Don’t look now, but bitcoin is back.

The cryptocurrency is hovering around $65,000, returning to its 2021 heights. Shortly after that previous high-water mark, crypto companies started flooding the airwaves in the US, spending a combined $223 million on TV ads in the first three quarters of 2022, according to MediaRadar.

We all know what happened next: FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, collapsed in November 2022, taking most of the industry’s ad dollars with it. Crypto companies spent 186% less on ads in Q4 2022 than in Q1 2022, according to data provided by iSpot. The evaporation of ad spend was stark enough that CNBC reported that the pullback could leave “budget holes” across the industry.

Now that bitcoin is back to peak levels, will the pre-bust levels of ad spend return, too? At the crypto exchange platform Coinbase, spending on ads never stopped entirely, despite the industry’s volatility, Kate Rouch, Coinbase’s chief marketing officer, said. The company continued to invest in TV ads, and it appears to have weathered the storm of the recent downturn.

“Crypto is hard to predict,” she said—perhaps the understatement of the century.

Keep reading here.—RB

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LinkedIn introduced ad formats during its B2Believe conference in New York City on Thursday, becoming the latest company to tune in to the connected TV advertising (CTV) craze. The platform debuted CTV ads, a partnership with NBCU to widen its reach, and live event ads.

Here’s a breakdown of the new ad formats and partnerships:

• CTV ads: Advertisers can create CTV campaigns that can be shared to platforms such as Samsung Ads and Roku through LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager feature.
• LinkedIn Premiere: LinkedIn is partnering with NBCUniversal to promote CTV campaigns on NBCU content. Advertisers will be able to target campaigns based on categories like interests, company type, and seniority through the managed offering. They can also use the new Brand Lift feature, as well as iSpot and Kantar, to monitor campaign activity.
• Live Event Ads: Advertisers can promote their company’s live event before, during, and after it occurs (and dynamically adjust for when it takes place). The company said it’s currently testing live event ads.

+1: Last summer, LinkedIn first announced it was testing CTV ads and generative AI features like AI Copy Suggestions for advertisers, offering video ads that play pre- and mid-roll on long-form video content and Thought Leader Ads to further amplify a user’s posts.—JS

The New York Times is partnering with Adelaide, a company that uses signals like eye-tracking data to gauge whether readers are paying attention to ads.

The paper of record, the first client to sign up for the attention metrics company’s new publisher-focused platform, Adelaide for Publishers, will work with the company to eventually benchmark inventory using so-called attention metrics, an emerging alternative metric that goes beyond the industry standards of viewability and impressions.

The Times started using its own proprietary attention metric last year, but this marks the first time that it is “adopting an external attention metric,” Gabriel Dorosz, executive director of audience strategy and insights at the New York Times, told Marketing Brew. The goal is to eventually tie attention metrics to advertisers’ campaign performance, be it programmatic advertising or directly sold inventory, he said. “What we want is a campaign-level offering, which we hope to launch over the summer.”

Who’s watching? Founded in 2019, Adelaide uses signals like eye-tracking data and web-page layouts to gauge the quality of ad placements. It’s worked with Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Mars, and is integrated with the programmatic platforms offered by Amazon, Google, and The Trade Desk, according to the company.

“We don’t think existing standards tell the whole story, right? We don’t think viewability tells the whole story,” Dorosz said. “We’re a premium publisher…and we’d like to drive that conversation forward in the industry.”—RB

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Stories we’re jealous of.

• Bloomberg reported that well-known podcasts and podcast networks are using mobile game ads to juice follower numbers and episode downloads.
• The Wall Street Journal covered The Atlantic’s journey “from broke to profitable” over the last three years.
• The New York Times reported on reactions to the newly redesigned Boston Marathon finisher medals, which now feature the Bank of America logo on the bottom.