‘Catch that lightning in a bottle’

On Monday, droves of media and marketing leaders will descend on the Croisette in Cannes, France, for The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity – more colloquially known as Cannes – for a week full of wheelin’ and dealin’. 

And this year, media companies are sending more of their sales folk than in years prior as the lure of face-to-face time with prospective advertisers and clients becomes all the more enticing. 

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Brands taking a stand

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It’s that time of year again for members of the advertising industry to head to France for Riviera views and the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. And, according to a recent Digiday+ Research survey of agency, brand, retailer, publisher and technology professionals, more industry members will be heading to the event this year, with meetings and dealmaking in mind.

Digiday’s survey found that, this year, 40% of ad industry members have plans to attend Cannes in the South of France this year. This is a significant jump from last year, when not even one-quarter of agency, brand, retailer, publisher and tech pros (22%) said they were planning on attending the event.

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About a year ago, advertiser categories like technology, finance, insurance and retail were decidedly not spending very much with digital publishers. In the first half of this year, however, publishers say there’s been a rebound – though not quite a full blown return. 

In general, publishers reported an uptick in digital advertising revenue during the first quarter of the year — a good sign considering how tumultuous the ad market was in 2023. They also reported that this growth is expected to persist into the second quarter. According to data from MediaRadar shared with Digiday, digital ad spend in the U.S. exceeded $52.8 million in the first four months of 2024, up 7% year over year.

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In light of the discovery, ad tech execs accused Colossus of tricking advertisers into buying audiences they weren’t trying to target. The claim was that the sell-side platform was changing the user ID attached to an ad impression to make it more appealing to advertisers. Thus, the SSP could charge a higher CPM.

A few terms were thrown around in the report — as well as by digital ad execs debating the impropriety — to describe the alleged misbehavior, including “cookie stuffing,” “ID mis-matching,” “ID spoofing” and “ID stuffing.”

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Formed in 2020 after TPG bought Goal.com from DAZN, FootballCo has been steadily growing an international audience of soccer fans across its portfolio of nine brands.

But this year, FootballCo is making a concerted effort to appeal to the burgeoning fandom of U.S.-based soccer enthusiasts under the leadership of Jason Wagenheim, CEO, North America.

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No one really knows how the ad market will look in the immediate run-up to the U.S. presidential election, but to avoid the possibility of lost revenue, news publishers are seeking alternative avenues to appeal to advertisers.

While Dow Jones is focusing on events and non-political content for its politically-averse advertisers, The Guardian set its sights on political and advocacy advertisers who want to show up against election coverage. 

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The bet publishers made on tentpole events and franchises to get advertising revenue back on track this year seems to be paying off.

According to seven publishers, their ad sales teams have been successfully closing more deals for marquee events and editorial franchises, at an earlier pace than last year. As a result, several media execs told Digiday they’re anticipating event revenue to grow this year over last year.

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Putting more marketing spend toward brand awareness efforts is seemingly one of marketers’ latest obsessions. Increasingly, marketers are shifting the focus back to brand building and awareness marketing tactics, as the digital advertising marketplace becomes saturated with competition and riddled with data privacy initiatives and rising CPMs.

Cava, which went public last June, is only the latest example of that shift, with Orangetheory Fitness and direct-to-consumer home brand Parachute also providing examples of brands that have made the move to prioritize brand building efforts. In Cava’s case, it’s leaned into a digital-first strategy, focusing on platform-based advertising on YouTube, Meta and TikTok and prioritizing streaming platforms including YouTube TV, Roku and Hulu.

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Until now, The Guardian US and its U.K. operation have considered political ads only on a case-by-case basis, according to a company spokesperson, and in the U.S., the publisher has only ever had one inbound campaign for a political candidate, who Romero declined to provide specific details on.

But now Romero’s team will be actively pitching direct-sold ads to advertisers for both political candidates and advocacy groups. He added that he’ll be hiring a political consultant to help establish guidelines for the content of those ads and what The Guardian will accept (or not) based on the publication’s mission.

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Publishers say there is only so much supply path optimization they can do before it impacts their revenue. Meanwhile advertisers and brands say they can only shift budgets so far towards greener media until the data exists to prove lower-carbon campaigns perform just as well as traditional campaigns. And DSPs are held to the KPIs that their clients are demanding, though some are working to push dollars into greener avenues. 

What results is a stalemate of sorts, waiting for someone to jump first and take the blow so that the rest of the digital advertising industry can follow when a revenue hit is no longer a risk. 

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Despite the hope that 2024 would be a turning point for publishers’ advertising businesses, the first quarter of the year proved to be a mixed bag, according to three publishers.

While programmatic CPMs on average trended up as the first three months of the year progressed, the direct-sold side of publishers’ advertising businesses fell into some of the same patterns as previous years with advertisers delaying campaigns into Q2 or later, rendering Q1 as just “fine.”

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Between Google’s phase-out of the third-party cookie and the saturation of advertisers in the digital landscape, performance marketers are grappling with changes in the space. For many marketers, like Ibotta, it’s meant retooling their marketing mix to focus more on brand-building channels as opposed to squarely focusing on performance marketing.

“The landscape’s getting tougher; it’s tougher to reach people,” said Richard Donahue, CMO at Ibotta. “We realized that it’s just, we need to expand the reach of the brand, expand the impact that we’re having.”

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Four agency executives told Digiday that it’s still too early into investigations to determine how much of their clients’ budgets were spent on ads displayed on Forbes’ subdomain (www3.forbes.com). However, early examinations revealed as much as 4 to 5% of Forbes impressions per client or 25% of an agency’s total client base’s impressions from Forbes were tied to the subdomain.

Ultimately though, the total portion of a client’s budget spent on the subdomain isn’t the biggest concern amongst agency execs. The fact that their clients’ ads were being displayed on this subdomain for years, undetected by verification firms, DSPs, SSPs and even within the agencies themselves reveals that major gaps exist in programmatic reporting to detect domain spoofing. And even more concerningly, how widespread is this practice? 

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Publishers are seeing how much more valuable authenticated audiences are compared to random passersby visiting their sites. But with authenticated users representing a minority of the traffic, publishers are under pressure to persuade more of their site visitors to submit their emails, which can be appended to third-party cookie-replacing deterministic IDs like The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 and LiveRamp’s RampID. 

For Unwind Media – a casual gaming company that owns two online Solitaire sites – authenticated users generated 42% more revenue programmatically than non-authenticated users, and the lift was 90% in cookieless environments like Apple’s Safari browser, according to svp of programmatic revenue and strategy Emry DowningHall. 

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