Data-Labor-Technology

“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 Shachar Shamir, co-founder at Ranky. Too often, marketing and sales folks work hard to move leads through the sales funnel, only for some of those customers to leave after making… Continue reading »

The post The Silver Lining In Lost Business appeared first on AdExchanger.

Earlier this week, we broke the news of GroupM requiring publishers to sign a “Data Protection Addendum” in advance of the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation in May.

Why this matters is more interesting. GroupM is scrambling to make sure it won’t take on significant liability. (The GDPR calls for fines of up to 4 percent of a company’s global revenue.) What it’s doing is using its leverage as the biggest ad buyer to play a game of pass the liability. The demand is simple: You take all the liability, or you get cut off our media plans. From GroupM’s standpoint, it’s simply ensuring a compliant supply chain. In its view, it’s a leader, much as it was in pushing onerous viewability standards on publishers. Those in the front take all the arrows.

The post The Rundown: Inside GroupM’s GDPR power play appeared first on Digiday.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Over-The-Top Growth TV ad spend will shrink in the US this year by 0.5% to $69.9 billion, according to eMarketer’s updated forecast. TV’s share of US media spend will decrease as a result, from 33.9% in 2017 to 31.6% this year. TV ad spend… Continue reading »

The post US TV Ad Spend To Shrink; A Quarter Of Web Traffic Isn’t Human appeared first on AdExchanger.

Influencer marketing is evolving as it grows, with brands ramping up their influencer budgets, bringing influencer marketing in-house and treating influencers as marketing partners. Another change: Influencer contracts are starting to resemble those for traditional talent for TV ads or billboards.

The contract language is comprehensive, now often including the length of a post, the period of paid amplification, the specific type of content — whether it’s a video, Instagram Story or Boomerang, for example — the amount of content, exclusivity rights, confidentiality agreements and payment terms.

“Recently, influencer contracts have become more in line with traditional talent contracts,” said Ryan Detert, CEO of influencer platform Influential, which uses an artificial intelligence platform run by IBM Watson to match brands with influencers. Contracts now include licensing rights for likeness and content usage, and they open up the opportunity to use influencers for display advertising, TV ads and billboards as opposed to just social channels, Detert said.

Over the past couple of months, Jamie Lieberman, founder of law firm Hashtag Legal, has also seen an influx of contracts that want influencers for longer periods of time, usually six months to a year as compared to a one-time post or a few posts. Lieberman also said contracts now refer to influencers more as brand spokespeople than influencers, request more in-person appearances and in some causes, even include morality causes that give the company permission to use content in case of death.

Even micro-influencers are receiving long-term contracts from brand partners. Micro-influencer Jeannette Kaplun, who runs the blog Hispana Global and its social channels and works with influencer agency Everywhere Agency, said she regularly engages in more longer-term partnerships.

Influencer marketing agency WhoSay generates the contracts between its influencers and brands, and it has updated them to reflect how brands want to use influencers for longer partnerships and as talent that extends beyond social.

WhoSay CMO Paul Kontonis said that last year, the agency updated the language in its contracts with the option to use influencer content for other applications such as TV, in-store or e-commerce campaigns. Now, brands are starting to take advantage of that, said Kontonis. For instance, in February, Google used one contract with entertainer RuPaul for a social campaign to promote its Pixel 2 phone as well as a TV commercial. Meanwhile, a social campaign Walmart launched with musician Jana Kramer was also used for in-store content.

This differs dramatically from five years ago, when most contracts were one-off agreements done over email, handshakes or phone calls, Lieberman said. Today, influencer marketing has become a significant part of brands’ marketing strategies, despite the struggle to calculate return on investment and widespread follower fraud. In 2018, brands are increasing their influencer marketing spend, according to influencer platform Linqia, which surveyed 181 marketers and found that 39 percent are increasing their budgets.

Requests for video are also appearing more in contracts. Lieberman said the deals vary dramatically from influencer to influencer, but overall, even bloggers have been asked to do less blog posts and more videos.

“We’ve seen cost per view being the most important pricing model as video formats have overtaken static content,” said John Kalis, vp of U.S. business development at influencer marketing platform indaHash.

Another area that influencer contracts are touching on is fraudulent followers and brand safety. In all campaign contracts, WhoSay includes a clause that gives it the power to whitelabel all of an influencer’s accounts, allowing the agency to control the accounts and use its platform to determine how many fake followers an influencer might have. Although WhoSay has done this for the past three years, Kontonis said brands are now appreciating it for regulating ad fraud and making sure an influencer is brand-safe. Kontonis said influencer Logan Paul was off its platform before his recent YouTube scandal.

There are also brands using platforms that eliminate the need for multiple contracts altogether. Procter & Gamble’s Head & Shoulders and L’Oréal use micro-influencer platform Peersway, and instead of negotiating individual contracts with influencers, they use one contract with the platform. Peersway CEO Arnab Majumdar said this is meant to help brands “save hundreds of hours, as they no longer need to negotiate individual fees with influencers or negotiate individual contracts.” Instead of negotiating deals that could span different price points, Peersway charges brands $60 an influencer to make one post and $90 per influencer to create two posts. Majumdar said a fixed price point allows the platform to deliver a cost per engagement of less than 25 cents, while the industry average is 50 cents.

Something that is not yet appearing in influencer contracts are brands’ expected KPIs, according to several agencies. Kontonis said brands will discuss their intention of measuring cost per impressions, cost per views and cost per engagements with the influencer content, but WhoSay leaves this out of the contract because it’s not the influencer’s job to achieve those — it’s the agency’s, said Kontonis.

Lieberman said that for influencers, it’s hard to agree to a campaign goal they cannot guarantee. Still, she said, it’s important for an influencer to understand a brand’s KPIs, especially for negotiations and deciding which content might benefit a brand more. But most of them don’t think to ask. “It’s still a conversation influencers are learning to ask about,” she said. So, Lieberman said it’s the first piece of advice she gives her influencer clients — to know exactly what the brand is looking for.

The post Influencers are getting long-term contracts that treat them more like traditional talent appeared first on Digiday.

Until a year ago, Render Media co-founder Eytan Elbaz was on a high, getting press coverage that floated him as the “most important person in LA tech,” landing on Inc.’s list of fastest-growing companies in the world, putting himself in the company of Vice and BuzzFeed and naming tech and gaming as Render’s next targets for expansion. Employees enjoyed free lunches, telecommuting benefits and expansive views of L.A.’s Fairfax district. Now, the startup behind social recipe site Cooking Panda and Opposing Views has confirmed it is shutting down, seemingly another victim of Facebook’s recent algorithm changes.

With Cooking Panda, 7-year-old Render helped popularize the hands-in-pans style of video shot from above. The sites weren’t the biggest — Cooking Panda had 25 million views in February, a fraction of BuzzFeed’s Tasty (1.2 billion) and Tastemade (609 million). But it had grown from 700,000 to 5.3 million Facebook fans in a year, and the company had a higher engagement rate than those bigger rivals, per Tubular Labs.

The social food video category was already starting to show signs of overcrowding last fall. Then, in January, Facebook announced it would deprioritize brands and publisher content in the news feed in favor of users’ posts and highly shared content. Publishers worried that Facebook’s shift in favor of user content would also make it more expensive for them to get their branded content in front of users. Soon after, social publisher LittleThings shut down, citing the news feed change, and others began to see their traffic dry up further.

A company source said Facebook wasn’t the only a factor in the shutdown, but wouldn’t elaborate. Elbaz and his co-founder Vic Belonogoff didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story. However, he said recently that his company has had to pay a “noticeable but not game-changing” increase to get the same reach it once got organically for its branded content. And like other media companies that built an audience on social media by chasing viral hits, Render struggled to wean itself from dependence on Facebook, with its audience that dwarfs other social media platforms.

In 2016, the company started pivoting away from overhead recipe videos to cartoons and lifestyle videos, and it started pushing out content on Instagram, Vine and Snapchat. The company even talked about launching a subscription product this year. But as of January, Facebook still accounted for the vast majority of Cooking Panda’s views and followers. Cooking Panda’s video views fell by almost half from December to 25 million in February, while Opposing Views’ Facebook video views fell even more sharply in the same period, to 22.7 million, per Tubular Labs.

Both sites were still posting on Facebook while the company winds down operations, but it’s not clear how much longer that’ll continue. The phone number listed on the company’s website wasn’t operational. The company was operating with a skeleton staff of six, down from the 35 it reported having in 2016. “If you check in with us a year from now, overall for both us and the industry, there will be less overhead recipe videos,” Elbaz said in 2016, on the company’s plans to differentiate. He was right, but probably not in the way he expected to be.

The post Onetime social publishing star Cooking Panda is shutting down appeared first on Digiday.

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. 

Digiday spoke to eight agency buyers for this story, 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.

Spark, which launched in July, is a social feed of photos. It is 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. At launch, Amazon touted that people can follow interests and influencers, which it dubs “enthusiasts.” Spark is shoppable, of course, much more so than other social networks, since it is so connected to Amazon. The company declined to share specific data on growth on Spark.

Amazon also recently introduced “contributor rewards” on the platform to give cash to people who contribute helpful or interesting content, as determined by the Amazon team.  Spark doesn’t have ad opportunities right now,  but according to a deck reviewed by Digiday, an upcoming brand profile function will allow brands registered in the Amazon Brand Registry to get a verified checkmark badge and participate.

There are a few ways brands can get involved with Spark: The most obvious is by paying an influencer. Another, execs say, is through a program called “on-site associates.” Open only by invitation, this program entails Amazon paying people to publish what it calls “quality content” on Amazon, including on Spark. Amazon suggests right now that someone within a brand who is a Prime member can use their own Amazon profile to represent the brand.

“We haven’t seen any push from them on Spark,” said Andrew Sandoval, group director at The Media Kitchen. “I see lots of opportunities from them through search, for example, but Spark just doesn’t come up.”

“No brands that we work with have asked about it,” said David Tucker, head of strategy at indie agency SwellShark.

Sandoval said his clients who are more lifestyle-focused mostly concentrate on Instagram, where you can “show people living their lives with your products.” “Amazon Spark is mostly just talking about your products, which is the hard sell,” he said. “Ultimately, the e-commerce social experience is a little far from the social experience.”

Another buyer at a major Amazon-focused agency said in his experience, influencer marketing and e-commerce aren’t taking off the way he — and Amazon, potentially — expected them to.

Agencies report Amazon is heavily pushing its other platforms, including Amazon Marketing Services and Amazon Advertising Platform, but also AmazonFresh, for example. Amazon recently has made moves to grow its agency development team worldwide.

Another media buyer said the problem he runs into is influencers themselves are less familiar with Spark. Amazon has had more success with other influencer initiatives like owned storefronts, which interest brands. “There is no hard data that shows the benefits of Spark,” said this person.

Another buyer said that initially, Amazon’s pitch was that Spark would feel more authentic since brands couldn’t directly post on it. But “I don’t think that’s resonating with customers because nobody is really complaining about there being too many ads on Instagram,” this person said.

There’s an internal communication issue at play, too. Agencies have long reported that groups within Amazon don’t talk much to each other. That’s the case with Amazon Media Group and AMS, as well as with Spark to some degree. The advertising team that should be promoting Spark isn’t really doing it.

This lack of communication is coming across in the product. “Amazon doesn’t feel that holistic right now,” said Sandoval. “It’s confusing for us as an agency. Why do we have different platforms?”

Influencers report nobody from Amazon has reached out about Spark after an initial email sent to everyone — not just influencers — announcing it. One influencer complained that the verification process turned him off — anyone can get verified on Spark — and he feels, like an influencer Digiday previously interviewed, that the potential audience is severely limited.

“Not a single person I know is using it,” said the influencer. “Why should I?”

The post ‘Nobody is using it’: Amazon Spark is not taking off with brands, agencies appeared first on Digiday.

Ikea wants customers to be able to browse its catalog, virtually decorate their homes and plan store visits from one app rather than three separate ones as they do now.

The decision comes after the success of the Ikea Place app, which uses augmented reality to show people what furniture will look like in their homes, pushed the retailer to review its apps.

Since launching on Apple devices last September, the app has been downloaded over 2 million times, and around 1 million people have repeatedly used it, said Michael Valdsgaard, leader of digital transformation at Inter Ikea, the holding company for Ikea.

Despite the app’s positive reception, Valdsgaard won’t consolidate all Ikea’s apps until he’s had time to compare the recently launched Android version of Ikea Place to the iOS original. Ikea Place had more than 370,000 monthly active users worldwide on iPhones in February, according to mobile app data company App Annie. From the app’s launch in September 2017 through the end of February, its top five markets by iOS downloads were the U.S., Germany, France, the U.K. and Russia, per App Annie.

“In the latter half of 2018, we’re going to figure out where the things [in our different apps] fit together and then move them over [into one],” said Valdsgaard. “They all have specific use cases, so we have to figure out how those different capabilities can fit together.”

The potential of having one Ikea app is part of Valdsgaard’s rationale for not pushing direct sales from its AR app. Valdsgaard also doesn’t want to flood Ikea Place with too many features before he knows what customers want. In order to secure more time to see how people use the app, he told other executives he would decide whether to add the capability to buy from it in the summer. “We won’t make a business case for the app until we’ve explored what AR could really mean for Ikea,” Valdsgaard said.

A visual search feature launched on Ikea Place earlier this month, and Valdsgaard thinks it could become a core part of the retailer’s app strategy.

Ikea is also working on an AR effect for Facebook or Snapchat that would run in the U.K., though Valdsgaard wouldn’t specify which one. Both are trying to use the technology to win more ad budgets.

“The problem [with working on the platforms] is the technology,” Valdsgaard said. “We want to give you a true representation in size, color and dimensions, which is complicated.”

Ikea is also working with agency 72andSunny to build a long-term proposition for AR.

The post Ikea wants to consolidate its three mobile apps into one appeared first on Digiday.

Paxton Baker, managing partner, Liquid Soul, mixes both a creative and a quantitative approach to his work. “When you run a TV network, you’re working on acquisitions, the daily line-up, new specials,
documentaries, awards. Plus you’re watching ratings and you’re ever mindful of the competition,” he explains.

Facebook is going to stop allowing third-party data providers from offering targeting directly on its platform. The move is a direct reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In the past, advertisers could use a feature called partner categories to supplement the targeting they do on Facebook with data from brokers, such as recent purchases or… Continue reading »

The post Facebook Kills Off Third-Party Data For Targeting appeared first on AdExchanger.

This Sunday is April Fools’ Day, and the hijinks are getting off to an amusing start with WArby’s–a purported joint venture between eyewear maker Warby Parker and fast-food purveyor Arby’s. “Arby’s has an eye for meat. Warby Parker has meat for eyes. The result? A new partnership sandwiched somewhere between vision and at least eight…