Data-Labor-Technology

These are tough times for digital publishers as they look for ways to diversify their revenue, with Google and Facebook eating up the lion’s share of online advertising. At the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, publishers shared their biggest challenges in branching out. Our events operate under the Chatham House Rule, which means all discussions are on the record, only without attribution of names and companies. Here’s a sampling of what people said about the shift to reader revenue, platforms and video:

Pivoting to subscriptions is hard
“You have to figure out who’s going to own subscriptions in your organization. Can your design team build a paywall? There’s an operational cost you need to take into account.”

“You can’t just pivot into a subscription. It’s a long, slow road to grow into a product and experience that’s good enough for readers to pay you anything.”

“Our subscription revenue is higher than our ad revenue — and both are growing double digits this year. But we are reaching a point with [the growth of] our subscription product where we either need to grab a greater share of wallet from existing subscribers, or we have to pivot into new markets.”

Commerce isn’t an easy flip of a switch
“You do need to think more like a merchant because the more merchandising expertise you have, the closer you can get commerce into being a meaningful line of revenue. It’s not as simple as slapping products up and hoping they sell.”

“If Amazon has [the product], we’re not going to touch it. We need to be one of the only companies on the internet that has that product. Our success is all off of our niche.”

There’s no love for or from Facebook
“We actually had an account manager and got dropped by them. Between how much we spend with them and how much we monetize on the [Facebook Audience Network] side, the fact that we can’t get an account rep just to answer questions is kind of ridiculous — but that’s Facebook.”

“Part of the reason we diversified to not rely on Facebook as much: These platforms change things up so much at any point, the more you do different things, the better.”

“We joke internally that now our traffic diversification looks a lot better because Facebook went down.”

Apple News is no savior just yet
“Right now, it’s purely a brand play for us. It helps us say we have more reach, and the editorial team loves it, but it hasn’t added to the bottom line in any way yet.”

“The tech lift and operational challenges of monetizing the platform is probably the biggest hurdle.”

“An Apple News rep told us that the RSS feed is kind of dead to them. We built custom integration of the WordPress plugin, so all of the articles are auto-syndicated into it. We were fortunate because they reached out to us. The rep told us that using their format is definitely preferred by them.”

“There are two people running publisher partnerships for everybody. So you almost have no possibility of inclusion in there. We were told that if you have a calendar planned out for the next year, that’s the best way to get inclusion and get bumped up by Apple News.”

“They gave us no performance data, no targeting data. I’m going to wait until someone I trust says they’re making a ton of money before I put a ton of energy back into it.”

The video landscape is confusing
“We recently have been approached by MSN, [which has] 500 million uniques worldwide and 120 million uniques in the U.S. Who still uses MSN?”

“Does video header bidding actually work? Some vendors say yes and some vendors say no — and I have no idea.”

“We just have to set expectations. If you want to be on the top 100 sites on the internet, there is only a quantifiable amount of inventory, and it’s not going to be $8 [CPMs].”

The post ‘You can’t just pivot into a subscription’: Overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit appeared first on Digiday.

At the Digiday Retail Summit last month in Austin, Texas, we sat down with 53 retail executives to learn about their mobile strategies. Check out our earlier research on which platform media buyers find hardest to advertise on here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Less than 50 percent of retailers in Digiday’s survey from the event have a mobile app for consumers.
• Retailers believe their apps most effectively drive purchases, collect consumer information and improve customer loyalty.

Mobile apps are essential to e-commerce, but less than half of retailers have them
Only 45 percent of retailers Digiday surveyed have a mobile app for consumers. However more e-Commerce sales take place on a mobile app than the mobile web or desktop. A report from Criteo found that mobile apps were the largest source of online purchases in 2017, with 44 percent of online purchases occurring on apps, 23 percent on mobile web and 33 percent on desktop computers.

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“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Lauren Wiener, CEO at Tremor Video DSP.  During commercial breaks, half of viewers reach for a device, posing a challenge for TV advertisers. Brand recall falls by nearly half, from 47% to 25% [PDF],… Continue reading »

The post Digital Can Amplify TV Ads And Stretch Spend Further appeared first on AdExchanger.

“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 Mike Romoff, head of global agency and channel sales at LinkedIn. Ad agencies face an existential crisis, years in the making, and it feels particularly urgent at this moment. There… Continue reading »

The post For Ad Agencies to Survive, Transparency Must Be More Than Just A Buzzword appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A Ton Of Bricks Target and Kroger are considering a merger, sources tell Fast Company. The combination of the Kroger, the second-biggest grocery retailer in the US (behind Walmart), and Target’s general merchandise sales would create another power retailer as the space consolidates to… Continue reading »

The post Kroger And Target Allegedly Consider Merger; Spotify Deals With Fraud appeared first on AdExchanger.

The more Diageo’s marketers work with martech startups, the more they realize media targeting has improved while creative has barely evolved.

Swapping a glass of Baileys for a pint of Guinness in a Diageo banner is effective and the first step in personalizing the company’s creative, including text, sound, imagery and storytelling, said Benni Lickfett, Diageo’s head of technology and innovation. As more of Diageo’s ads are dynamically assembled, the advertiser is looking beyond graphical elements to thousands of different iterations of ad copy, graphical elements and click-through actions triggered by location, time of day or weather.

Just don’t call it the rise of programmatic creative. Even as personalized programmatic ads appear closer than ever, Lickfett still thinks its early days. Diageo has been quietly running tests with Spirable, a company that produces contextual video campaigns, using Spirable’s proprietary technology to dissect videos into individual frames that can then be changed based on geography, gender, weather and customer data from Diageo.

Tests have run in several markets such as the U.K., including personalized email campaigns for the Baileys brand to determine how many variables Diageo can feasibly personalize. For now, though, organizational limitations and the view that dynamic creative is just a tactical ploy have hampered progression. Advertisers have preferred to use programmatic for direct response, but Lickfett is still wary of hyping dynamic creative and wants it to be used higher in the funnel.

“We can do so much [with the creative] at scale to the point where we are creating 20,000 individual videos that are pushed out,” said Lickfett. “The technology isn’t limiting. The user adoption is there. We need to be collaborative with our agencies — Carat and BBDO — in the way my team tests and learns with those partners so that we can work together to build a business case [for dynamic creative].

The ads aren’t served programmatically — yet. Lickfett is more interested in figuring out how Diageo can automate the process of creating tens of thousands of versions of the same ad. With Spirable, he and his team are trying to come up with a creative framework coded around specific parts of an image or breaks in an ad that would appeal most to the viewer.

“We’ve been A/B stress testing as part of some of the campaigns, and we’re seeing that the weather-triggered [changes] work really well,” said Lickfett. “It can be an agile process with the right planning; you just build a big decision tree with the different variables, and it’s actually manageable.”

As old as the promise of dynamic creative is — the Interactive Advertising Bureau tried to encourage adoption eight years ago — a convergence of forces suggests more advertisers will adopt it now. In October, Facebook made a play for dynamic creative budgets with tools that let brands automate the creative process. Brands like Unilever are cutting creative agencies as they venture deeper into programmatic trading, while startups like AdLib, founded by a former DoubleClick executive, emerge to fix what they believe is a broken full-service agency model.

Dynamic creative is one of a number of innovations Lickfett and his team are exploring with startups. Amazon, particularly its burgeoning voice ecosystem, is top of mind for them, as are conversational commerce, content targeting and social listening. Having the internal resources to explore those innovations means the business doesn’t have to outsource the bulk of its innovation efforts to agencies as some advertisers do, Lickfett said.

“We can’t treat startups like an agency,” he said. “They bring one specific expertise, and we as marketers need to connect the dots between them and our business in order to build a use case. But not everyone thinks that way or has the right skill set.”

The post ‘We can’t treat startups like an agency’: Diageo’s innovation boss on the dilemma of dynamic creative appeared first on Digiday.

Channel 4 — best known these days for its exposé of Cambridge Analytica’s shady inner workings — has also been on the forefront of interactive ads, having served them on its on-demand platform, All 4, since 2011. But as viewing shifts from desktop to the connected TV, its interactive ads are changing.

Channel 4 has 14 variations of interactive ad products that can be personalized based on data from registered users, like age, location, name and gender.

Since last April, the broadcaster has run seven ad campaigns featuring personalized audio for brands like 20th Century Fox for the film “Alien: Covenant,” yogurt brand Onken and do-it-yourself brand Ronseal. For “Alien: Covenant,” 2 percent of viewers clicked on the ad to either see an extended trailer or to book tickets, double the interaction rate of its interactive ads without personalized audio, according to the broadcaster.

All 4 has 17 million registered users, and over time, its viewing has shifted from desktop to mobile and connected TVs. Sixty percent of viewing happens through connected TVs, set-top boxes or game consoles, according to the broadcaster.

For now, interactive ads can only be served on desktop and mobile, which accounts for 40 percent of All 4’s inventory. Buyers say this restriction hasn’t deterred brands, and campaigns can get enough scale. All 4’s interactive ads became available on Roku in 2017, which accounts for 7 percent of All 4’s viewing, and will roll out on other providers like Amazon Fire TV Stick this year.

David Amodio, Channel 4’s digital and creative leader, said adapting the creative, such as changing the end frame to promote barbecues for a supermarket ad during hot weather or showing the nearest car dealership for auto brands, is the biggest opportunity for interactive ads on TV. He said it’s also important to surface more content, like prompting viewers to click to watch an extended version of a trailer, and keep the navigation simple.

“The level of interactivity is very different on the big screen,” said Amodio. “You need to respect the audience for [personalized audio ads] to keep their effectiveness. The key for keeping the format special is to keep it premium and not [make] it seem like wallpaper.”

With any kind of personalized campaign, brands also must avoid seeming too intrusive. According to the broadcaster, 5 percent of its viewers opt out of its personalized ads.

“Interactivity toes a fine line between being intrusive and relevant,” said Mihir Haria-Shah, broadcast account director at Total Media. “The big screen has massive potential creatively because it’s not too intrusive.”

While interactivity on TV screens has scale and technical limitations, Stefan Jansen, video director at Mindshare, sees the potential for interactive ads beyond the more niche applications.

“When you factor in voice, connected homes and commerce, there are many interesting possible ways to engage with interactive ads,” he said. “Clients are excited.”

The post How Channel 4 is adapting its interactive ads to the big screen appeared first on Digiday.

Apple is expanding the number of publishers that can serve ads into their Apple News articles using Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers after testing the option last year, according to five publisher and industry executives. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the record.

The DFP move lets publishers take the direct-ads sold on their own sites and plug them into Apple’s app. That has the potential to address publishers’ Apple News monetization problems.

“We’re excited about the prospect of DFP,” said Mic publisher Cory Haik. “Apple has done a great job listening to publishers, and this looks like an opportunity to package and sell our journalism seamlessly.”

“If we can run our DFP ads on Apple News, then Apple News becomes, for all practical purposes, an extension of our website,” said Daniel Hallac, chief product officer at New York Media. “We can monetize it in sort of the same ways we do on our owned-and-operated [properties]. And that’s a big change.”

New York Media has four properties publishing on Apple News: New York magazine, Vulture, The Cut and Grub Street. Apple’s app accounts for 5-8 percent of those sites’ traffic, according to Hallac. But Apple News generates less revenue per article than New York Media’s owned properties.

Apple’s initial DFP integration has caveats that limit the benefit to publishers, though. For example, it only applies to serving ads that a publisher sold directly to a brand, and doesn’t let publishers do targeted programmatic ads, according to publisher execs.

The DFP integration could still help Apple’s relationship with publishers at a time when they’re looking to other distributed media platforms including Flipboard and LinkedIn to diversify their traffic sources away from Facebook.

The size of the Apple News audience continues to grow — reaching 60.2 million people in the U.S. on mobile in February 2018, per comScore — as do publishers’ frustrations with Facebook following January’s news-feed change.

A publisher source said Apple has updated publishers monthly on its monetization plans and lined up regular meetings between media execs and Eddy Cue, Apple’s svp of internet software and services, and Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News.

“Apple is all-in on the publisher charm offensive right now,” the source said. “They’re determined to be the non-Facebook.”

Others echoed that view. Hallac met with Apple execs soon after joining New York Media late last year. “It was the first time I saw them proactively courting publishers,” he said. “What was fascinating about them was they really are interested also in making sure the publishers have a way to monetize their content.”

“They have been very vocal and very active. We talk to them daily and, on the strategic relationship side, weekly,” said Haik. “It’s evolved into a really positive model for how publishers and platforms can engage, down to a Slack channel that Mic’s editors are in with their editors daily, pitching stories, to very proactive planning on bigger packages and special reports.”

Apple News’ moves to help publishers make money gave encouragement to podcast companies, which also use Apple to distribute and monetize content.

To the frustration of many podcasters, Apple hasn’t adopted a third-party ad measurement standards such as Remote Audio Data, which was developed by a group of stakeholders including NPR. In January, the Media Rating Council released its first standards for digital audio advertising measurement.

“Apple allowing DoubleClick [on Apple News] is an encouraging step,” said Gregorio Roseto, digital audio investment manager at Horizon Media. “I would love to see them do something along those lines on podcasts.”

Apple released universal analytics for its podcast platform in December 2017, which makes it easier to detect if a listener heard an ad, but Apple hasn’t built any technology to facilitate third-party ad insertion.

“I think if [Apple] can gain confidence from testing there, that’s a good thing,” said Sarah van Mosel, the head of podcast sales and chief strategy officer at Market Enginuity.

Lucia Moses and Max Willens contributed reporting.

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