Weekly Roundup: Duopoly’s Increasing Market Share, Q4 Spend, CCPA 2.0, and More.

Summary

• Google and Facebook have 80% market share in Australia’s digital ad economy. The domination of the platforms is increasing continuously for the past years – The Guardian
• Because of the pandemic, the US e-commerce sale will rise by 35.8% during the holidays in November and December, whereas the in-store sale will decline by 4.7% – eMarketer
• The worldwide ad spend is set to decline by 4.5% to $614.03 billion. Spain, Italy, and India will be the most affected countries – eMarketer
• The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will go on the ballot this Tuesday. It is likely to pass and make ad targeting extremely difficult – TheDrum
• Bloomberg is harnessing the full potential of its AdOps and Product team by making them help each other – Digiday
• Google is offering new tools for news publishers. These tools will help journalists to work more efficiently by utilizing Google’s search, AI, optical character recognition, speech-to-text, and other capabilities.

Latest Trends for Publishers

Duopoly has 80% share in Australian Digital Ad Economy The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reports that Google, Facebook, and YouTube together leave less than 20% of the market share for other players in the digital ad industry. The report is coming out when the government is working on legislation to make the platforms share their revenue with news publishers. This report reinforces the need for the law. But the findings are not surprising at all. This is just the continuation of the trend where platforms have been gobbling up the lion’s share in the market, leaving very little for others. In 2018, Google received $49, Facebook received $24, whereas all the other websites received only $27 out of every $100 spent by the advertisers. In 2019, the share changed to $53 (Google), $28 (Facebook), and $19 (others) US Holiday Ecommerce Sales The US consumers will spend $190.47 billion via e-commerce, during the holidays in November and December. It’ll represent 35.8% of the total sale and a $50 billion YoY increment. On the other hand, the in-store sale will decline by 4.7%. Worldwide Media Ad Spend in 2020 Before the pandemic, eMarketer expected worldwide ad spend to increase by 7%. Later, eMarketer’s June estimates projected a decline of 4.9%, but now the projections are slightly better. The current projections estimate a fall of 4.5% to $614.03 billion. The situation will improve only in 2021 when the global digital ad spending will witness a growth of 16.4%. Spain, Italy, and India will be the worst affected countries in the world. Takeaway: The platforms are becoming bigger and bigger every day, this is why the concerns around their powers are not limited to Australia. The governments and the legislative bodies around the world are taking measures to keep the platforms in check.  The pandemic is causing a growing shift of US consumers towards e-commerce. But, at the same time, the economy is also witnessing uncertainties. So the consumers may not be spending more, but the holiday season is their chance to let go and de-stress themselves with shopping. Be prepared for the holiday sale as this can be a great chance for you to cover the revenue lost during the lockdowns. Our article on seasonality will help. 

CCPA 2.0 is Expected to Pass with More Specifics

In the beginning, it was called CPRA; later, it was nicknamed CCPA 2.0; now, people are calling it Prop 24. No matter what the name is, it’ll make our lives difficult. The CPRA will be on the ballot for Tuesday, and it is expected to pass. The CPRA’s definition of personal data includes purchase information, geolocation data, online identifiers, IP addresses, and even inferences drawn from such information to create consumer profiles. It would require all the third-parties involved in serving ads to give explicit notice to consumers and allow them to opt-out from selling or sharing their data. The companies collecting personal data, directly or indirectly, will be liable to disclose it to the users. It’ll be a huge challenge for advertisers, and the dynamics of audience targeting may change to a great extent. We’ll keep you posted. 

Bloomberg’s Interdisciplinary Approach

Bloomberg’s AdOps team has started using an A/B testing tool called ABBA to find out how its infrastructures for subscription business and ad business can support each other. The audience segments that the AdOps team used earlier for ad campaigns will now be used to market its subscription products.  On the other hand, the product team is also building solutions to measure the impacts of the efforts on both ads and subscription business. In short, the AdOps and Product teams are uniting to help each other.

“In a perfect world, you’d have one group working together.”

– Doug Wintz, the founder of DMW Media Works.

Similarly, its ad products team developed Ad Quality Index, an internal framework, to measure the effectiveness of its ad units. The AQI helped the publisher to cycle-out around 20 under-performing ad products a lot more quickly than it would normally have. Now the same AQI is helping the publisher in marketing its subscription products more effectively.  Takeaway: Bloomberg is conducting experiments in its operations department and then using the findings to improve multiple sides of the business. You can call it an interdisciplinary approach. What you can learn here is that if different departments of a business can use their expertise to help each other, then the business can grow much faster.

Google’s New Tool for Journalists

If you are a news publisher, then Google has a gift for you. Google is giving you Journalist Studio with a set of tools to make journalism easy for you. One of the tools is Pinpoint. It’ll help the reporters to perform searches within large file sets with hundreds and thousands of files. The search functionality will leverage Google’s AI capabilities along with its Knowledge Graph, optical character recognition, and speech-to-text technologies. It can scan through PDFs, images, handwritten notes, and even audio files. It can automatically identify the key people, organizations, and locations in the docs. USA Today is currently using it. Interested publishers can request access. USA Today is currently using it. Interested publishers can request access. The Common Knowledge Project is another tool in the set. It’ll help your journalists to explore, share, and visualize data in their local communities with interactive charts. These charts can later be embedded in articles and shared on social media. Takeaway: Google and news publishers work for each other. Google knows the importance of publishers in its business; that’s why it tries to help them. If you are a news publisher, then you should try the tools.

Moments That Matter

Apple’s Privacy-Safe Mobile Attribution Solution Is Buggy: Core Functions Missing From SKAdNetwork – Forbes Ogury launches ‘Thumbnail Ad’: Non-fullscreen format built specifically for mobile – Netimperative BuzzFeed Expects to Break Even This Year, Thanks to Heavy Cost Cuts – WSJ Lotame unveils its new cookie-less tech for ad targeting – TechCrunch IAB Tech Lab releases Content Taxonomy 2.2 open for public comment – IAB Tech Lab