Consumers are frustrated by intrusive or invasive ad experiences, and they’re concerned about how advertisers use their data. Here’s how consumers perceive their ad experiences across media channels, how they avoid ads, and how brands, advertisers, and publishers are responding.

Traditionally, linear TV ad buys have used content as a proxy for audience characteristics. Field Garthwaite, co-founder and CEO at video data firm iris.tv, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss bringing content signals to video advertising, where typically targeting has been based only on audience characteristics or the context of a webpage—which may not match with the content of the video itself.

For content execs, it’s all about clicks

When Blink Fitness had to temporarily close its doors at the height of the pandemic, the company quickly shifted its focus to where consumers were: online.

Internet memes are not a new phenomenon, but the events of 2020 have spurred their consumption. Despite their popularity among social media users, marketing with memes can still be a risky business for brands.

When asked about their priorities for the year in SEMRush’s “State of Content Marketing” report, the most popular answer, with 79% of marketers agreeing, was generating quality leads.

Ecommerce monetization opportunities for publishers are expanding. Publisher revenues from ecommerce now include commissions and fees generated from affiliate or partner marketing content, curated ecommerce marketplaces, and branded merchandise.

Per an image in Facebook’s blog post, these ads are apparently embedded within VR experiences, not unlike ads in traditional video games. The addition of targeted ads could help Facebook monetize VR and loosen Oculus’ dependence on Facebook’s more profitable ventures. Despite dominating the consumer VR market, Oculus has yet to truly monetize its growing platform.

The news: Danish fintech Pleo raised $150 million in a Series C round, valuing the startup at $1.7 billion, per a company blog post. More about the company: Pleo operates a platform that aims to simplify expense management. It offers spending cards for employees that automatically itemize purchases according to their company’s internal accounting systems.

The news: The UK-based insurtech launched building and contents insurance for homeowners—expanding its product suite beyond renters insurance, which it introduced in 2019 and which costs as little as £5 ($6.40), per a company blog post. Urban Jungle raised £8 million ($10.26 million) in June, and revealed that it has a customer base of 40,000 (up from 20,000 in June 2020).

He often speaks at industry events and contributes to the company’s blog. Before ChannelAdvisor, Link worked at Art.com, and as a management consultant for companies in finance, strategy, and organizational design. Moderator:. Suzy Davidkhanian is an eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, covering retail and ecommerce.