Month: May 2018

Although Facebook’s stock has mostly recovered from its Cambridge Analytica lows, stockholders are unamused by the rocky ride. “Scandal is not good for the company’s bottom line,” said one investor Thursday during Facebook’s 2018 annual shareholder meeting. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gotten quite good over the last year or so at acknowledging the scandals. “The… Continue reading »

The post Facebook To Shareholders: Sorry ‘Bout The Scandals, But We’re Making Changes appeared first on AdExchanger.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Jennifer Byrnes, associate director of data strategy and insights at Varick. Facebook recently decided to shutter its partner categories feature, which many advertisers relied on for targeting via third-party data… Continue reading »

The post It’s Time For A Data Intervention appeared first on AdExchanger.

At the Digiday Moguls Summit in March in Vail, Colorado, we surveyed 33 C-suite publisher executives on how they expect to grow revenues in 2018. Check out our earlier research on how publishers earn e-commerce revenue here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Thirty-two percent of C-suite publisher executives in Digiday’s survey said branded content has the biggest growth potential in 2018.
• Survey respondents said branded content was the most important revenue stream for publishers.

2018 is about diversifying beyond advertising
Spending on display advertising and video advertising is expected to increase in 2018. Despite this, C-suite publishers surveyed by Digiday believe alternate channels provide the biggest opportunities to grow revenues, with 32 percent choosing branded content and 23 percent selecting subscriptions as the revenue channel with the most potential, while just 6 percent said digital advertising and 14 percent said video advertising.

The post Digiday Research: C-level publisher executives bank on branded content for growth appeared first on Digiday.

When the sports news startup Minute Media was founded seven years ago, Bleacher Report, Huffington Post and other publishers already had demonstrated user-generated content and social traffic growth strategies before ditching the model for more traditional newsrooms. Minute Media wants to prove a new media company can stick with its contributors and generate returns by… Continue reading »

The post How Minute Media Spun User-Generated Content Into Tech And Influencer Businesses appeared first on AdExchanger.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem… AdExchanger: Origins AdExchanger: Crisis In Ad City (Part I) AdExchanger: Crisis In Ad City (Part II) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part I) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part II) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part III) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (The Conclusion) AdExchanger: Angels And Startups AdExchanger: Rumble In Arbitrage Plaza… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Fountain Of Youth The online media habits of US teenagers have changed dramatically since Pew Research last conducted a major survey of 13-17-year-olds. From 2014 to 2015, Facebook was used by 71% of US teens, then the only social platform with a clear majority,… Continue reading »

The post Pew On Teenagers’ Media Use; Understanding Google’s GDPR Moves appeared first on AdExchanger.

Marketers gathered in New Orleans this week to discuss the future of programmatic marketing at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit. Recurring themes included the fallout from GDPR, the growing trend of taking more marketing in-house and, of course, the influence of Google and Facebook.

The event took place under the Chatham House Rule, meaning discussions are on the record but without attribution of names and companies. Here’s what attendees had to say:

GDPR is a pain, but might be beneficial in the long run 
“Beyond the advertising side, we on the brand side have had to make some changes to our site. That’s a good thing to have done. I do think for us to just overall take a much more rigorous approach to the question of consent is a valuable exercise.”

“It’s a good thing. It’s painful to rip the Band-Aid off, but in the long run, it’s probably very good for the consumer that they have control and understand what’s going on, but at the same time for advertisers to hopefully get into this economy that’s cleaner, more transparent, with better accountability. At the end of the day that’s good for everyone, if not for a lot of pain and suffering and phone calls with legal.”

“Our industry is the only one where the future is less data and not more data, and that kind of sucks.”

“In this situation there’s less data, but it’s probably cleaner. It’s closer to the customer, it’s more accurate. Maybe it’s more expensive — maybe it changes the pricing and the economy around it, but we’ve cleaned it up. I think it disrupts a lot of tools and things that have been built, but I think people can evolve.”

“It’s creating more of a lean-in environment. Now we have a consumer that wants to interact with my brand versus being intrusive.”

Marketers are doing more marketing internally
“There’s a perception that it’s fewer people so it’s saving money. But that’s often not true.”

“The biggest miss right now is when you bring it in-house, unless you have very strong relationship with your agency, you lose the connection points. You may create some efficiencies but you might not get the learnings you would.”

“It’s a false assumption that agencies have a ton of talent. They’re hiring 24-year-olds and shifting people into it. We don’t see any talent issues.”

“It’s different when you work for the company and are doing it. Our agency had several accounts. I don’t know how much time they were really spending on our campaigns. There’s a lot more accountability when it’s internal.”

“Has anyone had a consultant not recommend taking marketing in-house? ‘I can save you $150,000: Take it in-house.’ That’s what they always recommend.”

“We’ve seen some of our agencies that have shifted their business models to support in-sourcing. We see them shift and actually bring ideas to the table, so instead of us going to another outside partner, they’re offering to do it themselves. I think we’ll see agencies shifting their models to help clients do this more, or at least I think they should.”

“There may be less ad tech intermediaries because of GDPR. It’s just not going to make sense for them to operate in Europe so there will be a lot of smart people who understand buying on exchanges, buying on major social platforms and that knowledge will probably transfer pretty well [to an in-house team].”

Questions are emerging around Facebook ROI
“We have clients coming to us saying they’re spending 70 percent of their budget on Facebook and Google and asking us to help them diversify. They don’t want to build their customer acquisition channels on two platforms that could get regulated or whatever else it may be. We’re suggesting they come back to programmatic, and try to get off of Facebook and Google as much as you can. But then GDPR kind of blew some of that up.”

“We’ve definitely scaled back and optimized and adjusted our model so we’re not doing as much video. Right now they’re banking on upper-funnel, so we’re rethinking that because people just aren’t consuming video for more than 2 seconds there.”

“Facebook is the perfect place to keep hammering existing customers versus trying to go out and prospect for new ones. We know Facebook works well for existing customers, but maybe not so much in many instances on the prospecting side.”

Marketers are souring on third-party data
“We’re getting more pressure to use more first-party data and step away from third-party data in certain areas, and it’s tying back to attribution for sure.”

“We can’t even get 50 percent confidence on something like gender. It’s just something where we all had suspicion because it was all of this aggregated data coming from unclear sources, and yeah, a lot of it’s garbage.”

 

 

The post Candid thoughts of marketers on GDPR, cutting out agencies and Facebook ROI appeared first on Digiday.

The General Data Protection Regulation may have usurped the threat of ad blocking in alarming media headlines lately, but U.K. publisher data shows the dent on revenue due to ad blocking is growing.

While the rate of ad blocking has remained nearly flat on desktop, with a small increase in mobile, the revenue loss has grown significantly due to publishers growing their audiences and adding more ad inventory.

U.K. publisher trade body the Association for Online Publishers, which counts members including Condé Nast, ESI Media, Global, the Guardian and The Telegraph, aggregated data from 14 of its members and found that at the end of 2017, 29.9 percent of ad impressions on desktop were blocked compared to 31.7 percent at its height in mid-2016. For mobile, 1.3 percent of impressions were blocked at the end of 2017 compared to 0.7 percent in mid-2016.

But the good news stops there. Across 14 members, the AOP calculated nearly £14 million ($18.6 million) in revenue was lost due to blocked ad impressions in 12 months. The trade body estimated that the average publisher loses roughly £630,000 ($837,000) in annual revenue.

“Ad blocking hasn’t vanished. It’s still a threat that can’t be forgotten. Publishers still need to find a route forward,” said Nick Flood, deputy managing director of digital at Dennis Publishing. “GDPR has taken over, but publishers still need to understand how to message and then monetize users.”

Across Dennis Publishing’s portfolio, the ad-blocking rate has remained consistent at around 23 percent. On mobile, though, ad-block rates have increased from 2 percent to 4 percent over the last 12 months, which is worrying as the majority of traffic comes from mobile, so there’s a possibility this rate could increase. Mobile ad-blocking rates have grown slower than expected, despite numerous ways of blocking ads on mobile. The number of blocked impressions is lower proportionally on mobile because there are far fewer than on desktop. As desktop fetches higher ad rates for now, publishers are focusing on reducing this number.

On Dennis’ technology site, Alphr, Dennis has reduced ad-block rates from 30 percent to 19 percent by blocking content to ad-block users, then asking them to whitelist the site. Previously, ad-block users could continue to access the site. Beyond just being able to monetize this audience, publishers can gather analytics to understand and retarget audiences.

Despite publishers’ best efforts over the last 24 months to curb ad-block rates, publishers working out their messaging to audiences for gaining consent under GDPR can educate them about the value exchange in blocking ads.

“We should remind ourselves this is a further opportunity to explain that in the most extreme cases, ad blocking undermines the ability to create content that’s available for free,” said Richard Reeves, managing director at the AOP. “The situation is not improving. We’ve spent two years messaging people, and it hasn’t made them change their mind.”

In the coming weeks, Dennis is rolling out its own consent management platform, which will integrate ad-block messaging, allowing it to identify audiences and show them different messages. The publisher will A/B test wording and a series of messages to see how audiences respond. “It will tie up the user journey in a coherent message,” Flood said.

Dennis is working with Sourcepoint for the ad-block integration in its CMP. “It is a user’s choice as to whether to decline consent to share their data with a publisher’s partner,” said Brian Kane, co-founder and COO at Sourcepoint, “but there can still be a transparent value exchange that takes place between a publisher and its audience to ensure some form of alternate compensation is provided.”

Flood said publishers are seeing positive results anecdotally from people opting in to share their data since GDPR took effect on May 25, although it’s still early days, and testing is ongoing.

There’s a possibility that certain ad-block software could begin blocking consent messages, said Flood, meaning publishers won’t have access to this segment of users to gain consent. “It would be an existing problem that will still continue,” Flood said. “Ad-block users weren’t having cookies dropped on them anyway. The devil will be in the detail of how publisher react.”

“Users of ad-block software don’t always have the choice on what they can and can’t see,” he added. “With CMP, users do have that choice. That’s what GDPR is about: giving users more choice.”

The post Don’t forget about ad blocking: Lost revenue to UK publishers rises to £630,000 a year appeared first on Digiday.

Once European regulators start enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation, don’t be surprised if brands with noncompliant sites try to shift the blame to their agencies. In the latest in our Confessions series, where we grant anonymity for honesty, a digital agency executive whose company helps build Fortune 500 companies’ websites said brands make agencies contractually responsible for GDPR violations. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

How has GDPR affected your agency’s work?
It feels like the decision-making is, “Let’s figure out how we can pass liability onto agencies as soon as possible because they’re the ones who are building these products.” In theory, it is your clients’ responsibility. But as the law was getting into place, all of a sudden all these Fortune 100 companies, were immediately sending you an update to their MSA [master services agreement] that you’ve agreed on for years that is now saying, “If you are designing and building this, you are assuming responsibility for assuming the nuance of this law, and we won’t indemnify you if something is noncompliant.” So rather than understanding or caring about the intent of the law, it’s mostly just making sure they’re not going to be financially liable or responsible.

What can you do to avoid assuming full liability?
Typically with the MSAs, it’s, “if you want to keep working with us, you’re going to do this.” And we’re certainly not at a point where we would say, “No, we’re not going to work with you anymore because you’re making us liable for this particular law.” So we’ll understand the law and do our best in making sure we’re compliant.

How does it work? A regulator comes after a client, and the client tells the regulator to go after you instead?
I think what happens — and this has not happened yet — is that the company gets sued and then the company sues the agency. What we were told is even when there is no case, you still end up paying legal fees because they’re going to try to push the risk downstream. We’ve tried to make assumptions very, very clear in each contract, and try to supersede some of those terms, so there’s a clear understanding of risk. And then there’s capped indemnity.

So you can only be held liable to a certain degree?
Yeah, we would only be liable for up to X amount of something. Because the thing that’s hard is, if you’re doing a project for a few hundred thousand dollars, and someone gets sued for a million dollars and they try to pass that down to you, the level of risk and reward from a project standpoint changes. The other challenge from this is it changes project timelines and adds costs in the amount of development work. When the lawyers get involved, all the nice and fuzzies of relationships go away.

How do you account for those added costs? Do you tell clients that if the agency assumes liability, it costs 10 or 20 percent extra?
We wouldn’t have success if we structured it that way. They’re not going to give us a markup on something. So we bake into the project cost itself where there are these new or additional resources or additional time because they’ve added complexity from a requirement standpoint. It’s almost like another feature. And they can’t push back on that.

Have you talked with other agencies about banding together and pushing back on clients that pass on liability?
We haven’t done that yet. I would assume that until one of us has a significant issue come out, we’re probably all going to want to stay under the radar a little bit. Because it’s not every single client that’s doing this and passing that on. It’s one of those things where the more you flaunt certain things, the more likely that people talk about it and bring it into your MSA, or a lawsuit [occurs]. On some level, we’re waiting to see how the dust settles.

The post Confessions of a digital agency exec: Marketers are shifting GDPR liability to agencies appeared first on Digiday.

Grey Goose is taking a TV-like approach to distributing its new branded digital video series, “Off Script,” starring Jamie Foxx.

“Off Script,” which premiered May 4, follows Foxx as he interviews other A-list celebrities, including Denzel Washington, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Melissa McCarthy. The series is labeled a Grey Goose production and was developed by its executives in charge of creative development and culture.

Grey Goose’s goal was to create a digital show about film and acting — the vodka maker has had a long history in Hollywood and filmmaking, being a frequent sponsor of marquee festivals in Sundance and Toronto, as well as the Sundance TV series “Iconoclasts” — but made for digital and social platforms.

In doing so, Grey Goose opted for a production and distribution model reminiscent of what’s frequently seen in the entertainment industry. Instead of having just one publisher pitch an idea for a branded show, produce that show and then distribute it on its own channels, or Grey Goose producing the show itself, building a hub and then buying media to drive people to the hub, Grey Goose sought multiple distribution partners for “Off Script.” The marketer developed and produced the show with Jash, a production studio whose executives have a long background in making talk shows, including “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Oath and Group Nine Media are publishing and distributing the series.

“The objective for us was to create great content, but also change the model a bit — [going from] a model that was about brand content being interruptive and changing it to a model where we can actually create entertainment content,” said Yann Marois, global vp and CMO of Grey Goose Vodka. “We went out to top players in the world of digital and social and pitched it as almost what you would do with a TV show, with an opportunity and an option of exclusivity [for the distributors].”

Marois wouldn’t say which other publishing companies “Off Script” was pitched to, but said the marketer went wide seeking partners.

“Oath is the second-largest digital media group and has extremely compelling targeting capabilities that allow us to bring the show to viewers with a high affinity for this type of content,” said Marois. “Group Nine is compelling because it’s one of the largest content creators on social media, and they really have an expertise in terms of distributing this type of longer-form content on platforms.”

Through Oath, Grey Goose distributes “Off Script” on relevant HuffPost and Yahoo verticals; with Group Nine, the show airs on Facebook through relevant NowThis and Thrillist pages across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The publishers’ Instagram accounts are also promoting cutdowns.

“We were sensitive in distributing this type of branded content in a way that feels natural for the audience,” said Christa Carone, president of Group Nine Media. “Thrillist has a big focus on food, travel, adventure and the notion that our audience is always looking for better things to do; and NowThis, which works with studios out in LA to bring their trailers to our audience, has a big focus on entertainment. It was a natural alignment.”

As Marois said, Oath has the digital publishing exclusivity on the show, and NowThis has the social exclusivity — but as a piece of “intellectual property,” “Off Script” remains owned by Grey Goose.

“The whole process of moving the show from production company to distribution partner is essentially how TV works,” said Alan Wolk, lead analyst for consulting firm TVRev. “In the ’50s and early ’60s, ad agencies would actually ideate TV shows and get them produced by sponsors. This is an almost identical model.”

When it came to picking distribution partners, it helped that Group Nine Media now owns Jash, said Marois. (Jash, which brought in Foxx to star in and host the show, became the production partner for “Off Script” prior to Jash’s sale to Group Nine.) Oath, meanwhile, has an ongoing relationship with Grey Goose’s media-buying firm OMD.

Marois said he’s been pleased with the show’s performance so far. The series has nine episodes running for roughly 10 minutes or longer. Across both Group Nine’s and Oath’s properties, the first three episodes have captured close to 10 million video views and average a watch time between five and seven minutes. Fifteen percent of the show’s viewership has been organic, which is above the benchmarks the brand set internally, Marois said.

“Our objective was to lead with entertaining content that would capture the audience’s attention,” Marois said.

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