Ad Networks, Ad Tech and Martech
Business Wire | July 17, 2023
Emburse, the global leader in spend optimization, released new information today about corporate online advertising spend in May 2023. The data reveals that despite macroeconomic concerns, companies are on track to spend more on search and social advertising in 2023 than in 2022. As companies seek ways to be more efficient with their budgets, they are shifting which platforms they prioritize with their ad dollars, but have not slowed ad spending overall.
According to the data released in an infographic today, the top three vendors by share of advertising spend, in order, are Google, Meta, and LinkedIn. Spending on Twitter declined 54% from May 2022 to May 2023, while companies are putting more money toward Gen Z-oriented social media platforms. ByteDance, which owns Tiktok, saw a 55% increase, and Snap, which owns Snapchat, a 41% increase from May 2022 to May 2023.
Companies invested 6% more in digital advertising in the first five months of 2023 than in the same period in 2022. Emburse also reported increased investment in newer business applications like chat-based AI tools. For example, the amount spent on OpenAI increased 3,266% from May 2022 to May 2023. Although many people expected companies to reduce spend overall this year, instead the company has seen an effort to better align business values with their budgets.
“Online advertising is an essential business function, even as companies look to establish lasting efficiency with their budgets and better manage spending practices,” said Emburse’s Chief Experience Officer Johann Wrede. “Many of our customers entered 2023 ready to make changes with a shifting economy, and found that concentrating their ad dollars on platforms that are giving them high value with little tumult is the way to make a longer-term impact on their bottom line.”
More than 18,000 companies trust Emburse for its corporate card and spend management solution, Emburse Spend, representing over $80 billion in spending transactions a year. Emburse tracks corporate financial trends, such as the SpendSmart Travel Trends report, which in Q1 2023 revealed that the number of domestic and international flights, hotels, and car rentals increased year-over-year. Investments also increased across all measurements, with the amount spent on flights increasing by 85% domestically and 178% internationally.
Emburse will continue to track the shift in corporate expenses as the year goes on. To view the full infographic and learn more about the data, visit emburse.com/learn/digital-ad-spending.
About Emburse
Emburse is the global leader in spend optimization. Our expense, travel management, purchasing and accounts payable, and payments solutions are trusted by more than 12 million business professionals, including CFOs, finance teams, and travelers. More than 18,000 organizations in 120 countries, including FORTUNE 100 corporations, high-growth startups, public sector agencies, and nonprofits, count on our intelligent automation, sophisticated analytics, and unmatched spend control to streamline processes, increase spend visibility, enhance compliance, and deliver positive financial outcomes.
Our mission is to humanize work by eliminating manual, time-consuming tasks, so our customers and their teams can focus on what matters most in their personal and professional lives.
For more information on Emburse, visit emburse.com, or follow our social channels at @Emburse.
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Advertiser Platforms
Acast | July 27, 2023
Veritonic, the industry’s comprehensive audio analytics and research platform, partnered with Acast, the world’s largest independent podcast company, to bring new data to market around the commonalities - and divergence - of audio creative on podcast ads served programmatically. In addition to identifying these global overlaps and points of difference, the goal of the research was also to help media buyers identify strong tactics and best practices in programmatic podcast advertising across three key media markets: the US, Australia and New Zealand, and EMEA.
Together, the companies sourced and analyzed podcast ads transacted programmatically with Acast and spanning various industry verticals including: automotive, tourism, retail, healthcare, entertainment, and more. They then identified the common threads and differences in the creative executions by region by examining themes like ad length, number of voiceovers, gender of voiceover, use of sound effects, call to action placements, and more.
“As an industry there is still a lot of myth-busting to do around programmatic ad buying. At Acast, we firmly believe that programmatic advertising should not be a rigid experience for the media buyer, podcast host, and certainly not the listener,” said Elli Dimitroulakos, Global Head of Ad Innovation at Acast. “Podcast advertising is effective because it’s a seamless part of the listening experience and that shouldn’t change based on how a transaction occurs. Programmatic ads can – and should – have creative elements that enhance the listener experience and brand relationship.”
According to the research, across all markets the majority of ads were a minimum of 30 seconds in length. This was most predominant in the US and EMEA regions which resulted in 80% and 73% of the examined ads, respectively. The Australia and New Zealand market trailed slightly behind with 56% of programmatic ads running at least 30 seconds long. The remaining 44% in the market were 15 seconds in length.
All three markets also reflected similarities in the use of single voices for the voiceover content. The US led the way with 86% of programmatic ads in the study using a single voice for the voiceover. EMEA and Australia and New Zealand were most similar with 66% and 68% of programmatic ads using a single voice for the voiceover, respectively.
However, when it came to gender detection in voiceover content, dissimilarities across the markets presented themselves. In the US, half of ads analyzed featured a female voiceover, 47% of ads featured a male voiceover, and the remaining 3% featuring both male and female voiceovers. Looking at ads that ran in Australia and New Zealand, 53% of the creatives featured a female voice over, but just 27% a male voice, and 20% contained both a female and a male voiceover.
In near equal numbers, the three regions all used sound effects in slightly less than the majority of programmatic ads, indicating that this may be a newly emerging trend in the space. According to the study, sound effects including birds chirping, phones ringing, engines revving, and more were used in 40% of programmatic ads from the US, 38% from Australia and New Zealand, and 33% in EMEA.
“Hope is not a strategy; it’s no longer enough for a brand to create an audio asset and simply hope it’ll move the needle,” said Scott Simonelli, CEO of Veritonic. “Having confidence that your marketing efforts and investments will pay off is crucial, especially in today’s economy. With audio reaching more than 214M adults in the U.S. monthly and having a 36% higher impact on memory than video, marketers need to be leveraging creative testing solutions like the Veritonic platform to ensure they are putting their best audio creative forward, regardless of how the ad itself is purchased or served.”
For more information on how you can make decisions in audio by leveraging the industry’s most comprehensive research and analytics solutions, contact marketing@veritonic.com. For more information on buying podcast ads programmatically, please contact automated@acast.com.
About Veritonic
World-renowned brands, agencies, publishers, and platforms rely on Veritonic’s comprehensive audio research and analytics platform to research, test, and measure the ROI of their audio assets and campaigns pre-market, in-market, and post-campaign. The resulting insight enables clients to gain confidence in their audio investment, mitigate risk through optimization, and increase their return as they engage consumers with compelling audio experiences. For more information, visit https://www.veritonic.com.
About Acast
Since 2014, Acast has been creating the world’s most valuable podcast marketplace, building the technology which connects podcast creators, advertisers and listeners. Its marketplace spans 92,000 podcasts, 2,300 advertisers and 430 million monthly listens. Crucially, those listens are monetized wherever they happen — across any podcasting app or other listening platform. The company operates worldwide and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. Acast is listed on Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market (ACAST.ST).
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Ad Tech and Martech
prnewswire | August 21, 2023
Today, Direct Digital Holdings, Inc. a leading advertising and marketing technology platform operating through its companies Colossus Media, LLC ("Colossus SSP"), Huddled Masses LLC ("Huddled Masses") and Orange142, LLC ("Orange142"), announced that it has partnered with Beeswax, a FreeWheel-owned programmatic buying platform.
The ad tech group, which is the ninth Black-owned company on the NASDAQ U.S. stock exchange, will collaborate with Beeswax to expand access to, as well as simplify the path for, buying multicultural – alongside general market – connected TV ad inventory.
The integration works like this: Colossus SSP, a Direct Digital Holdings-owned supply-side platform, works with both multicultural and general market publishers, giving its users access to a more diverse range of CTV ad inventory. As such, marketers and agencies that use FreeWheel's Beeswax to buy CTV ads can now reach a wider array of viewers.
This partnership and its accompanying capabilities are noteworthy as they provide a much needed and timely solve for many of the issues that marketers and agencies are facing today, including a dynamic, complex and fragmented TV ad ecosystem and a consumer landscape that is becoming increasingly more multicultural and diverse.
On a more technical note, this partnership includes integrations on both the buy and sell sides of CTV ad buying. On the buy side, Direct Digital Holdings' two digital marketing companies, Orange142 and Huddled Masses, will work with Beeswax to serve CTV ad placements for marketers. On the sell side, as outlined above, Direct Digital Holdings will work with Beeswax on simplifying and expanding access to both multicultural and general market CTV ad inventory via the group's supply-side platform, Colossus SSP.
"The media and marketing landscape today is very nuanced – from fast-changing innovations to constant industry fragmentation to audiences that are becoming increasingly more diverse and harder to reach, across multiple screens," said Mark Walker, CEO, Direct Digital Holdings. "Taking that into account, we sought a partner who brought a real-time, holistic understanding of the ecosystem, as well as a track record of creating simple and much needed, innovative solutions that remove friction and address and resolve the needs of marketers today. FreeWheel, through its work with Beeswax, exemplifies and understands these key traits and we're excited to be working with them."
"We are humbled and thrilled to team up with a partner who not only understands this space, but also is minority owned," said Tess O'Brien, VP, Head of Revenue, Beeswax. "We look forward to working with Direct Digital Holdings to drive innovation and growth in CTV, while helping to provide Beeswax's clients with an easier pathway to access multicultural content within the programmatic ecosystem."
About Direct Digital Holdings
Direct Digital Holdings (Nasdaq: DRCT), owner of operating companies Colossus SSP, Huddled Masses, and Orange 142, brings state-of-the-art sell- and buy-side advertising platforms together under one umbrella company. Direct Digital Holdings' sell-side platform, Colossus SSP, offers advertisers of all sizes extensive reach within general market and multicultural media properties. The company's subsidiaries Huddled Masses and Orange142 deliver significant ROI for middle market advertisers by providing data-optimized programmatic solutions at scale for businesses in sectors that range from energy to healthcare to travel to financial services. Direct Digital Holdings' sell- and buy-side solutions manage approximately 136,000 clients monthly, generating over 250 billion impressions per month across display, CTV, in-app and other media channels.
About FreeWheel
FreeWheel empowers all segments of The New TV Ecosystem. We are structured to provide the full breadth of solutions the advertising industry needs to achieve their goals. We provide the technology, data enablement and convergent marketplaces required to ensure buyers and sellers can transact across all screens, across all data types, and all sales channels, in order to ensure the ultimate goal – results for marketers. With offices in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Paris, Beijing, and across the globe, FreeWheel, A Comcast Company, stands to advocate for the entire industry through the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video.
About Beeswax
Founded in 2014 by a team of former Google executives, Beeswax is the programmatic buying platform that gives media buyers ownership and total control. Its Bidder-as-a-Service™ platform gives brands, media companies, and advertising technology firms greater control, flexibility, and transparency over their programmatic advertising. Beeswax customers include Uber, DraftKings and Nexstar. Beeswax is headquartered in New York City and has raised $28 million in funding from leading investors including Foundry Group, RRE, You & Mr. Jones, and Amasia.vc.
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