Data-Labor-Technology

Social media and marketing for mobile is the most potent cocktail of digital marketing for our times. It’s expected that by 2020, there will be close to 6.2 billion smartphones in the world. And the numbers of users of social media platforms hardly require any restatement. When you think of it, there’s hardly a digital…

Google has issued its first voice-activated coupon, a $15 offer for Target orders placed on shopping service Google Express via Google Assistant. Google said it did not have anything to share beyond the information available on its Google Express help page, but a Google spokesperson said in an email that “Google Express customers can complete…

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.  Lee Fentress wasn’t always sold on programmatic. But he’s changed his tune since joining the Los Angeles Times as VP of ad sales a little more than three months ago. “I came in pretty skeptical of programmatic, really wanting to do less programmatic and… Continue reading »

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At the Digiday Publishing Summit last month in Vail, Colorado, we surveyed representatives from 49 publishers to learn about their video strategies. Check out our earlier research on C-suite publisher executives’ mixed feelings about Facebook here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Since September 2017, the percentage of publishers that plan to boost their video production has slightly increased, according to Digiday’s survey.
• Publishers favor YouTube to distribute their videos.
• Forty-two percent said they plan to produce TV or OTT content in the coming year.

Publishers plan to produce more video
Undeterred by the challenges facing video-centric publishers like Mashable, Oath, LittleThings and Cooking Panda, more U.S. publishers plan to increase the number of videos they produce. Eighty-six percent of publishers surveyed at last month’s summit indicated they plan to increase their videos output in the year ahead, a slight uptick from 84 percent in October 2017.

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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 Martin Kihn, research vice president at Gartner. People who believe Cambridge Analytica put our president in office aren’t thinking very hard. We know how advertising works: It hardly works at… Continue reading »

The post ‘Advertising Wins Elections’ And Other Myths appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Pub Crawl CBSi, ESPN, Meredith, Fox News and NBCUniversal committed $2.2 million to support TrustX, a nonprofit subsidiary of the publisher trade group Digital Content Next. Read the release. The TrustX platform is a collective private marketplace, with exchange technology licensed from Iponweb and… Continue reading »

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Subscription publishers are targeting people between 18 and 24 years old, adapting content, tone, marketing and accessibility of their products to that audience to foster the habit of subscribing.

Before The Telegraph launched its premium product in 2016, when it put 20 percent of its content behind a paywall, it targeted an audience over 35. Now, the publisher said the fastest-growing subscriber segment is between 18 and 34 years old. This is partly due to its app, which was redesigned when the paywall launched with a younger audience in mind, according to Robert Bridge, chief customer officer at The Telegraph. According to Bridge, the app drives the highest conversion rate of readers to subscribers.

“Media companies are concerned about their age profile across print and digital. The fear is young people aren’t going to grow into the tradition of subscribing,” said Nic Newman, editor of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report. “There’s a huge battle at the quality end of the market and an intense push for the same people. Everyone is aware of how important that [18-24-year-old] group of the next leaders is. The difficulty is the intense competition in the market and the price points.”

While a common misconception in the industry that people in the 18- to 24-year-old age bracket won’t pay for content, particularly news, data from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report from October found that the proportion of people willing to pay across age groups is flat. Although paying for online news is still rare, 3 percent of people in the U.K. paid for news in the last year, and 54 percent say the reason for not paying for news is because they can get it for free elsewhere, according to Reuters.

The Economist has been more strategic in running campaigns targeted at students for the last two years. During September 2017, it ran a content-led marketing campaign featuring articles about the future of work as well as events at universities. Visitors to the future of work content hub are targeted with ads about the publisher’s subscription offer, featuring consistent creative, design and copy — such as “Some trends need more than a hashtag” — targeted to that demographic.

In January, the Financial Times expanded its free-access-to-schools initiative internationally, believing students are likely to be interested in FT content if it’s relevant to what they’re learning at school. In the U.K., where the initiative launched in June 2017 with Lloyds Bank as a sponsor, over 16,000 students and teachers from over 1,500 schools have unlimited access to FT.com. Schools in over 70 countries have also signed up. This type of sampling — access to the brand during school — should increase chances that people will subscribe when they leave, but less than a year into the program, the publisher said it was too early to glean any evidence.

The difficulty for media owners targeting the 18- to 24-year-old age bracket is bridging the price gap between content that can be accessed for free online and a typical monthly subscription rate of £26 ($36.55), while this demographic is used to paying half as much for other content subscriptions like Netflix or Spotify, said Newman.

While publishers have experimented with products that fit somewhere in between these price points, like New York Times NYT Now app, few have survived, said Newman, mostly because they end up cannibalizing the core news product, which needs to be kept at a sufficiently high price point.

Equally, it’s hard to police giving away a cheaper product to someone who is 24, for example, whereas letting students sign up to the product with a specific email address while they’re studying, similar to the FT’s model, is easier.

All publishers adapt news content to make it accessible to younger audiences on social platforms, and subscription publishers have long used social media to build up awareness without an immediate expectation that audiences will subscribe. Over the last three months on Snapchat, The Telegraph has reached an average of 4.9 million users a month through content created by the same team working on its app, said Bridge.

“When you consider that 33 percent of this [Snapchat] audience is aged between 18 and 24 and 31 percent under 17, we are talking about significant impact,” he said. “Snapchat is a brand play over an acquisition play. Our strategy is long-term: encouraging users, when ready, into the next best product — in this case, the app.”

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Influencer marketing is growing up, thanks to a deflation of the price bubble that marked its early days, as well as changes on Facebook and Instagram — where most influencer dollars are spent — that make smaller influencers more effective than big reach plays.

The Association of National Advertisers surveyed 158 brands to examine the state of influencer marketing, finding that 75 percent use influencer marketing. Of those that use it, almost half (43 percent) are planning to increase budgets in the next year. Among the 19 percent that are not using influencers, 46 percent don’t plan to start in the next year.

One reason why that 46 percent don’t plan to use influencer marketing: Government issues like Food and Drug Administration restrictions were a factor, the ANA found. Health care brands, specifically, were worried about Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulations. Other issues were concerns about risk and brand-safety issues.

One sea change in influencer marketing has been the growing drive to standardize it. Brands are looking at using self-serve ad tools to find influencers that work for the brand, as well as price and brand-safety screening. 

Companies that used to work with hundreds of influencers are also cutting back; about 58 percent of respondents in the ANA survey work with fewer than 25 influencers.

Most respondents use either mid-level or micro-influencers with under 100,000 followers. That marks another change in influencer marketing, which has been seen as a reach play — those with a giant following will give advertisers a lot of reach. Brands are now realizing that engagement matters more, and as platforms like Facebook and Instagram change their algorithms to benefit so-called “quality” content, micro-influencers’ posts are likelier to be treated like friends and family content. At Collectively, for example, co-founder Alexa Tonner said the optics of large followings are simply not what brands want — or should want. The company, which represents hundreds of influencers, said it sees the most success with a creative community of people whose careers hinge on content.

One of the biggest pain points for clients is figuring out how to manage influencer marketing and who should do it. A growing number of companies use self-serve tools created by influencer marketing tech companies to serve up assets directly, with the ANA’s survey finding that 87 percent are using influencer-specific companies. But respondents also said they use internal resources within their in-house marketing teams almost as often as they use external agencies.

Brands are also bringing influencer marketing in-house. Gil Eyal, CEO of Hypr, previously told Digiday that the No. 1 trend in the industry is in-house influencer marketing teams. For example, L’Oréal Paris UK, which has a robust influencer marketing approach, works directly with influencers, scouting them via its in-house team. One big factor is the move toward longer-term relationships with influencers that extend beyond a single campaign or post. That approach appeals to brands because influencers care more about the brand that way and see the relationship as less transactional. 

Influencer marketing is also becoming more complicated in terms of compensation. Brands are creating longer-term, more standardized contracts for these relationships. About 62 percent of brands are paying money to influencers in “brand ambassadorship” agreements, where the influencer talks about the brand in a positive way, according to the ANA survey. About a third are compensating influencers with products instead, while about 30 percent are still paying influencers per post, based on a CPM or cost-per-engagement metric.

Among the companies that know how much they spend on influencer marketing, about 62 percent of them spend under $100,000 per year, according to the ANA report. Sources say pricing, however, usually depends on agencies, many of which will book influencers in bulk buys and not per client or campaign. Overall, influencer marketing costs have become more manageable. One influencer agency executive said that in the early days, she used to pay $30,000 for basic appearances or up to $100,000 for a set of five pictures. “Some of that was because there was no set standard in the industry,” she said. “That’s changed.”

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