Facebook, Google beware: cord cutters entering digital ad landscape

Advertisers are fed up with Facebook and YouTube and want more options, according to Brian O'Kelley, CEO of AppNexus, a technology that helps companies monetize content.

“I talked to the largest advertisers in the world,” O’Kelley told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo on “Mornings with Maria” on Thursday. “They say consistently, ‘I want an alternative to YouTube and Facebook. I don’t want to spend my money there’ - but that’s where people are spending all their time.”

Facebook and Google beat analysts’ expectations as advertising dollars surged for the two tech giants, accounting for 91% of Facebook’s revenue and 97% of Google parent company, Alphabet’s, revenue.

O’Kelley said the biggest challenge is getting consumers to spend less time on Facebook and YouTube.

“If you’re Facebook or Google you have an immense amount of data from consumers that they’ve, in many cases, freely given and you can use that to micro-target ads,” he said. “But of course that also means that the consumer is the product - you’re effectively selling the consumer their own data and monetizing that, as you see in these earnings incredibly well.”

Even so, as television moves more toward digital, advertisers will be presented with more opportunities, in O’Kelley’s opinion.

“[As] people cut the cord, and we can actually do more intelligent ad-insertion into TV,” he said. “Increasingly, we can show different ads for different people and that means we can get much better results for television advertising.”