DIGITAL ROUNDUP - NOVEMBER 2024

Welcome to this month’s edition of the roundup to some core updates in the digital advertising industry.

NB: the following represents my own opinion

AMazon Ads UNBoxed announces a fresh set of new features

DEEPDIVE

Amazon’s annual Unboxed event took place during October, which saw various announcements across its ads business alongside the latest statistics showcasing growth across its different properties.

A couple of core highlights includes:

• New regions for Prime Video as it continues to grow its CTV presence for ads

• GenAI features through Amazon AI Creative Studio to create dynamic ads at scale

• A new product campaign format for US advertisers to scale new products within an endemic shop

• New AMC audience capabilities including with Amazon Publisher Cloud

• Audience bid boosts for Sponsored Ads (Product / Brands) campaigns

• A multi-touch attribution solution for US advertisers across the Amazon ecosystem

• A newly refreshed UI / workflow for Amazon DSP

That last one in particular was hugely needed given how clunky the current UI is in all aspects. But it is clear to see that Amazon are now considerably investing in their advertising stack to compete with Google / TTD in the programmatic space especially. And with the backbone of a cloud / data clean room, this is truly a powerful ad stack for endemic brands.

But as with any platform, it is always important to understand the limitations & test effectively to understand its true incremental value. Clearly a lot of these newer features are US centric which is great for US brands but not so good for anyone else. And there is still a heavy focus on endemic brands, which shouldn’t be a surprise. Things like a MTA measurement solution sounds a bit strange in an evolving ecosystem where MTA is clearly troubled by data regulation & technology changes. Amazon haven’t magically solved this either for non-endemic brands / the wider ecosystem, with Conversions API still the approach to bring in hashed PII to match on Amazon’s identity graph for non-endemic brands. Though for an endemic brand, MTA is an important insight that AMC would answer in the past but more of this is coming to the front end.

The power of Amazon’s 1st party data in conjunction with the AMC backbone to get advertiser / publisher 1st party data should not be underestimated, as I’m sure Google are struggling to replicate with ADH / BQ Clean Rooms. But it is important to be considerate of the area where Amazon is most weak in: the open web off their O&O properties where despite solutions like Amazon Publisher Services (APS), holes exist in measurement, ad quality & targeting capabilities vs their competitor set.

Meta announce new brand suitability updates

DEEPDIVE

Brand Suitability on social media platforms has continued to be quite the hot topic over the past few years, due to the user generated / feed nature of these platforms. Historically this has meant that brand safety capabilities both from the vendor themselves or 3rd parties has been super limited.

The latest updates from Meta specifically in time for the Q4 peak includes:

• The new overview dashboard section of the Brand Safety & Suitability Center to configure your setup more easily

• The ability to disable individual Facebook / Instagram Profiles from ads being served within it

• The ability to disable comments on ads, similar to what the likes of LinkedIn & TikTok do to date

• Wider 3rd party verification support for category / block list functionality

The announcements for 3rd party verification support focuses on the big 2 in IAS & DoubleVerify, but it is also important to note the likes of Zefr & more recently Adloox have Meta integrations also for certain use cases. And with any 3rd party verification from a measurement perspective, Meta is still ultimately responsible for giving these partners the data, so it is still open to being guilty of marking their own homework.

The comments piece in particular is something many brands have wanted control over, where sometimes having a social media governance process for ad specific content has proved challenging to deal with. But on the flip side, comments = engagement & engagement is a core characteristic in how the auction dynamics of Meta operates alongside its algorithm. So removing comments can potentially have a performance / pricing impact also.

OTHeR KEY CALLOUTS

SOCIAL / SEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 📱

• Microsoft have made some new adjustments to their Performance Max solution on Search (Microsoft)

• Meta have updated their Developer policy, making it much more strict to build on their APIs, including for ads related use cases (Meta)

• Google have announced some new PMAX adjustments in time for the holiday season (Google)

• Google have changed how auctions compete between PMAX & Shopping campaigns (SEL)

• Google Ads v18 API has launched, including new PMAX placement reporting & GenAI based recommendations (Google)

• LinkedIn have announced now new ad formats / automation features for B2B advertisers (LinkedIn)

• Google have pushed out a new Travel Ads feed feature for Search, leveraging real time feed data (Google)

• LinkedIn have added the ability to use Lead Gen forms on boosted posts (LinkedIn)

PROGRAMMATIC HIGHLIGHTS 🌐

• Google have made a subtle adjustment to the skip button on YouTube ads, causing some confusion to end users (Verge)

• Spotify have announced the introduction of its own ad exchange, with TTD as a launch partner (Axios)

• Taboola have partnered up with Jounce Media to attempt to remove MFA from their inventory (Taboola)

• Scope3 have announced a new round of investment, to push their sustainability offering in digital advertising (Scope3)

• SambaTV have acquired Semasio as a contextual solution in the CTV space (GlobalNewswire)

IDENTITY HIGHLIGHTS 🆔

• Mozilla have made a new post around their intentions in online advertising, doubling down on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (Mozilla)

• Microsoft have announced that their Ad Selection API solution for Edge is now progressing, as a means for ad auctions / targeting without reliance on 3P cookies, similar to Google’s Privacy Sandbox Protected Audience API (Microsoft)

• The IAB tech lab have announced a new proposal aimed at standardising attribution by bringing together advertiser / publishers through means of a common protocol called ADMaP (IAB)

• LinkedIn have been hit with a €310 lawsuit by the Irish Data Protection authority for misuse of data, including within targeted advertising (DP)

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