TV Dinner

A raft of new YouTube ad products highlights the importance of OTT and skinny pay-TV services in its strategy. For the first time, advertisers will be able to target YouTube television screen inventory, just as they can choose to exclusively buy tablet, desktop or smartphone traffic. Another innovation coming out this summer is an audience category called “Light TV Viewers” who consume TV programming but mostly online or streaming. That audience segment is “particularly interesting to advertisers who are trying to reach audiences that have become very hard to find on conventional TV,” YouTube’s managing director Debbie Weinstein tells Variety. Later this year, Google will also start packaging some YouTube TV content, which so far has been ad-free, into its Google Preferred premium video inventory.

“Can Someone Google GDPR?”

Some DoubleClick for Publisher customers are irked by Google’s assertion of itself as a data controller under GDPR, giving the tech company wider powers over publisher data and consent contracts. “Your proposal severely falls short on many levels,” four publisher trade associations representing about 4,000 media companies wrote in a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai Sunday. Publishers can move to a Google competitor, “but Google’s network is unrivaled in size and can often generate more revenue for publishers than rival networks can,” Reuters reports. Google is also making things harder on the demand side in the name of GDPR compliance, sharply limiting use of the DoubleClick ID for cross-platform reporting and measurement. 

Automating Automation

Marketing automation platform Marketo has acquired Bizible, which ties online and offline sales to media investments. Marketo calls the deal its largest acquisition to date – but didn’t disclose terms. Marketo is also building on its partnership with Google Cloud to improve audience segmentation and lookalike modeling based on a customer’s historical lead conversion patterns, leveraging Google’s considerable machine learning technology.

Hostile Environment

Facebook’s F8 conference kicks off tomorrow, and developers have their claws out. Over the past month, Facebook has had limited access to how much user data developers can take from its platform and paused approving new apps and messenger bots in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That’s had a serious impact on some developers who depend on this kind of  data from Facebook to run their businesses. "They're declaring war on developers, and we've done nothing wrong," an anonymous developer told Business Insider. "There could be a lot of unhappy developers next week throwing tomatoes at Mr. Zuckerberg."