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CES 2024 kicks off with the rapidly expanding impact of AI on media and marketing front and center - The 2024 conference season officially got underway this week with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). In many of the sessions and discussions, it's been all about AI (shocking), and the streamers have had a bigger presence this year as they lean into their ad-supported tiers and woo brand and agency executives. There have been a ton of announcements coming out of the event, the most important of which we’ve outlined below, along with the latest news...
Yahoo's ID Testing Lets Advertisers Compare Campaigns Without Cookies - Yahoo announced at CES that its demand-side platform (DSP) customers will be able to run a control campaign that uses third-party cookies and traditional identifiers alongside a test campaign using Yahoo's cookieless solutions. In early testing, Yahoo says its identity solutions delivered more than 90% of the same reach achieved with cookies and traditional IDs. Yahoo's identity approach is comprised of ConnectID (based on Yahoo's login data from 192M people in the US), and Next-Gen Solutions (which uses other data signals and AI).
Opinion: With Google beginning the process of withdrawing support for cookies last week for 1% of Chrome users (see below), this is the kind of tool that advertisers need to test and learn. This is a step in the right direction as the industry begins the transition away from traditional identifiers and buyers are overwhelmed with a plethora of ID alternatives. Many identity solutions are pitched as world-changing without much substantiation. And many are black boxes. Good on Yahoo for leading the way by giving their customers transparency and a means of testing.
Instacart Announces Rollout Of Ads To The Cart At CES - Ads are coming to Caper Carts, Instacart's AI-powered physical shopping carts that let consumers pay for products without a trip to the cash register. Caper Carts scan items as they are placed into the shopping cart and make product recommendations. Ads from Del Monte Foods, Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, and General Mills will debut on Caper Carts at Good Food Holdings stores, including Bristol Farms stores in Southern California.
Opinion: With Instacart planning to deploy thousands of Caper Carts in grocery stores across the US by the end of the year, these ads could create an important new incremental revenue stream for participating grocers. That’s a boon for an industry known for razor-thin profit margins. Will consumers be receptive?
Adelaide Launches Partnership with Inscape to Drive Advanced Connected TV Attention Insights - Adelaide's AU attention metric (short for attention unit) measures media quality by calculating the probability that media will capture user attention and deliver some type of impact. Adelaide's AU model will incorporate Inscape's automatic content recognition (ACR) data from over 23 million opted-in internet-connected TVs.
Opinion: This partnership announced at CES may give advertisers more insight into the effectiveness of connected TV ad placements they're buying, which is critical given that CTV CPMs are often much higher than CPMs in other channels. Don’t be surprised if we hear more about attention metrics in the coming months as advertisers look for new, better ways to connect ad exposures to outcomes, which will become harder as privacy restrictions proliferate.
InfoSum Launches Private Path, Enabling Data Collaboration Outside its Clean Room - The new product will enable InfoSum customers to bring anonymized, PII-free data outside of the data clean room environment. For example, matched, anonymized data could be moved into an advertiser's measurement system for advanced analyses. Previously, analyses had to be conducted within InfoSum's data clean room, which restricted the types of calculations that could be performed. Measurement will be a sweet-spot use case for this solution. Which is great because marketers need more privacy-preserving measurement tools as measurement takes a big hit from the deprecation of traditional identifiers.
NBCUniversal Will Use AI to Automate Streaming and Linear TV buying - NBCU likes to announce updates to its One Platform ad platform at CES, and this year was no different. Its new One Platform Total Audience tool will use AI to help advertisers identify audiences across its entire linear and streaming portfolio instead of planning separately. NBCU is going all-in on its audience-based approach, with a goal of transacting half of its deals on audience data this year instead of broad demographics. Testing of the tool is currently underway, with plans for general availability by Q4.
Opinion: Although linear TV viewing fell below 50% last year for the first time, many marketers haven't abandoned linear completely. There is so much fragmentation in the market, and this tool will help advertisers streamline their linear and streaming buys as they get more comfortable with CTV. Very smart for a premium publisher like NBCU to lean into its first-party data and audiences as third-party data starts to fade away.
Albertsons partners with Criteo to bolster retail media offerings - Albertsons' media arm is leaning on Criteo as it expands its commerce media ambitions and capabilities. The grocer will leverage Commerce Max, Criteo's self-service DSP, to centralize its first-party data, in-store sales data, and shopper signals. It will also use Criteo’s Commerce Yield platform to tap into new demand sources and monetize its online assets.
Opinion: Commerce media may be hot, but it's still a bit of a mess from the advertiser's perspective. Given the explosion of media networks, marketers need solutions that can help them more easily execute scaled buys. Commerce Max has tons of potential to become that top-tier solution in the market. This partnership is a huge win for Criteo!
Google Is Finally Killing Cookies. Advertisers Still Aren’t Ready. - Google pulled the plug on third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users on Jan. 4. While some are happy that Google is pushing ahead with its deprecation plans after a couple delays, others say the company hasn't given the industry enough time or help to prepare. Based on a rough analysis of some extremely early data, things look promising. Raptive's Paul Bannister ran the numbers from "tens of millions of impressions" since Jan. 4 and found that cookieless Chrome users are "monetizing about 30% worse" than their cookied counterparts. That's much better than the 60% drop in performance seen for Safari cookieless users. Some of the gap can be reduced with more experience and investment in cookieless solutions, Bannister said.
Opinion: We're on team deprecation. Let's do this sooner rather than later. It's inevitable; more delays will only stall industry progress. Awesome to see such positive early results.
 VideoAmp CEO out amid layoffs, financial drama - Founder and CEO Ross McCray has stepped down as CEO, leaving the company to be managed by an executive team that includes Peter Liguori (executive chairman), Peter Bradbury (new chief commercial & growth officer), and Tony Fagan (president of technology & strategy), among others. VideoAmp will also lay off 20% of its staff, reducing its headcount to about 320. The company raised $150M in Series G funding in September, but stakeholders were reportedly worried about its spending. Josh Chasin, VideoAmp's chief measurability officer, is also out.
Opinion: VideoAmp has been the poster child for inflated valuations of TV-focused measurement companies that are trying to take down Nielsen. So this is not all that surprising.
Amazon Taps Disney Vet Jeremy Helfand To Oversee Prime Video Advertising - Helfand, the former EVP of advertising & data platforms for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, joins Amazon just weeks before its highly anticipated launch of Prime Video ads. Amazon is pricing its streaming CPMs in the low- to mid-$30 range, well below the going rate of $50-$60 demanded by Netflix and Amazon when they launched their ad tiers in late 2022.
Opinion: It's an aggressive (and smart) move to price Amazon’s ad inventory low compared to competitors. That'll ensure greater advertiser buy-in upfront and smooth over some of the hiccups that will emerge with launching any new service. Another attraction is the instant scale for Prime Video’s ad tier since it will automatically opt-in Prime subscribers or give them an ad-free option for $2.99 per month. If executed properly, Prime ads will give Amazon a huge revenue boost this year.
OpenAI will open its custom ChatGPT store next week - OpenAI's GPT Store will let users share or sell their own GPTs, or AI agents, built with its GPT-4 large language model. The GPTs, which must comply with OpenAI’s brand guidelines and usage policies, are basically ChatGPT-style chatbots that can be built to help people with specific needs such as data analysis or negotiations.
Opinion: Is this the next big app store?
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