It’s not just publishers who see gold in their first party data. Retail media platforms were arguably the biggest advertising news in 2021. This year promises more of the same, with Best Buy kicking off its own ad business. And since a little virtue signaling never hurts, they’ve also announced they’d devote 10% of their own media spend to BIPOC media by 2025. If you don’t know what BIPOC stands for, you’re not in the target audience.
Publishers mourning the loss of third party cookies have moved past acceptance to the previously undocumented stage of glee. An amazing 70% in this Adweek survey said they saw the end of third party cookies as beneficial. Surely related: 36% said relationships with Big Tech have gotten worse in the past two years. First-party data and contextual ads are tied as the priorities for making it happen; data issues are the biggest challenges. Download for details.
Out of home media live even farther outside the Big Tech walled gardens. Atmosphere, which offers ad-supported streaming TV displays in over 18,000 restaurants, gyms, doctor offices and other venues with captive audiences, just raised $100 million in equity plus debt to expand their business. Targeting is based on context, geography, and demographics but not individual profiles.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.