The search for scale is really a quest for independence from Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Connected TV is another escape path offered by many players. One is Wurl, which just launched AdPool, a marketplace for video producers to sell their connected TV inventories. The scale is there: connected TV now accounts for half of all video ad impressions, according to this Extreme Reach study.
Despite all the martech products available today, custom software is alive and well. About 60% of US and UK marketers told Mailjet they have built their own marketing technology and another 20% have a project under way. Home-grown systems are harder to use but the cost of switching keeps many companies locked in. Click here for a summary and here for tons of interesting detail on pros and cons of each option.
Adtech vendor MediaMath has pledged to deliver a “100 percent accountable and addressable supply chain by the end of 2020”, via a cooperative project called SOURCE. It’s a bit unclear what’s involved (at least to me), but the commitment to “righting the wrongs of a digital advertising industry” that has “gotten lost in fraud, waste, and irrelevance” taps into a mad-as-hell-and-we-won’t-take-it spirit within the advertising world and beyond.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.