The Federal Trade Commission this morning issued an antitrust clearance for Verizon's $6.25-billion acquisition of Tracfone Wireless from América Móvil.

The companies reached the agreement, which includes $3.125 billion in cash and $3.125 billion in stock, in mid September. 

TracPhone has 21 million subscribers. The phones can be purchased at Walmart and Best Buy. Users get their own TracPhone plan, but they choose any wireless company to connect, reported Marketing Daily. Thirteen million choose Verizon; the other eight million get their service through Cricket (owned by AT&T) or Metro, owned by T-Mobile.

Verizon is the nation's No. 1 wireless carrier, with 120 million subscribers, but has just four million prepaid customers of its own, compared to AT&T's 18 million and T-Mobile's 21.5 million. Adding TracFone will make Verizon the prepaid leader. 

Lead Liaison is offering B2B prospect and company data through a widget on its Sales Enablement platform. 

The firm’s new DataSpring module provides access to almost 10 million company profiles and 400 million contacts, it says. 

These can drive marketing via mobile, email, website and offline channels through the firm's Revenue Generation Software.

DataSpring will be available on November 30 with any Sales Enablement license, the company says.  Data is searchable with such filtering options as job title, location and industry and profiles.

In addition, such data can be added to the user’s CRM and sales enablement workflows. 

DataSpring is compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PDPA, the firm says.

Mobile measurement and marketing company AppsFlyer has announced an investment from Salesforce Ventures that the company says gives it a $2 billion valuation. 

The venture funding arm of cloud company Salesforce joined a roster of investors in a late stage extension of its series D round led by General Atlantic earlier this year. In January, AppsFlyer raised $210 million at a $1.6 billion valuation in a fourth round of funding. At that time it had raised more than $294 million.

AppsFlyer aims to measure mobile ad spending and collect data in a privacy-compliant way.

Salesforce Ventures’ latest investment supports AppsFlyer’s focus on becoming a customer-focused, privacy-first attribution company.

The new funding comes as shifts in privacy policies and regulations take hold.

While the investment signals the advertising industry’s growing reliance on mobile attribution data, Apple plans to make ad tracking much more difficult as it retires Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) to increase user privacy. Consumers will need to opt into being tracked, rather than opt out.

Google also will stop supporting third-party cookies in 2021. And advertising insiders are convinced the federal government under president elect Joe Biden will see a national consumer privacy standards for the United States.

About 73% of the 171 marketers participating in an AppsFlyer survey expect there will be a negative impact of Apple's IDFA changes for iOS 14 on their campaigns and apps -- losing about half of identifiers under Apple's opt-in protocol.

Targeting, measurement and attribution will be the most challenging factors. The survey was conducted in September 2020.

Many marketers are not at all familiar with the Apple's plans. When AppsFlyer asked marketers how familiar they are with Apple's IDFA and iOS 14 announcement, only 6% of respondents said they are extremely familiar. Some 57% said they are either somewhat familiar or very familiar, and 37% said they are either not very familiar or not familiar at all.

Overall, AppsFlyer has raised more than $300 million in funding -- expanding to 1,000 employees globally, and exceeding about $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). 

The company supports about 12,000 brands such as Macy's, Minecraft, Nike, NBC Universal, Tencent, US Bank, Wayfair, and StitchFix.

The company’s marketplace reaches more than 8,000 partners including Facebook, Google, Apple Search Ads, Twitter, TikTok Ads, Pinterest, Snap, Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle.

With mobile app usage rising rapidly since the pandemic and ad spend following, a new campaign aims to position ESPN’s app — the world’s No. 1 sports app — to maximize its momentum in 2021 and beyond.

The campaign, “One App, One Tap,” debuted Sunday night during ABC’s airing of the 2020 American Music Awards.

A 60-second ad (below), from the BSSP agency, spotlights the recently refreshed app’s capabilities and content offerings — including the ESPN+ streaming service — amid clips of sports action and ESPN personalities, with vocals by popular performance artist Chika.

Despite the pandemic-forced suspensions and truncated seasons for major sports, this has been a banner year for the ESPN app.

According to Comscore, through October, the app leads its next-closest competitor by 244% in average unique visitors ad 98% in viewing minutes per month. The app has led in uniques for 32 consecutive months, peaking in January with a category record of 117.4 million (up 16% year-over-year), and the largest category share (58%).

The ESPN app also saw its best streaming month to date in September, according to Adobe Analytics data cited by ESPN. Total unique devices and time spent viewing were each up 15% YoY. That was driven by ESPN+ — whose subscribers tripled during the past year, to 10.3 million, helped by being bundled, with Hulu, in the Disney+ package — and by authenticated pay-TV unique devices, which rose by 26% in September and are at a record high.

Although a paid service ($5.99 per month or $49.99 annually, outside of the $12.99 Disney+ bundle), ESPN+ has always included ads, including in live sports streams and, as of October 2019, started including pre-roll ads in video clips.

With cord-cutting rates continuing to rise and the major sports hiatuses, linear TV sports ratings have declined. But consumers have shifted to mobile and other connected devices, and the sports and media industries are hoping for a return to normal seasons next year.

At the same time, App Annie reports that globally, average mobile time-spent hit 4 hours and 20 minutes during the pandemic (up 20% versus 2019), and that overall time spent in apps grew 25% YoY during Q3. Further, the mobile data and analytics platform projects that, facilitated by mobile, time-spent on "at-home" activities including streaming, food delivery, shopping, fitness, education, finance and business apps, will mushroom by 43%, to top 1.3 trillion hours, in 2021.

Result: Worldwide mobile ad spending will reach $290 billion next year, representing a two-year CAGR of 21%, App Annie estimates.

All of which — along with parent Walt Disney Co.’s strategic focus on digital and streaming — explains ESPN’s eagerness to maximize its app’s user base as the new year approaches.

U.S. advertising and marketing spending will fall 7.1% this year to $494.23 billion, according to a new forecast released today by media industry economists PQ Media. That's a steeper rate of decline than the 6.8% decline global advertising and marketing spending is projected to sustain, though most of the world's markets have experienced a significant impact from the global COVID-19 pandemic.

“While the economic damage wrought by the pandemic will squelch a decade-long expansion of the media economy this year, the emergence of new advertising and marketing opportunities in streaming video and audio, mobile gaming and apps, social media and influencer marketing, and digital product placement, content marketing and virtual events are expected to hasten the industry’s recovery going forward,” PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn said in a statement released with the new report, which projects the global advertising and marketing economy will fall to $1.278 trillion, it's lowest volume since 2017.

Advertising's share will erode faster than the overall marketing industry, declining 7% worldwide to $583.71 billion, while all other areas of marketing spending will fall 6.6% to $694.23 billion.

PQ projects the global advertising and marketing economy will rebound in 2021, expanding 5.9% from 2020, driven mainly by the accelerating of digital media, which will grow at nearly twice the rate (11.3%) of the overall market expansion.

UZE Mobility, a mobile marketplace platform for out-of-home advertising, has debuted in the United States. The company was founded by mobility expert Alexander Jablovski, a veteran in the automotive industry who worked at Daimler AG and is expert in mobility.

Cindy Jeffers, former chief executive officer and chief technology officer of Salon Media Group, will serve as U.S. president and chief operating officer. She’s also worked for the Media Group at the Huffington Post.

“I’ve always been excited by big challenges,” she said, adding that she leaned to code software at the age of eight. “I like standing at the bottom of the mountain looking up, trying to figure out how to get there.”

The company believes advertisers can offset the cost of deliveries by allowing brands to buy media online, run campaigns, and produce reports that support performance. Jeffers said in the U.S. there are more than 17 million commercial vehicles. The idea is to make advertising less expensive to buy by putting the ads on commercial vehicles.

The platform was built to allow online advertisers to port their creative from online to out-of-home and manage all types of media together. The real-time reporting would allow marketers to adjust budgets as needed. The marketplace software is intended to connect with the platforms of advertising agencies, SSPs, and DSPs, deploying the creatives to the displays out in the field. 

The displays have the ability to gather data through sensors, giving UZE the ability to change target in real-time. Advertisers can set up parameters and targeting, adjusting budgets and for where vehicles are running in real-time based on factors like time of day and weather. 

Pampers, which is marketed by Procter & Gamble, wanted to target advertisements in residential areas and new developments in Germany, where UZE Mobility initially launched, but couldn’t find the billboards to advertise on. They discovered DHL ran the routes in those neighborhoods, so they connected with the carrier to put the display on one of their delivery vans.

Jeffers sees the possibilities in mobility through UZE’s technology, which relies on artificial intelligence and sensor technology.

Mobile advertising provides a different opportunity through digital signs to reach consumers through fleet companies and other types of delivery drivers. Using proprietary advanced sensor technology and artificial intelligence, advertisers can personalize, target and adapt ads in real-time using granular anonymized user and environmental data.

The company initially launched in Germany, where UZE partnered with Hövding, for to promote their mobile airbag for bikers. After running a bike with a large screen through bike lanes in Berlin, Hövding saw web sales jump to 38%. 

Adele Martens at Century21 Real Estate, an early UZE client, said real estate sales increased 20% after working with UZE for only two months.

UZE began offering the service in Manhattan, with plans to expand across the U.S.

Over a two-week period, since November 10, TVision has had 28 TV commercial airings, with $3.35 million in total national TV spend, according to iSpot.tv.

Much of its effort has been around sports TV programming --- with eight airings for NFL football, six on college football, two on SEC football, two on ESPN’s “SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt” and one on the ABC’s “American Music Awards.”

T-Mobile’s main package -- TVision Live -- offers more than 30 TV networks for $40 a month, which feature major broadcast and cable networks with emphasis on sports and news content.

In addition, the initial TVision announcement also offered T-Mobile Vibe -- with 33 cable TV network channels for an additional $10 a month.

In response, executives from TV network groups with sizable cable networks --such as Discovery, and reportedly from ViacomCBS -- accused T-Mobile of being in breach of contract, saying their networks should not be separated from its main TVision Live package.

In result of that criticism, and as part of a holiday deal announcement offer released last week, T-Mobile now says that for a limited time, 33 TVision Vibe channels will be included at no cost for those buying its TVision Live package.

There is much chatter about online buying, for everything from paper towels to luxury goods. But there is one product area that also deserves our notice, perhaps the most essential -- groceries. 

Of the consumers who began ordering groceries online during the COVID-19 pandemic, 75.8% will continue to do so after the crisis, according to The AI opportunity For Grocery Ecommerce, a study by Clinch, a personalization platform.

Overall, 75.5% of consumers buy groceries online, and 80% are ordering more than they did pre-pandemic.

There’s no great mystery as to why this is happening. 

The pandemic caused a decline in in-store shopping, and accelerated online usage by existing shoppers, while bringing in new audiences — i.e., “older demographics who had a toe dipped in digital, but were accustomed to offline, non-digital experiences,” the study notes. 

The meaning is clear for grocery purveyors: They need AI-driven email systems that can shoot out personalized promotions at scale, and triggered programs for confirmations, alerts and delivery updates.  

Major outfits like FreshDirect have such capabilities, but smaller grocery firms may not. And they need them because they have been hard-hit by the pandemic.  

Grocery retailers also need finely tailored messaging. 

The study found that nearly 65% want incentives based on past purchases. In addition, 38.35% seek new and different products. 

Moreover, 31% desire a product coupon and discount and 20% want same-day delivery and/or curbside pickup.

When it comes to content, 30.64% want to see messages that focus on safety and cleanliness, and 20.86% favor ads that make food look delicious. 

“Consumers need an online experience that fits their unique need — this could be a compelling price discount, or an ad that shows them their favorite chocolate-chip cookie, right as that 4 p.m. snacking hour rolls around,” states Oz Etzioni, CEO of Clinch.

Mobile is the main ordering channel, utilized by 60% of grocery shoppers. Only 33% use desktop/laptop, and 7% voice assistants 

Consumers have a more omnichannel preferences when it comes to advertising:

• TV commercials — 37.9%
• Ads on Facebook — 28.2% 
• Streaming TV commercials — 26.69%
• Ads on Instagram — 24.87% 
• Ads on YouTube — 23.31%
• Direct mail — 19.17%
• Non ecommerce websites — 18.05%

And email?

“With an increasingly diverse and fragmented userbase, it is critical for grocery retailers to connect with their customers across a variety of platforms and channels,”  Etizioni says. 

 Etzioni adds, “We're seeing the most profound campaign performance coming from advertisers who take an omnichannel approach and leverage the right data and analysis to execute the right ad sequencing. Email can be a powerful extension of sequential messaging and establishing relevancy."

Etzioni concludes, “Brands need a solid 1st party data (CRM) that is continuously enriched with relevant insights in order to best nurture communication with their consumers and maintain brand loyalty.”