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ASX-listed privacy-focused baby pic sharing app Tinybeans spent years languishing under $0.08 a share. But it got a kick last month when James Warburton joined as a NED. The former Seven chief’s arrival was followed by Fatherly’s US-based co-founder and investor, Mike Rothman. The two “operators” are seen as category-connected muscle that’ll help the app find a viable way forward to profitability. But it must get marketing, product, team, strategy and operational efficiencies right – and avoid falling into the trap of relying on ad revenue. No small feat. But a year into the gig CEO Zsofi Paterson has made some major calls on business model, strategy and flipped performance for brand  investment while replacing the sales team wholesale and bringing on micro – or tiny – influencers. Paterson, Warburton and Rothman see growing pain relief ahead.

Artificially constructed Australian YouTube viewers, known as synthetic audiences, have provided the breakthrough for YouTube to finally subject itself to an independent research currency, joining OzTAM’s VPM data for BVOD in the digital audience currency run by the IAB and Ipsos. Although still based on log level data supplied by YouTube across its self-selected top 100 viewed channels, Australia is the first market outside the US where the video giant is muscling up against broadcaster digital audiences and potentially other streaming services for a single view on connected TV viewing. Ipsos also flagged its interest in cross-media measurement, a long-held ambition of advertisers globally who see efficiency gains by eradicating duplicated reach and frequency of audiences across different publishers and channels. Emerging measurement players like Adgile and Beatgrid are gaining momentum here via their cross-media measurement capabilities – Beatgrid, for instance, has been working with the likes of UM and Kmart and Virgin and PHD to develop custom cross-media measurement reporting with a methodology that captures viewing data on the walled gardens and platforms independent of their self-reported figures. 

Part Two: After last week’s instalment with S4 Capital’s founder and former WPP boss, Sir Martin Sorrell – in which he explained why the market cap of his next generation marketing services firm had plummeted from £5 billion to £300 million in the past three years – he’s back for part two. We cover the consolidation of the $700 billion global digital ad market down to a handful of global tech media players. Is that dangerous for brands and the broader marketing supply chain? Maybe, but Sir Martin thinks they’re only going to get bigger. Plus, we go deeper into AI and mass personalisation – Netflix style – along with the dodgy, inaccurate, but thriving online user data trade that was revealed a month or so ago by UM’s former chief privacy officer, Arielle Garcia (which is now Mi3’s top podcast and story so far this year). For the record, Sorrell agrees with Garcia: “Garbage in, garbage out … There are some murky parts of the market, but that’s our role to expose that, not to be a part of it.” Either way, he thinks the platforms will only get closer to marketers at the expense of intermediaries – and there is little agencies can do to stop it. Plus, he says OpenAI chief Sam Altman, who reckons AI will displace 95 per cent of advertising jobs, is “directionally right”. The timeframe? “Three years,” per Sorrell. “It’s going to be uncomfortable.” Conversely, Sorrell says the big platforms won’t be shrinking any time soon. On a GDP basis, “these are countries, they are not companies anymore.” He thinks that means regulation, unless co-ordinated globally, is ultimately powerless.