great story, educational and consistently links through to their own content.
- IKEA’s campaign is built on 17 years-worth of online conversations with parents and from analyzing 15m rows of dialogue data, showing that 50% of parents surveyed struggle to find ideas to encourage creative play amongst their children. The result: a practical use for its cardboard box waste in helping kids create toys. Creative, positive and fun.
https://vimeo.com/275933966
Smartest commentary
- “Creative agencies should have a separate team working on content and should not make advertising-specific people work on branded content or else the content will end up looking like long-form ads.” –Theodor Arhio, Global Director of Creative and Content at TBWA
- “Quality was considered by the vast majority to be more important compared to the (host) publication or the sponsor,” –Lexi Jarman, Global Director of Content Solution for Financial Times
Datapoints of note
- 20% of Chefclub’s revenue comes from branded content.
- From a Twitter + Magna study on their influencer content. Creator video tweets that include branding in their first 3 seconds boost unaided ad recall by 214 percent.
Events
- [July 12th] ARF’s NATIVExSCIENCE. Native advertising and branded content are approaches often outperforming traditional advertising. How to plan? How to develop? How to measure?
- Native Institute is hosting Native Days this November. Use code NAIFRIENDBEN to save.
That’s it for this week.
Ta,
-Ben
Simplifying ad buying by understanding which investments to back.
Nudge is a content marketing analytics platform that drives performance for leading brand advertisers and premium publishers.
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