Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

The program will help agencies effectively allocate their marketing resources as advertising budgets shift from offline media to digital platforms, according to Oracle Data Cloud.

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With local outposts in cities across the country, Gannett has an insider’s view into American communities and what their residents want and need from big brands. “Big, national brands often don’t want to be perceived as big, national brands,” said Kevin Gentzel, chief revenue officer at Gannett. “They want to feel embedded in local communities,… Continue reading »

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When a group that says it provides financial assistance “relating to the jihad” sought to improve conditions for fighters in a squalid, sandbag-fortified trench in Syria late last year, it turned to a new funding conduit: bitcoin.

Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce new moves promoting private ventures in space, including easing launch rules and putting the Commerce Department in charge of broader deregulation initiatives.

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Mobile texting never quite made it into the marketer toolkit, but some online sellers are re-examining SMS as a more cost-effective way to engage known customers than advertising. And ecommerce tech vendors are beefing up mobile messaging because the channel now supports data-driven segmentation, like retargeting campaigns. These capabilities are increasingly valuable as frictionless mobile… Continue reading »

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“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 Michael Lehman, vice president of supply at TripleLift. Despite efforts to evolve private marketplaces, investment in automated guaranteed and recent developments around non-standard formats being transacted programmatically, the indirect channel… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Strike A Happy Media Digital media consumption grew 13% last year, according to an examination of Nielsen Digital Content Ratings by Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser. Verizon, Amazon, Snapchat and Twitter were relatively flat in terms of their share of digital media consumption from… Continue reading »

The post Facebook’s Declining Share Of Total Media Consumption; Another Call For A ‘Big Tech Break-up’ appeared first on AdExchanger.

At the Digiday Hot Topic: Future of TV event last week in New York City, we sat down with over 60 media, television, and advertising executives from major companies to better understand the OTT landscape. Check out our earlier research on top performing OTT and online TV services here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Only 32 percent of respondents believe programmatic TV to currently be a viable advertising channel.
• Lack of campaign measurement and attribution were the most often cited challenges associated with programmatic TV
• Of people who said programmatic TV was three to five years away, 70 percent cited campaign measurement as its biggest challenge.
• Programmatic TV ad spending is coming from a multitude of sources, but primarily from TV and digital budgets.

It seems those hungry for “the year of programmatic TV” might find themselves waiting a little longer.

The post Digiday Research: Programmatic TV is still 1 or 2 years away appeared first on Digiday.

For the more than 200 publishers attending Digiday’s Publishing Summit in Monte Carlo this week, the main issues that were front of mind were plain: how to diversify platform distribution in the wake of Facebook’s news-feed changes, what more can be done to fight ad fraud, and how the arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation will affect business.

We asked attending publishers to jot down their biggest challenges, and we then collated ideas around how they’re planning to tackle them, across a series of themed sessions throughout the summit.

Here are the takeaways:

Diversifying platform strategies
Facebook’s latest news-feed changes fueled conversations around how publishers can pull back on throwing all resource at Facebook, and explore how to widen distribution strategies to other platforms. Twitter, Google Amp, Pinterest and LinkedIn took a far larger share of the conversation than they have to date at the Digiday Europe Publishing Summit. Attendees spoke of how Twitter has begun driving a lot more referral traffic back to them. “Twitter is having somewhat of a comeback,” said one publishing executive. Said another: “We have been talking with Pinterest, and they want to be more of a content creator and traffic driver, so that will be an area to watch for us.”

Earlier in the day, Condé Nast’s chief revenue officer, Jamie Jouning, referred to how the publisher has been working to make the content output across its numerous international Instagram accounts more consistent. That point was seized on by another publishing executive as a reason to invest more in social media managers.

“We as an [publishing] industry haven’t invested enough in social media managers. In traditional media, we still treat them as kids and pretend we can do it all. But we can’t. We need to invest more in graduates and the skills to make publishing to platforms work better,” said the same executive.

Ad fraud definition getting muddied
Thanks to the YouTube scandal last year, when advertisers pulled spend after finding their ads running alongside terrorist content, the definition of ad fraud has become muddied to the point where buyers and publishers don’t agree on the definition.

Ad misplacement — an issue that’s long existed on user-generated content platforms — has become intertwined with the original definition of ad fraud, which is bot-traffic. That’s causing publishers some headaches, making it even harder to monetize hard news.

“Advertisers now regard that [ad misplacement] as ad fraud. That’s migrated to news brands with some advertisers not wanting to advertise across hard news. So part of the problem is that what once was a simple definition [of fraud], has become skewed because of all the audiences coming into play,” said a publishing executive.

“We can’t allow clients to dictate an article they don’t like as ad fraud. It’s fine if they don’t want to appear next to certain content, but we must take a stand on that and not confuse the lines but be very clear on the definition of ad fraud actually is,” said another executive.

The arrival of Google’s Chrome ad blocker and Apple’s anti-tracking Safari update was described by executives as “painful and annoying” but “welcome” changes. “These browser changes will actually help condense the discussion back into bot inventory and non-human engagement of content,” said a different exec.

Another bone of contention: the somewhat opportune arrival of blockchain companies claiming they can fix ad fraud. “Just confuses and clouds what can be addressed by simpler, human measures,” said one executive.

GDPR: A game of wait and see
The arrival of the GDPR was the most common challenge that publishers noted. But there was relatively little discussion to move the topic forward. The atmosphere around the new law, preparing for it, and how it may affect business has become a game of wait and see for many publishers. Naturally, many have been busy getting ready for it, but confusion still remains around the definition of what constitutes personally identifiable information, as well as how to make gaining consumer consent for all products bulletproof.

One publishing executive spoke of a collaboration with a different publisher in their local market, which has opened up meaningful revenue for the two companies. But when it came to how to connect the dots on what they needed to do for joint permissions to ensure GDPR compliance, they admitted they’ve had to default to just wait and see what happens when the law kicks in. That view was echoed, with one executive adding that a “GDPR shrug” has developed in the industry.

The post ‘Twitter is having a comeback’: What’s on the minds of European publishers appeared first on Digiday.

In Europe, Vice Media is working out how to balance having a unified strategy around branded content while adapting to specific countries.

Publishers who underestimate a region’s cultural differences strike an awkward tone. Vice is moving away from simple translation, according to Nina Kennedy, head of media for Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Vice has ad operations in Germany and branded-content teams in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In Germany, Vice has around 20 people on the media side and 22 in Virtue, its creative agency, according to Kennedy. While in Austria, which has a population of 8.7 million, a tenth of Germany’s, Virtue has around 100 people working across media strategy, social strategy, campaign and account management. Despite the larger market, the creative agency landscape in Berlin is much more competitive.

“We need people in the country who understand the overall strategy but know how they need to adapt it,” said Kennedy, speaking at Digiday’s Publishing Summit in Monaco this week. This can be simple things, like including an Australian in this campaign for airline ANA that ran in Australia and Germany, changing the voice over to Swiss-German, or making the content more relevant to the interest points of that region.

“We have one strategy that’s easier for the client to monitor, one contact person, one media strategist, a consistent brand, and it’s easier to keep up with the reporting,” she said.

At the end of 2017, in order to gain more understanding of its audience, Vice surveyed its readers in European and U.S. markets on education, interests and income. As well as high levels of interest in fashion, food and travel, it found that 33 percent of respondents in Europe had an income level of over £50,000, ($70,000). Now the Vice analytics and data science team in the Netherlands is collecting this data collectively for the German-speaking market — Germany, Austria and Switzerland — so it can offer clients data at both levels.

For instance, the sharing economy is popular in Germany, so Vice is working on a campaign for an auto brand featuring the sharing economy targeted to German big cities. “In Berlin, there’s a lot of things you can do as part of the sharing economy,” said Kennedy, “but those won’t be the same opportunities for someone in a small town in Austria, so it’s not going to be a point of interest.”

Vice is working with the Berlin University of the Arts on research into the media consumption habits of Gen Z, which platforms are relevant, how Vice can seed content there, and what content is relevant to this age group. Speaking broadly, Kennedy said that early findings indicate Gen Z is more health-conscious, political and concerned with their environment thanks to millennials.

“Diversifying platforms is part of the master plan. We’re finding ways to get organic reach on Facebook and not be too dependent on the algorithm,” said Kennedy. Platform diversification was a topic much discussed at the Summit: In the first session, Duncan Chater, chief brand officer Hearst UK, revealed the magazine brand was publishing video content to Musical.ly, a platform that Kennedy said that has users typically in the younger teens.

“We can’t be too dependent on one target group,” she said, “just like we can’t be too dependent on one traffic-referral source. As a youth media brand, we have to be on top of trends and informed.”

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