Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

More advertisers are starting to ask better questions of the supply-side platforms their demand-side platforms use to hopefully yield better results.

Hiring a DSP, for many advertisers, previously rested solely on the media objective — selling cars via the cheapest cost per acquisition, for example — it could deliver. Now, there’s more focus on whether that media objective is being met fraudulently or through unsavory means, a decision advertisers like U.K. telecommunications firm BT are making based on the origin of the inventory coming from the exchanges and SSPs their DSP uses.

BT is set to make changes to its DSP spending in 2018. Graeme Adams, head of media for BT, which moved an estimated £160 million ($223 million) in media spending to WPP-owned Essence last year, is turning his attention to BT’s ad tech partners in the coming months.

“Figuring out the right DSP is something I want us, our agency, the various marketing teams here to take the time to think about because I don’t think there’s been enough focus on it historically,” he said. “You can just end up in a particular place without really taking the time to understand it.”

Ad exchange OpenX is at the front lines of the shift in the way supply-side partners are being interrogated. As advertisers like Procter & Gamble and Betsson Group have settled on DSPs that are as close to the inventory source as possible, their focus is turning to the ad exchanges and SSPs plugged into those platforms, said Joey Leichman, senior director of buyer development at OpenX. Marketers, according to Leichman, are now questioning whether it makes sense to work with 60 ad exchanges if only six of them are authorized to sell a publisher’s inventory.

While every request for information for a supply-side partner will differ, the questions are likely to fall into three categories, according to experts interviewed for this story: The first set of queries would cover general information such as the number of publishers on an SSP and the type of media those sites support; the second batch would examine the SSP’s approach to quality, such as its adoption of ads.txt or safeguards against ad fraud; finally, advertisers would want qualitative information to back up the sales pitch. Advertisers don’t just want a nice story about quality from their numbers; they also want to know their partners can deliver media results.

“We’ve never seen more people at brands and agencies determined to figure out who their supply-side partners are, what their publisher relationships look like and what guardrails they have to ensure the integrity of the marketplace,” Leichman said. “It’s why we’re seeing more supply-side reviews happening. Call it the year of the RFI.”

Quality over quantity is not a new concern in ad tech. Brands like L’Oréal, Heineken and P&G have used their own workarounds to increase reach by reducing wastage for some time. But not every brand has the media acumen of those big-spending brands, and so many, like Jaguar Land Rover, have been more reliant on the widespread adoption of ads.txt and the proliferation of TAG-certified companies to question the practitioners pulling the programmatic levers.

“We’re paying much more attention to working with partners that are ads.txt and TAG-certified,” said Ian Armstrong, gm at Jaguar Land Rover. “We’re not as sophisticated as some of the [consumer goods] brands, as we have historical issues that we have to contend with as an automotive player, but we’re trying to go through a process of standardization with the partners we work with.”

Last October, adoption of ads.txt among the biggest 1,000 publishers in the U.S. hovered at around 50 percent. Fast forward to mid-January, and three out of every four (82 percent) of the top 1,000 publishers now use ads.txt. Furthermore, companies like OpenX and MediaMath are mandating that their publisher partners adopt ads.txt in anticipation of big brands enforcing the anti-fraud initiative. Indeed, in a survey by the World Federation of Advertisers earlier this year of 28 companies that spend in excess of $50 billion globally on marketing communications, a third (34 percent) said encouraging ads.txt adoption is a major priority for the year ahead.

It’s not at the point where Jaguar Land Rover is only buying through publishers that have implemented ads.txt. The initiative on its own won’t untangle the web of challenges in transparent media buying. Jaguar Land Rover is also trying to improve on blocking malicious ads, identifying legitimate traffic and monitoring the quality of ad impressions bought. But there is more pressure on the automotive advertiser’s ad tech suppliers to adopt ads.txt.

Supply-side partner review can’t come soon enough to the industry, said Justin Kennedy, chief operating officer at SSP provider Sonobi. For a long time, it was as easy as getting a seat on a major exchange to launch a new SSP with access to seemingly endless supply. “Ads.txt and other initiatives such as header bidding are starting to help truly identify the companies that can provide competitive differentiation to the market,” Kennedy said.

The post ‘The year of the RFI’: Advertisers step up supply-side partner reviews appeared first on Digiday.

When Dotdash rebranded its home and food content as The Spruce almost a year ago, it took a risk: cutting ad loads by 30 percent. But thanks to The Spruce’s audience tripling over the past year to 30 million unique visitors in January, according to comScore, revenue grew 40 percent year over year in the fourth quarter. Direct-sold advertising is on pace to increase in the first quarter compared to last year’s fourth quarter. The company wouldn’t share specific dollar figures.

“There was a lot of doubt we could make hay in this space because it’s so crowded,” Dotdash CEO Neil Vogel said. “But the winds of what marketers and advertisers want change all the time. And the winds have blown in our direction.”

The site has compiled performance data on each of the advertising units spread across all of The Spruce’s page templates. That benchmark data about viewability, click-through rate, hover time and other engagement metrics is delivered to advertisers — excluding advertisers that purchase Spruce inventory on open exchanges — alongside the performance of their own ads.

Eric Handelsman, The Spruce’s gm, said The Spruce’s editorial staff puts considerable effort into keeping its content current. There are 54,000 articles in the site’s archive, and on average, each piece was updated less than one year ago. More popular content is reviewed once a quarter.

Because so much of the content is intent-driven — over 90 percent of its desktop traffic comes from search, according to SimilarWeb — The Spruce has spent a lot of time mapping its visitors’ interests and using that information to package articles together. The Spruce recently created a product it calls “journeys,” which group related articles together to encourage people to read more. Someone reading an article on how to make a martini, for example, will get a recommendation for “The Ultimate Cocktails Guide,” which includes a list of popular cocktails and a guide to buying cocktail blenders.

“We’re obviously concerned with engagement, but engagement is not the metric we look at as success or failure,” Vogel said. “We’re interested in them coming back.”

Revenue from e-commerce is also heading up, but most of The Spruce’s growth in 2017 came from selling display and branded content against 32 audience segments the publisher developed over the past 11 months. Without sharing specific dollar figures, Vogel said The Spruce’s advertising revenues were split about evenly between programmatic and direct sold, with its private marketplace revenues representing the fastest-growing segment.

The post The Spruce kept advertisers and audiences coming back in its first year appeared first on Digiday.

Welcome to a preview of the new Digiday Video Briefing, a new weekly newsletter from Digiday senior reporter Sahil Patel that will take you behind the scenes of an industry in upheaval. To get this in your inbox, sign up here.

Disillusioned by Facebook, some publishing executives are eager to do more with Snapchat — especially as the app prepares to double the number of original video shows it airs this year. One publishing exec, from a media company that has multiple Snapchat Discover channels, told me he’s more confident in Snapchat’s shows effort this year, particularly after it hired TV producer Seth Goolnik to head up its unscripted content efforts. (Snap vp of content Nick Bell runs the content team, with Sean Mills spearheading the original video shows initiative.)

“With [Seth Goolnik’s predecessor at Snap], we’d talk back and forth about shows, but it wasn’t clear if or when it was going to happen,” this exec said. “With Seth, we’re definitely going to do something together.”

One area of concern is that Snap does not subsidize the cost of producing these shows, which has limited the number of publishers willing to make shows for Snapchat. But with Snap mounting a publisher charm offensive, its openness to work with more digital and legacy publishers on video shows and a redesign that makes publisher content significantly more visible within the app, expect to hear more publishing executives praise Snapchat going forward.

As for Snap’s video shows strategy in 2018: Even though the company plans to vastly expand the number of shows it airs, it’s also going to be more focused, sources said. “They tried to replicate the entire universe of broadcast and cable, which made it feel very unfocused,” said one Snapchat content partner. “What we’ve heard from them is that there’s more of a concerted effort to be more focused on the type of programming they do: Rather than be the entire cable universe, they’ll try to be a compelling single cable network.”

Three questions with…
Athan Stephanopoulos, president of NowThis

NowThis has a website again. Why?
The pretty simple answer: We are producing a tremendous amount of content on any given day. This allows us to house all of the great work that our team does. And as we increasingly move into mid-form and longer-form content, the site adds one more distribution point to our sales matrix.

Did your Facebook video views decline after the news-feed change?
We’ve seen a low, single-digit decline over the last month. But that’s pretty standard in terms of how we can look [on Facebook] month to month. There hasn’t been this massive shift. The thing is, everyone else in the publishing landscape is now focusing on engagement. And this change will favor quality content. We’ve been doing both for a long time.

Is the distributed-media model still viable?
It is. There was a huge rush to go that way, and now, everyone’s panicking. But both NowThis and Group Nine holistically remain focused on the distributed model across many platforms, whether it’s a social site or streaming over-the-top platform. In today’s media landscape, you still have to bring content to where the users are.

Confessional

“With Facebook Watch, it’s clear that Facebook was writing checks but unclear on how long they’d be writing checks for. So we went all in, and made a bunch of series and produced them as quickly as we could because it’s Facebook, and you never know if and when they’ll change their minds.” — Publisher on producing for Facebook Watch

 

What we’ve covered
CBS remains aggressive about its OTT ambitions:

• CBS All Access and Showtime have a combined 5 million subscribers.
• An entertainment news streaming channel is coming in the fourth quarter.

Read more about CBS’s OTT strategy here.

Barstool Sports got 41,000 people to pay for an amateur boxing pay-per-view:

• PPV buys totaled more than $550,000 in revenue.
• It’s uniquely Barstool, but the PPV event could lead to other commerce-related revenue in the future.

Read more about Barstool’s latest antics here.

What we’re reading
We have streaming revenue, too, says NBC: According to the media giant, 44 percent of the revenue NBC has earned from “This Is Us” comes through digital viewership. With TV ad sales as a whole down 8 percent in 2017 compared to the previous year, it’s getting more and more important for TV networks to talk up their digital businesses. Expect more of this.

YouTube holds spending on Red originals: Does this sound familiar to anyone? As I reported a few weeks ago, YouTube Red is in the midst of an identity crisis. When the CEO of YouTube calls YouTube Red a music service, it doesn’t matter how much money the company spends on TV shows and movies. There’s still money to be made if you can sell or license a project to YouTube Red, but it’s not going to be a Netflix competitor anytime soon — if ever.

The post Video Briefing: Snapchat cozies up to more publishers for video shows appeared first on Digiday.

When Yasmin Sewell joined Farfetch in August of 2017 as the luxury marketplace’s first vp of style and creative, the former Style.com fashion director had a different challenge in front of her.

“I’ve spent my career trying to either build businesses or push them further. This business is flying in the most amazing way, and it’s growing,” said Sewell. “I don’t have the weight of that on me, and so, in a way, it’s almost less challenging. It’s like the house is already built, and I just need to paint it.”

Sewell is currently leading a full website relaunch that will include a new content portal — and it’s all being done in house, without the help of an outside agency. To help pull it off, she’s hired a creative director and editor-in-chief to support her team, and plans to make more hires down the road. Her goal is that Farfetch — an aggregator that sells products from more than 700 luxury brands and boutiques to customers in every country — will become known for driving trends.

As it stands now, the Farfetch brand revolves around its global reach as a big e-commerce marketplace, rather than as a taste-making force in the fashion industry. Like other aggregate marketplaces in the luxury industry, it’s struggled to find its footing as a source of organic inspiration for customers. Sewell’s position, if she’s successful, will help Farfetch lower the costs of customer acquisition through Google and other platforms as it competes in an industry thick with competitors, including Yoox Net-a-Porter and Ssense. As the company is rumored to file for an IPO this year, it’s a critical time to prove that it can bring in customers on its own.

We spoke to Sewell about the role data does or doesn’t play in her job, the biggest undertaking when it comes to overhauling the site, and how a singular brand vision can emerge from a multi-brand marketplace.

Farfetch relies on data to make merchandising decisions and serve its customers. Does that data play a role in your job?
I’ve come to deliver something else, which I think we were lacking: a fashion-led vision. Fashion authority doesn’t come from analyzing data; it comes from instinct. That’s what I’ve been able to totally, 100 percent focus on. The company needed that, and they knew that they needed it. They built a great thing with great people, and now it’s about adding the flavor. I haven’t looked at anything data-related — I try to avoid the data, actually. [I’m] pushing forward what I feel, what I predict will be big in fashion; it’s all intuition. That’s not a stat telling you a brand is going to be huge. My role is about bringing more of the emotion to the business.

Why is that role so critical in taking Farfetch to the next level, especially in a crowded market?
The curation for a site like Farfetch is so important, and that’s exactly what I’m there to do. [Founder] José [Neves] recognized that. It’s so crucial in our industry. You could have all these brilliant algorithms to predict what we’re going to buy, look at and show, but an algorithm would never have predicted that people would start wearing hoodies with Céline trousers, for example. It would just never show in the data, so without that curation and fashion perspective and emotion, you would never move forward. You would never evolve in the same way. We’re a fashion company, and we need to make sure we think like a fashion company. That’s my job, and that’s why I’m there.

What does a singular brand vision look like for a company like Farfetch?
We’re a truly global business, so my overarching vision ties in that global angle. We’ll shoot in a different country every month and include people who have worked with us, from every single country in the world. You’ll start to see the best of the world come to life much more on the site. We want to own that global angle, because we have people, partners and brands everywhere, and the breadth of what we do needs to be shown.

Overall, I just want the site to come to life. It need to be unashamedly fashion. A lot of people maybe haven’t been going to Farfetch for inspiration. If I hear people are coming to the site because they see it as a fashion player, rather than just one of the big e-commerce players with loads of stuff, I’ll have been successful — because we’re really much more than that. Ultimately, I want people to love us and know us as a brand. It’s as simple as that.

So how do you plan to actually change the way people see Farfetch?
What’s key to my approach is that I have an understanding of the commercial side of the business, even if my role here is fully creative. It lets me never forget that we’re a shop. If inspiration comes first, people will shop. So people need to know how much product we have without being overwhelmed, meaning we need to guide them much more. That will play out everywhere with our rebranding: on the new homepage, on product pages, on social media, in emails, in banner ads, in our apps. It’s my job to translate that vision, so being consistent is critical.

What’s been the most difficult aspect of steering Farfetch to being more of a fashion brand?
I’m overseeing our e-commerce product shots, which are a hugely important part of the business. We shoot thousands of those every day, and I’m working on elevating them. These photos are critical to any creative campaign, because that’s when the moment happens. That’s when someone goes from an observer to a customer, so I can’t underestimate how important it is that they’re done properly, in an elevated and beautiful way. And it’s a huge job. It needs a lot more thought put into it, as we’re doing thousands every day. We have to ask, “What are the core trends this season? What length of jean and what cut will work with all the blazers we shoot? What’s the right heel height?” Those details bring a season to life. That’s the bit that keeps me up at night.

The post Farfetch’s vp of creative Yasmin Sewell: ‘Fashion authority doesn’t come from analyzing data’ appeared first on Digiday.

U.S. Bank is the latest bank that wants to sell you your next car.

The U.S.’s fifth-largest bank by assets has formed a partnership with the startup AutoGravity that lets customers shop for new vehicles and add-ons on the U.S. Bank website, apply for auto financing and get a decision within minutes. The feature is designed to remove the friction from the shopping, buying and loan application process; it even gives qualified customers pre-approval for auto financing to make the decision process at the dealership even easier.

“Perhaps in the past, thinking from a bank-centric perspective, we would have created an even easier loan application system where we would say ‘tell us how much you want to borrow and we’ll tell whether or not you can borrow it,’ rather that truly thinking about what the customer really wants — a car,” said Gareth Gaston, head of omnichannel banking at U.S. Bank.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

The post Why U.S. Bank wants to sell you a car appeared first on Digiday.

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