Amazon expands media footprint with iHeart sales deal and new TV outcome tool 

Amazon is pushing deeper into the middle of TV and audio ad deals, rolling out a new measurement tool for streamers while tapping iHeartMedia’s 1,000-plus sellers to put its streaming inventory on more media plans. 

In the past week, iHeartMedia has expanded its relationship with Amazon Ads to resell inventory across Twitch, Amazon Music, Fire TV and Alexa, on top of the Prime video slots it already resells. At the same time, Amazon has launched Outcome Optimizer, a tool that uses Amazon’s shopping, browsing and streaming data to tune programmatic guaranteed campaigns in Freewheel, with media partners including Warner Bros. Discovery and A+E Global Media using it at launch, according to Sharmilan Rayer, director of Amazon Publisher Cloud. 

Together, the two moves mark the latest step in Amazon’s years-long push to build direct data-driven ties with premium publishers – and to sit at the center of both how TV and audio inventory is sold and how its performance is measured. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

,Read More

Nike versus Adidas: who’s winning the World Cup’s brand head to head?

For competing apparel brands Nike and Adidas, the World Cup is a golden opportunity, but one that finds the rivals in very different positions.

An apparent recovery last October, when revenues increased 1% amid a tough trading environment, turned out to be something of a false dawn for Nike. Its most recent set of results (published March 31) showed flat revenues and shrinking gross margins.

While Nike’s leadership attempts to turn the ship around, its old rival Adidas sees an opportunity to close the gap internationally, and grow its business in the U.S. CEO Bjørn Gulden told investors in March, during its fourth-quarter earnings call, that Adidas aimed to double the size of its American business – and gun for the No. 1 spot everywhere else. The company enjoyed improving margins and revenues rose 14% during that quarter.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

,Read More