AD TECH AND MARTECH
Comcast Advertising | September 15, 2022
Comcast Advertising today announced that it has appointed Pooja Midha as Executive Vice President and General Manager for Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable. She replaces James Rooke, who recently took on the role of president, Comcast Advertising.
In this position, Midha will oversee a national team spanning sales and sales development, operations, technology, product, data innovation and insights, and customer experience. She will continue to foster the company’s efforts to bring more widespread use of data to TV strategies, including the focus on multi-screen, audience-based advertising, as well as driving the growth of addressable advertising and programmatic capabilities across the company.
Midha will report to Comcast Advertising President James Rooke. She will be based in New York.
“Pooja is the right leader for Effectv at this time, especially as the company continues its transformation within the rapidly changing television landscape,” said Rooke.
“Pooja is the right leader for Effectv at this time, especially as the company continues its transformation within the rapidly changing television landscape,” said Rooke. “Through her recent work at Comcast Advertising, as well as her work within the industry as a pioneer and catalyst in driving innovation across both sales and software for premium premium video advertising, I am confident that she will lead the Effectv team to the next level of success.”
Midha has over 20 years of experience in the media and advertising sector, with a track record of transforming businesses, creating new models, developing brands and partnerships, and exceeding revenue goals. She has extensive knowledge of digital, video and television advertising, from pioneering digital and cross-screen strategies for major media companies and cable networks, to shepherding new technologies focused on consumer engagement and measurement for premium video.
In her role as Comcast Advertising’s first-ever chief growth officer, Midha oversaw global marketing across Comcast Advertising, FreeWheel and Effectv, including the launch of Effectv’s sales development organization. In addition to strengthening each unit’s brand and differentiated value, she worked with the leadership team to enhance the company’s products and solutions within a shifting, multi-screen landscape, emphasizing data and customer value.
“I’m excited, humbled and very much looking forward to leading Effectv in my new role,” Midha said. “In the last two years, Effectv has made significant progress in its mission to become the world’s smartest audience delivery company. I can’t wait to start working with the leadership team and network of talented employees to accelerate industry innovation and drive business results for our clients by combining the power of TV with the best of digital to connect their brands with multi-screen audiences.”
Prior to joining Comcast Advertising, Midha served as president of the advertising technology company true[X]. Before true[X], Midha was senior vice president, digital ad sales and operations for the ABC Television Network. Earlier in her career, Midha held a variety of senior sales and marketing roles at Viacom (now Paramount), including positions at MTV Networks, MTV Networks International and Nickelodeon. She started her career in advertising sales at Dow Jones & Company.
Midha is a frequent industry spokesperson and thought leader and has won numerous industry awards, including being named a 2016 Adweek Young Influential and a 2021 Multichannel News Wonder Woman. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Lehigh University and an MBA from Columbia Business School. Midha lives with her husband and two young daughters in New York City.
About Comcast Advertising
Comcast Advertising is the advertising division of Comcast Cable. As a global leader in media, technology and advertising, Comcast Advertising fosters powerful connections between brands and their audiences as well as among publishers, distributors, MVPDs, agencies and other industry players. Effectv, its advertising sales division, helps local, regional and national advertisers connect with their audiences on every screen by using advanced data to drive targeting and measurement of their campaigns. FreeWheel, its media and technology arm, provides 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. Comcast Cable, along with NBCUniversal and Sky, is part of the Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ: CMCSA). Visit http://comcastadvertising.com/ to learn more.
Read More
ADVERTISER PLATFORMS
Neeva | October 07, 2022
Search engine Neeva has today launched in Europe to rival Google, by giving web users honest search results, no tracking, and with absolutely no advertisements or affiliate links.
Neeva puts users first and gives consumers control to customise their web search experiences. By eschewing ads and advertisers, Neeva eliminates corporate bias that has plagued the traditional search experience. Instead, Neeva's sole goal is to create a search engine that delivers the best results as quickly as possible. Neeva delivers honest results and empowers users to select their information sources such as news outlets, shopping, software engineering sites, travel and others based on personal preference and relevance, rather than what advertisers suggest, all while respecting users’ privacy by blocking third party tracking and never profiting off of user data.
Neeva’s European expansion follows a successful 2021 $40mm Series B funding round. Founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube), Neeva is reinventing web search for good, challenging Google’s web-search dominance.
Commenting on Neeva’s launch, CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy said: “Neeva is a user-first platform focused on private, transparent searches versus a search engine serving advertisers."
Commenting on Neeva’s launch, CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy said: “Neeva is a user-first platform focused on private, transparent searches versus a search engine serving advertisers. The internet should be your private corner of the web instead of a barrage of ads, SEO spam and irrelevant information. We’re reinventing search by giving users control over sources; providing accurate and transparent results as well as private and customised experiences without the influence of corporate bias, tracked around the web.”
Neeva offers a freemium model and will first launch its private, ad-free free basic service in Europe, later introducing its premium subscription model with additional features such as a VPN and password manager. Neeva operates its own independent search stack, returning lightning fast results with high levels of accuracy, drawing from an index of billions of web pages. In addition, Neeva enables users to connect personal applications like email, Dropbox, Slack, Figma and others making it easy to search across the most important personal documents while maintaining strict privacy controls.
“Google has dominated the search engine market, maintaining over 90 percent market share. Neeva will challenge this supremacy by creating a better search and browse experience that delights users,” says Mr Ramaswamy. He added: “Users should be in control of their search and web experience rather than accepting one company deciding the information they see. The ad-supported internet, has created vastly misaligned incentives that have made Big Technology monopolies and advertisers richer while exploiting the privacy and personal data of users. It’s time for a new approach to search that puts people first.”
To date, search alternatives to Big Tech have mostly offered stronger privacy but at the expense of diminished search quality. Neeva is unique in building its own independent search stack (crawling, indexing and serving at scale) and without ads, freeing it to design user-first features with the sole focus of providing the best results in the most efficient way possible all with the strong privacy one should expect and demand from today’s internet experience.
Neeva is growing fast, gaining more than 600,000 monthly users since launching in the USA in 2021. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Greylock Ventures, Inovia Capital, and Neythri Futures Fund. The company has raised over $80m from its investors.
About Neeva
Neeva is the world’s first user-first private search engine. Neeva takes search back to its roots by focusing entirely on the user, delivering high quality results without any ads, giving users control over their sources, and protecting user privacy by blocking trackers. Neeva’s independent search stack offers rich visual experiences, integrates community forum content, and search over personal applications. Learn more and start searching today at neeva.com.
Read More
DISPLAY ADVERTISING
FuboTV | October 04, 2022
FuboTV Inc. (NYSE: FUBO), the leading sports-first live TV streaming platform, announced today a significant improvement on advertising campaigns transacted using Unified ID 2.0 (UID 2.0) through The Trade Desk’s platform. The first connected TV (CTV) partner to adopt the open-source, interoperable identity initiative, FuboTV has since seen a spend growth rate 112.8% faster than the increase in available impressions. This means advertisers were able to more precisely serve ads, while FuboTV was able to maximize yield and efficiencies for its available inventory, which is entirely addressable, premium video content.
A success for both the buy side and sell side, advertiser spend increased by 61.5% year-over-year, ad impressions increased by 25% year-over-year in addition to an increase in CPMs year-over-year for campaigns transacted through FuboTV using the identity solution.
Advertisers leveraging UID 2.0 can seamlessly tap into first-party data across devices including CTV to achieve reach and scale. In fact, an e-commerce retailer with a large first-party CRM data set that was using UID 2.0 saw better than average performance on campaigns transacted through FuboTV’s ad inventory. Cost per action (CPA) was reduced by 9%, conversion rate was 25% stronger and return on ad spend (ROAS) improved by 14% when compared to overall average campaign performance.
Unified ID 2.0 is a new industry-wide approach to internet identity that aims to preserve the value of relevant advertising while prioritizing consumer privacy and transparency. The solution also decreases the industry’s reliance on third-party cookies, which only account for browser-based environments.
“As the first CTV partner to adopt Unified ID 2.0, FuboTV is constantly innovating to remain at the forefront of advertising technology for streaming,” said Chris Flatley, VP, advertising sales, FuboTV.
“As the first CTV partner to adopt Unified ID 2.0, FuboTV is constantly innovating to remain at the forefront of advertising technology for streaming,” said Chris Flatley, VP, advertising sales, FuboTV. “The results we’ve achieved since partnering with The Trade Desk on Unified ID 2.0 are a testament to the power of identity-based solutions. We’re just getting started with UID 2.0 and are looking forward to bringing the benefit to even more advertisers across FuboTV’s premium CTV inventory.”
“CTV is a proving ground for new approaches to identity with ID solutions such as Unified ID 2.0, which are aiming to create a more consistent advertising experience across digital media,” said Ash Gangwar, general manager of TV partnerships, The Trade Desk. “As a leader in the CTV space, FuboTV understands the growing importance and benefits of an alternative – identity solution for advertisers, publishers and the consumer."
An increasing number of publishers, supply-side platforms and data and measurement partners are collaborating around Unified ID 2.0 with the goal of achieving a better approach to identity across the open internet. For more information about Unified ID 2.0, please visit the Unified ID solution site.
About FuboTV
With a mission to build the world’s leading global live TV streaming platform with the greatest breadth of premium content and interactivity, FuboTV Inc. (NYSE: FUBO) aims to transcend the industry’s current TV model. FuboTV Inc. operates in the U.S., Canada, France and Spain.
Leveraging its proprietary data and technology platform optimized for live TV and sports viewership, FuboTV Inc. aims to turn passive viewers into active participants and define a new category of interactive sports and entertainment television. The company's sports-first cable TV replacement product, FuboTV, offers U.S. subscribers more than 125 live sports, news and entertainment networks in its base package and is the only live TV streaming platform with every Nielsen-rated sports channel (source: Nielsen Total Viewers, 2021). Subscribers can interact with FuboTV’s live streaming experience through Fubo Sportsbook (in markets where available), free games and pick’ems, which are integrated into select sports content.
Read More