Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

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The IAB Tech Lab is tackling the thorny problem of transmitting consent under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. On Friday, the Tech Lab debuted an openRTB feature to convey user consent through the digital supply chain and unveiled plans to launch a GDPR Technical Working Group tasked with helping programmatic advertisers deal with… Continue reading »

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Qualcomm rejected Broadcom’s sweetened offer of more than $121 billion but opened the door for the first time to talks with its hostile suitor.

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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 Ming Wu, chief revenue officer at MightyHive. Programmatic has come a long way. The constant refrain heard at industry events over the last year is that all media will be… Continue reading »

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Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing is teaming up with SoftBank Group Corp. to help Japan’s taxi industry deploy cars more efficiently, in a move likely to stymie the ambitions of Uber in the country.

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“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Ryan Pauley, general manager at Concert and vice president of revenue operations at Vox Media. Certain corners of the advertising world discuss Feb. 15 with the kind of panic you might associate with the… Continue reading »

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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. CPGs Make Data Inroads CPG brands like P&G and Clorox are starting to crack the code on digital spending, according to a report from L2. CPGs are getting smarter about using data-rich channels like search, where they can capture intent. By bidding on cheaper… Continue reading »

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When Snapchat rolled out Stories in 2014, it didn’t take long for Instagram and Facebook to copy the feature. Now publishers and brands are updating their own apps and mobile sites with similar features to drive engagement.

Brands like Virgin and publishers like Food Network, Entertainment Weekly, People and Dictionary.com are adding sections to their apps called Stories. These Stories aren’t designed for people to share but rather for brands and publishers to share their own content, mostly vertical video, made popular by Snapchat’s Discover section.

Scripps-owned Food Network added a Stories feature to its Food Network In the Kitchen iOS app on Feb. 7. The idea is to get young people to interact with snippets of content, according to Vikki Neil, gm of Scripps Lifestyle Studios, which created the Story feature in-house.

As with Snapchat and Instagram, each Story in Food Network’s app shows a video or photo and sometimes the option to scroll up to see more content, such as a full recipe or instructional video. But unlike Snapchat, Food Network’s Stories appear directly on its app’s homepage in a series of panels categorized by trending topics such as “wholesome” or “fresh.”

Neil said Food Network saw how its Snapchat audience and Instagram followers were interacting with Stories on those platforms and wanted to bring the same feature to its app. With more than 70,000 recipes in the app, Neil said Stories can help users discover ones they might not see otherwise.

Other publishers like People and brands like Virgin are working with New York-based startup Apester to develop their own Stories. Apester Stories, which resemble Snapchat Stories, can be embedded into a brand’s or publisher’s CMS and from there be added to apps, mobile websites and articles online. The format can be used to share GIFs and quizzes as well as photos and videos and ads can appear on top of Stories.

For instance, People on Feb. 7 added an Apester Story to an article online and on its mobile site about Marvel’s new “Black Panther” movie. The Story asks questions like, “What are Black Panther’s superpowers?” In October, Virgin added a Story to its website that features Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, among other entrepreneurs, giving advice on starting a business.

Moti Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Apester, said its Story product lets publishers and brands create their own branded Story versions while reusing existing ads. Apester is also taking advantage of the reaction to Facebook’s news-feed changes to promote the product to agencies, saying that Stories can generate more engagement for brands and publishers beyond social media.

It’s not surprising that publishers and brands want to incorporate Stories into their own apps and mobile sites. The Stories format has proven popular on Instagram, Snapchat and even Facebook to a certain extent. Instagram Stories are used by more then 250 million people a day, the platform announced in June.

If anything, publishers and brands can expect that Stories will be shared more widely. At the end of January, Snapchat announced it would let users share their Stories across any social platform. In its quarterly earnings, the platform also said it would bring Stories to big screens at the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl.

The post Publishers and brands are copying Snapchat’s Story feature for their apps and mobile sites appeared first on Digiday.

Digital content studio and broadcaster Little Dot Studios started by making TV content work on YouTube. Now, it’s creating its own weekly original documentaries for its YouTube documentary channel, Real Stories, and is looking for brands to sponsor them.

Publishers used to growing audiences quickly on Facebook find YouTube a tougher destination to crack, but the YouTube audience tends to be more loyal and engaged, leading more publishers to shift their focus there.

Little Dot Studios has produced nine original documentaries lasting around 30 minutes each that it plans to start publishing weekly to YouTube documentary channel Real Stories in the coming weeks. The publisher picked a variety of topics, so it can learn what audiences respond well to. There are docs about a missing schoolgirl in southern England, an Eminem fan with brittle bone disease and an expedition down the Mississippi River on a boat made from plastic bottles.

Real Stories has already grown to over 1.2 million subscribers in the last 18 months from posting archived hourlong documentaries three times a week. According to the company, the channel gets between 600,000 and 1 million video views a day. The channel had 16.7 million YouTube video views in December, per Tubular Labs.

“We want to have our own view of what a Real Stories documentary is,” said Andy Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Little Dot Studios, adding that it plans to have brands sponsor the upcoming original films and also pitch them as TV pilots.

Beyond YouTube, Real Stories since last summer has put its films on Facebook, driving 18.7 million monthly views, according to Tubular Labs. In the coming months, they’ll be available on Amazon Fire and Roku. Real Stories also recently launched iOS and Android apps.

A part of All3Media production company, Little Dot Studios manages YouTube channels for TV shows like “The Graham Norton Show” and Gordon Ramsay’s from broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 4. Across its network of channels, the studio noticed that the second-most viewed genre on YouTube was documentaries, after children’s content. That spurred it to launch the Real Stories channel, featuring human-interest films like “My Son the Jihadi” and “America’s Poor Kids.” The studio has since launched two more documentary channels: Spark for science films and Timeline for historical documentaries.

“One-off documentaries are not a high-value genre in TV; scripted shows have driven everything in TV for the last three years,” said Taylor. “There’s this odd gap where the TV market is being driven by scripted, but the data tells us documentaries are the most popular.”

Taylor’s team uploads videos and tags them to ensure the algorithm surfaces them so they get as many views as possible. Most of these views occur in the U.S. and U.K., said Taylor, adding that the general rule of thumb is a million views on YouTube works out to $1,000 (£720) in pre-roll revenue after YouTube takes its 45 percent cut. The studio buys the docs outright from production studios or distributes them for a revenue share. This year, the Real Stories channel has paid out $3.5 million (£.2.5 million) to partners, up 200 percent year over year. The docs are still a small part of the company’s revenue, most of which comes from managing channels for broadcasters and producing films for brands like the Formula E car-racing series and Pepsi Max.

Google touts that 15 percent of YouTube watch time in the U.K. happens on the living room screen. More than 20 percent of Real Stories’ viewing takes place on connected TVs, with an average watch time per video of 20 minutes, according to Taylor.

“The algorithm is so complex, people still believe one to two minutes will do well,” Taylor said. “If you believe that, the algorithm will destroy you. YouTube is a place people go for long periods of time.”

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At the Digiday Hot Topic UK: Data-Driven Publishing event last November in London, we sat down with over 20 publisher executives from major media companies across the country to understand their knowledge of emerging technologies in the advertising world. Check out our earlier research on whether Facebook’s algorithm change will help or hurt publishers here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Top findings:

• Only 22 percent of respondents think they have a perfect understanding of how first- and second-price auctions work.
• Only 6 percent think the publishing industry has at least a “solid” understanding of first- and second-price auctions.
• Sixty-seven percent think they have a better personal understanding than their industry does of first- and second-price auctions.

Publishers such as LittleThings, Prisa and MailOnline have adopted header bidding or server-side bidding in search of higher ad revenue. According to a report from ServerBid, 73 percent of the top 1,000 Alexa sites that sell ads programmatically conduct header bidding. But even as header bidding becomes ubiquitous among major publishers, few publishing executives understand it.

Only 22 percent of publishing executives in Digiday’s survey claimed to have a perfect understanding of how first- and second-price auctions work. Ninety-four percent said they had at least some understanding, while only 6 percent said they had no understanding. Publisher executives thought less highly of their industry as a whole. While 51 percent thought their personal knowledge was either solid or perfect, only 6 percent thought their industry had solid knowledge. No one thought their industry had perfect knowledge.

Most publishers are understandably only focused on content rather than building internal ad tech. Freestar, an agency that helps publishers monetize their ad inventory, has over 30 people dedicated to that task, whereas most publishers have only a small team of a few people, if not just one person, focused on monetizing ad inventory. These companies lack the resources and time to commit to understanding header bidding.

“At the end of the day, publishers aren’t ad tech companies,” said Christopher Stark, co-founder of Freestar. “Most of [the executives] are more worried about strategy around content than auction economics. [Header bidding] is deep, nerdy shit that executives don’t want to know and take the time to understand.”

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