Monday’s Musings . . .

ADWEEK’S TOP DIGITAL TRENDS:  It’s been a few weeks since AdWeek gave us a Top Digital Trends summary, but they’ve more than made up for it with this week’s list.  Among the highlights are the surge in Messenger apps (#3), the growing power of Social platforms (#5), and an increase in cord cutting as consumers shift to OTT content delivery (#6).  But there were also lowlights, including digital ads being viewed for less than 2 seconds on average (#1), and an estimated 30% of online content being classified as outright violent (#7).  All of these stats paint the picture of a digital media industry in a state of constant flux as users get more savvy about what content they consume, and brands demand greater accountability about how their digital dollars are spent.

SLACKER FINALLY GETS A DANCE PARTNER:  The pureplay streamer Slacker finally has a buyer, after months of speculation about the company’s ability to stay afloat.  An LA-based company called LiveXLive has purchased Slacker for a relative pittance at $50M.  As you might remember, back in April Slacker laid off almost 50% of its workforce as rising royalties costs and a lack of revenue put them in a squeeze.  So why did LiveXLive make the investment?  According to company sources LiveXLive will utilize Slacker’s audio streaming tech to compliment its video platform to create a multi-media system for content distribution.  From a wider industry perspective the Slacker move is part of a trend towards the consolidation of stand-alone second tier streamers, as was the case with the SoundCloud acquisition by a pair of Asian investment firms back in August.  Changes like this are proving that audio streaming is a tough business with room for only a handful of top-tiered players to succeed.

APPLE IS ABOUT TO KILL THE COOKIE:  Tomorrow could go down as an inflection point in the history of digital advertising.  It’s the day Apple pushes out its new Safari browser update, which limits users’ cookie-based retargeting to just 24 hours through a new policy called Intelligent Tracking Prevention.  Why is this such a big problem?  Because the vast majority of 3rd party publishers, ad networks and programmatic trading desks are still dependent of cookies to provide behavioral data in order to deliver ads.  So without this data Safari users become non-targetable, which isn’t very useful in today’s data-driven world.  The industry, as you might expect, is freaking out about this change.  As noted in the attached AdWeek link, six major trade organizations have published an open letter blasting Apple’s move for setting “opaque and arbitrary standards of cookie handling”.  The industry’s greatest fear is that Apple’s move could be mimicked by other browsers, which would pretty much kill cookie-based retargeting altogether.  On the other side of the coin, this would make mobile retargeting using MAIDs (Mobile Ad IDs) even more important, since cookies are non-existent in the mobile environment.  The stakes are high on all sides of this issue, so be ready to watch the ripple effects occur after tomorrow’s Safari switch over.

Have a great Monday guys!

20 thoughts on “Monday’s Musings . . .

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