Behind Headlines: 180 Seconds in Ad Tech — Video Games & Search Engines

Hey there! This is Ari at Sharethrough with another episode of Behind Headlines. In this episode I'll be giving you a 180-second recap of what happened the week of January 17th in ad tech. Let’s go!

First up, Microsoft makes one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history when it spent nearly $70B to purchase Activision-Blizzard, video game developer and publisher of titles like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Overwatch, as well the favorite game of moms everywhere, Candy Crush. Microsoft says gaming will play a key role in metaverse developments and plans to expand the games offered in its subscription service Game Pass, turning itself into the Netflix of games. What does this mean for advertisers? This could expand the pool of users that advertisers can target with the Microsoft Audience Network, it’s ID-based ad targeting service, which includes Xbox accounts. (Source: New York Times, Reuters)

Moving to the CTV world, NBCUniversal is testing a new CTV measurement partner for the upcoming Super Bowl and the Olympics and recently struck a deal with iSpot.TV. After a trial run with multiple vendors, NBCUniversal chose iSpot.TV for its speed and broad data sets. However, the media company will eventually support multiple vendors but is sticking with iSpot.TV for now. NBCUniversal is another media company joining the hunt for a new measurement platform in the midst of explosive growth in streaming and connected TV viewership. Viacom partnered with VideoAmp, and WarnerMedia is still testing out iSpot.TV and VideoAmp, leaving Nielsen, the industry leader for more than 10 years, in the wake after being stripped of its accreditation from the Media Ratings Council. (Source: Axios)

On to automotive advertising, where 2021 saw a growth in ads for electric vehicles. The growing popularity of electric vehicles, accelerated by Tesla, and the supply-chain issues affecting other manufacturers’ inventory of traditional combustion engines, is prompting them to spend their advertising dollars promoting their EV range. Audi leads the pack, as it shifts most of their marketing budgets towards EVs after it noticed that viewers of their EV commercials were nearly twice as likely to look up the brand online, compared to viewers of combustion engine ads. (Source: Bloomberg)

I never thought I’d say it, but Google may have some pressure from other search engines, like Brave, Neeva and DuckDuckGo. Brave had its user base double from 25 million to 50 million active users in the last year. Brave is also unique in that, tied to the browser, their Basic Attention Token (BAT) is considered one of the more credible cryptocurrencies. The way BAT works is that users are awarded the tokens for ad views and publishers and content creators can also be paid with the Basic Attention Tokens. Neeva is the smaller of the indie search engines with under a million active users, and it’s unknown how many active users DuckDuckGo has but the search engine recently announced it surpassed over 100 billion search queries. If that’s not enough, Chrome had a slight slump in browser market share, but still maintains the majority, while Microsoft Edge rose to 6%. Internet Explorer would be so proud. (Source: AdExchanger)

And it wouldn’t be a week in ad tech without what? If you said M&As, boy were you right with five acquisitions to report this week alone! OpenWeb, the company that powers publishers’ comment section and ad targeting on a user-ID level, recently acquired publisher data and distribution company, Hive Media Group for about $60 million, after it already raised $150 million back in November. Additionally, Precisely, the data onboarding and enrichment company, bought PlaceIQ, a location data provider, for an undisclosed amount. And three more acquisitions occurred on the same day: MindIT, the retail trade analytics company, was acquired by Kantar, Salesforce’s automated marketing platform Datarati was bought by OSF Digital and, lastly, ad tech and media owner The Media Group bought the magazine title Parade. You could start a fantasy league with all these trades and mergers! (Source: Insider, AdExchanger)

Thanks for tuning in! For more in-depth information or to subscribe to these weekly updates, check out the links in our blog. This has been Ari at Sharethrough for our weekly 180 second-recap in Ad tech. See you next week!