Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

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Twitter is a company that always seems on the verge of flight. The potential is there, but the question remains: Will the platform ever be able to fulfill it? Instability in Twitter’s C-suite doesn’t help. On Tuesday, COO Anthony Noto – second in command to Jack Dorsey – became the most recent top Twitter exec to fly… Continue reading »

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“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Tim Ware, vice president of advanced television at Telaria. In my last column, a little more than a year ago, I outlined the philosophical differences between programmatic TV and digital video buyers. While both… Continue reading »

The post Targeting, Fraud, Viewability And Completed Views Will Shape The Next Generation Of TV appeared first on AdExchanger.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Settle An Old Score Changes are afoot at comScore, but it’s unclear if those changes are for the better or the worse. Bloomberg reports comScore has enlisted Goldman Sachs to explore a potential sale, though no formal talks have begun. The measurement firm also… Continue reading »

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Fitness magazine Self folded its print edition at the end of 2016 as part of a consolidation of Condé Nast’s magazines. But since then, editor-in-chief Carolyn Kylstra has found new life (and younger readers) for the brand on Snapchat.

Self launched in May on Snapchat’s Discover section for publishers with a weekly frequency, which increased to three times a week in July. Self now reaches 8 million unique users a month on Snapchat, making it Self’s biggest platform, followed by its website, which had 6 million uniques in December, according to comScore.

From an engagement and loyalty perspective, Self is performing well, according to Snapchat parent Snap. Its audience has grown steadily since May, and the percentage of its audience that returns to its Discover Stories at least three times a week is more than 50 percent.

That loyalty is notable. Snapchat has moved to make Discover more of a video destination, which can make it hard for text-based publishers like Self to compete. “Video provides more value for ads and keeps people inside the platform longer,” said Nick Cicero, CEO of Delmondo, which provides Snapchat analytics to Discover publishers. “It might be harder for a text-based publisher to break out. But the audience is so young, just to be on there is advertising for a lot of publishers.”

Founded in 1979, Self has carved out a name with women in their 20s, 30s and 40s as a positive, inclusive fitness brand, but it wasn’t as well-known to Snapchat’s teen and college-age audience. On Snapchat, Self avoids topics that are risky or irrelevant to teens, like weight loss and child rearing, but the subject matter is essentially the same as Self.com’s.

“When it comes to health and wellness, everyone cares about feeling better, no matter how old they are,” Kylstra said.

There’s not a publisher out there that’s not thinking about how to diversify their traffic sources, especially in the wake of Facebook deprioritizing news in its news feed. Self was already moving in that direction, cutting its daily story output in half last year to 10, to focus on longer, more differentiated stories; and increasing traffic from its newsletters, search and Instagram. Snapchat doesn’t let publishers link to their sites from their Discover editions, but Self still considers it a good way to build its brand with a new audience.

Publishers have their own issues with Snapchat, with some saying it’s hard to make money there, but the app has been cozying up to publishers lately, building a partnership team to serve them and planning a publisher summit.

Condé Nast said it wouldn’t discuss the details of its partnership with Snapchat, but it said that as a standalone channel, Snapchat is profitable for Self. Kylstra said she’s not super concerned about converting Snapchat users to Self.com. Self has three people dedicated full time to the Discover edition, supplemented by freelancers, which is smaller than many publishers’ Snapchat teams, and Self’s team often repurposes Snapchat content for Instagram and Self’s own site.

“My biggest focus is to establish the brand as a trusted resource in wellness,” said Kylstra. “The broader goal is to build brand affiliation and create really loyal audiences who, when they see [our products] at Target or Bed Bath & Beyond or go to one of our running clubs, they’ll be excited about us because they know us.”

The post After folding in print, Self’s 8 million Snapchat users are more than on its website appeared first on Digiday.

Pop-up shops offer brands, especially e-commerce brands, a way to form lasting relationships with consumers. These pop-ups operate as experiential retail spaces that merge entertainment with retail, allowing brands to sell and generate buzz around their products.

The problem is, spaces for pop-ups can be expensive. As a workaround, ad agencies are using their own offices as sites for their clients’ pop-ups. This accomplishes two things: Agencies can eliminate their existing clients’ real estate costs and show off their experiential talents to gain new clients.

Take digital agency Grow, for example. This spring, it will transform one of its two office buildings at its headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, into a pop-up space. The 1,500-square-foot area will serve as the lunchroom for the agency’s 45 employees during the day, but it will be redesigned and reconfigured at night to fit the experiential needs of Grow’s individual or prospective clients, whether it’s for a night, weekend or several weeks.

Drew Ungvarsky, CEO and creative director at Grow, said a “massive” need exists for more spaces where brands can experiment with a brick-and-mortar presence, but many companies cannot host pop-ups because of the high price. A 1,000-square-foot space in Norfolk, for example, can cost around $24,000 a month, according to S.L. Nusbaum Realty Co.

The cost of renting a space is even steeper in larger cities. A room in New York City’s Nolita neighborhood under 1,000 square feet can easily cost $35,000 to $40,000 a month.

For this reason, Ungvarsky said, Grow plans on renting its pop-up space out as cheaply as it can, if not for free. Grow itself plans to spend around $50,000 for the initial renovation and operating costs, according to Ungvarsky.

“We want to help our clients find out what works today, so our intent is not to make money off of this,” he said. “We’re thinking of it as a space where our partners can innovate.” He added that the effort also helps the agency show off “the different way it thinks about [experiential].”

Hawke Media already has experience in building its own experiential pop-ups for clients in a co-retail space it bought last year called The Nest. Several companies sell their products in their own shops within the 1,100-square-foot space on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, one of Los Angeles’ trendiest and most expensive streets, a few minutes from Venice Beach.

Between March and May last year, Hawke Media hosted e-commerce brands such as Ridge Wallet, Sweat Tailor and BaubleBar at The Nest to boost their brand awareness, throw branded events and test new concepts. Hawke Media’s experiential team managed the daily operations, including staffing and inventory; promoted the shop on social with paid media; and threw events featuring influencers, live music and activities like yoga.

“We wanted to create a turnkey solution for brands looking to dip their feet in pop-up shops, especially if they are only e-commerce,” said Erik Huberman, founder and CEO of Hawke Media. “It’s really hard to survive in a retail presence in LA just because it’s so expensive.”

Companies aren’t necessarily driving revenue from these pop-ups. In fact, every brand at The Nest, as well as Hawke Media itself, broke even. Every month, Hawke Media would rotate the spots among 10 e-commerce brands, half of which were existing clients. These brands would split the operational costs, which Huberman would not disclose, making the overall cost much cheaper than it would be if they rented their own spaces.

“With The Nest, brands can test something out in a short-term basis and see if they would ever want to go into retail permanently, rather than committing to a five- to 10-year lease,” said Karolina Swietoniowska, experiential marketing producer at Hawke Media.

If anything, these pop-ups are effective marketing plays, said Huberman. “From a brand-equity standpoint, it’s so valuable to have a physical presence,” he said. “E-commerce is great, but it’s missing a lot of that touch-and-feel aspect that you get from having that direct presence.”

Huberman said Hawke Media will continue to operate The Nest. The agency is thinking of bringing the activation to large events like Art Basel, South by Southwest or even Cannes.

The growth of marketing technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality and voice is also driving this need for temporary brick-and-mortar spaces. Brands use these technologies as new ways to interact with their customers, but they need room and audiences to test their approaches. Some agencies are using their in-house pop-ups as temporary areas for brands to demonstrate their latest technologies.

Tool of North America, for example, owns what it calls a “mixed-reality coffee shop” named Goodboybob in Santa Monica, California, where customers can get a sneak peak of a client’s VR or AR project along with some avocado toast.

The post Agencies free up their offices for their clients’ experiential tests appeared first on Digiday.

Few brands have the fortitude to run marketing on their own without much reliance on ad agencies, but Netflix is an exception. With an in-house approach, Netflix is increasing its marketing spend from approximately $1.3 billion to $2 billion this year, as the company plans to spend around $8 billion on content — including 80 new original films — in 2018.

Netflix declined to discuss its marketing strategy, but analysts and agency executives believe Netflix’s marketing budget increase aligns with its content strategy, and they expect most of Netflix’s ad dollars to go to digital, especially programmatic, as well as to offline events to generate earned media. The streaming service is known to handle most media buys in-house, although MEC is Netflix’s major media shop, they said.

“Netflix is a performance marketer. Data is everything, with which Netflix makes marketing less subjective,” said Brian Wieser, senior research analyst for Pivotal Research Group. “I think Netflix will spend its increased marketing budget mostly on digital media. But keep in mind, most of its growth is international, so I’m sure there will be different [media-buying] choices by market.”

Programmatic is an area in which Netflix is likely to keep spending more. In a letter to shareholders last April, Netflix said it was investing more in programmatic as part of its $1 billion-plus marketing spend, with the goal of improving its ability to “do individualized marketing at scale and to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time.” Speaking on condition of anonymity, one major ad exchange said Netflix has been among the top 10 brand spenders on the exchange over the past three years, and the streaming service will maintain that position based on its buying patterns. Netflix primarily uses Google DoubleClick Bid Manager to buy media programmatically, according to the exchange.

Of course, Netflix will continue to run programmatic in-house through a team — consisting of multiple former WPP and Publicis employees — in the Bay Area. This is because more and more brands have started overseeing buy-side fees in programmatic, and Netflix can take an in-house approach because it has technical competency, according to Will Doherty, vp of business development for Index Exchange.

“Netflix needs to maintain its content library, recommend relevant content on its platform and support different user interfaces across devices, which requires lots of technical competency. Programmatic is less daunting compared to that,” said Doherty. “If I’m a marketer who is selling candy bars, I don’t have that tech infrastructure ingrained in my DNA.”

Netflix’s hands-on approach is not limited to programmatic. Since the streaming service is a tech-centric company, it has developed its own marketing model and is used to processing internal data on its own. Because of that, media agencies are usually only responsible for campaign execution, instead of developing strategic media planning for Netflix, according to Wieser. “Netflix works with media agencies on something that it can’t do efficiently on its own, like buy TV or out of home,” he said.

Netflix has even brought some creative work in-house. Robert Green, chief creative officer for Ripple Collective, has worked on ad campaigns for Netflix before and said the company is unique because it lets a group of marketers run advertising in-house. “That means you have people who are focused on outcomes helping to craft and create campaigns, rather than having more purely creatives at that stage of the work,” said Green. “And also uniquely — though this is changing more and more — the majority of the campaigns would [take place] on the Netflix platform itself, with some outdoor to augment but very little else in the way of media buys.”

As Netflix plans to create more original films, Green believes the company will need to spend more on TV, out-of-home and digital series to promote its movies, just like other movie studios. Lauren Tetuan, evp and media director for Deutsch, thinks that as a performance marketer, Netflix has developed — and will continue to develop — innovative marketing strategies, from social media to events marketing to offline installations, to reach a broader audience.

“It is a balance of maintaining and attracting new subscribers with driving viewership of new content,” said Tetuan. “Netflix is now competing with the major studios, not just Hulu and other streaming services, so a big piece of the plan is orchestrated around getting people to watch its growing portfolio of original content.”

The post ‘Data is everything’: Netflix is pouring money into marketing — and that should benefit programmatic appeared first on Digiday.

For a company with some money, there’s no better opportunity for exposure than the Super Bowl. Just ask U.S. Bank, whose hometown of Minneapolis will host 125,000 visitors coming for the big game next week.

During the week of the event, it’s going to place ads that will “take over” a light rail station near the stadium, and Super Bowl-branded ATMs will let customers donate to the American Red Cross. It isn’t an official NFL sponsor, but it will be placing TV ads that will run locally during the Super Bowl pregame show, along with sponsored videos on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and a Snapchat filter. It won’t be running national ads during the game. The bank is in its third year of a 20-year deal that gives it naming rights to the stadium hosting Super Bowl events. It was also a bank lender that helped finance the stadium.

“It’s an opportunity for us to expose existing and future consumers to the brand and tell the story of who we are as a company,” said Chris Lee, head of sponsorships for the Minneapolis-based bank. “This is our crown jewel, having our bank step onto a national platform — it’s an awareness play.”

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

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By all accounts, it’s been a turbulent year for media. The alarming spread of fake news — whether for financial gain, pushing partisan agendas or sharing inaccurate information — has shaken audience trust in media both on and off social platforms.

Mounting pressure on Google and Facebook for their part in spreading fake news has taken its toll, with German, French and U.K. governments looking for ways to regulate tech companies. The platforms have launched fact-checking initiatives and invested in flagging extremist content. Most recently, Facebook has responded by distancing itself from seeming like a media company, demoting publisher posts in its news feed and asking its users to qualify which publishers are trustworthy in surveys.

Here are five charts on the state of trust in the media.

Trust in platforms reaches five-year low
According to Edelman’s “Trust Barometer 2018,” global trust in social platforms has fallen by two points since last year, while trust in journalism has risen by five points. (Respondents were asked to rank their trust in platforms on a nine-point scale.) This is a far cry from 2015, when trust in platforms was higher than trust in journalism.

The report found that trust in platforms decreased in 21 out of 28 countries surveyed. In the U.K., trust in traditional media has increased from 48 percent last year to 61 percent in 2018, according to Edelman.

People disagree about whether social media is good for society
The same Edelman report found that in the U.K., distrust in social media platforms has been fueled by inaction on their part to stop unethical or illegal behavior on the platforms (70 percent) and the spread of extremist material (70 percent).

When asked if social media is useful for staying in touch with loved ones, nearly 70 percent of respondents said they agree with or are neutral on the statement, while 34 percent disagree that social media is a force for good in society.

As a result, Britons want more regulation of social media platforms: 64 percent believe platforms aren’t regulated enough, while 62 percent fear platforms will sell their data to advertisers.

Audiences question traditional media’s agenda
There’s a healthy skepticism of media organizations, according to Edelman’s report. Globally, 66 percent believe media organizations are overly concerned with attracting big audiences rather than reporting, while 65 percent believe organizations would sacrifice accuracy in order to be the first to break a story. Just under 60 percent believe organizations would rather support an ideology than accurately inform the public.

In the U.K., 33 percent are reading the news less, mostly because they believe news sources are biased.

Traditional media can improve at separating fact from opinion
Forty percent of people believe traditional media does a good job of separating fact from opinion, compared to 24 percent who believe the same for social media, according to a global report for Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

There’s opportunity for the media to do a better job, with the report noting that partisanship isn’t a problem in itself but is disliked when it is dressed up in a news article to distort the truth. A more diverse media in terms of age, demographics and political and economic outlook would help, as well as highlighting the journalists’ fact-checking processes.

Trust in government correlates with media satisfaction
Global research from the Pew Research Center finds a strong correlation between satisfaction with the media and trust that the government will do what is right for its country. The gap is largest in Vietnam, Sweden and the U.K. In the U.S., there is no difference in media satisfaction between those who trust the government and those who do not.

The post The global state of trust in media, in 5 charts appeared first on Digiday.

The resurgence of the “Angry Birds” brand several years after the best-selling mobile game’s debut has prompted a change in how its parent company Rovio monetizes the latest iterations in the series.

Rather than continue to prioritize producing one-off, custom versions of the “Angry Birds” games for brands, the developer is turning brand partnerships into something more long term. Rovio wants more brands to spend on “live integrations,” the developer’s term for putting brands into its existing “Angry Birds 2” and “Angry Birds Evolution” titles.

“We used to have the premium activations like the ‘Angry Birds Star Wars’ game, whereas what we’re doing now are these timed events in the existing games that incorporate the brands,” said Miika Tams, vp of games at Rovio Entertainment.

The NFL, for example, launched a partnership for both “Angry Birds 2” and “Angry Birds Evolution” earlier this week to promote the Super Bowl. In “Angry Birds 2,” players can dress their flocks of birds in any of the 32 NFL jerseys and helmets to compete in Super Bowl-themed levels. In “Angry Birds Evolution,” meanwhile, gamers can win a new character called the Quarterback, created exclusively for the NFL. The Super Bowl-themed levels will run until Feb. 5 across both “Angry Birds” games, while additional NFL-themed levels will run in “Angry Birds Evolution” following the Super Bowl.

It’s difficult to sustain awareness for games, and it’s hard to make money from the free-to-play model, said Tams, unless developers can populate their titles with “new stories and constant updates” that keep people coming back.

By incorporating brands into its existing titles, Rovio can potentially strike more partnerships and consequently make more advertising revenue without the burden of having to produce full games for clients as it has done in the past. In the three months leading up to September, Rovio generated €64.3 million ($79.8 million) from advertising sales and in-app purchases, compared to the €40.1 million ($49.7 million) it made over the same period in 2016.

While Tams would not reveal what other brands Rovio is working with, he said the company would look to use future partnerships to piggyback on the hype for big events in 2018 such as the World Cup and summer blockbusters.

Rovio tried to tackle the freemium space in 2013 when “Angry Birds” was the hot property in the gaming space and the company’s valuations were at their peak. But newer brands “Candy Crush” and “Clash of Clans” exceeded the popularity of “Angry Birds,” pushing Rovio to adopt the microtransaction business model and regular updates those rival titles pioneered.

The switch had an immediate impact on Rovio’s fortunes last year, increasing sales at a rate of around 90 percent in the first and second quarters. In the third quarter, revenue from its games jumped 40 percent year over year, buoyed by better monetization of its top games, the company said at the time. Despite the growth, financial analysts have questioned whether Rovio can keep making money from the “Angry Birds” game as well as find alternative sources amid ongoing speculation of the company’s rumored initial public offering.

For now, the business is focused on the “Angry Birds” brand and getting in front of brands, Tams said, adding, “There’s a risk involved in the strategy — as there is with anything you do in such a competitive space — but Rovio believes we’re doing the right thing when focusing on the live integrations with the brands.”

The post Rovio, the company behind ‘Angry Birds,’ changes how it monetizes mobile gaming appeared first on Digiday.

Everyone talks about, and agonizes over, Amazon’s effect on the retail industry. And for good reason. But there’s a smaller, yet still mighty, transformation rippling through the industry that brands are bending to accommodate, and that’s the Stitch Fix effect.

CEO Katrina Lake is spearheading the future of personalization in fashion, a point of obsession for brands and retailers that know they can no longer offer up a generic user experience and still win. And while every apparel brand desperately wants to get to know the person buying and wearing its clothes on a more intimate level, Stitch Fix was modeled on the premise. It established a new type of retailer that asked customers for insights and feedback alongside their size and color preference for items, even the ones customers didn’t like or buy, in exchange for a clear value proposition. Stitch Fix, for its members, would eliminate the need to go out and shop for clothes.

The machinations of the Stitch Fix model rely on a combination of data science — machine learning, AI and natural language processing — and human stylists; on top of complex customer profiles built by data, stylists can layer the nuances of buying and wearing clothes. Striking that balance has led the company to its IPO. and to nearly $1 billion in revenue in 2017.

In response, other brands are scrambling to figure out how they can create a similar customer feedback loop using data science and promote a more personalized experience. We asked Lake to think about what it takes to be a data-powered retailer, what’s holding the industry back and where priorities should land.

Prediction: Human roles won’t vanish, even as AI dominates.
Stitch Fix’s Hybrid Design line of in-house apparel is created using a series of algorithms that identify white spaces in Stitch Fix’s inventory, then take successful trends, colors and patterns across clothing pieces and combine them into a series of new styles. For any designer working in retail, this could sound like a death knell.

But Lake said Stitch Fix’s ability to use people’s strengths alongside data science is the company’s secret sauce.

“The relationship we have with data science is not so much about client data as it is about the clients themselves,” said Lake. “So to be able to get to know people one-to-one and personalize Fixes to their needs, it requires that we really understand clients well and that we have a lot of information on them, which informs the inherent relationship around how Stitch Fix works. Because we have stylists and not just an algorithm, we get much higher quality data, and more involved and authentic data points.”

For instance, someone might buy a pair of jeans from their Stitch Fix delivery, and then tell their stylist that they only bought the jeans because they’re in the process of losing baby weight and want the jeans to fit. Right now, though, they don’t actually fit — so the stylist can then inform the algorithm not to take those jeans’ data and apply it to the customer’s profile.

“Our data is real, and effective. And people share this information because they know we’ll actually use it to deliver a good experience,” said Lake.

Prediction: Customer expectations are going to skyrocket.
Right now, we’re all used to seeing generic, “If you liked this, you might like this” photo dumps at the bottom of an e-commerce page, or getting an email in which a retailer boldly claims, “You’re going to love our new arrivals!” Arrivals that, of course, you very much do not love.

According to Lake, patience for such superficial excuses for personalization is wearing thin.

“Today, you laugh off a bad recommendation, but the bar is going to get much higher when it comes to what is expected from companies that are serving you recommendations based on your data, and what they actually understand about you,” said Lake. “Companies get away with inauthentic personalization and data that doesn’t make a lot of sense. In the future, all retailers should be able to anticipate better than they can today, whether that’s based on what you’ve liked on Instagram or your past purchases.”

Prediction: Experiences will actually evolve based on customer data.
As customer expectations increase, experience will actually catch up. There’s so much customer information that can be culled online that people willingly give up (whether it’s knowingly or not), that current retargeting efforts and recommendation bots are just the tip of what’s possible.

Eventually, that gap between customer information and experience will start to close.

“Historically, there’s been a gap between what you give to companies and how much the experience is improved. Big data is tracking you all over the web, and the most benefit you get from that right now is: If you clicked on a pair of shoes, you’ll see that pair of shoes again a week from now,” said Lake. “We’ll see that gap begin to close. Expectations are very different around personalization, but importantly, an authentic version of it. Not, ‘You abandoned your cart and we’re recognizing that.’ It will be genuinely recognizing who you are as a unique human. The only way to do this scalably is through embracing data science and what you can do through innovation.”

Prediction: ‘Client-centricity’ will become a pressing priority.
There are a lot of reasons why retail at large hasn’t caught up to the developments around what data science can do to serve a customer. Stores are closing, foot traffic is falling and when times aren’t good, experimenting with new technology takes a backseat.

It doesn’t help that these companies have legacy systems in place that would require a massive overhaul to change. But, according to Lake, time is running out for retailers to invest time and energy elsewhere.

“It’s a real challenge to invest in something new when you’re facing other challenges. People also don’t see how it will add value to their businesses. They can learn from what we’re seeing value in to improve the ecosystem overall, but it’s not super easy or straightforward,” said Lake. “But think about this ‘client-centricity’ of the industry. There are so many places where people can buy things today, that you have to think about everything from the lens of: ‘How is my customer at the center of everything?’ To be able to know, ‘This is the value we’re delivering to the client, and introducing this feature will be better for him or her,’ and to live and breathe that, is incredibly important.

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