Walled gardens are everywhere; Disney introduces an ad funded model
This is the FirstPartyCapital weekly newsletter. It covers news and updates about the FirstPartyCapital fund and its portfolio companies.
Walled gardens are the new reality
ITV released positive results this week: pre-tax profits rose 48 per cent to £480million in 2021 as it took in record advertising revenues of £1.96billion, a 24 per cent increase on 2020..
Clearly, the ITV walled garden is WINNING. Quality ad-funded content is finite - so they can easily operate this as a siloed entity. Numbers don't lie. The industry needs to get comfortable with this new walled garden reality.
The next big move is going to be audience aggregation, segmentation and activation all being done via sell-side clean rooms. It's going to be impossible to activate and scale from buy-side clean rooms via an ID or some hacked fingerprinting proposition.
Interoperability is going to be key between clean rooms. The power is very much with the sell-side, people.
FirstPartyCapital continues to invest in startups tackling the big problems affecting publishers, agencies and marketers.
And just in case you thought we were exaggerating, here comes another walled garden…
Disney announced this week that it is rolling out its own walled garden built around a proprietary ad stack, premium content and first party data. The objective is to take on Google, Amazon and Meta.
The company has been building its own stack since 2017, tying to a “Disney ID”. The company is currently using Google ad server but is looking to move off it in the coming 12 months (music to our ears).
The question you need to be asking yourself now is how to I manage this sea of walled gardens. How do I measure? How do I optimiSe? Good questions. Look no further than our portfolio.
FirstPartyCapital has made investments in clean rooms, attention-based measurement, CTV measurement and contextual. All of these are going to be necessary to knit together all this fragmentation. It’s a mess out there. But where there is chaos, there is opportunity.
Standing with Ukraine
The tragedy unfolding in Ukraine has shocked people across the world. Russia’s unlawful invasion of a sovereign nation has left many of us powerless (including our governments).
We hope sanctions will have an impact, but Putin seems happy to let the Russian people suffer, and live in ignorance.
There is not much anyone can do about the former, but a group of ad people in Ukraine are trying to address the latter.
Ukrainian ad experts have formed a volunteer group targeting ads to Russia and Belarus, looking to address misinformation being spread by the two autocratic governments.
It’s hard to know if it is having any effect, but it’s still good to see the people in this industry standing up against this type of tyranny.
Deals Live On The FirstPartyCapital Platform
Evorra: The perfect application of “clean room” technology to a real world problem, moving a $200 billion data market into the privacy-first era …
Passendo: The leading category tech vendor in the email ad server space that just raised a pre-series A €2.3 million round …
The FirstPartyCapital fund: A $15 million fund investing in the next wave of innovative ad tech, martech and digital media startups, predominantly at the seed stage…