Data-Labor-Technology

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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 Tom Weiss, chief technology officer and chief data scientist at Dativa. With online segments overlaid on linear schedules, many are hoping for a golden age of TV advertising, where brands can break out beyond… Continue reading »

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Within the context of Publicis Groupe’s broader restructure, Publicis Media was born to simplify the group’s media offering while leveraging a more modern definition of scale. “Although it’s become so much more complex, media has always been about scale and insight,” said Steve King, CEO of Publicis Media. “We weren’t leveraging that scale effectively.” Publicis… Continue reading »

The post Publicis’ Steve King On Trust, Transparency And Transformation In A Post-ANA-Report World appeared first on AdExchanger.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Ad Bubble? Investors have overestimated the growth potential of digital advertising, claims The Economist. Valuations are sky-high for Google and Facebook, which generate their revenue from ads, while mega-mergers like Comcast-NBCUniversal and AT&T-Time Warner’s pending deal are justified in part on the basis of… Continue reading »

The post The Economist Sees A Digital Ad Bubble; Safeguard Scientifics May Sell MediaMath Stake appeared first on AdExchanger.

By Bryn Caruso — vp, sales & customer success at Julius

In less than five years, influencer marketing has gone from a trendy method of marketing amplification to a serious sales driver. We recently surveyed marketers and public relations professionals on the ways that they currently implement influencer marketing, and found that overwhelmingly, they focus their influencer marketing efforts on driving sales.

While encouraging brand advocacy was a close second response, it was clear that even that focus was in service to driving volume and velocity through the ever-changing purchase funnel.

As shown by the data, there were clear common issues that marketers wanted to address in order to optimize their influencer marketing. Across all of these goals, we identified that there were three salient challenges in particular that marketers will need to overcome in order to execute their most successful influencer marketing campaigns in 2018.

Obstacles to overcome in 2018

1. The need for more information about influencers

Those marketers who relied heavily on in-house efforts for campaign management found that a significant amount of time was spent vetting digital influencers as less information about them is made publicly—and readily—available, especially when compared to traditional celebrities. Yet with today’s complex social dynamics and concerns of appropriateness, these efforts will only increase. Plus, marketers surveyed found that the influencer space is getting crowded, making it increasingly difficult to find quality influencers.

The shift to software supporting these in-house efforts provided a basic level of comfort, due to the added level of knowledge. This helped marketers face the challenge of vetting quality influencers vs. a “spray and pray” approach.

2.    Standardization in proposals and pricing

Not all influencer marketing campaigns are created equally. Nonetheless, marketers in 2018 are looking to standardize proposals to both increase efficiency and make the process more comparable. Easily comparing influencers by their reach on their respective social platforms and sending standard rates per-post or per-video created will be paramount this year.

 

3. Increasing analytics to continue to prove the ROI

One challenge that the surveyed marketers had previously faced was the ability to easily show the performance of their campaigns, including the complete value of their chosen influencer from first post to last reached follower. As the entire influencer marketing world moves to increased accountability for sales funnel contribution, so does the desire for an increase in reliable metrics.

Influencer marketing isn’t just here to stay; it will continue to see robust growth in 2018. It’s clear that with more information, marketers are more strategic: vetting the influencers, standardizing process, costs, and protocols, and accurately measuring campaign effectiveness. Through increased focus on these aspects, marketers will be able to make more informed decisions and find the best representation of their brand.

The post In 2018, influencer marketing is about driving sales appeared first on Digiday.

Digiday’s “Research in brief” is designed to give you quick, easy and digestible facts to make better decisions and win arguments around the office. They are based on Digiday’s proprietary surveys of industry leaders, executives and doers. See our earlier research on whether publishers are making money on Facebook here.

Until technology replaces the human workforce, brands will look to implement it to improve their marketing campaigns and drive consumer purchases.

The post Digiday Research: Brand marketers see more potential in AI than other technologies appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook’s news-feed change is likely to cut into the money publishers can make from producing and distributing custom branded and sponsored editorial videos on the platform, their top source of revenue on Facebook.

Top Facebook publishers can nab a 50-70 percent margin on custom branded videos they distribute on Facebook after paying for production and paid media, according to four publishing sources, including three executives from publishers with at least a billion monthly views on Facebook. With Facebook counting views at 3 seconds, the cost per view has been incredibly low — “less than a penny,” one source said — which means top publishers can scoop up plenty of ad dollars based on their organic reach on Facebook.

There was even more money to be made from sponsorships of editorial videos that publishers already had on their schedule and required no additional production dollars — “essentially free money,” as one exec at a top Facebook publisher said. And it helped that the typical, made-for-Facebook news-feed videos — short, silent, text-on-screen autoplay clips — are cheap to churn out.

Facebook is about to get more costly
With Facebook clamping down on media within the news feed, these executives have legitimate concerns that it could impact how much money publishers can make from custom and sponsored videos. For instance, the cost models for branded content will likely change. As three executives said, it will cost more to run paid campaigns to seed videos in front of users in the news feed, which will cut into profit margins.

“My gut says a lot of people are going to have to increase paid budgets to hit their guarantees,” said one CRO of a digital publisher. “Candidly, does that change anything? I’m not sure — a lot of people were already masking that they were putting paid media behind some of this content — but it probably will affect the bottom line in some way.”

How much this impacts publishers’ overall revenues remains to be seen.

“No one knows what’s going to happen, so we’ll wait and see what this means for our branded stuff — we might have to charge more,” said one executive at a publisher that reaped “eight figures” in branded video revenue from Facebook in 2017.

One potential way to make up for losses in branded-content revenue is producing brand-funded shows for Facebook Watch or selling sponsorships into existing Watch programming (with the exception of Facebook-funded shows). One top Facebook video publisher said it’s been pitching advertisers on broad campaigns that include sponsorships of some of its self-funded Watch shows. This assumes, of course, that Facebook keeps prioritizing Watch programming in the news feed.

“Facebook wants people to watch longer videos so they can get to the pre-rolls and mid-rolls, but no one is going to Facebook for that right now,” said the CRO. “The hope is that the news feed is going to favor [Watch] so people can hit the mid-rolls.”

“We’ve been waiting for this [change] for quite some time, which is one of the reasons that we leaned so, so, so hard into Watch in the first place,” said the CEO of a big digital publisher. “This move makes Watch an even bigger focus.”

Top digital publishers say they have a better safety net
According to Digiday research, 86 percent of publishers make 25 percent or less of their video revenue on Facebook — which points to how unsuccessful Facebook has been in building an ad revenue-sharing product that works for media companies. But almost all the video ad dollars publishers can make on Facebook come from branded content, not Watch, publishing executives said. Even if Facebook isn’t the biggest driver of video revenue, it’s responsible for a decent chunk for many publishers.

Multiple bigger digital publishers are banking on the idea that their businesses are becoming diversified enough that the news-feed changes won’t hurt them as much as it will publishers that heavily rely on Facebook for reach and revenue. One head of a brand content studio at a top Facebook publisher said roughly 15 percent of the company’s revenues — “single-digit millions annually” — come from custom videos solely produced for Facebook. This company also distributes branded videos on YouTube, other social platforms and its own website, which will ideally mitigate the impact of Facebook’s changes.

“I do think [the changes] are going to whittle away a fair amount of the digital players that are out there, but for ourselves, we have some time to figure this out,” this exec said. “You never want 90 percent of your business from something you don’t control.”

Other Facebook video giants point to their organic reach on the platform — their ability to get videos watched and shared without running too much paid media behind it — as a reason they’re not too worried about the algorithm change.

Attn, which did 255 million video views on Facebook in December, according to Tubular Labs, said its branded-content engagement is 4.4 times higher than the Facebook average, citing data from research firm Brandtale. Attn co-founder Matthew Segal pointed to a recent six-minute branded video featuring Keith Richards and Sheryl Crow, which has more than 3.5 million views and 38,000 shares, as evidence of its success in this area.

“Very few people are accidentally watching a 6 1/2-minute-long video featuring older rock stars,” Segal said. “They are making an intentional decision to watch it once they see it on their feed, which Facebook wants.”

Publishers are looking to diversify beyond Facebook
There’s also an opportunity for top digital publishers to sell branded video campaigns that run across other platforms in addition to Facebook.

This is what BuzzFeed does, charging a flat cost per view and guaranteeing total views across multiple platforms, including YouTube and its own site, according to a source and confirmed by the company. BuzzFeed also pointed to its expansion of its Tasty and Nifty brands, built on Facebook, to Snapchat Discover and other platforms. BuzzFeed also has an entertainment division creating shows for YouTube, streaming platforms and TV, and has been building out its commerce business, a company spokesperson said.

Bleacher Report, too, has been diversifying its business with entertainment programming, growing its app audience and other ventures.

“A lot of media brands, Bleacher amongst them, made these changes because we saw [Facebook’s move] coming for a long time,” said Howard Mittman, CRO and CMO of Bleacher Report. “It’s the ones who got over their skis and relied too much on a single distribution mechanism that will have trouble.”

Meanwhile, those looking for a quick near-term fix see Instagram as the natural place to look for revenue — and those willing to take some time and invest in platform video programming can move resources to YouTube. (Snapchat, meanwhile, is about to go on a publisher charm offensive.)

“You’re going to start seeing Instagram cluttered with even more video because it’s the same format as Facebook news feed,” said the digital publisher CRO. “In theory, you can still get organic reach on Instagram — until [Facebook] corrects that, too.”

Unfortunately, Facebook’s news-feed change could also lead advertisers to conclude they don’t need publishers to create and distribute content for them. If brands can hire studios directly and pay for distribution on their own channels and get the same reach, why work with a media partner?

Said the CRO: “The big thing is, if the organic reach also sucks and it doesn’t matter if the video comes from a brand or publisher’s handle, brands have lost the reason to distribute with publishers.”

The post Facebook news-feed changes will cut into publishers’ branded-content revenue appeared first on Digiday.

Google has been using page speed to rank sites for desktop search results, and now it’s getting ready to do the same for mobile. In a blog post published Jan. 17, it said that starting in July, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches. Google said the “Speed Update,” as it’s called, will affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries.

We decided to see how the top publishers’ sites perform on mobile, using Google’s own speed test. (This list is based on the comScore 200; in cases where the parent company is listed, we used the biggest or flagship site.) A few observations: The sites that ranked fast aren’t all digital natives, and some of the sites that get hyped as tech-forward don’t deliver, at least when it comes to speed. And size isn’t always an advantage: The slowest sites included CNN, MailOnline and The Wall Street Journal.

Publisher	Mobile speed
The Atlantic	fast
Better Homes & Gardens	fast
Business Insider	fast
Bustle	fast
Cosmopolitan	fast
Diply	fast
ESPN	fast
Everyday Health	fast
Gizmodo	fast
The Hill	fast
HuffPost	fast
International Business Times	fast
Los Angeles Times	fast
National Geographic	fast
New York magazine	fast
NY Daily News	fast
NPR	fast
PBS	fast
PopSugar	fast
Refinery29	fast
SheKnows	fast
Verywell	fast
ABC News	average
AOL	average
BBC	average
Bleacher Report	average
CafeMom	average
Complex	average
Fox News	average
Guardian	average
LittleThings	average
Mashable	average
New York Post	average
The New York Times	average
Ozy	average
People	average
Purch	average
Thrillist	average
Upworthy	average
U.S. News & World Report	average
The Telegraph	average
Vice	average
Vox	average
The Washington Post	average
WebMD	average
Wired	average
Yahoo	average
CNN	slow
MailOnline	slow
NBC News	slow
Reuters	slow
The Wall Street Journal	slow

The post Google’s emphasis on mobile page speed will hit CNN, WSJ and other top sites appeared first on Digiday.

Commerce-focused publishers looking to deepen their ties with retailers and limit their dependence on Amazon are delivering more than just interested audiences these days.

Using conversion data from e-commerce transactions, commerce publishers are giving retailers recommendations on everything from discounting strategies to the look of retailers’ landing pages to the prices of the items themselves. They are also using site search and influencer data to help retailers know what products to promote to customers. Some are considering licensing this data, but for now, most provide it for free in hopes of benefiting indirectly because if the retailers’ sales improve, so will the publishers’ cuts.

PopSugar gives retailers data on which products and brands are most popular with its audience and 20,000 Instagram influencers.

Tech-focused publisher Purch uses audience data that tracks its readers across sites and devices to help retailers optimize everything from sales offers to the design of their sales pages.

Ziff Davis started advising retailers on how to improve conversions 10 years ago. It now provides data to certain ones so they can optimize the offers they make to customers. In the fourth quarter, it advised retailers on their mobile commerce checkout strategies. (The publishers wouldn’t give specific examples of retailers they’ve worked with.)

Such moves will become more common as e-commerce continues to eat into brick-and-mortar retail, customers get more comfortable buying products online and publishers search for revenue streams outside of advertising.

“It’s absolutely grown in sophistication,” said Doug Llewelyn, president and chief operating officer of Purch. “Way too many publishers think they can put affiliate buttons on their page and say it’s content and commerce.”

Publishers that have strong positions in search results and credibility with their audiences can do this kind of advising because they often have a more comprehensive view of the market than an individual retailer.

Ziff Davis, for example, recently convinced one of its partners, a “brand-conscious, boutique-y retailer” that it wouldn’t name, which seldom offered discounts, to try a discount offer it had never tried before.

The move, which was informed by conversion data Ziff had gathered from that retailer and others, led to a substantial increase in the average order size without affecting conversion rates, drastically improving Ziff’s payout.

“It’s almost like free consulting for them,” said Howard Schaffer, Ziff Davis’ head of audience. “Merchants are very good at saying, ‘We’re gonna do what we’ve done in the past,’ even though a lot of times they don’t even have good data to see how that’s performed.”

The collaborations can grow deep. Purch has enough best practices about what kinds of landing pages convert that it built its own template, which it periodically offers to retailers.

On multiple occasions, Purch has delivered so much information that improved conversions for retailers that the retailers put the publisher in charge of custom-designing those retailers’ site landing pages. Llewelyn said those retailers each pay Purch millions of dollars per year in affiliate commissions.

“Commerce publishers are literally a click ahead of retailers,” said Shirley Chen, Narrativ’s founder and CEO. “The best editors today act more like market researchers than just regular experts. You often see a lot of publishers pushing back on promotions their retailers work with because they know it’s not best in class.”

There are obstacles to working together. Retailers normally interact with publishers through their marketing teams, which are typically far removed from the product teams that have direct control over the sites’ look and feel. And retailers often get apprehensive about doing anything that might compromise their SEO efforts.

“It’s often a long game of telephone,” Schaffer said. “Marketing has to go to product, who has to go to engineering, who has to go back to product and so on. It becomes a hassle.”

And publishers have run into indifference from retailers that didn’t see much point in messing with a revenue stream that was growing anyway.

“Personalization has been one of the biggest things on our clients’ road maps this year, and publisher data is key to that,” said Matt Faulk, the CEO of the agency Basic, which has designed e-commerce strategies for clients including Beats by Dre, Ubisoft and REI. “You’ve got to get the use cases and distill it down so you can see what’s converting and what isn’t.”

While the data and assistance publishers are able to provide to retailers may help grow revenues, none of it will be able to replace Amazon. According to Narrativ estimates, a full half of the transactions that commerce publishers initiate are converted by Amazon.

But what the changes do offer is a chance to build durable relationships that will be key to long-term growth. “Way too often, [commerce content] becomes a tactic, not a strategy for publishers,” Llewelyn said. “We see it as our business model.”

The post How commerce publishers use their data to cozy up to retailers appeared first on Digiday.

In 2018, talk about cryptocurrency moved beyond a niche area among finance geeks to a mainstream one that’s part of popular culture. It’s made it into dinner table conversation among families. Companies that mention blockchain have seen their share prices gone up. Bitcoin has stood in the way of friendships.

Now, publishers are getting in on the frenzy. Media companies from Business Insider to Investopedia are all creating new products, from newsletters to video — but the pressure is also on to differentiate. It’s impossible for them to cover everything, and finding a niche is the way to grow audience reach and keep loyal readers engaged.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

The post How publishers are cashing in on cryptomania appeared first on Digiday.