U of Digital Newsletter - 1/8/25 (premium)

Author

Shiv Gupta
January 08, 2025

December 24th-January 7th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Happy New Year! Lots of newly announced partnerships to talk about in this first edition. But first, we’ll kick things off with big news out of Disney…

StackAdapt’s 2025 Unfiltered: No-Nonsense Insights for Marketers Webinar will be moderated by U of Digital’s Shiv Gupta! Join to hear industry experts share predictions & insights for the year ahead.

Top Story 👁️ 

Summary: In a surprise deal, Disney will launch a new virtual multichannel video provider (vMVPD) offering by combining its Hulu + Live TV business with Fubo. Disney will become the majority owner of the new company with a 70% stake and choose a majority of the board. Fubo's CEO David Gandler and management team will run the combined business, which will continue to be traded publicly under the Fubo name. Fubo will drop its lawsuit against the Venu sports streaming service planned by Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Key points of the deal include:

• Consumers will still be able to access Fubo and Hulu + Live TV as separate offerings. Hulu will still be available as part of the Disney bundle. Fubo will handle carriage negotiations on behalf of the services.

• Fubo will be able to offer a less expensive bundle that includes ESPN and ABC, similar to Venu's offering. Venu will still launch.

• Hulu + Live TV and Fubo will have a combined 6.2M subscribers in North America, compared to 8M subscribers for YouTube TV.

• Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery will pay Fubo $220M. Disney will provide Fubo with a $145M term loan. Fubo will receive a $130M termination fee if the deal fails to go through under certain circumstances.

As Disney neutralizes the Fubo lawsuit and paves the way for Venu, the company is also making it easier for brands to buy its live sports inventory programmatically. Disney announced a new certification program🔒 at CES this week that will let advertisers buy Disney inventory through Google’s Display and Video 360, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo in real time. Supply-side platform Magnite will also participate in the program.

Also at CES, the company released Disney Compass, a new ad product that gives advertisers access to data from VideoAmp, Affinity Solutions, LiveRamp, Snowflake, and eventually other identity and measurement vendors. The tool aims to help buyers more quickly compile reports from various data vendors so they can compare reach across multiple campaigns and optimize against their business goals.

Opinion: Guess 2025 really is going to be the “Year of Streaming”, huh? We’re starting the year off with a big streaming deal! (and yes, we agree, it’s confusing af.)

This deal tells us a few things right off the bat:

  • Live sports streaming is the hottest advertising commodity, and everyone wants a piece of it. Disney and friends REALLY wanted to move forward with Venu and did so by ponying up for Fubo. (And did you see Netflix’s NFL debut broke the record for a streaming NFL game, with more than 24M domestic viewers?)

  • The vMVPD market is going to heat up and get more competitive, given its live angle and YouTube TV’s success.

  • We’re still in the “early days” of streaming, because there’s no way all these various mish-moshed apps and different price points withstand consumers’ desire for simplicity.

Our prediction: There will eventually be a standalone vMVPD Fubo & Hulu + Live TV app (with new branding). There will also be a separate, standalone Disney+ & Hulu app. Consumers will be able to buy these apps separately or bundle them together for a discount.

Once there is some streamlining, this deal will be great for consumers and for the digital ad industry. More players and more content (especially live sports) are coming to streaming, which means better products and more ad dollars for everyone.

Kudos to Disney for its creativity in getting this deal done so it can move forward with Venu while also bringing Fubo into its mix. Disney continues to lead!

Other Notable Headlines ✍️

Comcast to launch Universal Ads in bid to win smaller advertisers over from tech - Comcast has partnered with Paramount, Roku, Fox Corp. and other media companies for the launch of Universal Ads, its new TV ad platform designed to help smaller businesses buy premium video ads just as easily as from social media platforms. Comcast hopes Universal Ads, built using FreeWheel's tech, will attract the small and medium-sized businesses that make up the bread-and-butter customer base of Google, Meta, and other social media platforms. The platform will launch in Q1, and there are plans to eventually offer free AI tools to help advertisers also produce the ads. TV advertising for SMBs is a hot, up-and-coming sector!

Roku's Clean Room Evolves Into Its New Form - Roku's new product will help advertisers access more detailed streaming TV data through Innovid, iSpot, Omnicom's Omni platform and PMG's Alli platform. A Yahoo DSP integration is also in the works for the second half of the year. Advertisers accessing the Roku Data Cloud won't have to pay any subscription fees for the service, which is built on Roku's robust automatic content recognition (ACR) data set, first-party signals from its 90M households, and sign-ups and purchases in Roku's OS. Advertisers can use Roku's ACR feed to build audience segments based on their viewing behavior or mine Roku's OS data for demographic information. Roku hopes the Data Cloud can help targetability for CTV at scale and improve performance.

TikTok's North American Ad Chief Steps Down as Ban Nears🔒 - Sameer Singh joined ByteDance in 2019 and will leave TikTok at the end of February. His departure comes as the short-form social video company faces a U.S. ban due to take effect on Jan. 19, barring action from the U.S. Supreme Court, which is scheduled to hear arguments about the ban on Jan. 10. Singh has been pivotal in helping TikTok manage its North American ad business as the company faced uncertainty in the U.S. and Canada because of national security concerns. Singh helped TikTok deal with the fallout from getting banned in India in 2020 and helped the platform expand in Brazil and South America. The company said in an internal memo that Singh would return to India at the end of the month. Should the ban go through, Lemon8, which is TikTok's sister app, has been running sponsored posts on TikTok to nudge users into migrating to Lemon8. 

Omnicom Media Group hits CES with a blitz of search-related partnerships, starting with Google🔒- OMG's new partnership with Google includes a planning tool called Share of Voice and the AI-powered Next Generation Search Agent. Share of Voice uses Google’s Gemini AI to show advertisers demand for their products versus competitors and recommends how and where they should expand or optimize their campaigns. The Next Generation Search Agent takes those insights and provides investment, creative, and targeting recommendations. OMG also unveiled a separate partnership between its Flywheel unit and Amazon Ads that will give advertisers access to five years of shopping data🔒, up from 13 months currently. The purchase data and Next Generation Search Agent will be available through Omnicom’s platform called Omni.

Experian Launches Its First-Ever Third-Party Data Marketplace - Experian's new third-party data marketplace, announced at CES, aims to provide reliable third-party data to supplement first-party data and support ad campaigns. It's mostly a TV advertising product and can be used to help forecast audience ratings. The marketplace builds on Experian Third-Party Onboarding, a data onboarding service it launched last summer. For that product, Experian onboarded data from vendors and matched them to its identity graph, inspiring the company to turn it into a "full-fledged marketplace where audiences from other data partners will be accessible.” Data vendors Attain, Circana, Dun & Bradstreet, and Alliant will be part of the new marketplace at launch. Sounds like a … DMP?

YouTuber LegalEagle sues PayPal over 'sleeping leech' Honey extension - The lawyer behind the LegalEagle YouTube channel claims PayPal's Honey browser extension is diverting affiliate marketing revenue for transactions that should be credited to the YouTuber who posted the affiliate link. Honey’s value prop to consumers is that it automatically applies discount codes to online purchases. PayPal bought Honey for $4B in 2019 and incentivizes content creators to promote the extension to their audiences. Attorney Devin Stone says that if a viewer has installed Honey and makes a purchase, the extension will substitute its own affiliate link, even if it doesn't provide any discount, crediting it for the sale. Another YouTuber called MegaLag made similar accusations last month. The story is bringing lots of attention to the flaws of last-click attribution.

Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓 

Horizon Taps Agency/Media Vet Lord As First 'Holdings' President - Bob Lord, formerly of IBM and AOL, will report to Horizon founder and CEO Bill Koenigsberg in what may signal a potential succession plan.

Precise TV Secures $26 Million PE Investment - Contextual intelligence platform Precise TV has been self-funded until now, other than a smaller angel investment in 2016.

Google Ads plans major AI Push in 2025, reshaping search marketing - Google will focus on AI-powered creative tools for marketers, cross-channel measurement, and how search behavior will evolve beyond keywords.

VideoAmp offers advertisers free data amid Nielsen-Paramount standoff🔒- VideoAmp is letting advertisers use its national linear content ratings dashboard for free through March 31 to help offset any costs from Nielsen’s recent restrictions on Paramount's data.

NextRoll and Audigent Launch First Audience Activation Within Google's Privacy Sandbox - The partners announced Audigent Interest Groups on the AdRoll DSP.

Meta is getting rid of fact checkers. Zuckerberg acknowledged more harmful content will appear on the platforms now - The move away from professional fact checkers toward user-generated “community notes” is similar to X's policy, meant to encourage "free expression."

That’s It For This Week 👋

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