Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
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A publisher’s job nowadays is “to be a systems integrator and experimenter,” said Ryan Nathanson, COO of Salon Media Group, a news and culture publisher known for liberal commentary. That’s been Nathanson’s approach since taking the reins of Salon’s operations a year ago. The company has explored new payment and supply chain vendors, for example,… Continue reading »
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At the Digiday Media Buying Summit earlier this month in New Orleans, we surveyed 63 media-buying executives to learn how brand-safety concerns have affected their work. Check out our earlier research on retailers’ advertising strategies on Amazon here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.
Quick takeaways:
Procter & Gamble chief brand officer Marc Pritchard, who famously ignited conversations about the lack of media transparency in 2017, has proclaimed 2018 as the year of brand safety. Major brands have heeded his call, and say they are taking steps to address the issue. Bank of America appointed a “brand-safety officer” to oversee its online ads, and Diageo pulled its Snapchat ads after finding they reached underage users. With this increased attention on brand safety, Digiday research found that clients’ brand-safety concerns are increasingly affecting media buyers.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Viewability Budge The Media Rating Council (MRC) will review its digital viewability standards, which require 50% of a display ad’s pixels be in view for one second and that a video ad play for two continuous seconds. Four years ago, big brands and agencies… Continue reading »
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If your enterprise works with data (and which enterprise doesn’t these days?), you’ve probably been paying attention to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (otherwise known as GDPR or simply, “the Regulation”), a new set of rules expanding the privacy rights of all EU citizens.
Recently, “GDPR: Beyond Borders,” a series of expert panels sponsored by Braze, mParticle, and Mailjet, provided an industry audience with key insights on how brands can make the journey to GDPR compliance more easily. If you missed the panels, have no fear—we’ve rounded up the five most essential GDPR tips:
#1 Focus on the spirit of the Regulation
Dr. Pierre-Nicolas Schwab, chairman of the Big Data Initiative at the European Broadcasting Union, outlined what he considered to be the foundations of GDPR compliance.
In short, focus on the spirit of the regulations, as opposed to the bare minimum it takes to cross T’s and dot I’s. Ask yourself and your colleagues how GDPR compliance can best be integrated into the fabric of your organization.
#2 Assume all users are EU citizens
Susan Wiseman, general council of Braze, pointed out that since it’s often difficult for brands to know whether a given user is an EU citizen or not, it’s best to assume that all users are.
Antonis Patrikios, a partner at the privacy informational group at Fieldfisher, added that the GDPR is likely to influence future regulations in Asia, underlining that the impact will be global.
Regarding the rush to meet the May 25th deadline, Patrikios offered a reality check: “Focus on understanding what you need to do and fixing the tricky problems…and then you can sort out the rest later.”
#3 Err on the side of over-explaining to users
Perhaps the most-discussed aspect of GDPR is its consent mandate. Patrikios and Schwab brought out an important nuance: It’s not enough just to ask for permission. The user must understand clearly what exactly their data is going to be used for. To simply state that it might be used in the future, or that it might be shared with partners, is not enough. If you don’t know what you’ll be using a given piece of data for, it’s better not to collect it.
#4 Be your brother’s keeper
Jon Hyman, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) at Braze, summing up the essence of data controller/processor partnerships in GDPR terms, explained:
Darine Fayed, head of legal at Mailjet, brought a little levity by singing a few notes of “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by The Clash, illustrating the need to abandon vendor relationships that are not conducive to compliance. Every department must maintain a list of outside partners, and each of those partners must be surveyed about their data usage to ensure that there’s no weak link in your GDPR compliance efforts.
Hyman noted that finding GDPR-compliant partners is not so different from finding partners that are compliant with other regulations, such as SOC 2. He noted two major considerations:
#5 Prioritize
Fouad Khalil, head of compliance at Security Scorecard, offered an upbeat perspective: the pressure of an upcoming audit can bring real clarity to operations. Priorities become easy to set, and less important projects automatically take a back seat.
Ben Hoxie, Director of Product Management at mParticle, and Kate Hooker, who leads the legal department at Greenhouse Software, worked with Marissa Aydlett, head of marketing at Braze, to outline the steps to figure out your GDPR prioritization:
The panelists also discussed the importance of establishing a process to keep internal teams aligned. The key is building cross-team collaboration into the compliance process, ensuring that your GDPR compliance efforts have multiple internal champions and that all teams feel they have skin in the game.
Speaking of different perspectives between departments, Hoxie pointed out that, while the GDPR’s ambiguity may be frustrating for a lawyer, “for a product person [the ambiguity] is kind of fun because there’s a little bit of room to swim. To…’build a flexible solution.’”
Khalil said: “As an auditor myself, even if you are not at a point of compliance, but you show progress, you show a date when you’ll satisfy the law, that’s a good step.”
In other words, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good: Just get started. For more insight, watch the complete “GDPR: Beyond Borders” session here.
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These are dark times for publishers, as media companies of all sizes are under increasing pressure to bring in real revenue. Digiday gathered C-level executives in Vail, Colorado, at our third Moguls event to discuss the issues on their minds — from ongoing Facebook monetization issues to developing new, non-advertising revenue streams.
Our Moguls events operates under the Chatham House Rule, which gives the media executives an opportunity to speak openly and honestly — and without attribution — about the challenges they’re facing. Here’s a selection of what was said and grabbed our attention in snowy Colorado.
On Facebook
“The typical view time on a Facebook video is that 90 percent drops off after 10 seconds, so you can’t even get to the mid-roll.”
“We were making on Instant Articles 30 to 50 percent of what we would make on a web-page view. But the question was: would Facebook favor the content and extend the reach? I don’t know if we ever really saw that and we are certainly not seeing that. We came to a decision based on pure economics, mobile web is better.”
“The real issue is that Facebook and Google are taking 85 to 90 percent of every new dollar in the marketplace and we’re fighting for scraps. The issue is not how Facebook is screwing me with distribution. They have a business to run. They should do what’s good for their business and we should make good business decisions on our own. We have to be smarter and more strategic about how we attack the real problem.”
On Snapchat
“I have stopped thinking about it. I forgot it was still a platform.”
On Pinterest
“Their partnerships team sucks. It’s impossible to get a phone call returned. They’ve never prioritized publisher partnerships.”
On Twitter
“One of the platforms that’s working for us is Twitter. I think it will overtake Facebook for us this year. It’s a lot less reliant on the quirks of the algorithm than Facebook is. It’s our No. 2 source of traffic from platforms.”
On Apple News
“We’re doing tens and tens of millions of pageviews per month on Apple News, and we’re making thousands of dollars. They really have to fix it.”
“We’ve had fill rates of 30 percent of articles that hit a revenue component. There’s high engagement, lots of pageviews, but I assume Apple is going to wake up and figure out that there’s still a lot of money to be made here.”
On publishers lobbying for platform regulation
“I think Google and Facebook would be able to outspend on lobbyists than all of us publishers. It’s a nice thought, though.”
On Facebook relations
“There is a shit ton of confusion in the people making decisions at Facebook because everyone is frazzled. The best way to get Facebook’s attention is to get your brand mentioned in negative stories about Facebook.”
On platform equivalency
“Google rewards good content, Facebook rewards people who game the algorithm.”
On trusting platforms
“All of these platforms are fickle. What might help you this quarter will screw you the next quarter.”
On programmatic advertising
“Agencies want to shift money from direct [buys] to PMPs or open marketplaces. That’s where they make the best margins. If you make everything available, you commoditize your inventory.”
On consumer revenue
“We haven’t done any paywalls on our sites just yet. It’s hard to justify taking a chance on that and risking a loss in scale of the ad-supported business.”
“People talk about how ‘our audience trusts our brand.’ Trust is the wrong word. You want audience reverence. You want your audience to revere your brand so much that they’ll buy your tote bag.”
“For legacy companies — The New York Times, The New Yorker — subscriptions make sense. For digital-only sites, no matter what number you put in front of users, I think it’s going to be too expensive.”
On the pivot to TV and content licensing
“In the world of episodic TV, you only make your money when you hit year five. It’s a very hit-driven business.”
“If a majority of what you do is evergreen, it’s easier to find licensing dollars. If you’re doing news and politics, the life cycle on that is a shorter window.”
“[Content licensing is] a short-term versus long-term question. In the short term, the margins do make sense, but what are the opportunity costs in the long term? Facebook Watch was an interesting test case, because we launched a show and then had the option — because Facebook wanted to buy it — of selling Facebook the IP or self-funding it. It was a hard thought process, and ultimately went with the latter, in the hopes of seeing that long-tail value.”
“In the short term, [selling IP ownership] is going to give us a calling card and credibility to negotiate better terms in the next round. You never want to say no to Netflix and the resources that they can provide — plus their lawyers versus our lawyers is not a conversation worth having. We’re going to be forced to eat it in the same way we have been forced to eat it in many ways with Facebook. Until, after a time, we can build a reputation to build something at that $5 million per episode level.”
“[TV] is a different clock where it can take two to three years to get something done, which is a different type of accounting than many in digital media are used to.”
On selling branded content
“The devil is in the pricing. We in the industry haven’t been smart enough about the pricing between sponsorships of pure editorial versus custom video created for the brand.”
“We just took over a creative [agency-of-record] assignment for a full year’s work; but you’re only going to be able to do those types of deals in dribs and drabs. I had a direct relationship with the president of the brand and he didn’t feel the costs were worth what they were doing, and so I told him to come direct to us.”
“Vice had the gumption to do what I haven’t been able to convince my CEO, which is to invest in an agency acquisition. You’re going to need an infrastructure to jumpstart the agency part of your business.”
On the importance of owned channels
“If we had pre-roll scale on our dot-com, the trajectory of our organization would be changed forever. If I could grab anything, I’d take that.”
“We have gone all-in on YouTube because that has the best monetization path. But also what we put on YouTube can go on our O&O.”
On GDPR
“I brought it up. My boss said he’s appointed a couple of people to handle this. One of those people includes someone in legal. The people he appointed to handle GDPR are not capable of handling GDPR and what it could mean in terms of fines and everything else.”
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Tensions between publishers and platforms and between advertisers and platforms have long been mounting. Recent reports about Facebook’s major data breach and conspiracy videos on the YouTube Kids app put those tensions front and center during Advertising Week Europe this week. Here are three themes that emerged.
Publishers have their swagger back
Over the past several months, there’s been a recognition by publishers that they need to stop complaining about the difficulty of monetizing on platforms and about the duopoly’s domination of digital advertising and instead focus on what advertisers need.
“Publishers need to listen more to what brands need, rather than just launching things we think they want,” said Oliver Lewis, News UK’s director of digital strategy. “We’re seeing better collaboration between publishers and brands, and there’s the sense now that publishers are starting to rise up, put our shoulders back and stand a bit taller.”
Joseph Harake, digital director at media agency OMD, referenced reports published this week that show Google and Facebook’s share of digital ad revenue dipped to 56.8 percent from 58.5 percent last year. The duopoly faces growing competition from Amazon and Snapchat and challenges in serving clients directly, he said. “The tremendous growth Google and Facebook have had will be hard to sustain,” said Harake.
Facebook’s data breach will lead to more scrutiny of tech partners
The fallout from the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach, two months before the General Data Protection Regulation takes effect, will encourage publishers to scrutinize their ad tech partners more closely.
“There’s a desire in the industry to protect the status quo, for [ad tech] companies to continue to have all the access to data while the liability falls with the publisher but without telling publishers what they are using the data for,” said Jason Kint, CEO of U.S. publisher trade body Digital Content Next. “If you look at what happened over the weekend [with Facebook’s data breach], it would be crazy to allow that.”
Publishers are already having a tough time ahead of the GDPR figuring out how their ad tech partners are using data. The Financial Times, for instance, is inspecting its ad tech partners and how they use data, but it’s taken a year to fully understand how just one of them uses data, said Anthony Hitchings, digital advertising operations director at the FT.
People read the FT for business news if their company is planning to merge or acquire another firm, for example. This type of data could be dangerous in an outside entity’s hands because readers may not want other companies to find out about their plans.
“One vendor we discovered was capturing all [intellectual property] details in full and all URLs in the browser, building up a complete browser picture across the web,” said Hitchings. “That’s not what we want to do here. Publishers don’t have the bandwidth to do the right amount of due diligence on anything more than a small handful of partners.”
Limiting platforms’ power
Since Facebook’s data misuse was revealed, the U.K. has taken a tougher line with the tech platforms, calling for an end to the “Wild West” era. Margot James, U.K. minister of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said the harm caused by cases like Facebook-Cambridge Analytica is too big to ignore. A weakened duopoly could benefit publishers, which have balked at the power imbalance with the platforms. “The government has a responsibility to maintain a level playing field,” said James.
Onstage at Advertising Week, Hossein Derakhshan, fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, suggested that the tech companies should be forced to split up their hardware from their operating systems and software.
“You have the device, or in this case the platform, then you have the algorithm or the operating system, then the user data sits on top,” he said. “Users would be able to choose which algorithm they would want; they might to buy a different algorithm from Facebook’s, one that might seem more transparent or favors diversity over popularity. Platforms allowing third-party algorithms would solve a lot of problems around transparency and secrecies of data.”
“We thought all we needed was regulations and sanctions,” said Mariarosaria Taddeo, deputy director for the Digital Ethics Lab at Oxford Internet Institute. “But we need to start auditing technology before it’s deployed.”
Jessica Davies contributed reporting.
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Of the scandals that have plagued Facebook in the last year, its response to the Cambridge Analytica issue is shaping up as its most bungled, as the company’s top executives remain silent, its stock gets whacked and calls increase from lawmakers for answers (and investigations).
On March 17, The New York Times reported that a professor had created in 2014 what he said was a personality-analysis app on Facebook, which led 270,000 people to give the app permission to access data on them and their friends, exposing 50 million profiles. The data was then passed to Cambridge Analytica, something Facebook knew about in 2015. In 2016, Facebook shut down access and asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data. Cambridge Analytica claims it deleted the data, but the Times viewed copies of it.
Crisis experts believe Facebook couldn’t have messed up more.
The first issue: Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg and chief privacy officer Erin Egan have not yet commented on the situation.
Second, as columnist and political commentator Rick Wilson noted on Twitter, Facebook has not followed the basic rules of public relations: telling the truth, getting ahead of the story and fixing the issue, plus not letting lawyers do crisis PR.
Most of Facebook’s response has involved blaming Cambridge Analytica, with Facebook vp of marketing Carolyn Everson labeling Cambridge Analytica’s actions an “incredible violation.”
Crisis experts often point to “convergence” as a big problem — when companies have a list of seemingly unrelated problems and multiple negative storylines that all get tied together. A non-Facebook example is Uber, which was already dealing with multiple issues when former employee Susan Fowler wrote a blog post about the company’s sexist culture that contributed to CEO Travis Kalanick’s departure. As a paper published in February on the impact of message convergence notes, an organization in crisis is often seen as being more in crisis if it has multiple unrelated issues.
Sam Huxley, the chair of risk and business strategy at PR firm Levick, said he believes convergence applies to Facebook’s issues on a macro level. On a micro level, “Facebook has totally screwed up” its response, he said.
Zuckerberg’s absence during this particular crisis is particularly of note. In September, two weeks after Facebook admitted it sold ads to Russian propagandists, Zuckerberg addressed the issue in a livestream. “They made him the face prematurely,” said Huxley. “You want to hold the CEO back until things escalate.”
Now that issues have escalated, Facebook has “set the expectation that [Zuckerberg] addresses this, and now they’re not addressing it,” Huxley added.
Chris Sojka, co-founder at Madwell and a branding expert, said the issue is a big one for Facebook. “Silence is a tragic mistake both from a marketing and morality perspective,” he said. “Facebook should have switched gears to radical transparency, launched a public service advocacy campaign educating users on the ways in which people might phish for their information and set up an easily accessible apparatus to combat abuse of their platform.”
It’s not the first time Facebook’s external messaging has gone awry. In February, when an indictment against 13 Russians by U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller found that Facebook played a major role in how Russian agents used fake news and articles on Facebook, Facebook’s strategy at the time to have executives use Twitter to get their messages across backfired: In a series of tweets, Facebook vp of advertising Rob Goldman said he didn’t think Russia tried to sway the election.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vp of global policy, said in a statement: “Nothing we found contradicts the Special Counsel’s indictments. Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.” According to Axios, Facebook also made overtures to Hill staffers that distanced its official stance from Goldman’s comments, showing it had cooperated with Mueller and the FBI in both this case as well as about issues of abuse on Facebook.
That internal confusion is bad from a crisis communications perspective as well. On March 19, the Times reported that Facebook’s data security chief, Alex Stamos, would depart the company. Right after the report was published, Stamos denied he was leaving but admitted his role was changing. “It’s indicative of organizational chaos,” said Huxley.
Facebook has also fallen into a pattern of dismissing issues — remember when Zuckerberg called fake-news allegations “crazy”? — and then backtracking, then apologizing.
“The messaging isn’t representative of the actions, and the messaging is the only action being taken,” which is often a huge mistake, Huxley said. “You’re not even really acknowledging the issue.”
Sojka agreed, suggesting the only way out is to launch a learning center within Facebook, plus maybe even buy some ads. “Think of it as the ‘Truth’ campaign,” he said, “but instead of cigarettes, it’s social media.”
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The Atlantic has launched a new family section, to which it’s taking an expansive, multiplatform approach, reflecting the publisher’s focus on building direct connections with readers in a post-Facebook news feed era.
The section is the first big editorial initiative by The Atlantic, now majority owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, since the publisher announced plans to grow the staff by 100 people (30 percent) overall over the next year to 18 months, with as much as half going to editorial.
Family is staffed by a five-person desk. Its coverage will run across the site and magazine, but also have a presence in The Atlantic’s podcasts, live events and video.
“We have a cross-platform mentality across our sections for sure, but we did see this as an opportunity to go all out,” said Adrienne LaFrance, editor of TheAtlantic.com. ”It’s a doubling down.”
Family will have a public Facebook group and its own newsletter, two firsts for The Atlantic and a direct indication of its recent push to connect directly with readers as it looks to grow reader revenue by boosting subscriptions and involvement in its Masthead membership program. Other publishers have launched Facebook groups to form tighter connections with small groups of readers, recognizing more engaged readers are more likely to become subscribers.
“Obviously, pages on Facebook are being downplayed in the algorithm,” said Caitlin Frazier, head of social and audience at The Atlantic. “So we started looking at groups because it allows for more community and more semblances of privacy and sharing experiences.”
As for the editorial scope, the family section will take an expansive view of American family life, looking at the cultural, political and economic forces at hand. The section kicked off with pieces on the changing attitudes toward child rearing and a parent’s reflection on teaching his child about racism. LaFrance said The Atlantic isn’t new to covering the family, pointing to a 1932 piece by Helen Keller on the effect of machines on housework and others that have examined family roles.
“We see this as a continuation of a tradition but also bringing it into the current media ecosystem,” she said.
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