Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

With its leap into the electronic health-records field, Apple Inc. is trying to solve a problem that has vexed tech companies for years: simplifying disparate networks of medical information and putting more data into the hands of consumers.

The Guardian won Publisher of the Year at the Digiday Awards Europe last night, one of seven organizations honored in the Grand Prix category.

Decided by public vote, Publisher of the Year honors the publisher that best displays original thinking, creativity and overall excellence in its approach to publishing and media across all editorial efforts. In the last 12 months, the Guardian has pivoted away from advertising-focused revenue to a reader-focused revenue model. This has paid off, as Jess Davies writes in a new Digiday feature.

“We’re making great progress with our three-year strategy and on track to break even by 2019,” said Guardian Media Group CEO David Pemsel. “The media sector remains challenging. However, our reader revenues are growing well, our advertising proposition remains strong, and more people are reading us than ever before — we now reach over 150 million unique browsers each month, and we have over 800,000 supporters.”

The Digiday Awards Europe recognize the publishers, advertisers and technology platforms bringing about change and innovation in the European market. View the full list of winners and check out their work below. You can also see the winners of the Digiday Content Marketing Awards Europe, which were announced at the evening’s gala as well.

PUBLISHING

Best Use of Multimedia
Vice Media and Chanel – “The Fifth Sense”
In this video series, which ran on Vice Media’s youth-oriented vertical i-D, women creatives from a variety of disciplines shared their work, processes and perspectives. Then, they created a project for “The Fifth Sense,” inspired by Chanel’s Chanel No. 5 L’Eau fragrance. See the full series here.

Best Use of Video Content
Maximum Media – “The Joe Show”/”SportsJoe Live”
Maximum Media created Ireland’s first live chat shows on major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. “The Joe Show” is a chat show for the digital era: It features viral news, celebrity interviews, live music and viewer interaction through giveaways. “SportsJoe Live” focuses on sports, featuring interviews with athletes and highlights (and lowlights) from the week.

ADVERTISING

Best Brand Partnership
Vice Media and Chanel – “The Fifth Sense”

See the full series here.

Best Native Advertising Campaign
Venatus Media, Mindshare, Rovio and Radox – “Venatus Angry Birds”
Based on the enduring success of the mobile game “Angry Birds,” personal hygiene brand Radox created its own game to promote its newest line of shower gels, Scent Touch. In the game, players use the familiar “Angry Birds” slingshots to release shower gels, a play on the campaign’s tagline: “Released by touch.” Play the desktop game here.

Best Use of Social Media
AnalogFolk, Giphy and PG Tips – “Morning Moods”
To connect PG Tips’ black tea portfolio to how tea drinkers feel when they wake up in the morning, digital creative agency AnalogFolk created a series of GIFs, in partnership with Giphy, featuring the brand’s iconic Monkey in a variety of moods, ranging from ecstatic to grumpy. View all of Monkey’s morning moods here.

Best Brand Video
Expedia Media Solutions and Visit Britain – #OMGB
Tourism company VisitBritain wanted to draw attention to more than just London with its #OMGB campaign. In partnership with travel booking website Expedia’s advertising arm Expedia Media Solutions, VisitBritain created travel guides highlighting the cultural experiences, landmarks and events in different regions in the U.K.

Best Programmatic Advertising Platform
Quantcast – Quantcast for Brands and Agencies
In an often confusing and cluttered media landscape, technology company Quantcast positions itself as a partner to brands and agencies eager for brand-safe environments.

Best Branded Content Series
Channel Mum and Iceland – “Power of Frozen”
Frozen food brand Iceland had a brand-imagery issue: It was perceived as low-quality food with little nutritional value. With the help of parenting platform Channel Mum, Iceland worked with a variety of family influencers to show that Iceland products are both healthy and cost-effective. It has produced over 100 pieces of branded content with Channel Mum, with more to come.

TECHNOLOGY

Best Publishing Platform
Ve Global and Athletics Ireland – The Dublin Virgin Media Midnight Run
After a successful Great Dublin Bike Ride, Athletics Ireland turned once again to Ve Global to increase sign-ups for the Virgin Media Night Run, which is a course run through Dublin’s city center. Ve Global used its suite of capabilities in on-site engagement, programmatic display and email remarketing to increase sign-ups. See how the night turned out below.

Best Video Advertising Platform
Twitch & Kellogg’s Crave
Kellogg’s wanted to make its chocolate cereal Krave the go-to snack of gamers. To break through to this difficult-to-reach, often cynical audience, it worked with livestreaming website Twitch’s custom solutions team to create a series of ads showing the cereal mascot Chocovore invading the gaming streams of popular Twitch gamers. Watch Chocovore in action below.

Watch Twitch Tresor FR from TwitchCustomPortfolio on www.twitch.tv

Best Mobile Advertising Platform
Taptica
Taptica’s mobile advertising ecosystem has become the tech of choice for clients who rely heavily on reaching people on the go, including Starbucks, HBO Go, Orbitz, Lyft and OpenTable.

Breakthrough Creative
Weber Shandwick and ActionAid UK – #BrutalCut
Three million Kenyan girls are at risk of female genital mutilation. U.K. charity ActionAid enlisted the help of agency Weber Shandwick to draw attention to the effects FGM has on girls’ lives. Popular vloggers and publishers “cut” their video content with a short message from a Kenyan girl at risk of FGM. The effort helped ActionAid secure millions of pounds in funding to create safe havens for girls at risk of FGM.

GRAND PRIX AWARDS

Agency of the Year – iProspect
iProspect has brought digital chops to a variety of leading European and international brands, including Eurostar, John Lewis, Diageo, Santander and Specsavers. See how the agency delivered for Eurostar below.

Publisher of the Year – The Guardian
The Guardian’s move to a reader-focused revenue model after years of struggling to break even seems to be paying off. According to a report by The Economist, the newspaper will hopefully be back in the black by next year.

Consumer Campaign of the Year – PMG and Beats by Dre: “Be Heard”
Beats by Dre is well-known in the U.S., but its agency PMG wanted to extend brand recognition into Europe, too, specifically in the U.K. PMG tapped into British sporting culture by collaborating with Sky Sports, the broadcaster of the Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko boxing match. With access to Sky Sports’ production process, PMG was able to deliver a brand experience that closely linked Beats by Dre to Joshua’s victory.

B2B Campaign of the Year – Viacom International Media Networks: Viacom Velocity Showcase
Viacom Velocity is Viacom’s in-house brand agency, designed to serve clients with the full suite of Viacom capabilities, including insight, entertainment and multiplatform distribution assets. For Viacom’s annual showcase, Velocity created a multimedia art gallery featuring characters from popular Viacom shows. See the gallery in action below.

Video Team of the Year – Unilad
What started in a Manchester, England, bedroom in 2015 as a content curation vertical on Facebook has turned into nine channels, including tech, food, sports and lifestyle, of original content production. Unilad is Facebook’s most engaged page globally, according to Forbes. (Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo’s page comes in second.)

Content Studio of the Year – Twitch Custom Solutions Team
Live video is a prospect that would scare even the hardiest of brands, but Twitch has worked hard to educate potential clients about its comment moderating system and ensured that gaming influencers resonate with the brand’s target audience. The approach has helped Twitch expand its client portfolio, which includes both gaming- and nongaming-adjacent brands.

Brand of the Year – Benefit Cosmetics
In 2017, Benefit Cosmetics distinguished itself from other beauty brands by reaching out to an underrecognized segment: mothers. Collaborating with influencers on the Channel Mum platform, it created the series “Wake Up to Makeup,” which included makeup tips specifically for busy mothers. See the case study video for the partnership below.

DIGIDAY CONTENT MARKETING AWARDS EUROPE

Content Marketer of the Year
Channel Mum

Best Agency/Client Collaboration
G+J Media and Dutch National Railways (NS) – #nsfavourites

Best Brand/Influencer Collaboration
We Are Social and Adidas – “Pogba x Stormzy”

Best Experiential Marketing Campaign
The Economist Real-World Marketing Team – #FeedingTheFuture

Best Use of Native Advertising/Sponsored Content
Shortlist Media and Chambord – “Château de Stylist”

Best Brand Publication – Print and/or Digital
Shell – Inside Energy

Best Branded Content Site – B2B
Fifty-Five – The Tea House by 55

Best Branded Content Site – B2C
VG Partnerstudio and Komplett – Smart

Best Branded Content Series
Channel Mum and Iceland – #ThePowerofFrozen

Best Use of Video
We Are Social and Adidas – “Pogba x Stormzy”

Best Use of Real-Time Streaming Video
24sata – “From Noob to Superb”

Best User-Generated Content
24sata – “Videostar”

Most Innovative Use of Content
We Are Social and Adidas – Tango Squad

Best In-House Content/Brand Studio
Titel Media GmbH (Highsnobiety) – Highsnobiety+

Best Use of Social
Benefit Cosmetics – @benefitcosmeticsuk Instagram

The post The Guardian wins Publisher of the Year at the Digiday Awards Europe appeared first on Digiday.

If you use an iPhone, you’ve probably gotten Apple Inc.’s out-of-iCloud-storage alerts, and you might even pay for more iCloud storage—but do you understand how iCloud works?

After two battle-weary years in which The Guardian cut costs and halved losses, the publisher is starting to turn a corner. Today, it has a new reader-revenue driven business model and is on the brink of breaking even.

Getting to this point hasn’t been easy. The Guardian has been forced to downsize and rein in its global ambitions. But a shift to a unique reader revenue model that relies on voluntary contributions as opposed to restricting access has, in many ways, proved naysayers wrong.

Today, The Guardian, coming off a redesign, can confidently say it is on firmer footing than it has been in years. The Guardian has halved its operating losses compared to two years ago, now looking at breaking even by 2019. Perhaps most critically, it no longer relies on advertising for the majority of its revenue. In recognition of its comeback, The Guardian was named publisher of the year at the Digiday Awards Europe on Jan. 24.

“We’re making great progress with our three-year strategy and on track to break even by 2019,” said Guardian Media Group CEO David Pemsel. “The media sector remains challenging. However, our reader revenues are growing well, our advertising proposition remains strong, and more people are reading us than ever before. We now reach over 150 million unique browsers each month and we have over 800,000 supporters.”

No longer chasing reach
When Pemsel and editor-in-chief Katharine Viner laid out their three-year cost-cutting plan in 2016, weaning itself off chasing reach was the top priority. The Guardian’s mantra of open journalism naturally lends itself to big audience numbers, with the publisher attracting 23 million monthly unique users in the U.K. and 31 million in the U.S., according to comScore. But as many publishers have found, big audience numbers don’t necessarily equate to revenue — a fact the Guardian has been candid about from the start.

“One of the core parts of this three-year plan was to build deeper relationships with our readers and not be so obsessed about reach,” Pemsel said in an interview with Digiday.

Where others like The New York Times and The New Yorker have turned to the trusty paywall, the Guardian took a philanthropic route, asking readers for one-off donations and paid memberships. So far, that decision is paying off.

A total of 800,000 people now pay money to the Guardian, 300,000 of which are regular paying members, up from 50,000 two years ago, when it started offering paid memberships. An additional 200,000 subscribe to the digital and print editions and readers have made 300,000 one-off contributions, according to the publisher.

“The Guardian has undoubtedly exceeded everyone’s expectations,” said Alice Pickthall, media analyst at Enders Analysis. “In the long term, they need to find more ways to monetize their audience than just charity, but committed digital subscribers, not just supporters.”

The publisher has experimented with using data to see what topics people are most interested in, then solicited donations around related events and coverage. That approach has worked particularly well in the U.S.

“The U.S. market is very different in terms of people’s propensity to contribute, so we’re no longer just beholden on advertising there,” Pemsel said. “We’re at the foothills of what we can do [with donations and paying members], and we’ll keep testing and learning our way through generic and topic-specific contributions.”

Reining in costs
Journalism faces a cost problem. The revenue-per-reader in advertising is a fraction of what it is in print. That’s led to a reckoning that news publishers can no longer try to do it all.

Naturally, cost-cutting across the board has been front and center of the Guardian’s pivot to building a sustainable business model. The publisher’s pledge to cut 20 percent of its costs within three years, began with scrapping plans to transform the 30,000 square foot Midlands Goods Shed (a former train depot) at King’s Cross into a dedicated events space. Guardian Media Group also sold its 22.4 percent stake in Cannes Lions owner Ascential for a total of £239 million ($339 million.) Another wave of cost savings were made from job cuts, 400 in total, leaving the current staff count at 1,500 people.

The publisher then started looking at where it could cut back overseas, specifically in the U.S. Last year the Guardian’s U.S. offshoot underwent a severe course correction. After a buoyant U.S. launch in 2014, the publisher was forced to cut 60 staffers; the head count now stands at 80. The publisher reduced office space costs as well, relocating employees to a WeWork office in New York City. A core reason for the heavy trimming: The U.S. edition was set up to be mainly ad-driven. The U.S. operation brought in $15.5 million in revenue in the year ending April 2016, only to lose $16 million. This year, the U.S. office will make “a positive contribution” to the Guardian’s profits, according to Pemsel.

“However difficult it was [making cuts], the U.S. remains an incredibly important part of The Guardian, both editorially and commercially,” said Pemsel. “It’s just that it was being built primarily at the time for an advertising-only outcome, and the dramatic changes happening in the U.S. market around digital advertising meant it was just not sustainable within the financial framework we had set.”

Last January, Evelyn Webster was appointed interim CEO of Guardian U.S. She oversaw big internal changes and the diversification of revenue streams with reader revenue. Of the 300,000 one-off contributions made to The Guardian, half of them came from the U.S. Its biggest day for U.S. contributions was Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to the publisher.

As many publishers have found, the days of spending millions to expand into a new market and hoping they deliver a return through advertising alone are probably over. They certainly are for the Guardian, which instead is more interested in putting relatively small, agile teams into new markets and seeing if readers can fund them, according to Pemsel.

This has come with other cuts, of course. Last week, the Guardian shrunk its print edition from the Berliner format to a slimline tabloid and outsourced the printing and distribution of the paper to Trinity Mirror Group. That will shave “several million” off its cost base, according to the publisher.

Taking a stand
Despite its focus on reader revenue, advertising remains core to the business, and the Guardian has cracked down on bad practices, particularly in programmatic advertising. It remains the only publisher to take a serious stand against an ad tech vendor over hidden tech fees, and its lawsuit against Rubicon Project is ongoing. But it has also called for more industrywide action to tackle fraud in digital advertising. Now, it is using data to identify high-value buyers in the open market and switch them to premium programmatic. The publisher claims this tactic has grown yields while ensuring more of advertisers’ dollars go to working media.

Agencies are bullish on the Guardian’s ability to retain high-quality services to them, despite the job cuts. “When a company that large is going through such massive change, you will inevitably see a drop-off in servicing,” said Craig Smith, trading director at media agency Mindshare. “But to their credit, we never saw anything like that, despite the fact it was probably a tumultuous time as a business in terms of how they dealt with us.”

The Guardian has also overhauled its commercial structure and external messaging in the last two years, positioning itself as a “platform for change” that will deliver meaningful business results for advertisers, not vanity metrics like click-through rates. That clarity of message, along with its success with reader revenue, puts it at the top of the list for agencies, Smith said.

The publisher has also revamped its branded content operation, Guardian Labs, in the past year. The former in-house agency model has been dropped in favor of a commercial features desk led by new executive editor Imogen Fox. As a result, its win rates on briefs have doubled, according to the publisher.

Keeping up culturally
The Guardian operates differently today than two years ago. Of course, it’s smaller, having reduced its head count by 400 people to around 1,500 during that time. But beyond that, the Guardian has implemented in the last few years a process to get departments to collaborate with each other and ensure its products evolve faster — a departure from its formerly siloed structure, similar to many legacy businesses.

Dozens of cross-department huddles occur each month, with people from commercial, editorial, product, marketing, engineering and user experience meeting with a set problem to solve. Every three months, they give progress updates. The process, borrowed from Google, has been instrumental in shaping the Guardian’s current model. The idea of asking for donations as an alternative to a paywall came from one of these huddles, for example.

In addition to those moves, the Guardian has also invested £42 million ($59 million) in venture capital fund GMG Ventures to stay abreast of technologies like artificial intelligence that are set to change news distribution.

The post ‘We’re at the foothills of what we can do’: How The Guardian improbably put itself on the path to profits appeared first on Digiday.

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