Data-Labor-Technology

Dear American publishers that think they will be fine when the General Data Protection Regulation takes effect next month: Check your email.

As brands, agencies and publishers scramble to get their data collection, usage and storage situations in line with European regulations, few have gotten their email newsletter subscriber operations into a GDPR-compliant state, either by securing affirmative consent for use of subscribers’ data or by updating their email onboarding process so people give consent when they subscribe.

Some haven’t done it because they have their hands full with other facets of GDPR compliance. Others haven’t because they’re still trying to figure out if their current situations are, in fact, acceptable under the regulations. Others are waiting for third-party providers to deliver tools to help navigate the problem. Still others are reluctant to do anything that could put a meaningful dent in their newsletter subscriber counts.

“This is definitely a risk,” said Brad Schorer, the president and CEO of data and marketing consultancy Digital Segment. “They need to prepare to have the steps in place to allow for their readers to opt out of the newsletter and/or be able to produce the level of detail on them that the publisher has in house.”

A common misconception about the GDPR is that it is for European companies. In fact, the GDPR covers any company that collects data from European Union citizens, which is to say most every publisher. Publishers have liability if they have any EU citizens on their email newsletter lists. Under GDPR rules, publishers must be able to point to a specific date when a reader affirmatively consented to have their data used by publishers. That covers all email subscribers, not just those acquired after the GDPR takes effect on May 25.

Most publishers don’t have those dates on file, particularly for email subscribers they’ve had for years, which presents them with an uncomfortable choice: Send an email asking European newsletter audiences to opt back in, risking a percentage of their subscriber base dropping out, or do nothing and hope the law is enforced for bigger violations.

“Any communication to consumers always entails the possibility of losing readerships due to opt-outs for any number of reasons,” Schorer said.

Many publishers also have to figure out how to get readers to actively consent, a break from the user experience templates that readers have been trained to expect in recent years. “It’s difficult to funnel people into signing up as it is,” said one source who oversees newsletter operations at one large publisher. “Now, we have to go completely out of the way to make sure consent is explicit by not having pre-checked boxes. Users have learned behavior that assumes boxes will be checked, and now we will have to teach them new behavior.”

The GDPR, to this point, has been a worry for European publishers, which have been busy hiring data protection officers and trying to build unified login systems to minimize shock when the regulations are enforced. As the May 25 enforcement date has drawn closer, fears among European publishers have subsided a bit, according to Digiday Research.

Yet many American publishers draw sizable chunks of their audience from outside the U.S. Just over 10 percent of The Washington Post’s digital subscriber base, for example, is based abroad. The New York Times said 14 percent of its 2.6 million digital subscribers reside abroad, though that number does not exactly correspond with its 13 million email newsletter subscribers; the Times does not break out the country of origin of newsletter subscribers.

Some publishers are trying to be proactive, despite the minimal risk to their business from being GDPR-compliant. At Morning Brew, a business-focused newsletter publisher with 180,000 subscribers and an open rate that hovers around 45 percent, just 3 percent of its subscriber base resides in Europe. But the company decided to add a double opt-in system to its newsletter onboarding program, in part because it minimizes bad actors taking advantage of its referral program and in part because it sees upside in adapting its system in ways that emphasize transparency and privacy.

Morning Brew is still trying to confirm that every facet of its business is GDPR-compliant, but it said it expects to be by next month. “The way we justified it is we need to do right by our readers,” Morning Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman said.

The post GDPR is leaving publishers with a newsletter list problem appeared first on Digiday.

A tale of redemption involving soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo and an amateur sculptor has turned into a hit for Bleacher Report.

On March 29, Bleacher Report released a 10-minute documentary called “The Ronaldo-Over,” which tells the story of an amateur sculptor getting a second chance to create a bust of Ronaldo after his first attempt was met with social media ridicule. Produced by a team of 24 people from Bleacher Report’s U.K. division, the documentary, which is accompanied by a 6,000-word article, profiles the sculptor, Emanuel Jorge da Silva Santos, who hails from the same hometown as Ronaldo. Redemption comes in the form of a new sculpture from Santos that more closely resembles the soccer star.

Since the story went live, the video has amassed more than 3.4 million video views across several Bleacher Report social accounts, including the main Bleacher Report channels on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as the Bleacher Report football channels on Facebook and Twitter, according to the publisher. On Bleacher Report’s website and mobile app, “The Ronaldo-Over” has 716,000 video starts, the publisher said.

The accompanying article has captured 320,000 pageviews on Apple News and 204,000 pageviews on CNN.com. (CNN, like Bleacher Report, is owned by Turner.) The story has also been picked up by other outlets, including BBC News, as well as a retweet from actress Susan Sarandon, “which was probably the most obscure one of the day,” said Lee Walker, global managing editor at Bleacher Report.

The Bleacher Report documentary and article are getting attention because of Santos’ initial Ronaldo sculpture, which infamously did not look anything like the soccer star.

It sparked a wave of memes and jokes about the bust and Santos, including some by Bleacher Report itself:

Some of the all-time great Cristiano Ronaldo moments pic.twitter.com/57Tx9VhbUm

— B/R Football (@brfootball) March 29, 2017

The initial success of “The Ronaldo-Over” comes as Bleacher Report is expanding into more soccer content and coverage. The publisher’s hit Instagram account, House of Highlights, for instance, is posting more soccer highlights and clips about players ranging from Ronaldo to Manchester United’s Paul Pogba. (With parent company Turner also acquiring U.S. broadcast and streaming rights to the UEFA Champions League, soccer has become more important across the Turner Sports portfolio.)

“With Champions League coming to Turner and Bleacher Report later this year, we’re going to do a lot more shorter-form storytelling around soccer,” said Walker. “We want to immerse the audience in the experience of being a soccer fan.”

The short documentary and story also works for Bleacher Report because it hits on the area between live sports and youth and social culture that Bleacher Report wants to own, Walker added. While it’s great to have access to live sports and highlights, there’s a ton of conversation happening about sports that is not tied directly to a specific game. The story of Ronaldo’s bust, for instance, was covered by “Saturday Night Live” and other U.S. late-night shows.

“This goes way beyond who Real Madrid is playing,” said Walker. “We could always talk about Ronaldo and how he scored another goal, but he has more than 120 million Instagram followers, and I’m sure many of those followers aren’t going there to see his highlights.”

As for Santos and his redemption, the new Ronaldo sculpture resides in Bleacher Report’s U.K. office. Walker said the publisher has contacted Ronaldo’s representatives to find a way to give the bust away to charity. “We won’t be using it for financial gain,” Walker said.

Photos courtesy of Bleacher Report

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A new U.K. law has prompted a flurry of media owners and agencies to publish gender parity reports over the last two weeks.

Under the law, all companies with more than 250 staffers have to report the difference between male and female employees’ pay, regardless of their job or position, by April 4.

Among those that have reported their gender pay gap, the core reason for disparities is that while companies are getting closer to having equal numbers of male and female employees, there are more men in senior positions and more women in junior positions, leading to a bigger pay gap.

All media owners that have reported their figures so far have pledged to do more to close their gaps. Here’s a breakdown.

The Telegraph
What it reported: In 2017, women working at British national newspaper The Telegraph are paid 35 percent less than men on average — the biggest gender pay gap of any U.K. media owner that has reported official figures. Bonuses paid to men were also 46 percent higher on average than those paid to women at the publisher.

What it promised: The Telegraph’s CEO Nick Hugh called the gap “unacceptable” and has pledged to eliminate it by 2025. To do this, the publisher will prioritize building its inclusive culture, making structural changes to its flexible work arrangements. Its projections for 2018 indicate it has reduced its pay gap by one-fifth due to efforts like introducing better maternity pay.

The Economist Group
What it reported: On average, men at The Economist Group made 33 percent more than women there did in 2017. Seventy-six percent of those in the highest-paid roles are men. The publisher also reported an average gender pay gap for bonuses of 26 percent, with 34 percent of male employees receiving bonuses compared to 23 percent of women.

What it promised: The publisher said it will consider multiple male and female candidates for senior roles and ensure better gender balance in management teams. It will also re-examine paternity and maternity support and management development, while implementing diversity and inclusion training to help employees understand unconscious biases.

Channel 4
What it reported: In 2017, the broadcaster paid its female employees 29 percent less on average than its male ones, despite the fact that 59 percent of its employees are women — figures its first female CEO Alex Mahon described as “uncomfortable reading.” The average bonus gap between men and women was 47.6 percent.

What it promised: Channel 4 said it will increase the number of women in higher-paid positions, setting a target to achieve a 50-50 gender balance among its top 100 earners by 2023. Men hold 66 percent of these roles now.

BBC
What it reported: The BBC reported its own gender pay gap in October, in the wake of controversy that arose from publishing the salaries of its top-earning talent in July, which showed that most of its top-earning presenters were men. Men working for the BBC earned an average of 9 percent more a year than women, while the national average pay gap is 18 percent, according to the Office for National Statistics.

What it promised: The BBC attributed the gap to the fact that there are more men than women in senior positions. BBC director general Tony Hall pledged to eliminate the pay gap by 2020.

Guardian News and Media
What it reported: The gender pay gap at the Guardian is 11 percent. The publisher has said 65 percent of its highest-paid employees are men, while 57 percent of the lowest paid are women. The gap on editorial teams is lower than the rest of the company, though, at 7 percent, while non-editorial groups have a gap of 17 percent.

What it promised: The Guardian said it will achieve a 50-50 gender balance in the top half of the business within five years. It plans to do this by developing, promoting and recruiting more women at every level. The publisher will offer mentoring programs for women and initiatives like fast-tracking women’s progression in middle and senior management roles.

News UK
What it reported: News UK, which owns The Times of London and The Sun, has a permanent staff of 66 percent men to 34 percent women, according to the publisher. In 2017, women were paid 15 percent less on average than men at the two newspapers, while bonuses men received were 11 percent higher on average than those paid to women.

What it promised: The company hasn’t publicly released an exact target, but it has pledged to continue being proactive about ensuring its teams have equal gender representation.

Financial Times
What it reported: On average, men made 24 percent more than women at the FT in 2017, while the gender pay gap for bonuses was 38 percent, and two-thirds of the highest-paid staffers were men.

What it promised: The publisher said it will reach gender parity on its global leadership team by 2022. It has also pledged to develop or introduce plans to improve workplace diversity, including ensuring it has 50-50 short lists for all hiring and internal recruitment.

The post Scorecard: UK media reports big gender pay gaps appeared first on Digiday.

In March, Horizon Media hosted a blockchain summit and brought together platforms to discuss how they are working with the technology. The conference was meant to educate the agency about blockchain as much as enthuse its publisher clients. Horizon Media had been dubious about whether blockchain — a ledger that encrypts information for secured sharing and allows an advertiser to track how media makes its way to the media owner — could deliver on its potential use case of eradicating ad fraud in the media supply chain.

“Everyone was asking about it, but not really sure what it was about,” said Eric Warburton, vp of ad operations at Horizon Media. “What was made clear after this was that blockchain is way too new and it’s going to take testing.” Horizon Media is actively seeking clients that want to test the technology on future campaigns to determine whether blockchain can stamp out ad fraud.

Horizon Media isn’t the only agency jumping on the blockchain bandwagon. Havas, GroupM, Droga5, The Marketing Group, 360i and Huge say they are working on implementing strategies with their clients, but overall, they aren’t disclosing details.

Yet marketers question whether the technology can be used eliminate ad fraud and say it’s simply another shiny object that agencies are capitalizing on.

“Realistically, it’s more conceptual than it is practical,” said David Eisenman, CEO of Madwell, a Brooklyn-based creative agency. “We’re really not seeing advertising companies using it or media being deployed on blockchain in a serious way. I think people are taking advantage of the amount it’s in the spotlight right now.”

So far, most use cases for blockchain lie in supply chain management and financial services. Droga5, for instance, is working with a client, which Droga5 declined to disclose, using blockchain to verify the authenticity of the materials in its products. Havas has worked with French supermarket Carrefour to verify where the store gets its chicken and displays this information on its website. Agencies have plenty of examples of these scenarios, but they have few when it comes to blockchain’s use in advertising.

“There really is no blockchain that exists in advertising right now in any way whatsoever,” said an agency executive, who wishes to remain anonymous and works at an agency that is working with clients on blockchain.

Agencies, of course, tell a different story. Truth CEO Mary Keane-Dawson said the agency, which was built on blockchain technology and launched in November by The Marketing Group, is working with five clients, but wouldn’t share their names. Keane-Dawson said she believes the offering gives the agency a “competitive edge,” especially at a time when transparency has such weight, with Facebook’s recent data mishaps not helping platforms’ reputation of lacking transparency. Still, Truth didn’t launch its first blockchain-backed campaign until the end of March, and Keane-Dawson said the agency is still testing blockchain’s effectiveness.

Brands such as AT&T, IBM and Unilever that are testing blockchain, meanwhile, appear to be doing so directly through advertising marketplaces like Nasdaq’s New York Interactive Advertising Exchange or Amino Payments rather than turning to agencies.

Eisenman said that while blockchain might be a clever way to store information in a database, it lacks a purpose in combating fraud. Most ad fraud, he argued, happens from manmade bots that create impressions, clicks and views that advertisers pay for. A database of encrypted information will not stop bots because “anyone can still add false information to it,” he said.

This is especially true with a permissioned blockchain, Eisenman said. Unlike bitcoin, which is permissionless, meaning it is not controlled by a single entity, most companies’ blockchains are permissioned, so companies have full control of who gets to add information to the blockchain.

“If you are Walmart and you run your supply chain management over blockchain, you don’t want everyone in the world to have access to that,” said Eisenman. “You set up a command that controls and gives people permission to be able to access it, but there come risks when exposing it to multiple parties.”

Warburton said that while blockchain will not solve all fraud, it could help combat domain spoofing. Within an ad exchange, said Warburton, a programmatic vendor is able to see whether a domain name is a real domain name or from a bot.

“What blockchain is doing is saying, ‘You are CNN, and you have this payment ID form,’” said Warburton. “Someone else can’t come in and declare themselves without knowing their ID.”

Horizon Media wants to test how blockchain can combat domain spoofing, but it’s getting pushback from its publisher clients. “When we attempt to use someone to test a new technology, we get a lot of publishers that flat out say no,” he said, adding that the agency must be more forceful to get its clients to let it test blockchain with them.

“I have a pessimistic view on publishers policing themselves because most of them prove that they don’t want to do it,” said Warburton. “I hate to say this, but it’s the money.”

The post Agencies are hopping on the blockchain bandwagon appeared first on Digiday.

As Amazon grows the Bank of Amazon, Walmart is becoming the PayPal of retailers.

Walmart is expanding the reach of its U.S. money-transfer service Walmart2Walmart to recipients in 200 countries for a flat fee. The service, called Walmart2World, will be offered at all of the retailer’s 4,700 U.S. locations starting this month through a partnership with MoneyGram.

Like any retailer, Walmart isn’t exactly taking on the banking industry — although it has its history of that — but instead, it’s making financial services more accessible to its existing customers in order to keep them and maybe increase their shopping activity.

Like PayPal before it, Walmart already emphasizes the physical channel for underbanked customers who can top up their account balances using cash or card at the point of sale. While it has more recently courted higher-income customers, it’s now reaching out to its original customer segment by encouraging consumers to make in-store transactions.

“[Money transfer services] are like bread at the restaurant for Walmart; it’s negligible revenue for them,” said Daniel Ives, chief strategy officer at GBH Insights. “The broader strategy is to build up that product arsenal on the consumer side  — every Walmart customer globally is an Amazon customer that could be taken away.”

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

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Digiday Media’s Amazon Briefing is a weekly newsletter pulling together all the Amazon coverage from across Digiday, Glossy and Tearsheet, as well as exclusive insight, executive intel, the latest news, research, and some gossip. To get the newsletter in your inbox every Wednesday, subscribe here. 

What does an Amazon brands want to work with look like?

Demand 1: Make it easy for us to be discovered on Amazon.

It’s no secret that Amazon keeps its inner machinations private, and now that it’s aggressively launching private-label brands, it’s rigging the game so Amazon-owned brands have the leg up. That’s not exactly a great set up for the brands that are hoping to scale on the platform.

“We’re testing selling on Amazon because I’m using it as a testing ground to understand how people discover us, what their purchasing patterns are,” said Aaron Luo, the CEO of luxury accessories brand Caraa. “But it’s hard to get discovered on Amazon, because we don’t understand the algorithm. It’s a black box. But from what we can tell, it’s a very small portion of customers that discover us through Amazon.”

As a result, Caraa keeps its best-selling and most expensive bags off of Amazon, in order to keep the bait as low-stakes as possible.

“It’s a little bit crazy that, considering how many retail searches start on Amazon, how little new brand discovery it drives. They could become a better partner to newer brands that don’t have the history,” said Luo.

Demand 2: Don’t just share customer demographics – prove that Amazon drives off-platform purchases.

Amazon’s black-box problem weighs on brands that find the lack of transparency hopeless, especially when learning how customer behavior on Amazon influences purchases on a brand’s website.

Andy Oshrin, the CEO of Milly, which doesn’t sell on Amazon, suggested it would help Amazon’s case if brands could track the customers that explored or bought the brand on Amazon, and then later purchased from their own e-commerce site. Basically, Amazon could demonstrate that it’s supporting a brand’s “rising tide of awareness,” by helping turn Amazon shoppers into loyal brand customers.

But alas, Amazon doesn’t share much information about who brands’ shoppers are on the platform in general, let alone their broader browsing and buying history.

Demand 3: Clean up counterfeits… Or build a nicer product page, whatever comes first.

So Amazon has a brand discovery problem. And it has a data-sharing problem. Then there are the aesthetics.

“If you look at the site, it’s not a place we want to be,” said one manager at a beauty brand. “But there are counterfeits and third-party seller on the site, so we’re forced to have a presence to at least try to capture some of those sales. So I guess my first complaint would actually be — do something about the counterfeits and illegal third-party sellers. Then, make it a prettier place to have a presence. Or if you can’t do the first, do the second. Honestly, it’s all a mess. And regardless of what Amazon thinks, branding matters.”

Unfortunately for brands, Amazon plays only by its own agenda. What this does, though, is create an opportunity for other retailers — be it direct e-commerce competitors like Jet.com, or department stores like Nordstrom — to play the good-guy-retail-partner role in contrast to Amazon’s domineering dictator.

They just have to figure out how to understand customer data first.

What we’ve covered

Nearly nine months after Amazon launched Spark, agencies, influencers and brands are all still reporting the retail juggernaut’s social media platform is failing to catch on.

• Spark, which launched in July, is a social feed of photos similar to Instagram, but open only to Prime members. (Nonmembers can view the feed, but they can’t post.) The idea is for Spark to focus on products Amazon sells — users can post pictures and run “polls” asking whether certain products are better than others.
• Digiday spoke to eight agency buyers, all of whom report Amazon barely mentions Spark in its pitches to them. And two influencers said they see no interest from brands they work with on other platforms in paying them to post on Spark.

To learn more about Spark’s fizzle, read the Digiday story here.

hough Amazon’s retail stronghold continues to pose a threat to companies both large and small, there’s one demographic the e-commerce giant has yet to crack: Gen Z.

• In a survey of whether individuals made a purchase on the platform in the last month, 79 percent of millennials reported they had, while just 62 percent of Gen Z said the same.
• According to analysts, Amazon isn’t appealing to experience-driven Gen Z shoppers, in large part because the platform’s main value propositions — namely convenience and cost — don’t speak to them.

Read about how Gen Z could threaten Amazon’s retail dominance on Glossy.

What they’re saying

“I don’t think about Amazon. I think they’re awesome in what they do — they’re also our neighbor in Seattle — and they keep us on our toes. But I don’t necessarily see that as competition to what we’re doing. We’re bringing an experience, new product, and cool ideas, and matching our customers to new brands. That’s very different than what Amazon is.”
-Olivia Kim, the vp of creative projects at Nordstrom, on why she’s not feeling the heat from Amazon.

Numbers to know

The Trump effect: President Trump attacked Amazon four times this week. Here’s a breakdown by the numbers.

$1.50 – The dollar amount the U.S. Postal Service loses for every Amazon package it delivers, according to Trump. [Twitter]
Many billions of dollars – What it’s costing the taxpayers to cover this damage Amazon is causing to the USPS. [Twitter]
5.2 – The percentage that Amazon’s shares fell, to $1,390.90 on Monday, after President Trump sent out a series of tweets attacking Amazon, saying that it’s costing the U.S. Post Office a “fortune” and not paying its fair share in taxes. [Chicago Tribune]
$53 billion – The market share Amazon lost after Axios reported the President was “obsessed” with regulating the company. [Axios]

What we’re reading

If Trump runs against Amazon, he will lose (Business Insider)
How Amazon’s relationship with the Post Office really works (Bloomberg)
How Amazon rebuilt itself around artificial intelligence (Wired)

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The post Everything that’s wrong with Amazon appeared first on Digiday.

One woman was dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound and three others were wounded after a shooting at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., on Tuesday.

Spotify Technology roared onto the public market, cutting a new path to public ownership that could alter the way companies think about the listing process and pose a new threat to a core business on Wall Street.

Facebook might be reconsidering the policy it initiated last Wednesday about third-party data providers, Acxiom CEO Scott Howe said Tuesday in a letter to advertisers. Read it. “We’ve seen some signs that Facebook is reconsidering the initial policy they issued last week on data imports in light of advertiser concerns that will have an economic… Continue reading »

The post Acxiom CEO: ‘Signs’ That Facebook May Reverse Data Import Policy appeared first on AdExchanger.

It’s the advertising catchphrase heard ’round the world, but it won’t be heard at Augusta National Golf Club. “Dilly Dilly” has reportedly been banned at the PGA’s 2018 Masters Tournament, according to British golf publication Bunkered, whose reporter got wind of a list of phrases that will get spectators ejected immediately from the tournament. Just…