Nexxen’s Messaging Is Good. We Should Hear More About It
I often critique adtech companies’ approach to messaging. Earnings calls are an especially revealing and fair forum to perform that criticism because they are necessarily up to date, and they allow the CEO to riff in detail on where the company is headed.
Nexxen’s Q2 earnings call is an example of effective messaging for three reasons:
Each company only gets to be known for one thing. Nexxen is unusual in that they actually seem to have clarity on what this single descriptor is: the advertising platform (DSP/SSP) with unusually deep data capabilities.
They clearly and explicitly differentiate themselves from competitors by leaning into their no. 1 differentiator (data).
They effectively situate themselves within industry developments. They position themselves as offering a solution to the no. 1 trend in adtech, privacy, while also making the case that the most significant recent development related to privacy (Google’s cookie deprecation delay) doesn’t affect the urgency of their solution.
Messaging should meet three objectives:
Clarify what you do and for whom
Differentiate you from competitors
Drive urgency
Nexxen’s earnings call statement is pretty effective at all three. However, a pretty big question remains: are they actually succeeding at bringing this message to the market, and is it believable?
Let’s dive into what the company is doing well and what it could potentially do better.
Be known for a single thing
Most companies try to be known for too many things. This lack of internal clarity translates into a lack of clarity in the market. And that lack of clarity is especially damaging if you’re already operating in a commoditized market such as DSPs and SSPs, which are categories where folks assume there’s no meaningful difference between you and your competitors.
Nexxen’s earnings call statement clearly positions the company as a “full-stack platform” (DSP+SSP) distinguished by its DMP, or its ability to “maximize the value of data to generate better results and returns to customers.” This quote is from the second paragraph of CEO Ofer Druker’s remarks. The third paragraph is as follows:
“Nexxen is placing data firmly at the center of its strategy. Data has historically given Nexxen an advantage over other adtech competitors as our full-stack platform has been unified by a robust data management platform that integrates directly with our DSP and SSP to improve activation.”
I often ask whether a company’s messaging passes the happy hour test. If you ran into another adtech person at an industry happy hour and said you were working with Nexxen and they didn’t know what Nexxen was, could you explain it succinctly? The statement would prompt me to say, “Nexxen is a DSP/SSP. They also have a DMP, and they try to distinguish themselves by leaning into their data capabilities.”
That’s a job well done from a messaging perspective. The message satisfies two of the three messaging objectives: clarifying what the company does for whom and why it’s different from competitors.
Align marketing with product
Talking the talk is one thing. The natural next question is whether the company’s products align with its message. This appears to be the case for Nexxen, as the company’s big recent product announcement is a data platform:
“Nexxen Data Platform [launched in Q2] combines and better unifies all our data assets and applications, resulting in an unrivaled full-stack, end-to-end data offering that has strengthened our competitive positioning and amplified the effectiveness of our solutions. Through Nexxen Data Platform, customers can now directly and securely onboard first-party data. After onboarding, customers can leverage Nexxen Discovery to create audiences, unlock insights, and enrich first-party data.”
Most companies have one or multiple of three marketing problems — awareness, differentiation, or urgency. For well-known DSPs/SSPs like Nexxen, differentiation is usually the big pain point or business problem. Nexxen appears to be attempting to solve that problem through product-marketing alignment around data as a differentiator. Why would you go to Nexxen instead of another DSP/SSP? Because they maximize the value of a brand’s first-party data.
That level of clarity — and product-marketing alignment — is rare in adtech messaging.
Position your success as inevitable within the industry context
Nexxen’s earnings call took place shortly after Google had announced it would kick cookie deprecation back to consumers. Investors might’ve wondered whether the extended availability of third-party cookie data would undermine the urgency of Nexxen’s data-centric strategy. If you’re investing in helping advertisers maximize the value of first-party data, does the prolongment of the third-party cookie diminish the value of that strategy? Again, Nexxen tackles this doubt directly:
“We were well positioned for cookie deprecation, but Google’s recent decision reduces risk and removes an industry overhang. That said, we continue to embrace the industry's need for alternative ID solutions like ours. And our agnostic identity strategy hasn't changed in the wake of Google’s decision, nor has our preparedness for their evolving approach. We have also recently furthered our ID graph's capabilities by partnering with Experian to bring in PII data, which helps customers reduce costs and audience loss in the data onboarding process. … We continue to believe data licensing is the huge long-term growth opportunity for Nexxen.”
This is the right message for adtech companies that have been helping brands and publishers adjust to privacy changes. In essence: “Privacy changes are still moving forward, and they’re a much broader movement than third-party cookies on Chrome. In fact, third-party cookies have already been deprecated on other browsers, and major privacy changes are already the default on mobile. As a result, brands and publishers still need alternative identity solutions as well as the ability to maximize the value of both first- and third-party data. We’ve been building for that future by leaning into data as a differentiator, so we’ll help our customers operate at the forefront of a privacy-adjusted world no matter what Google does.”
Nexxen directly tackled the Google news, which was likely to be top of mind for investors eyeing secular trends, and made the case as to how its data-centric strategy positioned it and its clients for success. This is an approach to industry developments that other companies should emulate. Don’t run from the news; figure out how to capitalize on it.
Caveats and critiques: messages are only as good as their distribution
Despite Nexxen’s successful approach to messaging, two significant challenges stand out to me.
Druker began his remarks by stating that the rebrand to Nexxen had been a success. The success of the name change in particular isn’t entirely clear to me. When I asked on Twitter about Nexxen, no one said they’re the DSP/SSP that is able to take advantage of their DMP to maximize the value of advertisers’ data. In fact, the most-liked comment said “Nexxen” recalls a pharmaceutical product.
I would contend that, contrary to the CEO’s claims of success, the Nexxen brand remains to be defined in the market. The messaging is solid, but the company requires better marketing distribution to align market perception with its latest direction. The success of Criteo’s repositioning is a good story for Nexxen to emulate. Criteo successfully rebranded itself as the leading commerce media platform. Despite an unusually clear and coherent approach to messaging on its Q2 earnings call, Nexxen has not yet established a similar repositioning. How can it?
2. The need for better distribution leads me to a recommendation. I don’t know anything about Nexxen’s marketing strategy apart from what I can observe about its public-facing messaging, but I’d recommend that they make a concerted effort to build a direct relationship with their audience by leaning into first-party communications channels. There is no more efficient path to redefining a company in adtech than becoming a prolific contributor to the community conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter in particular is where you influence the influencers, and if Nexxen can make regular, productively controversial, thought-provoking contributions to the discussion on that platform, the people who set the terms of the industry conversation will start to associate Nexxen with what the CEO is saying — instead of a skincare product (or just one more undifferentiated ad platform). The recent success of Viant’s direct communication strategy is illustrative of the potential here. If Nexxen wants to be known as the DSP/SSP that best helps advertisers maximize the value of customer data, they can achieve it. But they need to be talking about data in the marketplace of ideas in a way that goes beyond traditional distribution methods.
In short, Nexxen’s messaging stands out for its clarity, the apparent alignment between product and messaging, and the company’s willingness to situate itself in relation to competitors and industry trends. But Nexxen seems to have room for improvement when it comes to bringing that message to market. Taking advantage of direct communications channels and leveraging the CEO or a deputy as the company’s chief evangelist would likely help.
