Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

Quinn, an investor in the crypto trading platform Coinbase, says “the toothpaste is out of the tube.”

The decentralized virtual currency called bitcoin has been around for nearly a decade, but it’s just recently starting to find mainstream attention and, in some circles, acceptance. That shift is thanks in no small part to the skyrocketing value of bitcoin, the world’s best-known “cryptocurrency,” from $1,000 near the start of the year to nearly $20,000 today.

For investors like Spark Capital General Partner Megan Quinn, “the toothpaste is out of the tube.” On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Recode’s Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Casey Newton, Quinn explained her investment in Coinbase, a company that is trying to position itself as the safe place to trade cryptocurrencies.

“People were sleeping on each others’ couches and renting rooms before Airbnb, but Airbnb provided that really safe, clean, approved — you got feedback, it was a transaction,” Quinn said. “You felt good about it. We think Coinbase is providing that sort of experience for trading crypto.”

You can listen to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Someday, Quinn said, the value of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin will level off enough that we will be able to start treating them like real money. But that day is not today.

“Today it’s speculative, 100 percent,” she said. “One of the folks on my team said he was liquidating his 401k to buy in, which made me pretty nervous. I’m optimistic that it will actually be a tool for transacting, once we reach some steady state.”

“In a world where it’s going up by a thousand dollars every couple hours, you don’t want to go to Overstock.com and buy a mattress,” Quinn added. “But if we can get to a place where it’s steady-state, I think there’s real opportunity there.”

So, who should buy into bitcoin now, when the price is so volatile? Talking to Swisher and Newton a few weeks ago, when the price was a measly $17,000, Quinn warned not to trust any of the “false prophet[s]” who claim to know when the roller coaster ride will be over; buying in now only makes sense for people with a lot of disposable income, she added.

“If you have a spare $17,000 that you are fine seeing go to zero, okay, fine, that’s not the worst way to spend it,” she said. “I don’t think cryptocurrencies, or bitcoin specifically, is ever going to go to zero. But I think if you’re someone who’s willing to have it go to zero, then you can ride out the stomach-lurching volatility that we’re going to continue to see for a while.”

If you like this show, you should also sample our other podcasts:

• Recode Media with Peter Kafka features no-nonsense conversations with the smartest and most interesting people in the media world, with new episodes every Thursday. Use these links to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
• Too Embarrassed to Ask, hosted by Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Lauren Goode, answers the tech questions sent in by our readers and listeners. You can hear new episodes every Friday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
• And Recode Replay has all the audio from our live events, including the Code Conference, Code Media and the Code Commerce Series. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on Apple Podcasts — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Kara.

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What is TV DMP? How can you combine TV viewership data with other behavioral audience data to reach your consumer across screens and devices? Learn more about Lotame TV DMP at https://www.lotame.com/products/tv-dmp/
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As a B2B marketer, you are often caught trying to serve two masters: the need to drive engagement for specific campaigns or periods relative to the business vs. the overall goal to drive persistent ROI throughout the year. In any scenario, it’s becoming more clear that the “campaign” mentality no longer serves.

Even marketing’s cousin, advertising, has evolved. In the age of programmatic and audience-based, data-driven marketing, advertisers have already moved away from the campaign a
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Hear how Lotame’s data management platform (DMP) has helped leading media companies increase CPMs, sell more media, and improve ROI. Learn more about how Lotame works with publishers around the globe at https://www.lotame.com/solutions/publishers/
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2017 was the biggest year in media and marketing since 2016. Whether it was the duopoly increasingly controlling the digital ad market, digital publishers and traditional media companies fighting back against the duopoly, advertisers pressuring the duopoly to improve its advertising and measurement products or things that had nothing to with the duopoly, the duopoly reigned supreme. But Google and Facebook weren’t winners on all fronts. Here are Digiday’s biggest media and marketing winners and losers of 2017:.

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Here’s our daily recap of what happened in marketing technology, as reported on MarTech Today, Marketing Land and other places across the web.
From MarTech Today:

Lotame’s prep for GDPR highlights big changes in data management
Dec 19, 2017 by Barry Levine
There’s tracking consent, providing data access and minimizing liability. Plus there’s the pending ePrivacy Regulation.
Equifax and beyond: How data breaches shaped 2017
Dec 19, 2017 by Robin Kurzer
Could this be a turn
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Check out some of the key highlights from our must-attend conference for Data Management Platform clients! Lotame Spark Client Summit 2017, March 7th in NYC. #LotameSpark
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For the past year and a half, Theresa Moore, vp of platform partnerships at Pixability, has been trying to buy video ads on Amazon to no avail. A few months ago, Moore — who said trying to build a relationship with the e-commerce giant has been an “interesting journey” — thought she finally had an in.

Amazon’s user-experience team responded to an email she sent, but instead of giving her the direction she needed to buy, it offered her a $100 Amazon card to learn about her experience trying to contact the company. Moore was flabbergasted: “I told them, keep your $100 and give me the contact information of someone at the company who can help me make progress.” She said she didn’t get a contact, but she kept the $100.

Moore is one of many ad buyers trying to work with Amazon but finding it difficult to secure an Amazon rep and then start the process of advertising through Amazon’s suite of ad offerings, including its in-house team Amazon Media Group, self-serve marketing suite Amazon Marketing Services and programmatic solution Amazon Advertising Platform.

“It’s at a level where you can only develop a relationship with Amazon if you know someone,” said one ad buyer at a large agency who asked for anonymity.

Another ad buyer, who wishes to remain anonymous, said their large agency has begun forming a relationship with Amazon after a year of “stalking,” but only because of a major client’s spend.

Digital agency PMG had a similar experience. PMG started reaching out to Amazon about two years ago and didn’t gain traction with the company until a year in, when its client, retailer Cole Haan, expressed interest in spending with Amazon, according to Price Glomski, evp of digital strategy at PMG. That led the agency to acquire eight contacts at Amazon and start building its own internal Amazon practice. In the past year, the agency has spent well into seven figures on the platform, working on campaigns for large clients like Beats By Dre, Glomski said.

But even when ad buyers have an Amazon rep and footing within Amazon, they don’t necessarily get the answers they need quickly.

The makeup of Amazon’s internal client services teams is murky. None of the five ad buyers Digiday spoke with for this story know how Amazon’s client services teams are structured or how many people each has. There is a general understanding that AMG, AMS and AAP all have their own teams, and one ad buyer, who prefers anonymity, believes Amazon has teams structured around specific brands rather than agencies. Still, this person said, “You never have a holistic idea of what’s going on.” An Amazon spokesperson said the company does not reveal how many people work in each division or how many teams fall under client services.

Moore said after months of pestering Amazon, she finally secured her own rep who directs her to other groups within the company that might be able to assist her. But that’s where the help stops.

“It’s such a black box,” said Moore. “They’ve been really nice, but the groups at Amazon don’t know who does exactly what I want, which is to run video ads.”

Even PMG, with its eight contacts and several Amazon campaigns under its belt, has trouble navigating Amazon’s internal client services teams.

“The teams have really focused expertise, so when you ask a question about another ad product or product road map, it tends to get lost in translation, and you have to be directed to another product team,” Glomski said. “Fortunately, the Amazon team we work with is really good, but even they come back to us and say, ‘Sorry, it’s a development in progress.’”

Ad buyers said Amazon is following the playbooks of other ad platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, which were slow to make their client services teams available to agencies and ad tech providers while developing ad offerings. Rather, they initially focused on building relationships with large brands.

“Amazon definitely gives more interest and more resources to the larger brands,” said one ad buyer. For instance, one brand this person works with has its own assigned Amazon contact.

Moore is not surprised that Amazon would take this approach. “At the end of the day, brands are the ones that have the creative and the customers,” she said. “Amazon can get the information they desire straight from the brands without having too many chefs in the kitchen.”

“Everything Amazon does is to benefit Amazon,” said another ad buyer. “Everything they’ve built, from their tech stacks to their ad units to their content pages is all to benefit them, so why wouldn’t they go to brands with the big budgets first?”

But this might not be the best tactic for Amazon, as ad buyers at agencies and brands with smaller budgets get antsy about spending on the platform. PMG’s smaller clients, for instance, are eager to spend more on Amazon. Glomski said PMG estimates another $20 million to $25 million is on the table for Amazon from the agency’s midsize brands.

“You can tell [Amazon] is continuing to grow, so for some of our smaller clients, which are still good brands, they just don’t have as much mind share for them,” said Glomski. “What needs to happen quickly in order for advertisers to not get frustrated with Amazon is for Amazon to start building out their strategic group to help grow and train advertisers that will be in the system.”

Amazon has made strides in the past year, like bringing training teams to select agencies and making client service hires. The fact that Amazon’s user-experience team is reaching out to ad buyers like Moore also shows the company is considering ad buyers’ efforts to advertise with the behemoth.

“Agency relationships are very important to us,” said Seth Dallaire, vp of worldwide sales and marketing for Amazon Media Group. “We’ve made investments in both agency development and services as our advertising business grows, and this will continue to be the case.”

Some agencies are seeing the effects of these investments. “They’ve gotten much better in terms of having contacts you can work through, and they’ve made themselves more available to agencies,” said Kevin Packler, vp and director of Amazon services at independent agency The Tombras Group.

But Glomski warned that until the majority of ad agencies and smaller brands feel they are getting the attention they need from Amazon, other platforms with robust client services teams like Google and Facebook will continue to retain more market share. This is especially true, he said, when it comes to transparency and data, another area in which Amazon is known for being a black box.

“With Google and Facebook, any CMO can go in and pick apart different aspects of their marketing strategy,” said Glomski. “If Amazon can provide optics to performance on a daily and hourly level, which is what most marketers today need, that will create a sense of trust and willingness to spend $10,000 dollars a day on Amazon.”

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Publishers are bending to the will of advertisers to make their ads more viewable, but some publishers are finding the payoff isn’t as great as they anticipated.

Over the past year and a half, advertisers have continually pounded their fists, demanding that they’ll only buy ads that are guaranteed to be seen by a user. The push for viewability gave the impression that advertisers would spend branding campaign dollars with publishers that had highly viewable ads, said Erik Requidan, vp of programmatic strategy at Intermarkets, which helps publishers including Drudge Report and The Political Insider market their ad inventory to buyers.

Instead, the sites Requidan works with continue to be relegated to getting performance-based ads, he said. Those sites might see a few dollars increase in their CPMs if they boost their viewability, but big-brand dollars haven’t materialized.

“If something is 90 percent viewable, shouldn’t that unlock a whole lot more money or a bigger price point?” he asked.

When listicle publisher Ranker tweaked its site layout last year, page-load time went down 60 percent and average viewability rates doubled from 35 percent to 70 percent. Those factors helped Ranker increase its average CPMs by about 75 percent, but the prices of its least and most viewable ads don’t differ much.

Ranker’s ad viewability ranges from 62 to 82 percent. But there’s only a 13 percent difference in the CPMs for these ad units, said Ranker CEO Clark Benson. Given how much advertisers and their tech vendors emphasize that campaigns perform better when ads are 80 percent viewable, Benson expected Ranker’s most viewable ad units to command a higher price.

“So far, the promise of viewability quickly filtering out bad actors and improving yields for the good ones seems to be only a half-kept one,” he said.

It’s a similar story elsewhere. Stephanie Layser, vp of ad tech and operations at News Corp, said there’s no significant difference in price between the publisher’s least and most viewable ads. Remedy Health Media, the publisher of health sites like HealthCentral and TheBody.com, has seen little lift in its ad rates since increasing its viewability, said Aryeh Lebeau, evp of client operations there.

Some publishers said they’re satisfied with the pricing lift they’re getting for highly viewable ads, which is a function of their expectations of their advertisers.

Lebeau wasn’t bothered by the lack of lift in ad rates because advertisers never promised Remedy higher rates in exchange for higher viewability.

A programmatic specialist at a comScore 200 entertainment publisher, requesting anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to share financial details, said a 30 percentage-point lift in viewability at his company’s websites tends to increase CPMs by about 20 percent. This person emphasized that it’s difficult to isolate viewability’s impact on ad rates, so these figures are rough estimates. The source still felt his company was being compensated fairly for its highly viewable ad placements.

Another source, Danny Khatib, CEO of 100 percent programmatic publisher Granite Media, said high viewability rates can boost Granite’s CPMs by a few dollars, which he saw as significant.

“We never expected new branding budgets to come online solely because of viewability improvements,” he said. “That seems like wishful thinking.”

In an Integral Ad Science survey of more than 1,000 advertisers, 68 percent of respondents said they transact on viewability and another 25 percent said they wanted to do so. Although buyers are regularly transacting on viewable metrics, viewability is less likely to influence ad rates if it isn’t a primary KPI.

The reason rates haven’t risen right along with viewability has to do with how programmatic buying works. David Lee, programmatic lead at media-buying agency The Richards Group, said that even in a private marketplace setup, most buyers don’t place bids on individual publishers but place bids across hundreds, if not thousands, of sites at a time.

So if viewability is being used as a secondary KPI, then buyers’ bids will be restricted to the publishers that meet a certain viewability threshold. But since buyers aren’t bidding on individual publishers, they’re not intentionally setting out to pay specific publishers more based on their viewability gains. And since viewability rates are rising across the industry, publisher improvements in viewability are less likely to increase publishers’ CPMs than they were a year ago.

Another issue with rising viewability is that in an effort to appease advertisers, many publishers are doing whatever they can to make sure their ads are viewed just long enough to be counted as viewable. Most viewable ads are in view for just one second, according to IAS data. That amount of time happens to be the standard the Media Rating Council uses to define viewability.

As publishers increased their volume of viewable ads by refreshing pages, sticking ads in photo galleries and using interstitials, users got turned off and buyers caught on. IAS found that the average time that a desktop display impression was in view declined from 9.8 seconds in May 2016 to 7.7 seconds in May 2017.

“We’ve seen some publishers game the system in using ad placements that provide a less than optimal consumer experience but have higher rates of viewability,” said Stephani Estes, svp of media strategy at ad agency Cramer-Krasselt. “In those instances, we’re not willing to pay more for higher viewability.”

It’s understandable that publishers get miffed by low returns on highly viewable ads. But in programmatic environments, the highest CPMs come from programmatic direct deals, not the open exchange. And to entice ad buyers to set these deals up, publishers need to have viewability rates above 65 percent, according to three publisher sources.

Viewability isn’t necessarily a way to lift rates, said Mort Greenberg, svp of ad sales at Sightline Media Group, which owns government-focused sites like Federal Times and Military Times. “However,” he added, “high viewability will keep you on a plan.”

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Hear from panelists Patrick Dolan, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, IAB; Kim Riedell, Senior Vice President of Partnerships and Business Development, Advantage Media Solutions; Grant Whitmore, Executive Vice President, Digital, New York Daily News; and Tyler Paxton, Founder & CTO, Are You A Human. Moderated by Jason Downie, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Data Solutions, Lotame. Lotame Spark Client Summit 2017, March 7th in NYC. #LotameSpark
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