| | Media Buyer & Planner Today | | | | | | | | | #1 Walmart Promotes Media Capabilities | | The retail giant is making a push to grow its advertising by positioning itself as a media platform, Digiday reports. With over 5,000 store locations and a growing e-commerce business, Walmart has gathered a massive amount of transactional data from its customers which it is willing to share to help brands retarget consumers via Walmart.com. Walmart is pitching its scale across the country and its offline data as differentiating itself from Amazon. And it is scheduling both meetings with agency buyers and learning sessions and invitation-only summits with brands and agencies to pitch its platform and help them learn how to use it. Helping Walmart with this entire process is WPP's Triad Retail Media. Right now online sales are a small part of the chain's $486 billion in annual revenue, but buyers tell Digiday that Walmart's acquisitions of ecommerce sites Jet.com, Bonobos, Moosjaw and ModCloth show it is serious about growing its ad business beyond its brick-and-mortar stores. To facilitate ad sales, Walmart Exchanges uses programmatic infrastructure combined with in-store sales data to target ads through private marketplaces and ad exchanges. | | WHY THIS MATTERS: As retail competition from online companies continues to grow, more and more retailers are creating their own ad platforms that can offer more sophisticated ways for advertisers to target their own customers and make them unique from their competitors. The push by retailers has increased in popularity over the past year. In addition to Walmart, other brick-and-mortar retailers attempting similar steps include Nordstrom and Kroger, while internet retailers like Amazon and Overstock are also doing it. While it can be an advantage to advertisers to get more data, the retailers are also able to dangle that data to get advertisers more involved. For example, at Walmart sharing more data can also lead to other discussions about paying for more high-traffic in-store shelf space. | | A Take: Digiday | | | | #2 Kellogg Begins Pre-Olympic Sales Push | | The cereal maker is rolling out its marketing plans for the upcoming Winter Olympics Games this February. Ad Age reports Kellogg will use two prior Olympic medalists to promote its brands, as well as two newcomers. Kelly Clark, three-time U.S. Olympic medalist in snowboarding, and Meghan Duggan, two-time Olympic ice hockey medalist, will each appear on Corn Flakes boxes in stores and also on special boxes of Special K Red Berries available only through the KelloggStore website. Nathan Chen, 2017 U.S. men's figure staking champion will appear on boxes of Corn Flakes, while Mike Schultz, a U.S. national Paralympic snowboarder will appear on boxes of Frosted Flakes. Kellogg may also expand on that roster. The company will continue its "What Gets You Started?" slogan for its Games' promotions. Kellogg will not make a company-wide ad buy on the NBCU Olympic telecasts, however, individual brands could advertise on the Games which begin on Feb. 9 from PyeongChang, South Korea. The pre-Olympics campaign will include videos and Kellogg plans to hold Games watching events at its upcoming café location in New York. | | WHY THIS MATTERS: Kellogg is known for putting athletes from major sports events on its boxes, so that tradition will continue. It is also hoping that the athletes give the brand an increase in sales. Ad Age says sales in Kellogg's U.S. morning foods business, led by cereal, fell 6% in the first half of 2017, after a 2% decline in 2016. As for not advertising as a company during the Olympic telecasts, Kellogg says it hasn't yet seen an impact from competitors who have run ads in the Games telecasts featuring Olympic athletes. | A Take: Ad Age
| | | | #3 Old Ad Fraud Tactics Still Effective | | Long-time ad fraud tactics like domain spoofing, sending traffic to garbage sites and disguising display inventory as video continue to be widely used and an effective way of robbing ad dollars from marketers and online publishers, Digiday reports. And in some instances, new brand-safety mandates and the rise in header bidding frequently inadvertently prop up those classic ad fraud tricks. A recent BuzzFeed report that exposed and outed an ad fraud operation highlighted the fact that old schemes are still duping big brands. And as Digiday reports the Financial Times recently found that 15 different supply-side platforms were purporting to sell its video inventory, even though FT doesn't sell its video inventory programmatically. The publisher estimates the value of that fraudulent ad inventory to be about $1.3 million a month. Meanwhile, DoubleVerify says video ad fraud is about twice as common as display ad fraud. And even with the additional vigilance to protect brands against running ads on questionable site, fraudsters have come up with tricks to beat new safety tools. | | WHY THIS MATTERS: While ad tech companies are still trying to develop ways to prevent digital ad fraud, there are certain things marketers can do to protect themselves from becoming ad fraud victims. Much of it is changing the habits of how they advertise. Digiday suggests they restrict the number of sites they let their ads run on, and to be more careful about heavily targeting niche demographics where quality supply is scarce. | | A Take: Digiday | |
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| | 47.7 | | Percentage of U.S. social media users who say they last made a purchase from Facebook, according to data from Open Influence. Instagram was a distance second, with 8.6% of those polled saying they made their last purchase via social media on Instagram. Next was 4.5% who made their last purchase via YouTube, 2.1% made their last purchase via Pinterest, while 1.4% made their most recent purchase via Twitter. A total of 34.6% say they never purchased an item through social media. | – Reported by eMarketer
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| | Fox Wins on Wild World Series Game | by Michael Malone
Fox took the Sunday ratings title with a decisive performance by the World Series, which saw the Astros jump ahead in games, 3-2, with a 13-12, extra inning, homer-happy, barnburner over the Dodgers. Fox had a 5.8 and 19 share for prime, ahead of NBC's 3.8/12 thanks to Sunday Night Football. Fox had an NFL over-run at 7.0, then The OT at 6.0, before shifting to baseball. Game 5 scored a 5.5 in prime. On NBC, Football Night in America was down 29% at 2.2, and the game, the Pittsburgh Steelers against Detroit Lions, down 23% to 4.3. The Sunday game was not up against the World Series the week before. CBS did a 09/3. 60 Minutes was off 40% at 1.5 and Wisdom of the Crowd dropped 27% to 0.8. NCIS: Los Angeles slipped 20% to 0.8 and Madam Secretary was down 25% to 0.6. ABC was at 0.8/3. Toy Box scored a flat 0.4 and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown a 1.0, before a double run of Shark Tank did a flat 0.9. Univision did a 0.5/2 and Telemundo a 0.3/1, both same as last week. | |
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| • JOANNE ZAIAC was named chief client officer, Americas, at Dentsu Aegis Network's performance marketing agency Merkle. She was most recently chief operating officer at DigitasLBi North America. She spent more than 18 years at Digitas in assorted roles, including as president of the agency's New York office for more than a decade.
• PHILLIPE TORLOTING has joined Havas Group's social media agency Socialyse as chief operating officer. He previously spent more than a decade at Publicis Groupe, including his most recent stint as deputy general manager of its Blue449 agency. He also held executive roles at Publicis agencies Moxie and DigitasLBi.
• LORI DeBORTOLI was appointed managing director of WPP experiential agency SET, where she will oversee the agency's West Coast offices. She was most recently brand digital director for the Nike account at AKQA Portland. She was also senior VP of integrated production at Edelman and an executive producer at W+K Portland. | |
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