Data-Labor-Technology

Ad agencies using data to retarget publishers’ audiences is nothing new. But multiple publishers said they’re getting more frequent, onerous demands from ad agencies wanting to get their hands on that audience data.

Sometimes agencies merely ask for the audiences’ social media IDs so the agency could retarget them on Facebook, using people’s Facebook’s IDs. Of greater concern to publishers is when the agency asks for all the IP addresses of people targeted by a campaign, which would permit the agency to retarget them elsewhere using its data management platform. Increasingly, publishers say, the agencies are asking for permission to use this data in perpetuity.

Publishers said Publicis agencies including Spark and GroupeConnect are the most aggressive, requiring that publishers accept clients’ pixels for campaign analysis and retargeting, but that they’re increasingly getting similar demands from other agencies.

A Publicis agency document sent to a publisher as recently as January said it requires the media partner to accept a pixel for the advertiser to use for attribution analysis and audience segmentation. “We’re also looking to build partnerships with publishers that will allow pass back of impression and click data for targeting/retargeting purposes. In this scenario, we’d look to potentially retarget users who were exposed to our ad on site A (your site) within our DSP,” the document read.

A Publicis Media spokesperson said this language isn’t common in the holding company’s contracts. “We take data privacy very seriously and adhere to all applicable privacy laws and regulations,” the company said in a statement. “Consistent with long-standing industry practice, campaign information is used to help advertisers better understand how their advertising is performing and to optimize relevancy. We do not use publisher first-party audience data with the intention of finding these audiences elsewhere.”

It’s legitimate for the advertiser to use tracking pixels for attribution purposes, following a consumer to understand what led someone to take an action on an ad, said one publisher, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution by agencies. But “I’m not OK with thinking because you served an ad on our site, you own our audience,” the publisher said. The other worry is the agency will use the audience data for other clients. This publisher will only agree to let the agency use the audience data for attribution purposes, but that puts the burden on the publisher to keep track, and often the publisher finds the agency is using the tags for retargeting.

Publishers and agencies alike see the asks as part of a wider story about agencies under siege. Agencies, squeezed by other companies trying to horn in on their business and clients who are cutting their fees, are scrambling to prove their worth to clients by showing they have differentiated data and targeting capabilities. Steve Buors, CEO of Reshift Media, said the programmatic dashboards that agencies use are flawed, leading agencies to lean on publishers. “Because the dashboards are mostly using third-party data, there is a certain degree of invisibility of using the programmatic dashboard these days,” he said. The question then becomes: Who owns the consumer data in the first place?

“We’re seeing more requests for access to publishers’ first-party data,” said David Spiegel, CRO of Inverse. “Everyone’s trying to claim they should own the data in the marketing relationship. It’s an aggressive ask, so hopefully publishers are considering the ramifications.”

Publishers say they try to push back against these requests. The anonymous publisher exec said if the publication has a strong relationship with the client, the exec can do an end run around the agency and call the client directly and complain, and that puts a stop to the problem. That can work if the publisher is a must-buy for the advertiser. But it’s a matter of who has the bargaining power and how much ad revenue is at stake. And long term, the publisher worry is that if they give over their data to win an agency’s business, they’ll be contributing to their own irrelevance. Already, many advertisers have sought to fully own the branded content that publishers create for them.

Evan Krauss, svp of global sales at Ranker, has gotten audience data requests with greater frequency from clients and agencies alike where, for example, an advertiser might want to reach women 25-34 and add Ranker’s data on movie enthusiasts to its data set. “Let’s say we saw it twice in the fourth quarter; we saw it 15 times in Q1,” he said of these data requests.

“Agencies are looking to built up their proprietary DMPs,” he said. “We have a lot of unique data; we have people voting specifically for things they like or don’t like. But if someone is buying heavy movie enthusiasts on Ranker and they can buy them anywhere else for cheaper, that means they don’t have to come to Ranker as much. Our theory is we have enough value, but it has a yellow flag up.”

Now that consumer privacy has been thrust to the forefront with the revelations that Facebook user data was misused, and with the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation starting May 25, publishers are finding their voice in pushing back. “GDPR provides us a backstop to say we can’t let you pixel people because they haven’t given consent to all the ways you’re using data,” the unnamed publisher said. That’s more effective with global campaigns, since the GDPR requires companies to get consent to collect data on European consumers, but U.S. agencies are less GDPR-aware, the publisher said. “U.S. agencies don’t realize the extent of the issue and the penalties,” this person said.

Some agencies look askance at this whole practice and question its efficacy in the first place. Buors said Reshift doesn’t often ask publishers for their first-party data, saying brands’ data is of higher quality. Eric Smith, executive director of innovation at Mediassociates, said his agency uses a publisher’s audience data to optimize a campaign, not to retarget, and the agency values the publisher relationship and believes a campaign loses value when it targets people off the publisher’s site anyway.

“There’s not a need to steal or clone or misuse publishers’ data,” Smith said.

The post ‘An aggressive ask’: Publishers bristle at agencies’ demands for first-party data appeared first on Digiday.

On Jan. 8, MediaMath kicked a handful of publishers out of its “curated market,” an exclusive programmatic marketplace that the demand-side platform created last year for more than 7,000 advertisers and 500 publishers to automate the buying and selling of high-end inventory. The reason: Those publishers had failed to upload to their sites an ads.txt file listing which companies were authorized to programmatically sell or resell their inventory.

“There were some meaningful publishers who, unfortunately, we had to excuse from the curated market,” said Lewis Rothkopf, gm of media and growth channels at MediaMath.

Last May, the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab introduced ads.txt as a way to root out domain spoofing and ad tech arbitrage. While compiling a list of all the companies a publisher had authorized to programmatically sell ads on its site was a straightforward undertaking — with Google and Amazon aiding publishers’ efforts — many publishers initially dragged their heels. That led ad buyers and DSPs to try to force their hands. But there was a concern that too much enforcement would lead to too little available inventory. That concern has abated.

“At this point, the adoption rate is pretty much there,” said Nichola Perrigo, vp and director of digital media at RPA.

Roughly 60 percent of the top 1,000 publishers in the U.S. have uploaded ads.txt files to their sites as of last week, according to OpenX, which used comScore’s list of top publishers.

Index Exchange has told ad buyers that it has seen higher adoption rates. “They say 82 percent of the top 10,000 domains that they crawl have an ads.txt file,” said Dan Davies, Mediahub’s svp and director of media sciences.

With a majority of top publishers having adopted ads.txt, “now most of our leading DSPs can allow us to only buy from ads.txt publishers. That means the scale is there,” Perrigo said.

And it means more enforcement is coming.

After enforcing ads.txt in its curated market earlier this year, MediaMath will begin enforcing ads.txt when buying ads through open exchanges “in the coming days to weeks,” said Rothkopf. However, there’s a wrinkle to this next stage of enforcement: MediaMath will not limit its open exchange bids to publishers with ads.txt files. The company will still bid on inventory within open exchanges from publishers that do not have ads.txt files, but for publishers that do have ads.txt files, it will only buy ads from the sellers and resellers listed on those files, Rothkopf said.

That hedge shows how the remaining publisher holdouts have made it hard for ad buyers to switch to only buying ads.txt-compliant inventory.

“There are still some good publishers that don’t produce that file, so there’s a little bit of hesitancy to act in binary fashion, which is to only run on ads.txt-certified [inventory], because you would be sacrificing some noncompliant publishers that are fine,” said Davies.

Adoption of ads.txt is “a crawl, walk, run scenario,” said Jessica Kerwin, director of media technology standards at Publicis Media Precision. Publicis Groupe’s programmatic hub already requires publishers in its private programmatic marketplaces to have ads.txt files. But for the agency to limit its programmatic buying to ads.txt-compliant paths, there are potholes in those paths that need filling.

“Errors in posted files, challenges with crawlers and limitations around mobile support or content syndication are still things that need to be ironed out before full-scale buying is available,” she said.

The post As ads.txt adoption grows, so too does enforcement appeared first on Digiday.

To stand out in a crowded field of women-focused publishers, Refinery29 has shown advertisers an increased willingness to offer up access to its editorial staffers.

Last summer, it began selling advertisers the opportunity to set up shop inside its offices. More recently, it has begun selling influencer campaigns that includes sponsored posts created by editorial staffers. Previously, all branded content was done through Refinery29’s content studio.

The line between church and state in journalism has grown progressively thinner, and sometimes looks downright translucent at some publishers; publishers including Conde Nast and Mental Floss have used their editorial teams to create branded content. But Refinery29 giving its editorial staff the chance to operate like influencers has caught the attention of advertisers. The number of advertisers that ran native ads on Refinery29 increased 76 percent year over year in 2017, according to Mediaradar data.

“They are pushing the boundaries the most,” said one media agency source who’s responsible for handling clients’ branded content. “We have some partners that are very church and state. It makes it difficult for us to build something that feels authentic to the audience. With Refinery, what we get there is something that blurs the line a little bit.”

Since it began focusing on branded content, Refinery29 has shown itself very willing to expand the possibilities of the form. 29rooms, an experiential marketing play that started as a staff party three years ago, has grown into a bicoastal, ticketed event that’s spawned a horde of imitators. It was among the first publishers to incorporate branded content into its Instagram stories feed.

“A lot of what we do is convincing people to create work that services women instead of sells to them,” Refinery29 chief content officer Amy Emmerich said. “I’ve seen more lean-in from brands as the world changes.”

But over the years, those brands, Emmerich said, began indicating they would like ways to be closer to Refinery29’s editorial staffers.

So in July 2017, after looking over feedback from a poll of its employees, the venture-backed startup began offering advertisers the chance to market their wares directly to editorial staffers, via a product called Refinery Run-Ins. Advertisers were permitted to set up shop in an event space that sits near the main newsroom in Refinery29’s New York office. Staffers, lured by the promise of cocktails, had the chance to sample everything from donuts to beauty products from brands including Clinique. The Run-Ins typically had hashtags associated with them, which attendees were encouraged to use.  

The Run-Ins are part of a busy schedule for the event space, which also features weekly events including lectures, screenings and Q&As; the director Ava Duvernay was a recent featured guest. But the mixture of educational events and brand-sponsored activations created a blur for some. “It was hard to tell what was sponsored, and what was not,” said one person who attended multiple events in the Refinery.

Attendance was not required for Refinery Run-Ins. But according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the matter, staffers, including former executive editor Caroline Stanley, would send multiple, increasingly urgent emails out to editorial staffers on days when the Run-Ins were sparsely attended.

Refinery29 offers brands access to its staff in other ways as well. For example, this past fall, to promote a program created with Walgreens, The Refinery29 Collection, a number of editorial staffers created sponsored posts on Instagram promoting the effort.

We all need a little self care right now, so my “me time” as of late has included these fall candles and this beauty box full of goodies from @Olay, @Crest and @Pantene. And good news: If you buy more than $30 worth of P&G products at your local @Walgreens this month, you’ll receive a gift box too! (And yes, yes I am a grown woman wearing pajamas with sushi rolls on them!) ✨ #TheR29Collection #ad #SelfCare #BathTime

A post shared by Arianna Davis (@ariannagab) on Oct 19, 2017 at 4:43pm PDT

Brands including Google have used Refinery29 editorial staffers, particularly those with large social followings, to publish these kinds of posts, which are FTC-compliant, through their own accounts on platforms such as Instagram. The editorial staffers, including features writers, video producers, and its video talent, participate completely of their own volition, and are compensated in the form of a quarterly bonus in their paychecks. The price per post is non-negotiable, according to a source.

That boundary-pushing, so far, appears not to have irked Refinery29’s readers. “It’s something we expect users to push back a little bit more on, and they don’t,” the first agency source said. “It’s super exciting.”

Though Refinery has plenty of attributes that would make it attractive to an advertiser — it claims a global reach of more than 550 million, across all digital platforms — these recent moves have distinguished the publisher in a crowded, competitive marketplace for branded content.

The increased friendliness Refinery29’s shown advertisers came within months of the publisher laying off nearly three dozen staffers in December 2017. 

“Over the years, they’ve had a certain air about them in how they’ve written their content and kept the advertising separate,” said a second media agency executive who has worked with Refinery29 in the past. “Lately, they’ve become a lot more amenable to working with the brands.”

The post How Refinery29 uses its editorial staff to stand out for advertisers appeared first on Digiday.

To break out of a one-note marketing strategy centered on flash sales, promo codes and basic retargeting, Tumi turned to artificial intelligence.

Over the past year, Tumi has applied AI — in the form of machine learning and natural language processing with customer data platform partner AgilOne — to personalize the messages in its outbound marketing (like emails and push notifications and one-to-one chat), smarten its digital advertising strategy and improve the customer experience and service. Tumi’s platform pulls data from customers’ email activity (from across any owned email account), activity on social media, behavior on the Tumi site, as well as browsing and search behavior across the web.

“The brand had been screwed up by a cycle of, ‘Let’s sell more stuff,’ which meant send another email. ‘Let’s sell more’ [meant] blast out a promotion,” said Charlie Cole, Tumi’s chief digital officer and the global chief e-commerce officer at Samsonite, which acquired Tumi in August of 2016. “So to get to this point where we really understand who our customer is and how to reach them is something I’m proud of.”

Cole acknowledged that AI has become a buzzword that retailers and marketers can pitch to executives to sound savvy. “AI just organizes your data so it can be crunched mathematically, and then you base strategies off of that data,” he said.

Samsonite doesn’t break out Tumi’s revenue, but when it purchased the brand in 2016, it was a $500 million company. Cole framed the results from using AI this way: “We sent 40 million fewer emails in 2017 and made more money from them.” He added that e-commerce revenue decreased in 2015, was back to growth in 2016 and increased six times over in 2017, but didn’t provide specific figures to add context to that percentage. Email accounts for the lion’s share of revenue sourced from marketing campaigns. Samsonite is also investing in this technology: In its 2017 financial results, the company said it would be increasing marketing spend from $66 million to $100 million, half of which is dedicated to Tumi.

In practice, this means it’s sending the right push notifications, chat messages and emails to the right people at the right time, with better context around where they are in the purchase path. As a result, the company sends out one more impactful email on average, where it used to send three. Instead of bidding on ad words like “luggage,” it’s putting money behind ad placements that are predicted to target customers with the highest lifetime value. Facebook acquisitions now come from reaching the right new customers, not just from retargeting. And it’s offering product recommendations that are based not just on purchase history, but on browser history, email activity and recent search behavior. That’s not just helping online business, but in-store business, as well: Store employees have access to the customer data platform and can bring up detailed browsing and purchase history with an email address.

“Businesses are all sitting on the same data and, so far, they’ve done what they can within the rules; they’ve exploited data as far as humanly possible,” said Omer Artun, the CEO and founder of AgilOne. “What hasn’t been tapped into is the potential of the hidden patterns in data, which are really hard to find for a human. When you’re dealing with millions of customers, you can’t decipher cognitive behavior at scale. AI changes the rules of business by recognizing a pattern and providing context around not only what people are buying and why, but also what they’re not buying and why.”

This has changed Tumi’s clienteling business, which is an integral part of its in-store strategy. As a luxury brand (Tumi’s bags and backpacks run between $400 and $800, while its luggage sells for around $1,000 to $1,500 a piece), store employees rely on the traditional black book to better service and keep track of high-spending customers.

Cole offered this example: A store manager who had worked with a specific customer for years tested out a product recommendation tool that surfaced items the customer would be most likely to buy, based on the AI-built dataset. The tool suggested all women’s products, and the manager assumed it was wrong, since the customer had only ever purchased men’s accessories. So he called the customer and asked what he was currently shopping for, and he replied that he had been looking around for a gift for his wife.

“We knew recent browser behavior, email open rates, search behavior — it’s far more predictive than past purchase,” said Cole. “What I bought yesterday isn’t always going to predict what I buy today. To get to that layer, you have to combine his purchase history with his browser behavior and email open rates. That’s what AI can do.”

Outside of marketing, the Tumi website is backed by an algorithm that changes what people see first, depending on their data history. This data also helps inform inventory buys and order fulfillment, since it can track who’s buying what and where. Right now, that use of the technology is concentrated online. Cole said he wants to eventually use it to stock individual stores with localized inventory, as well as better personalize in-store customer service overall.

“AI’s real heyday will come when it can totally overhaul the in-store experience. If its full potential is at a 10, we’re at a three. Right now, we can only apply it to customers we know; it’s for people who come back. Using second- and third-party data for personalization is where it gets fun, and that’s a bigger piece of the pie. You need new customers,” said Cole.

He said that the company plans to keep working at improving personalization using AI, but it hasn’t made any new hires in the department. Its email marketing team consists of two people, and for Google and Facebook advertising, it outsources to an agency. In the future, he sees AI weaving throughout every department at the brand.

“People who aren’t using AI are eventually going to lose their shirts — but it’s not a revolution; it’s merely an evolution. It’s a tool to solve a problem,” Cole said. “The hype will collapse in about a year, and then it will just become part of the trade.”

The post How Tumi is using AI in marketing campaigns, online and in stores appeared first on Digiday.

The Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor department-store chains have suffered a security breach that has compromised shoppers’ personal and financial information.

Facebook Inc. is battling a backlash from lawmakers, regulators and users on multiple continents. Some of the sharpest criticism is coming from close to home: Silicon Valley rivals.

Regulators are grappling with privacy questions about encrypted apps like Signal and Telegram, which assure users of complete security but also can allow terrorists to go undetected.

Using 3-D printers to build concrete jail cells, foam homeless shelters and earthquake-proof bungalows is a promising, if still unproven, construction technology.