Thursday’s Themes . . .

CONNECTED HOME MEETS TARGETING:  Of all the audio streamers Pandora has benefited the most of the surge in Connected Home listening over the past 24 months.  Over 10M of Pandora’s MAUs listen on at least one connected device in their home, and they’re listening for an astounding three hours per day on average.  With this kind of scale comes the ability to overlay data segmentation across the Connected Home platform.  As described in the attached AdWeek link, brands can now buy any of Pandora’s 2,000+ proprietary audience segments for audio ads running on Connected Home devices.  Since many of these devices don’t have a screen and are voice-activated, audio is the perfect native ad unit to capture listeners’ attention.  Bottom line . . . there’s more in-home listening than ever before, and brands now have more ways to use audience data to reach these listeners.  Seems like a positive step forward all around!

iHEART IN THE SPIN ZONE:  Yesterday iHeart held it’s Q3 Earnings Call.  Their biggest headline was 18 straight quarters of revenue growth on a barely positive .03% growth in Q3’17 vs. Q3’16.  Keep in mind this growth now includes trade which they treat as ad revenue, so the more trade they do the more “growth” they achieve.  I decided to go a little deeper into iHeart’s earnings results to get a better picture of the financial health of the company.  According to the attached RBR link iHeart’s total debt inched up to $20.6B, thanks to a net loss in Q3 of $248M.  Think about that for a minute.  At current pace iHeart is losing almost a billion dollars a year, which is causing the company to sink further and further into debt.  Perhaps the most striking financial number to consider is cash on hand.  On Jan 1 iHeart had $845M in cash, but now that amount has shrunk to $286M.  At the current burn rate iHeart will run out of cash sometime in the middle of Q1.  And since it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to borrow more money (would you like to be the last creditor to get paid in a $20B line?), bankruptcy could be realistic in Q1.  Suddenly that trade-fueled .3% growth doesn’t seem too exciting, right?

DOING PROGRAMMATIC THE WRONG WAY:  Earlier this year Snapchat announced it was launching a self-service API portal for clients to buy programmatic ads on the platform.  This seemed like a logical way to scale thousands of new advertisers at once and help Snap compete against the big boys like Facebook and Google.  But it turns out there was an unintended consequence to this move – the commoditization of Snap’s inventory into low cost, non-targeted ROS impressions.  According to the attached Digiday link, Snap’s lack of audience data (which is needed to create audience segs) means most impressions bought programmatically are selling the $3-8 cpm range.  By comparison two years ago Snap was famous for only selling high-end “takeover” style ads for $750K+.  So in an effort to bring more clients to the party Snap has inadvertently gutted the specialness of its platform, and transformed from a premium environment to one that’s barely better than an ad network.  And programmatic was the knife used to perform this unnecessary surgery.  Goes to show you that programmatic unto itself isn’t necessarily a good thing.  It needs to be combined with data to create valuable audience segs which command a premium price to help drive the overall business forward.

Have a great Thursday guys!

25 thoughts on “Thursday’s Themes . . .

  1. Patient tolerability and compliance with aromatase inhibitor therapy is a very important issue because of the extended duration of treatment involved buy cialis online with prescription However, in the absence of a control group not receiving neurohormonal antagonists, the interpretation of the observations of a disconnect between increased use of neurohormonal antagonists and effect on LVEF change remains speculative

  2. For calculation of the SUV, circular regions of interest were drawn around areas with focally increased uptake in transaxial slices and automatically adapted to a 3 dimensional volume of interest at a 70 isocontour as previously described 5 cialis no prescription Church LRG Lenti_sgRNA_EFS_GFP 65656 Mammalian Lentiviral LIC none S

  3. Nice blog right here! Additionally your site so much up fast!
    What web host are you the usage of? Can I am getting your associate link for your host?
    I wish my website loaded up as fast as yours lol

  4. Hi, Neat post. There’s an issue with your web site in internet explorer, may test this… IE still is the marketplace leader and a big component to other people will pass over your great writing because of this problem.

  5. Simply a smiling visitant here to share the love (:, btw great design and style. “Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes.” by Daniel Defoe.

  6. A lot of of the things you claim is astonishingly precise and it makes me wonder why I hadn’t looked at this with this light previously. This article truly did switch the light on for me as far as this particular issue goes. Nonetheless there is just one point I am not too comfy with so whilst I try to reconcile that with the core theme of your point, let me observe exactly what the rest of your readers have to say.Nicely done.

  7. I am usually to running a blog and i really admire your content. The article has really peaks my interest. I am going to bookmark your website and keep checking for brand spanking new information.

  8. It is actually a nice and useful piece of info. I’m satisfied that you just shared this useful information with us. Please stay us informed like this. Thank you for sharing.

  9. Java Burn: What is it? Java Burn is marketed as a natural weight loss product that can increase the speed and efficiency of a person’s natural metabolism, thereby supporting their weight loss efforts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *