Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals.
Datacenter
Amazon’s Connections Marketplace explained, plus email marketing’s mobile advantage: Datacenter Weekly
Also: Grey’s new global data (and strategy) chief, an upside to the death of cookies, macroeconomic news in a nutshell and more
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Amazon
Amazon explores the ad ID space
“Amazon is quietly exploring the growing ad ID space as it develops Connections Marketplace, a little-known platform being called a one-stop shop for website publishers and their ad tech vendors to, well, connect,” Ad Age’s Garett Sloane reports. “The marketplace connects websites with new ad IDs, which are being developed in the wake of new privacy and data restrictions.
Essential context: Connections Marketplace, Sloane adds, is “a sign that Amazon is thinking about the future of internet advertising, playing with new signals to target ads, just like Google. In recent months, Amazon has been partnering with more ad tech companies, such as LiveRamp and ID5, allowing publishers to test their new IDs. The Connections Marketplace was officially launched last year, but Amazon has not revealed all the ad tech vendors in it, yet.”
Grey appoints a global chief strategy and data officer
“WPP’s Grey has named Jonathan Lee as global chief strategy and data officer,” Ad Age’s Keira Wingate reports. “Lee, formerly chief strategy officer of Grey New York, will now lead strategy and data for all of Grey Group’s 32 global offices.”
57%
That’s the percentage of clicks on marketers’ emails that occured on mobile devices in the first quarter of 2022 throughout North America, according to data shared with Datacenter Weekly by Cheetah Digital, the enterprise marketing technology company that works with thousands of brands—and sends 1 billion messages to consumers every day on behalf of those brands. Among all marketer categories, restaurants had the highest mobile-device click percentage at 75% (vs. 25% of clicks that came via desktop/webmail), followed by retail at 63% and finance at 61%.
Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell
• “U.S. unemployment claims drop to 200,000, as layoffs fall to lowest level on record,” per MarketWatch.
• “Private payrolls increased by just 128,000 in May, the slowest growth of the recovery, ADP says,” CNBC reports.
• “US consumer confidence slips in May amid stubborn inflation,” per the Associated Press.
• “How America is coping with inflation: Buy what’s needed, nothing more,” from CNN.
• “Restaurants Add New Fees to Your Check to Counter Inflation,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
Why the death of cookies could be a boon for marketers
“Cookie deprecation could be a blessing in disguise, at least for big brand marketers,” Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports, “because the individual targeting it enables doesn’t work that well for them anyway, according to a meta-analysis from Analytic Partners based on hundreds of client studies. The analytics firm’s ROI Genome report finds that contextual targeting—matching media buys with likely interests of the target audience—is generally 1.2 to 2.5 times more effective at driving sales or other objectives than hyper-targeting based on data about individuals.”
Essential context: “Dollars, however, have been moving in the other direction for years, said Mike Menkes, senior VP overseeing consulting services for Analytic Partners,” Neff notes. “The share of sales driven by platforms that allow hyper-targeting, such as social, display and online video, has grown from 55% in 2016 to 75% last year, according to ROI Genome data.”
ICYMI: Ad Age Agency Report 2022
Agencies have come roaring back, with strong revenue growth across disciplines and record-high U.S. ad agency employment. Ad Age’s 78th annual Agency Report shows who’s on top and where the business is growing and going. There’s a lot to Ad Age Agency Report 2022—so the Datacenter team has come up with multiple entry points for you to start your own deep dive. To wit:
• Agency Report 2022: What’s inside
• Agency Report 2022: Biggest companies and networks
• How agency revenue growth soared—and what it means for the industry
• Agency Report 2022: Agency employment
• Agency Report 2022: Agency discipline rankings
• Agency Report 2022: Revenue growth
• An index for the entire Ad Age Agency Report 2022
See also: “Think you know agency-speak? Take our transformational quiz”
Plus: “Ad Age Agency Report 2023 Questionnaire”
Just briefly
• “How brands can mitigate iOS data loss,” from Ad Age.
• “McKinsey strengthens data capabilities with Caserta acquisition,” from Consulting.us.
• “Employee retention—how a data company is responding to the ‘Great Resignation,’” from Ad Age.
• “Crypto Bosses Flex Political Muscle With 5,200% Surge in US Giving,” Bloomberg News reports.
• “In a small Dutch town, a fight with Meta over a massive data center,” from The Washington Post.
• “As data science goes mainstream, so does its language,” InfoWorld reports.
The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.
Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.
This week’s newsletter was compiled and written by Simon Dumenco.
