Jagran New Media, a leading publishing house in India, had a revenue problem. They’d been relying on ad networks to manage outstream video — mobile-only ads that appear on partner sites and apps outside of YouTube — on their websites. “The video player was fully controlled by the ad networks and implemented on our sites as a 1×1 tag,” explained Dinesh Joshi, AVP and Head of Ad Monetization and Strategic Partnership at Jagran. “We experienced very high discrepancies between our ad server and the network ad server, which was a consistent issue.”

Using multiple video players from various ad networks caused a host of issues that ultimately impacted their ability to monetize video across their websites. These included: Late payment and payment disputes and a lack of revenue transparency.

Jagran partnered with Aniview, a video ad player solution, to manage their AdOps needs internally. Since taking their video ad serving in-house, Jagran’s video revenues have dramatically increased. Video ads have become a significant revenue generator for the company, with revenue doubling for ad spots on the in-house solution. The standout metric for Joshi is transparency. “Before using Aniview, we received poor transparency, but never really understood the value that comes with having more clarity. We now realise how important it is.”

Read more here.

On Thursday Snap, owner of popular chat app Snapchat, reported lower revenues than expected for 3Q, and pointed to Apple’s iOS privacy updates as a primary cause. The new iOS’s App Tracking Transparency feature restricts the ability to track user behavior across apps and measure the effects of advertising.

Snap reported $1.07 billion in 3Q earnings, undershooting the $1.1 billion earnings projected by financial market data provider Refinitiv. Snap also expects to miss 4Q projections by up to $200 million.

The iOS features, including App Tracking Transparency, were first announced in the spring. iOS users have the ability to opt out of app tracking. Although some change in the app advertising landscape was expected, Snap’s stock declined over 20% with this earnings news.

“We will continue to focus on delivering strong results for our advertising partners and innovating to expand the capabilities of our platform and better serve our community,” said CEO Evan Spiegel on an earnings call.

Snap also reported that it had 306 million daily active users, a 23% increase year-over-year, representing 57 million more users.

Why we care. This is perhaps the biggest evidence so far of the effect that iOS updates are having on the mobile advertising business, which is a significant marketing channel. The reality is that regardless of the unique experiences and convenience that social apps provide for their users, the success of the companies that build them depends on advertising revenue, and the revenue they can grow for their advertising partners.

Read more here.

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SORT (Smart Optimization of Responsive Traits) is a new privacy-conscious, cookieless identity resolution technology from Perio Network, a global ad tech company focused on search, social, display and CTV/video advertising. It joins a growing number of proposed alternatives to tracking consumers with third-party cookies. SORT will initially be offered by the Perion company Undertone.

SORT uses AI to aggregate “common ground” traits that identify scalable target audiences based on a range of real-time data signals. It identifies similarities between users and creates groups which are fluid with users continually moving between them (an example of a group would be consumers in New York who are reading entertainment content on an iPhone on a Saturday morning). SORT delivers advertising that matches their interests with publishers’ contextual inventories. Advertisers will be able to display a SORT Signal to indicate that they are being targeted in a non-invasive way.

The announcement comes with some data on SORT’s effectiveness, audited by Neutronian, and independent data quality certification service. Preliminary data showed indications that SORT could out-perform cookie-based targeting.

Why we care. Back in August, we noted some debate within Google about whether cohorts (as in Federated Learning of Cohorts — FLoC) might be better replaced by topics. SORT seems to be developing cohorts but based on a number of contextual signals rather than just the topic of the content that is being consumed. Also, SORT, of course, can run outside the Google ecosystem.

More and more, the key to solving critical marketing and marketing ops challenges is marketing technology. But with 7,000+ solutions on the market, finding the right one for your needs can be overwhelming. MarTech makes it easy. Discover dozens of time-saving, profit-boosting solutions and the actionable tactics to effectively leverage them… all in one place, all without leaving your desk, and all for free.

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Today, SEO includes everything from content marketing and distribution to user experience, and even the core job of gathering and interpreting search intelligence has become more challenging as the search engines continually change their display of results and port them over to other media like voice assistants.

This doesn’t mean that the well-established SEO best practices should be cast aside, however. Keyword research, page-level analysis, backlink tracking and acquisition, and rank tracking are still of critical importance, even as the environment continues to change.

SEO platforms offer numerous capabilities that range from keyword research and rank-checking to backlink analysis and acquisition, as well as competitive intelligence, social signal integration, and workflow rights and roles.

Learn more about the capabilities of enterprise SEO platforms here.

“Me, showing off our tech stack to a marketing ops candidate.” Steven Dunston, Senior Director of Demand Generation, Sendbird