Ad Buyers Shun News Content; Forrester Releases Social Ad Tech Wave

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Killing The Messengers

More brands are disinclined to buy ads against news content. A string of automotive murders, including one fatality when a right-wing activist struck liberal counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va., has auto advertisers hesitant to appear next to any news coverage. “There’s a feeling that isn’t partisan but avoiding the whole subject,” Grace Briscoe, Centro’s VP of candidates and causes, told AdExchanger in June, pointing to an anti-Trump immigration series from the Los Angeles Times that surprised her by turning off liberal-oriented brands. “We’re seeing advertisers block the whole news section or even go so far as to avoid home pages because it’s going to be primarily political headlines.” More at Digiday.

The Social Wave

Sprinklr and Brand Networks lead the way in a cluttered and fragmented social ad tech space, according to Forrester’s Social Advertising Technology Wave. Read it. Most social ad tech companies manage small budgets of around $80 million, while a few frontrunners, including  Sprinklr, Brand Networks, Kenshoo, 4C (performers) and Nanigans (contender), manage the lion’s share. Marketer and agency knowledge of social ad buying is also immature, as most vendors run their platforms as a managed service. Forrester predicts that in the short term, social suites like Sprinklr will be best positioned to lead consolidation in the social ad tech space, followed by DSPs in the medium term and marketing clouds in the long term.

LA Story

Los Angeles Times publisher Tronc fired the newspaper’s top editor and publisher, Davan Maharaj, on Monday, along with numerous other staffers. In his place the company installed media vet Ross Levinsohn as publisher and CEO. Levinsohn is a surprising pick for the post because newspapers tend to value newspaper experience, and he has none. But his job isn’t to reinforce newspaper habits, it’s to shake them up. Levinsohn is a former interim CEO of Yahoo, and before then led the Fox Interactive team that launched Hulu. “Ross isn’t coming in to manage further downsizing,” says Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn. More at the LA Times.

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This post was syndicated from Ad Exchanger.