The relationship with Samba is notable, as media companies such as NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery have turned to other measurement players such as iSpot.tv and VideoAmp, respectively. The new breed of players has cropped up as the industry looks beyond Nielsen’s traditional measurement panels, with the aim to scale new currencies and accurately capture programming and advertising audience data and impact in a viewing world that’s increasingly fragmented across streaming and traditional platforms.

According to ad tracker iSpot, in September AbbVie spent $29.8 million on auto-immune drug Rinvoq; Regeneron and Sanofi spent $29.4 million on autoimmune drug Dupixent; AbbVie spent $19.8 million on autoimmune drug Skyrizi; Pfizer paid $16.7 million for its Comirnaty COVID vaccine ad.

Every weekday we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company.

“The ice-free period is about three to four weeks longer than it used to be in the 1980s already. And what this translates to is less time hunting for polar bears and less nutrition for them,” Polar Bears International staff scientist Alysa McCall told Earther in 2022. “The worst-case scenario, of course, is that a human gets injured or killed by a polar bear. And while that’s rare, it does happen.”

In today’s digital landscape, consumers have quickly become the driving force of how businesses conduct their marketing and customer-facing operations. As such, it is essential that brands stay abreast of consumer expectations in order to keep up with the changing times.

To help marketers navigate consumers’ changing viewpoints, Marigold — the newly relaunched global relationship marketing pioneer (formerly CM Group) — today released new research that uncovers what consumers expect from the brands they do business with online, the channels they want to connect on and the data they are prepared to share in exchange for more personalized experiences.

One obvious obstacle to the expansion of Samsung TV Plus is that some other smart TV manufacturers have already launched their own content platforms, LG and Vizio being notable examples. The big opportunity for Samsung would presumably be to embed its platform with high penetration Chinese firms like TCL.

What started as an app for teens and young adults became more mainstream among older adults, especially during the pandemic. The company is also attracting a broader following by inking deals with TV manufacturers – including Vizio, Samsung and LG – and streaming services Android TV and Amazon’s Fire TV.

Free Ad-Supported TV (FAST) channels are poised to capture a dominant share of ad spend by 2027, yet at the same time there remains a concern that as TV viewing shifts from linear to streaming, ad dollars may not follow.

These seemingly contradictory findings appear in a new report from research firm TVREV, “FASTs Are the New Cable Part 2: Advertising,” which concludes that the shift of advertising to streaming is “still not guaranteed,” despite huge tailwinds in its favor.

In 2018, Polar Bears International helped the Association of Zoos and Aquariums establish the Polar Bear Research Council. The council, made up of zoo experts and polar bear researchers, is focused on keeping research up to date on emerging scientific questions about bears in the wild. The latest polar bear research master plan was completed last year.

Every weekday we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company. (Scroll down to watch them all.)

A few highlights: An office intern named Sasha learns how to master “the Dunkin’ run.” Apple hypes Apple TV+ with a little help from Timothée Chalamet. (Ad Age’s Alexandra Jardine has the backstory: “Timothée Chalamet has Apple TV+ envy.”) And John Cena does a little song and dance for Experian Boost.

“Outside of the most popular handful of titles, precious little information about streaming series ever makes it beyond need-to-know circles within media companies,” says Rick Porter at The Hollywood Reporter. “Media conglomerates and ad buyers began to get more aggressive about finding alternative data streams to serve their needs.”

The NFL pulled in an estimated $1.1 billion in national TV advertising revenue, offering marketers 17.7 billion impressions, according to iSpot.tv.

National TV revenue a year ago amounted to $1.2 billion, with total impressions at 26.2 billion. The top paid advertisers were Verizon ($50.6 million), Progressive Insurance ($36.7 million), Chevrolet ($25.40 million) and Geico ($25.35 million).

A FAST would also help Netflix crack price-sensitive international markets, said Alan Wolk, cofounder at analyst group TVREV. "It's inevitable," he said. "We're at a point now where more people watch streaming than broadcast or cable. Cable and broadcast have been propped up by carriage and retrans fees, and they carry it over to the consumer. Streamers don't have that. As a result, they need that ad revenue."

As we all know, customer retention costs far less than customer acquisition. When it comes to cutting costs, you can only save so much. But there's no limit to how much you can earn. So, if past recessions are any indication, the smartest strategy is to focus on your most loyal customers and super-serve them with personalized offers, experiences and rewards.

Brands are recognizing the power of a membership program for growing and maintaining a loyal audience. A strong cross-channel marketing platform that automates the delivery of personalized experiences to members can make all the difference, as Flaviar and Caskers discovered.

With the SXM App, Vizio Smart TV users can stream Howard Stern’s two exclusive channels; the new original comedy channel Team Coco Radio, executive produced by Conan O’Brien; more than 330 channels of ad-free music; podcasts; live sports and sports talk; entertainment; news; comedy and more.

Over the past two years, spending for the four cryptocurrency advertisers has followed a classic bell curve. According to national TV ad spending data supplied by iSpot in February 2022 (when Super Bowl LVI was televised), FTX, Coinbase, Crypto.com and eToro reached a high water as estimated ad spending reached $84.3 million. Over the last six months of 2022 the four companies invested only $8 million in TV ads, slightly more than the cost of one Super Bowl ad.

Global warming could mean more polar bear attacks.
The killing of an Alaska mother and her 1-year-old son by a polar bear last week suggests that scarcity caused by global warming is raising the risk of attacks by the Arctic bears, The Washington Post reported. “Animals in poor body condition are just more likely to take risks, and those are the bears specifically that people have to be worried about,” Geoff York of Polar Bears International told the Post.

“Music fills my head at all times,” Rodger shared on his Songtradr account. “It helps me cope with life. I have always had a great love for music. 28 years ago, I was a 28-year-old frustrated male. I was trying to make sense of the world around me. The dating scene was (is I imagine) quite confusing. I also needed to learn how to apply my BSEE degree as that is what turned out to pay the bills in my journey of life.”

Today, CM Group CEO Wellford Dillard introduced Marigold, which brings together the company’s global, cross-channel email and martech solutions, technologies and services under one brand. Marigold’s offerings are united by a singular mission and focus: to deliver world-class relationship marketing solutions that enable customers around the world to grow, scale and future-proof their businesses. Customers are already benefiting from the collective power and force multiplication of Marigold’s full-solution portfolio, which is accelerating innovation across all Marigold products and making market-leading developments available to customers faster.