Amazon’s Advertising Business Surges by 87% To Nearly $8 Billion
Key Points:
- Amazon’s “Other” category which primarily includes sales of advertising services, as well as sales related to other services offerings, grew a whopping 87% Y-o-Y in the Q 2.
- Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky noted that the advertising business is a part of the company’s ‘flywheel’.
- He further cited on a media call that new products and functionality for factors like high demand, click through, and high bid rates.
- Amazon’s grabbed a 10% share of the entire U.S advertising market and is anticipated to rise further as trends show that online shopping is here to stay.
Amazon’s advertising business continues to surge, becoming one of the key sources of revenue for the company. The company said its ‘Others’ category generated sales of $7.9 billion, up a whopping 87% from Y-o-Y in the second quarter. The rate in the year-ago quarter was 41%.
The e-commerce giant’s ‘Others’ umbrella is led primarily by advertising as well as includes cloud computing and subscription arms. Amazon recorded total retail sales of $ 113 billion, an increase of 27% Y-o-Y. On the other hand, Amazon Web services and cloud computing products displayed robust growth as the sales grew 37% Y-O-Y.
Advertising is a high-margin business that contributed highly to Amazon’s profits. According to e-Marketer, Amazon’s share of the US digital ad market exceeded 10% last year, strengthening its position as the No. 3 ad publisher.
In its earnings release, Amazon offered some insights into the progress of the advertising side of the business,
“Amazon Advertising launched over 40 new features and self-service capabilities, making it easier for sellers, companies and authors to grow their businesses by helping customers discover their brands and products.
Recent launches include regional sponsored product campaign creation tools; access to educational, technical, and marketing resources via the Partner Network; and a simplified creative asset management solution.”
Furthermore, it said it also expanded the services in Australia, Europe, India, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, creating more opportunities for local and global sellers and brands.
Though the pandemic has affected certain segments of advertising spend, digital advertising has gained immense momentum due to online shopping trends. Amazon has also benefited from it but majorly generate its ad revenues from charging companies to promote their products on Amazon’s online marketplace.
Amazon also drives ad revenues from the online streaming businesses with Fire TV, IMDb Tv, and Twitch. Recently, the IMDb TV streaming service inked a licensing deal with Universal Filmed Entertainment Group. The company also announced it will exclusively stream Thursday Night Football, further boosting Amazon’s streaming ad ambitions. The e-commerce giant noted that it reaches 120 million monthly viewers on Amazon streaming services.
To maintain the momentum, Amazon has also launched bonus programs for merchants and made some of the privacy-related changes affecting the digital ad world.
Publicis Groupe Acquires CitrusAd, An Australian-Based SaaS Provider
Publicis Groupe has bolstered its retail portfolio by obtaining the Australian-based Software as a Service (SaaS) provider CitrusAd, which will help the company improve its marketing effectiveness on retailer websites.
This has come at a time when the company has undergone rapid development of eCommerce over the last two years.
By the virtue of this agreement, CitrusAd, which was started in 2017, will continue to function as a distinct organization while working within Publicis Epsilon’s data division to build a personal identity-based solution for retailers based on Epsilon’s existing Core-ID data product.
CitrusAd is a SaaS platform that enhances brand marketing performance directly into retailer websites, with over half of its revenue based in the United States.
Kohl’s, Macy’s, Tesco, Ocado, Lowe’s, Sainsbury’s, and Woolworth’s are just a few of the companies that collaborate with the firm in 22 countries. It also boasts that its self-serve platform is being used by 4,000 brands.
The co-founder and chief executive of CitrusAd, Brad Moran said in an interview that there had been discussions with other interested parties about the acquisition’s timing, but that the transaction with Publicis looked to be the best option.
Moran threw some light on this acquisition and said that Epsilon and CitrusAd’s partnership helps retailers to increase income by marketing co-branded assets across broader publisher networks outside of their four walls.
He further commented –
The world is moving to become cookieless, the world is moving towards walled gardens, and between us and Epsilon, we want to build the biggest walled garden in the world
Epsilon’s identification layer, Code ID, stores first-party data on customers worldwide, with 200 million profiles in the United States and 50 million in Europe alone. CitrusAd will add to Epsilon’s existing insights on online shopping and buying patterns, allowing the brand to better understand its customers and increase conversion rates.
Arthur Sadoun, CEO and chairman of Publicis Groupe said :
We are delighted to welcome Brad, Nick and the CitrusAd team to Publicis. The leading technology they have developed, coupled with Epsilon’s CORE ID will enable CPG brands to grow faster and retailers to generate new sources of revenue to win in a platform world. It will also give to Publicis a strong competitive advantage in a channel that by 2025 should surpass traditional TV spend
CitrusAd will continue to be managed by Moran in his existing capacity and co-founder and CMO Nick Paech, who will supervise 130 engineers and media professionals stationed around the world when they join Publicis Groupe.
Moran will report to Thibault Hennion, Epsilon’s head of international operations, and Jay Askinasi, Publicis Groupe’s chief growth officer.
Trade Desk Allows First-Party Data Onboarding In Solimar Trading Platform
The Trade Desk has announced a new trading platform, Solimar, that will allow clients to integrate first-party data to guide media-buying strategies, eliminating the need for a separate customer-data platform (CDP) or data-management platform (DMP).
By the virtue of this move, the Trade Desk will be able to build the UID2 ecosystem while offering users identity-based targeting as the first-party data will be transformed into Unified ID 2.0 (UID2s) from e-mail addresses.
One of the most significant improvements of the new user interface, Solimar, is the inclusion of client data. To include client feedback in the launch, The Trade Desk performed two months of private beta testing with a limited group of its major clients.
Coming from the Spanish words, ‘ sol y mar’ meaning ‘ sun and sea’, Solimar, for the Trade Desk, symbolizes the “perfect moment” when the sun and the sea meet during sunrise/sunrise.
Trading specialist Dawn Chan said in a briefing call –
This is what our release represents—it’s the perfect moment in our industry as we head into a new age of advertising, one that is digital and data-driven and also moves beyond the complexities of our ecosystems around siloed data and single-channel strategies
He added that the company wants to concentrate on enhancing advertisers’ capacity to do what’s best for their business as well as for consumers.
Mitch Waters, The Trade Desk’s SVP of Southeast Asia, India, and ANZ, told Campaign Asia-Pacific in a briefing call that it has been two years approximately since the development of Solimar first began.
The Trade Desk had three important areas of attention for Solimar, in addition to easy onboarding of first-party data: strengthening the user interface, putting goals at the forefront of campaigns, and including enhanced planning and optimizations.
Koa, an artificial intelligence application that gives suggestions throughout the campaign development and while it is running, is used to optimize campaigns.
According to Waters, this combined with what the business says is a more simplified and intuitive platform design intends to free traders from the tedious work of setting up campaigns and line items, allowing them to focus more on insights. Both agency and in-house teams have been considered when developing the platform.
Solimar launched on 7th July’21, comes three years after Trade Desk released its user interface, Megagon.
Waters said –
Essentially we had to build the plane while flying it we had our old platform to stand up. We have the vision of what we want to achieve…then what we do is work backwards in terms of resourcing and everything else we have to do on an everyday basis. We release product every week, and our team have requests every other week that we need to prioritise
He added –
It was about working together to keep the pace of everyday innovation, as well as building something scalable and meaningful
The Solimar Platform
To help buyers make smarter choices, the Solimar platform starts with a ‘Live flight summary,’ which displays what The Trade Desk considers to be the most significant data for growth, such as:
- Goals: Does the client have a suitable marketing mix?
- Pacing: Is the client on schedule and expected to spend the full amount?
- Channels: Is the channel mix suitable, or is there space for diversification through emerging channels such as DOOH?
- Data: Is the client successfully utilizing data? This section shows how many campaigns are based on first-party, third-party, or no data.
Advertisers may now measure against many KPIs, categorized as primary, secondary, and tertiary, using the new campaign creation tools.
Adbrain’s campaign insights, such as reach and frequency, can be examined at the household, individual, or unique-ID level.
Also, planners can use a forecasting tool to adjust targeting settings and observe how it affects the reach and frequency of a campaign.
Waters, who sees this technology as particularly useful in APAC because of the dispersion of platforms between markets, says –
One area where we have seen a lot of demand is within OTT. If you are buying individually, you don’t have complete view of what an OTT opportunity might look like. Being able to see holistically what an OTT opportunity is across major partners within Indonesia
Koa
Solimar’s performance-enhancing features are powered by the Koa AI engine. When a client develops a new campaign, Koa will recommend KPIs based on the customer’s given objectives, cross-device vendors, a budget split by channels, retargeting, lookalike audiences, and contextual techniques, among other things.
Furthermore, the Koa Identity Alliance is a cross-device graph that integrates leading and new ID solutions such as LiveRamp IdentityLink, Oracle Cross Device, Tapad Device Graph, and Adbrain Device Graph, removing clients’ “guesswork” about identity resolution.
The Trade Desk intended to make Koa’s decisions visible, so clients may see which CPMs, tactics, and data segments the AI chose, and change or disregard Koa’s suggestions as needed.
First-Party Data
One of Solimar’s main advances is incorporating the value of a client’s first-party data or third-party audiences to inform their media purchase.
Clients can identify their target consumers in the campaign setup in the form of first-party or third-party data, which will act as a seed audience for Koa to build when making suggestions.
Brands can submit first-party data such as pixels, app data, and IP addresses directly into the platform or import data from a third-party DMP or CDP via a data section.
If a client decides to import CRM data as email addresses, they will be translated to UID2s automatically. After the UID2s have been converted, the platform will scan them to see how many are ‘active UID2s,’ or how many of these users have been active in the programmatic universe in the previous week.
If the client decides to act on those UID2s, they will be transmitted into the programmatic environment to match the publisher side, resulting in a synchronized UID2 ecosystem.
Re-Inventing Adtech: The French Competition Authority’s Google Fine
The French Competition Authority ( ADLC), in an unprecedented move last week, announced its decision to penalize Google for 220 Million Euros. This decision comes in the backdrop of the tech giant’s anti-competitive activity in the AdTech sector. The relevance of such a ruling is that Google took advantage of its hegemony via numerous anti-competitive measures aimed to forestall rival agents at the expense of publishers.
ADLC’s decision to fine Google comes at a crucial time for the company when it is already under scrutiny for its AdTech practices by various other competition authorities. Such authorities include the Italian Competition Authority, Market Authority, the UK Competition, and the European Commission. On behalf of a multistate coalition in the US, the Texas Attorney General has also filed a lawsuit against Google.
The French Competition Authority has held Google accountable on the basis of the fact it engaged in two cases of abuse – one, where Google’s ad server favored its ad exchange, and two, where its ad exchange favored its ad server.
By sharing information of the price offered by rival ad exchanges to its ad exchange, Google used its ad server to favor it. Google’s Ad Exchange then used this information to enhance its bidding, and in varying the commission that it charged the publishers based upon the competition the company faced from rival ad exchanges.
Google also enforced limitations that were technical and contractual in nature on the use of its ad exchange through a third-party ad server. As a result, the interoperability terms offered to third-party servers were inferior to the terms between its ad exchanges and ad server. This fined both third-party ad exchanges and the publisher clients.
ADLC’s groundbreaking decision has also laid down the harmful effects of Google’s behavior on publishers. It is harmful because Google’s activity has prohibited publishers from seeing a more invisible net negative effect.
To elaborate further on the harmful effect, they include –
- High pricing on its ad exchange where Google behavior hindered competition
- A poor publisher revenue because of Google’s attempt to degrade its rival’s SSP’s performance against Google ad exchange, which makes the ad exchange’s contribution look much bigger than it actually was
- ADLC explicitly laid down an instance where Google’s mechanisms might come across as if they are benefitting publishers but in actuality, they don’t. ADLC said- “Google’s ad exchange’s dynamic revenue share reduces not only the impression volumes won by rival SSPs, but also the total revenue of the publisher”.
The French Competition Authority’s move to fine Google is necessary and critical and it addresses at least some of the anti-competitive tactics employed by Google. This decision is significant in re-inventing the AdTech space and recreate competition and innovation. Because of this move, the publishers – who are the immediate victims of Google’s activities – will gain more freedom. The publishers will be able to choose their technology partners and regain control of their most important assets such as content, audience, and data.
Overall, ADLC’s decision is just one groundbreaking move in creating a more just fabric for the AdTech sector, and there are more milestones to go.
Verizon Media Rolls Out Connect ID To Replace Third Party Cookies
Verizon Media this week rolled out a new unified identity solution Connect ID in an industry-wide effort to help advertisers and marketers to transition from using third-party data as the center of online ad targeting.
The third-party cookies will soon be redundant as Google and Apple take steps to limit audience tracking owing to consumer data privacy concerns. Though the advertising industry has seen numerous innovations by many growing companies such as Lotame introduced Panorama ID, Verizon claims Connect ID is powered by direct relationships with 900 million global consumers.
The company has valuable first-party data about the activities of millions of customers based on its 30+ owned and operated consumer brands including Yahoo (content, search, and mail), AOL, and TechCrunch. Verizon Media will generate 200 billion data signals based on deterministic first-party data to create an identity graph that can help advertisers target and track audiences across devices. With Connect Id, the company aims to provide audience targeting on a large scale.
The company is promoting Connect ID to more advertisers and publishers to use its programmatic platform to buy and sell digital ad placements in an ongoing effort to capture the market share of the industry’s biggest players. The company has a full-stack advertising technology solution with a demand-side platform (DSP) for buyers and a sell-side platform (SSP) for content providers like Newsweek that are looking to unlock the full value of their advertising inventories. Dev Pragad, CEO of Newsweek, said,
We want to deliver the best experience possible for our audiences as well as maximize revenue for the premium content we produce. To ensure we can maximize our clients’ user experience while maximizing our revenues, we need partners like Verizon Media who can connect our audiences with quality advertisers and experiences, maximize yield and ensure our audiences’ privacy choices are respected. That’s why we’ve signed up for Verizon Media ConnectID.
As a part of the launch of Connect Id, the company also announced several partnerships with leading data providers like Acxiom, Adstra, Equifax IXI, Experian, Neustar, TransUnion, and Throttle. Concurrently, Verizon Media Connect Id is also working with IAB Tech Lab programs to develop industry-wide pro-privacy solutions for addressability with accountability. Jordan Mitchell, SVP, Head of Consumer Privacy, Identity, and Data, IAB Tech Lab, said,
IAB Tech Lab is proud to have Verizon Media involved in the development of new privacy-preserving addressability standards and industry accountability programs through Project Rearc, and we look forward to their support of these standards and programs once they are released.
The unified ID helps advertisers buy, measure, and optimize ads while enabling publishers to manage, monetize, and navigate audiences–all without third-party cookies. The company says adoption of the unified solution delivered a 33% lift in performance compared to third-party cookies. Iván Markman, Chief Business Officer at Verizon Media told AdWeek,
Most of the identity solutions out there are largely dependent on third-party integrations. Most of the companies don’t really own the customer relationships, and more important they won’t have the assets to provide a value exchange.
Presently, Verizon Media ConnectID is available in North America, APAC and select LATAM markets at launch and will soon roll out to more markets.
YouTube Introduces New Audio Ads To Target Music Fans
In a bid to help brands grow further and better reach music fans on its platform, YouTube launches new audio ads and music lineups.
With people shelter-in-place due to pandemic and music concerts are closed, users are increasingly turning to YouTube to listen to a podcast while doing regular chores or working out while listening to albums. In an effort to adapt to this consumer behavior and monetize the moments on YouTube, the platform rolled out audio ads in beta.
The 15-second audio ads are now available to all advertisers globally via auction on Google Ads and Display Video 360 on a CPM basis with the same audience targeting options, bidding strategies and Brand Lift measurement capabilities, and brand safety features as YouTube video campaigns.
These ads won’t be audio-only but the audio soundtrack plays the lead role in delivering the brand message. The visual component is mainly a still image or basic animation. In the blog post, YouTube says the key that the audio message should carry is: “Think: If I close my eyes, I can still clearly understand what this ad is about.”
The company claims that in months of alpha testing,
“75% of audio ad campaigns on YouTube resulted in a significant lift in brand awareness.”
For instance, this Shutterfly Audio Ad resulted in a 14 percent lift in ad recall and a 2 percent lift in favorability among their target audience.
YouTube is also introducing dynamic music lineups that allow advertisers to target campaigns at collections of music channels on YouTube in the popular genre such as Latin, K-pop, country, rap, and hip-hop. Marketers can buy ads targeted by moods or interests like fitness or meditation. Let’s say if a brand prefers to run ads at any given moment, they can buy against the Top 100 — powered by YouTube Charts. In head-to-head competition with Spotify that pioneered in selling only audio-ads for years, YouTube expects the move to boost ad revenue that it generates from music on the platform.
In another blog post, Lyor Cohen, global head of music for YouTube, positioned the new ad push as an effort to help artists and record label partners earn more revenue from this new ad format. He further explained, more than 2 billion logged-in viewers are watching at least one music video each month whereas 60% of music consumption on YouTube happens on mobile devices,4 where background play is not available.
“Regardless of when and how people are tuning in, we have ways to help advertisers connect, even when they’re consuming music in the background. Now you can complement the moments your consumers are watching, by engaging them in moments when they’re listening, with newly announced audio ads.”
The blog reveals more than 50% of logged-in viewers consume more than 10 minutes of music content in a day. Though, video is still the main and largest category for YouTube: 85% of music consumption on the platform is in the foreground, Adam Stewart, YouTube’s VP of sales said the remaining 15% is a ripe market to tap for audio ads.
“We know being associated with this content works, and so it’s incumbent on us to create packaged opportunities for advertisers to get close to it in whatever format they want to work in, whether that be audio, video or both.”
The audio ad on YouTube follows another audio announcement from Google earlier this year in August as it launched programmatic audio in Ad manager.
Lotame Unveils First Global Cookieless Identity Solution, Panorama ID
The leading global provider of data enrichment solutions, Lotame, announced the launch of Lotame Panorama ID, a new way that will help publishers and marketers to track identity.
The company said in a press statement that Panorama Id is powered by Lotame’s patented graphing technology that helps publishers unify first-party data. The single identity solution connects all types of device identifiers, customer ids, and associated user behaviors as well as privacy choices without dependence on cookies. It is freely accessible to all digital advertising players and enables advertisers to target audiences through header bidding and can cap the frequency with which a user sees the ad. It is available to all who want to use it via API, prebid, and inbound/outbound server-to-server.
For many years, advertisers online have relied on third-party data and cookies to target audiences. However, it is time for a cookieless world with major browsers phasing out the third-party cookies. To adapt to the internet to this new change, Lotame introduced Panorama ID. Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame said,
“Third-party targeting challenges and mounting privacy regulations have created an identity crisis in digital.”
“Without privacy-friendly and people-based tools, brands and publishers can’t communicate and transact effectively in a cookieless world. If they can’t get identity right, they can’t understand or engage audiences at scale, affecting everything from customer loyalty to sales and revenue to the viability of business tomorrow. “
The Survival Of Fittest
It is essential to find a solution to identify the survival of the digital ecosystem beyond Google, Facebook, and Amazon. IAB’s report suggests that if digital tracking ended without a replacement, “there would be a shift of between $32 billion and $39 billion of advertising from the open web to the walled gardens by 2025.”
Lotame Panorama ID is the only omnichannel and freely accessible identity solution that does not depend on third-party cookies to target consumers globally. With this identity solution, marketers and publishers can:
-Protect consumer privacy: Panorama ID is privacy-friendly and compliant with a variety of regulations including GDPR and CCPA. Users will be able to opt out of Panorama ID across every digital touchpoint and device.
-Increase ad targeting accuracy and scale: Lotame Panorama ID matches attributes across devices and domains to an individual. The company says that on average a single pseudonymous ID will include 119 web and 89 mobile attributes delivering the highest accuracy, profile depth, and scale across the open web.
-Effectively measure campaigns: Lotame Panorama ID enables marketers and publishers to effectively target, measure, and deliver campaign reporting based on unique people than a cookie or mobile ID.
-Work together: Consumers are changing all the time. To reflect this change, it is important that the marketer and publisher relationships evolve along with customers. Lotame Panorama ID provides a common language or bridge to make ad targeting and delivery to analytics impactful for advertisers, publishers, and consumers.
-Increase revenue beyond contextual targeting: Publishers can use Lotame Panorama ID to go beyond the limits of contextual targeting to help marketers reach customers based on their expressed passions, behaviors, and interests across all their devices and publisher domains. This also unlocks new monetization opportunities for publishers as COVID-19 continues to impact revenue.
Andy Monfried further added,
“With our Panorama ID, we’re giving the marketplace equal opportunity to compete, improve consumer relationships, and deliver outstanding, diverse, ad-supported content across the open web and connected devices.”
Demand Side Platform(DSP) Launched by Samsung Ads
A self-serve demand-side platform has been introduced recently by Samsung Ads. Samsung Ads is a television advertising unit of Samsung.
The feature will enable programmatic buyers to access the CTV exclusive inventory. It will also help them to reach an approximate of 45 million households using Samsung devices. Further, letting them access their data and trace their footsteps for better advertising and building strong campaigns to maximize the sale of their products.
DeviantArt
It is undoubtful that Samsung has created a strong user base across the globe. Hence, the new demand-side platform by Samsung ads will enable the programmatic buyers to utilize this user data for better advertising techniques. Samsung is one of the biggest electronic product-selling industries in the world. Its gadgets in the electronic market range from smart Television, mobile phones, tablets, and other accessories, frequently used by Android users.
Therefore, utilizing Samsung’s DSP will surely give an upper hand to the programmatic buyers.
As we have already discussed, Samsung has a wide range of audiences using its devices. The advertisers using Samsung’s DSP can manage the frequency and the range of their campaigns of mobile, desktop, connected (CTV), and linear TV.
The buyers of Samsung’s DSP are free to use third-party inventories and audiences alongside with Samsung’s Ads proprietary data.
Samsung Ads consist of a huge database of video data from its millions of smart devices. These devices consist of both TV and mobile.
Samsung is not the only brand that is trying to spread its wings in the field of advertisement. In December 2019, Samsung’s competitor Vizio launched its sales division for advertising. The division enables the advertisers to utilize its frequency, duplicate audiences and manage their range across linear buyers and OTT.
However, Vizio doesn’t have a DSP yet. Therefore, we can say that Samsung is trying to stay afoot from its competitors.
Last month, a feature called True Incremental Reach was introduced by Vizio for its advertisers. It enables advertisers to gain input data on extra user achieved when buying commercials from Television makers directly.
Taboola And IAS Partners To Launch Industry-First New Pre-Bid Brand Safety Solution
Taboola, the world’s leading discovery and native advertising platform announced a partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS), the global leader in digital ad verification, to introduce an industry-first pre-bid brand safety solution for performance advertisers.
The partnership will allow advertisers to directly deploy the pre-bid brand safety technology within Taboola’s native advertising platform. It will also help customers to place relevant content in front of Taboola’s large audience base of 1.4 billion people each month.
Adam Singolda, founder and CEO at Taboola said,
“Now Taboola’s large number of global advertisers can feel secure knowing that their content will only appear in locations that have been deemed appropriate by IAS technology. IAS has proven to be a brand safety innovator and a key strategic partner for Taboola. By extending our partnership and introducing this first-to-market offering, we’re giving advertisers yet another way to benefit from Taboola’s audience scale and ultimately ensure ROI.”
Pre-Bid Brand Safety: What It Means For Marketers?
IAS scores web pages across a range of suitability parameters and blocks brand ads from unsafe pages based on the brand’s own risk threshold.
In the press release, Taboola described the partnership as an industry first and, Taboola’s Corporate Communications Leader Dave Struzzi told MarchTech Today,
“IAS works with a variety of publishers, platforms, and advertisers, but to date, IAS pre-bid brand safety solutions are typically found in traditional demand side platforms. This integration is the first of its kind within a closed native advertising platform which operates on a CPC bidding model.”
Taboola has worked with IAS for several years to build new products and optimize their publisher inventory. The new product development will bring the power of IAS’ proprietary ad verification technology to Taboola Ads Console that gives advertisers the control to opt-in to pre-bid brand safety targeting on any campaign.
Craig Ziegler, VP Product Management, IAS said,
“Performance advertisers don’t have to sacrifice brand safety to obtain the scale they’re looking for.”
“We’re giving advertisers an intuitive way to ensure their ad placements are brand safe directly within Taboola’s technology as they begin a campaign.”
Why We Care:
Many advertisers make sure about brand safety by purchasing ad inventory from premium publishers. The trade-off is scale and exposure is restricted through selective buying. The latest integration will allow marketers and advertisers to leverage programmatic native advertising while ensuring brand safety.
Read More: Why Did The Most Anticipated Taboola-Outbrain Deal Collapse After A Year?
Why Did The Most Anticipated Taboola-Outbrain Deal Collapse After A Year?
Key Insights:
- The two biggest content distribution giant, Taboola and Outbrain, called off a year-long engagement.
- The merger of the giants would have created a $2 billion company and could have been a ‘meaningful competition’ for the walled gardens of Facebook and Google.
- Some publishers who relied on the two firms for ad revenue expressed their concerns that the merger would suppress the competition and decrease the payouts.
- Ultimately, the merger deal ended when Taboola revised the deal offer, renegotiating the cash component from $250 that it initially offered to $100 million.
Nearly a year after announcing the biggest Ad tech merger deal between the two largest content-recommendation companies, Taboola and Outbrain have now collapsed. The merger was meant to give advertisers more ‘meaningful choices’ outside the walled gardens of Facebook and Google that influence a large part of the digital advertising ecosystem.
A Year-Long Road That Changed It All
The delay in regulator scrutiny, the pandemic hit, and changing of the market led to the termination of the deal.
Outbrain and Taboola’s products are the “recommended for you”-type article boxes that are found at the bottom of news articles and are all over the web. The publishers have earned handsomely from Fox News to CNN by renting ad space at the bottom of the publishers’ article pages.
Under the proposed deal, Taboola would acquire Outbrain for $250 million in cash and 30% equity of the combined company. CEO Adam Singolda was set to lead the combined entity with the deal valued $850 million and would have more than 2000 employees. The pair pitched the proposed union as a way to help advertisers. The pair pitched that the combination of the platforms would be beneficial for advertisers looking to buy sponsored links across the web and the new entity would increase revenue for publishers owing to increased investment in technology and product. However, between then and today, a combination of factors changed the progress of the Taboola-Outbrain deal.
Scrutiny By Regulators
The first of those was the delay in the regulatory process to approve the Taboola-Outbrain deal. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department was examining whether the merger would hurt competition raising antitrust issues and in turn, affect publishers who rely on those two companies for ad revenues. Publishers expressed their concern on the operation of the proposed entity
Though the U.S. Justice Department did not challenge the deal, the merger was still being investigated both in the U.K. and Israel. The U.K.’s Competition and Market Authority(CMA) after initial probing, proposed a “phase two investigation” this summer. According to CMA, Taboola and Outbrain have a combined market share of 80% in the U.K. content recommendation market. The regulators raised concerns for U.K publishers who would have a reduced choice in content recommendation services which could result in a drop in ad revenue. The Israel Competition Authority’s investigation was also outstanding. Israeli business newspaper Globes reported that ICA launched an investigation on a Taboola client, local news site Ynet, over alleged coordination between Taboola and Outbrain before the merger was approved. CEO Singolda reaffirmed that they will come out clean of the investigation.
As reported by Adweek, sources familiar with both sides of the deal said the competition regulators investigation took much longer than expected and the developments brought pressure on the financing. The financing deal with the participating banks expired in August.
Renegotiation Of The Taboola-Outbrain Deal, But Why
The pandemic hit and temporarily affected their ad revenue like many other ad tech companies.
In a June 29 blog post, Taboola CEO Adam Singolda wrote, “We’ve had to ask our publisher partners to work with us through these challenging times by temporarily switching from a revenue guarantee to shared revenue.”
Though Taboola described it as a temporary pause, this caused tension with Outbrain which didn’t refrain from its existing guaranteed deals, as per Digiday. As a result, in July, Taboola’s biggest clients with more than 139 million unique visitors in July as reported by ComScore left for Verizon Media’s native advertising product.
All this transpired for the breakdown of the merger deal. CEO Singolda wrote in the blog post that Outbrain agreed to be acquired by Taboola in October of 2019 but the agreement had an expiration after 12 months giving both parties a way to part ways. He further added,
“As part of the process, we exchanged financial information with each other. Based on the relative performance of the two companies, we decided the original deal does not make sense anymore. We could choose to pay the same price of 30% in equity + $250M, but our shareholders thought it’s too much for what we would get based on the relative contribution of the two companies. Nothing emotional, not about culture fit, just data.”
“Out of deep respect, we tried to do a deal that was equity only (but less equity), or equity and cash (but less cash) that matched Outbrain’s financial contribution to Taboola. We failed, and we called it off.”
It is believed that Raboola renegotiated the earlier agreed-upon fee of $250 million to approximately $100 million which was unacceptable by Outbrain. According to Digiday, a memo to Taboola staff by CEO Adam Singloda stated that
“While we continue to grow and do better than ever since the merger announcement, Outbrain’s business continues to stagnate and in fact trend downward.”
He also said that Outbrain remains underinvested in their company over the last two years and this finding also led to revising the original deal agreements.
On this, Outbrain co-CEO Yaron Galai replied to Digiday that the deal got terminated because Taboola didn’t carry out the original deal. He further added,
“Outbrain is profitable, hitting all of its key metrics, and experiencing strong growth. Importantly, Outbrain’s profits are achieved in alignment with our publisher partners, while standing by all of our commitments to them.”
Publishers Post-Covid:
Many publishers were skeptical when the proposed merger deal was announced but now breathe a sigh of relief. However, the sudden decreases in ad spending as the Covid-19 pandemic hit harshly, the not new but the old two competitors Taboola and Outbrain altered their priorities. Publishers pursued a more subscription-based model for healthy margins and making revenue forecasting more sustainable.
In the post-Covid landscape, Taboola and Outbrain are now moving to reinstate some of the past guaranteed deals. Taboola for its part is also eyeing commerce and TV advertising and CEO Adam Singolda said that they will send more traffic to publishers from other devices than Google sends.
Read More: A One-stop Guide On All You Ever Need To Know About AdTech In 2020
