Month: September 2019

Previously, to place ads next to Vice content on third-party platforms, advertisers had to buy each platform separately, across individual markets.

By packaging video for advertisers across fragmented markets and platforms at scale Vice has grown its video ad revenue by 120% globally, the youth-publisher said. Across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, video ad revenue has grown 180%, albeit from a lower base given cross-platform ad products are newer in this region than in the U.S. Vice said selling in this way has brought in seven-figure revenues for Europe since the beginning of the year. Vice Media video revenue for Europe will account for 18% of its total revenue by the end of the year, while globally that’s projected to be around 23%, according to the publisher. Vice wouldn’t disclose specific revenue figures.

“Over the last few years we’ve made a conscious effort to pivot toward servicing the market based on our clients’ needs and in a more client-centric way,” said Luke Barnes, chief digital officer and chief revenue officer for EMEA. “It’s a competitive marketplace and this helps with differentiation.”

Vice’s video CPMs have risen between 10% and 20%, depending on the region, said Barnes. In general, average client-brief size has reduced across the board for Vice and the wider industry, but the number of campaigns running each month is growing, he added. Another factor is that Vice’s cross-platform video ad sell is traded directly with ad buyers rather than programmatically, so it commands a higher premium. It plans to keep it that way, he added.

Other digital publishers like Insider, BuzzFeed and Group Nine have taken similar products to market. Naturally, scale is needed. In July, Vice had 100 million video views across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, according to Tubular Labs. The analytics firm found that July was a record month for some of Vice’s regional channels, like Vice España and Vice India. July accounted for over 10% of those channels’ total historic views, suggesting Vice’s biggest growth opportunities are in those emerging markets, per Tubular.

According to Dominique Delport, Vice Media global CRO and president of international, speaking on the Digiday Podcast in July, digital accounts for 30% of Vice’s overall revenue. Digital media is just one of Vice’s five core revenue lines, alongside Vice News, film and TV production arm Vice Studio, TV and cable channel Viceland and creative agency Virtue. The Wall Street Journal reported August. 29 that the company plans to merge the Vice News brands with Viceland, with more emphasis on news.  Thanks in part to organizing around these revenue streams under CEO Nancy Dubuc, Vice reportedly exceeded revenue goals for the first half of this year.

“For quality video, there’s still less quality supply for the demand we have,” said Alexis Faulkner, head of future adaptive specialist team at Mindshare. “We have a fractured market, we define places where to find the highest quality at scale, whoever can make that easier for us is going to be appealing. But there needs to be a balance.”

For certain clients, she said, there will always be a level of brand appropriateness in placing ads in context. Advertising next to news content can be fraught for brands, there’s a balance in using the right amount of targeted keywords that won’t throttle scale.

For Barnes, the next step is to develop a way to cross-reference audiences across the platforms to build audience segments. Vice, along with digital publishers BuzzFeed and Group Nine and Tubular Labs formed an alliance at the beginning of the year to align measurement across platforms.

“Right now there’s not necessarily an eloquent way to bridge the gap between Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube and others,” said Barnes. “For some of those platforms, we’re in more developed conversations to do that than others. I expect to have made strides in that with some of our partners by the end of the year. That will drive the next step in putting data more at the core of the video proposition.”

The post Vice sees success with its year-old cross-platform video ad sales push appeared first on Digiday.

“Internally, we’re increasingly worried about the regulator coming down hard in the next six months,” said an executive at a major publisher. Meanwhile, agency legal teams have been particularly pretty strung out over the last few months, according to multiple agency executive sources.

Here’s a primer.

What is TCF 2.0?
It’s a revamped version of the original framework launched in 2016. The purpose of it is to standardize how businesses —  publishers and ad tech vendors predominantly, but also agencies — can continue running programmatic advertising on the open exchange in a way that is compliant with GDPR.

Why was it revamped?
Simply put, publishers hated the first version. Given such a large proportion of the IAB Europe’s members are ad tech vendors, the general consensus among publishers was that the first iteration of the framework was too biased toward what would be beneficial for ad tech vendors and no one else. It has been reworked to cater to publishers’ needs, with far fewer loopholes for ad tech vendors to exploit. Google has also committed itself to joining the TCF by the end of next March.

Is that a big deal?
Yes. Without Google, the argument for integrating with the TCF, which is quite resource-intensive, was far thinner given how much of the ad market Google controls. Until now, vendors have had to struggle with interoperability issues by using two different sets of guidelines and rules and how consent signals are transmitted to digital ad supply partners, known as consent strings. There was one set of rules issued by IAB Europe, and the other by Google which has taken a conservative approach to compliance. However, some publishers are nervous that Google’s integration will lead to it somehow dictating terms for them in the future.

So people like this version?
Yes and no. Views on it are mixed, though there is general recognition that it is far better than the original version, while most also accept there isn’t much of an alternative given it’s the only industry-wide attempt at a standard. It’s just that many publishers and agency executives — not to mention privacy activists — question whether the TCF can actually protect anyone. A core reason being that these are guidelines that companies are told to adhere to. But there is no actual policing. The ICO will end up doing that where feasible. That means, even if the TCF states that ad tech vendors can’t misuse data such as personally sensitive information within programmatic bid requests, without explicit consent from that user they have no way to enforce it or oversee it.

Is it even possible to police?
Given the hundreds upon hundreds of ad tech vendors in the digital ad supply chain, it is surely impossible to police data leakage in any meaningful way. Many in the industry believe the IAB is wrong to assert that the TCF can solve everyone’s GDPR headaches, but also that it helps protect the current ad tech status quo, rather than encourage the rooting out of bad practices that have dogged the industry for years. Naturally, the IAB’s position is that the TCF will at least get everyone on the same page as to what compliance can look like.

So what will the TCF be a success?
The jury is out on that. For starters, its take-up will depend on Google. There isn’t likely to be a stampede of additional publishers or vendors and agencies integrating with it until Google has done so. Multiple ad tech and publisher executive sources have admitted as much. The fact a good proportion aren’t even fully integrated with the first version, given the technical resource it takes to do so, it won’t be clear whether the TCF will be a rip-roaring success for some time. Perhaps even more importantly, the ICO hasn’t yet blessed the new version, and it’s unclear whether it will. The regulator recently criticized the first version, so there will be a lot of interest around whether it publishes a direct response to the second version and deems the new additions to the framework GDPR-compliant.

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