Data-Labor-Technology

Brands pay a lot of money to advertise on NBCUniversal’s vast portfolio of media assets. That’s why the company is helping its advertisers and agency partners understand just how many people are consuming their commercials across all viewing platforms, linear and digital alike. The network introduced CFlight, a unified advertising metric measuring live, on-demand and…

NBCUniversal is about to do something TV companies have talked about for years: transact TV in a similar way as digital – on impressions. NBCU revealed Thursday that it would begin to measure live, on-demand and time-shifted TV ad buys using a common impression-based metric called CFlight. CFlight will be part of NBCU’s upfront pitch and… Continue reading »

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he made a “huge mistake” in not focusing more on potential abuse of users’ personal information, as the social-media giant he founded revealed that data breaches were far more extensive than previously known.

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Lance Neuhauser, CEO at 4C Insights. We’re about to witness a generational realignment of the media mix. Consumers have complete control over how they receive information, and they can subscribe, fast-forward, opt out, block or… Continue reading »

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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 George W. Ivie, CEO and executive director at the Media Rating Council. Cross-device audience measurement is difficult and has been slow to emerge because the clues involved are unique to… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Survey Says… As more witnesses take the stand in the Department of Justice’s challenge to the $85 billion merger of AT&T and Time Warner, the telco’s legal strategy is coming into focus. The DOJ case rests in part of a pair of surveys, one… Continue reading »

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Six months ago, Turner networks TBS and TNT began working with 21st Century Fox’s TrueX to test interactive ads with desktop visitors. In testing, 25 percent of people have opted to interact with the ads to have fewer ads interrupt their viewing, while those ads command a CPM “that is significantly higher than your standard mid-roll,” said Karina Kogan, svp of digital media and products at TBS and TNT.

Now, as TBS and TNT plan to officially adopt the TrueX ads, Kogan is exploring how the networks can find other viewers who are more likely to interact with those spots, so she can better tailor content recommendations to digital viewers and improve ad targeting. Underpinning that effort is the work TBS and TNT began last year to collect more information from people, such as their names, email addresses and phone numbers, in order to tie what people do on its digital properties to those identities.

“One of our core strategies is to move from being data renters to data owners,” Kogan said.

When Kogan joined TBS and TNT in January 2017, her first priority was ensuring the networks’ digital distribution spanned the major channels by having mobile apps and OTT apps. That work is nearly done; the networks’ Xbox apps are the final piece and are set to launch in May. So last summer, Kogan turned her attention beyond building up the networks’ digital audiences to building out the data it had on those audiences.

First, she hired CRM platform Braze to manage TBS’ and TNT’s first-party data, and use that data to send personalized push notifications and recommend content in the networks’ apps. The networks started running CRM-like campaigns earlier this year, said Kogan.

TBS and TNT have run direct-response ads across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat that tease their shows and ask people to download the networks’ apps, enter a sweepstakes or otherwise complete a form that gives their information to the networks. TBS and TNT can then use that information to find other people who may also be interested in their shows and providing their information through the platforms’ lookalike-audience ad targeting tools.

Beyond adding more people to TBS’ and TNT’s digital audiences, Kogan wants to use the first-party data to make the networks’ digital properties more valuable to viewers and to advertisers. That can mean the type of ad targeting typically associated with Facebook and Google and less so with linear TV.

“Unfortunately, the bar is really low for TV ad targeting, so any improvement is a good thing,” said Barry Lowenthal, president of The Media Kitchen. But it can also mean different types of ads for different viewers based on how receptive those viewers would be to a given ad.

“Maybe over time we find what are the characteristics of those 25 percent of the people [who opted for TrueX-powered ads] to make sure we’re really optimizing for them, and stop bothering the people who never want to engage with that type of ad,” said Kogan.

The post How TBS, TNT plan to use first-party data to boost digital ad sales appeared first on Digiday.

Following Spotify’s initial public offering, ad buyers are expecting the streaming music giant to put more emphasis on its ad business.

Ads have never been the streaming service’s strong point. In fact, Spotify’s biggest strength is its ability to convince people to become premium subscribers so they can avoid ads. At the end of 2017, around 45 percent of the 159 million monthly active users were premium subscribers, up 29 percent from the year prior. Subscriptions, not ads, are where the money is for Spotify.

After its IPO, Spotify must balance its subscription offering — the most lucrative part of its business model — with its ad-funded business if it wants a fallback revenue option. Like many technology firms, Spotify has sacrificed profit for revenue growth since launching a decade ago. Yet in the year leading up to its IPO, it pulled together an ad platform that allows it to profit from the scale of its audience.

Ad buying veteran Marco Bertozzi joined Spotify as its vice president for Europe at the end of 2017 to further develop its ad business. Months later, he hired ad tech veteran Zuzanna Gierlinska as head of programmatic for the region. Spotify’s ad business started to take shape as other commercial executives joined on both sides of the Atlantic between both appointments. In September, Spotify quietly rolled out a self-serve platform for audio ads, signaling its intent to win programmatic budgets missed by its previous attempt to pull money in from private marketplaces and direct buys.

Spotify sellers are pushing the concept of mood-contextual advertising, based on the music genre being consumed. The idea: music is such a highly emotive and mood-shaping experience that the ability to target listeners based on their likely mood could be a huge differentiator for Spotify’s somewhat rigid programmatic offering, in a digital ad market still dominated by image and video. To date, agencies have only been able to target Spotify playlists that give some indication of mood through direct buys.

Nevertheless, there’s a “creative freedom” to audio advertising, said Daniel Wilkinson, head of paid media at Jellyfish. Spotify ads are “definitely not as expensive as video,” he added, while frequency and reach is “usually a lot higher” because listeners can tolerate a higher volume of ads without getting bored.

Audio, however, is a tough sell to advertisers even for Spotify, which is renowned among ad executives for its brand-safe ads, cross-device targeting and richness of audience data. “I never knew what to do with Spotify,” said Scott Moorhead, the founder of media consultancy Aperto One and a former media buyer at Publicis and Havas. Finding a place on a media plan for digital audio is tricky, Moorhead added, because it’s not cheap. While the average cost per thousand for digital audio ads has dropped considerably from the £9 ($13) it was when Moorhead bought Spotify ads in 2016, Dan Larden, global strategic partnerships director at Infectious Media, said it is still a “punchy” CPM compared to digital radio. But Larden noted benefits that come with that price.

“[Spotify ads are] unskippable, so at least you know a person’s listening,” Larden said. “Plus, it’s completely trackable from a view-through rate, which is different to other digital audio you can buy.”

The problem with buying Spotify, according to five media buyers interviewed by Digiday, is that it’s cookieless. Unless an advertiser’s measurement solution uses mobile device IDs, the streaming service won’t fit into a generic programmatic display campaign, which uses cookies for measurement. Furthermore, the data is not as granular as some executives like James Duffy, head of media futures at Total Media, would like it to be. For example, Spotify ads can’t be targeted by composer or subgenre, he said.

When selling ads, Spotify’s sales executives talk up data that shows what songs are listened to at what time of the day as listeners commute, relax, train, cook and more. Having such a wealth of first-party audience data from both the premium and free memberships is a massive plus for Spotify, particularly when advertisers expect third-party data to come under increasing scrutiny in 2018.

For media executives, advertising on Spotify may become secondary to the platform’s data, Duffy said. If Spotify can find a way to allow agencies to use its audience data to target people outside of its walled garden, then it could be a “big opportunity,” Duffy added. If an agency can buy a single user ID that lets brands target audio ads, which could be followed by display or native ads, Duffy said it could lead to “interesting testing of ad-type variations and buying models.”

Whether Spotify is willing to go that far in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal remains to be seen. Even as the company outlined its strategy ahead of its IPO, prospects for its ad business are reportedly bittersweet. Advertising accounts for just 10 percent of Spotify’s revenue, but chief financial officer Barry McCarthy said he would be “thrilled” if that figure reached 20 percent — though he expressed doubt about it happening, per Reuters.

McCarthy’s doubts aside, Spotify’s ad-supported tier drove 60 percent of its new premium subscriptions in 2014, according to documents it filed to regulators prior to its IPO. Although the company wants to keep converting listeners from its ad-supported offering to premium subscriptions, eventually growth will slow, meaning it’s reached peak subscriber revenue. Advertising is therefore an important way to grow revenue, which is ultimately what investors are looking for.

While Spotify has built a large audience of paying subscribers, there will be a cap on those affluent music fans in its existing key markets, said Doug Baker, director of strategic services at digital agency AnalogFolk. As Spotify expands into other developing markets, it is unlikely they will see the same ratio of paid to free users. “Yes, Spotify will rely on their ad model more and more,” he said. “But there’s a huge opportunity for innovation in audio advertising unavailable to visually led platforms like Facebook.”

The post Ad buyers expect Spotify to focus more on ad business post-IPO appeared first on Digiday.