Data-Labor-Technology

Thanks to digital skullduggery, brand safety remains hotter than the devil’s anvil.

From the stump speeches of Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard to the role of ad tech in funding misleading content to YouTube’s multiple ad scandals, the perils of digital media buying were on full display throughout 2017. Here are five charts that summarize the state of brand safety.

Brands claim responsibility
Whether you’re examining brand safety, fraud or data leakage, there’s plenty of blame to go around the complex ad-supply chain whenever a snafu arises. But brands have more to lose than others if their ads appear next to questionable content.

A survey of 30 brand marketers by Digiday+ showed that brands place more responsibility on themselves than on agencies, vendors or publishers, when it comes to maintaining brand safety. Marc Goldberg, CEO of anti-ad fraud vendor Trust Metrics, said brand advertisers should be leading the conversation on brand safety because if they don’t care about it, nobody else will.

YouTube’s brand pullouts
In March, brands like AT&T and Verizon took their ads off YouTube after The Times of London published an exposé that showed brand ads appearing in videos that promoted terrorism. Although most of the brands that pulled their ads from YouTube were back on the platform within a few months, posturing surrounding this event catapulted brand safety into elite buzzword territory.

The concept of brand safety has been around for years, but as seen in the Google Trends graph below, searches for brand safety peaked in March.

Violent content is widespread
From drugs to piracy to sex, there is a lot of content on the internet that advertisers try to distance themselves from. Violence is the category that ad-verification company Integral Ad Science blocks, most often for brand-safety reasons, for its advertiser clients.

Travis Lusk, vp of global sales strategy at IAS, said advertisers aren’t necessarily more sensitive to violence in content than they are to sex content or illegal downloads. Compared to other touchy topics, there just happens to be more content across the web that gets categorized as violent.

Brand-safety tactics
In November, video ad platform Teads surveyed 100 CMOs and vps at large brands about brand safety. Nearly 80 percent of them said they are more concerned about brand safety than ever before.

About half of the survey respondents said they had reviewed their agency and vendor contracts over the past year. More than a third said they layered on more third-party ad measurement to their campaigns.

“Marketers are stepping up to take control over the way their money is spent,” said Forrester analyst Susan Bidel.

Programmatic perils
IAS found that across display and video for both mobile and desktop, programmatic buys have a greater likelihood of exposing brands to unsafe content than direct buys. This makes sense, given that with direct deals, brands know who they are working with. Programmatic platforms, on the other hand, are engineered to bring ads to thousands of publishers simultaneously, and the long-tail sites featured on these platforms offer cheap scale at the price of appearing next to low-quality or sensational content.

As Pritchard noted in a recent interview with Digiday: “We’ve still got to do work on brand safety.”

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Thanks to digital skullduggery, brand safety remains hotter than the devil’s anvil.

From the stump speeches of Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard to the role of ad tech in funding misleading content to YouTube’s multiple ad scandals, the perils of digital media buying were on full display throughout 2017. Here are five charts that summarize the state of brand safety.

Brands claim responsibility
Whether you’re examining brand safety, fraud or data leakage, there’s plenty of blame to go around the complex ad-supply chain whenever a snafu arises. But brands have more to lose than others if their ads appear next to questionable content.

A survey of 30 brand marketers by Digiday+ showed that brands place more responsibility on themselves than on agencies, vendors or publishers, when it comes to maintaining brand safety. Marc Goldberg, CEO of anti-ad fraud vendor Trust Metrics, said brand advertisers should be leading the conversation on brand safety because if they don’t care about it, nobody else will.

YouTube’s brand pullouts
In March, brands like AT&T and Verizon took their ads off YouTube after The Times of London published an exposé that showed brand ads appearing in videos that promoted terrorism. Although most of the brands that pulled their ads from YouTube were back on the platform within a few months, posturing surrounding this event catapulted brand safety into elite buzzword territory.

The concept of brand safety has been around for years, but as seen in the Google Trends graph below, searches for brand safety peaked in March.

Violent content is widespread
From drugs to piracy to sex, there is a lot of content on the internet that advertisers try to distance themselves from. Violence is the category that ad-verification company Integral Ad Science blocks, most often for brand-safety reasons, for its advertiser clients.

Travis Lusk, vp of global sales strategy at IAS, said advertisers aren’t necessarily more sensitive to violence in content than they are to sex content or illegal downloads. Compared to other touchy topics, there just happens to be more content across the web that gets categorized as violent.

Brand-safety tactics
In November, video ad platform Teads surveyed 100 CMOs and vps at large brands about brand safety. Nearly 80 percent of them said they are more concerned about brand safety than ever before.

About half of the survey respondents said they had reviewed their agency and vendor contracts over the past year. More than a third said they layered on more third-party ad measurement to their campaigns.

“Marketers are stepping up to take control over the way their money is spent,” said Forrester analyst Susan Bidel.

Programmatic perils
IAS found that across display and video for both mobile and desktop, programmatic buys have a greater likelihood of exposing brands to unsafe content than direct buys. This makes sense, given that with direct deals, brands know who they are working with. Programmatic platforms, on the other hand, are engineered to bring ads to thousands of publishers simultaneously, and the long-tail sites featured on these platforms offer cheap scale at the price of appearing next to low-quality or sensational content.

As Pritchard noted in a recent interview with Digiday: “We’ve still got to do work on brand safety.”

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Alphabet has announced that Eric Schmidt will step down as executive chairman and will take on the role of technical adviser on the company’s board at the end of 2017.

Schmidt served as Google’s chief executive in 2001 and became its executive chairman a decade later, retaining his position when the tech giant restructured to form Alphabet Inc.

Alphabet’s board will now most likely appoint a new, non-executive chairman at its next meeting in January.

“Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition,” said Schmidt.

“The Alphabet structure is working well, and Google and the Other Bets are thriving. In recent years, I’ve been spending a lot of my time on science and technology issues, and philanthropy, and I plan to expand that work.”

 

In his new role, he is tipped to advise the company’s urban development arm, Sidewalk Labs with its deep learning efforts, as well as its healthcare startups Verily and Calico.

 

 

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Alphabet has announced that Eric Schmidt will step down as executive chairman and will take on the role of technical adviser on the company’s board at the end of 2017.

Schmidt served as Google’s chief executive in 2001 and became its executive chairman a decade later, retaining his position when the tech giant restructured to form Alphabet Inc.

Alphabet’s board will now most likely appoint a new, non-executive chairman at its next meeting in January.

“Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition,” said Schmidt.

“The Alphabet structure is working well, and Google and the Other Bets are thriving. In recent years, I’ve been spending a lot of my time on science and technology issues, and philanthropy, and I plan to expand that work.”

 

In his new role, he is tipped to advise the company’s urban development arm, Sidewalk Labs with its deep learning efforts, as well as its healthcare startups Verily and Calico.

 

 

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Diageo’s voice strategy is becoming clearer with the launch of a service for the Amazon Echo Show that shows people how to make cocktails with the drink maker’s brands.

It is the company’s first app in Europe for Amazon’s latest voice-controlled speaker, which launched last month with support from a handful of brands and publishers. Diageo was among the early adopters, intrigued by the addition of a screen to Amazon’s range of smart speakers, a feature Diageo believes makes the device perfect for the kitchen.

Rather than adapt an existing skill, the name for apps on Amazon’s voice-controlled devices, Diageo has created a new one for the Echo Show. The advertiser took the concept behind thebar.com, a site it launched in 2013 to tap into the trend of mixing drinks at home, and built a voice-controlled version called “The Bar.” The skill gives people three options: People can ask for a recipe and then be talked through the recipe; it offers cocktail suggestions based on user preferences such as sweet or sour; and it teaches people mixology techniques.

Ingredients for the cocktails can be saved to shopping lists that are then sent to the Alexa mobile app, where the user can buy the ingredients. The skill also gives users the option to purchase certain ingredients and 12 of Diageo’s brands, including Smirnoff, Captain Morgan and Johnnie Walker, by directing them to Amazon.

“Technology is changing the way we socialize in and outside of the home,” said Periklies Antoniou, new technology and media innovation manager at Diageo. “With the new The Bar skill, we’re tapping into the growing number of adults using voice-enabled devices to take them on a journey toward mastering mixology.”

Antoniou’s enthusiasm for the new skill reflects how quickly and aggressively Amazon has flooded the market with its range of smart speakers. Forty percent of U.K. households will own an Echo by next year, according to the Radiocentre. Wise to the possibilities that scale could bring, Diageo has cozied up to the online behemoth’s voice-controlled offering, so much that the advertiser was wheeled out during Amazon’s first upfronts to the U.K. advertising industry earlier this year.

Should the Echo device become ubiquitous in households, then it could potentially become a sales channel for Diageo, which has struggled with direct selling for years like most consumer goods companies. While Diageo’s latest Echo skill is focused more on brand awareness than e-commerce, the brand has previously talked up the latter’s potential on voice-controlled devices. A recent report in the U.K. from Accenture found that 60 percent of people want to use the Echo to help them shop, and 7 percent already do so.

Search will be fundamental to any full-fledged strategy Diageo concocts for voice-controlled devices.

There will come a time when many search queries won’t be “mai tai” in text form; instead, it will be “how to make a mai tai” as a verbal query, the company’s head of digital innovation, Benjamin Lickfett, has said. When that time comes, brands that exploit the most relevant conversational, long-tail search terms will be able to monetize voice searches, which is why Diageo is trying to have a plan in place before its rival brands.

Image courtesy of Diageo

Diageo’s voice strategy is becoming clearer with the launch of a service for the Amazon Echo Show that shows people how to make cocktails with the drink maker’s brands.

It is the company’s first app in Europe for Amazon’s latest voice-controlled speaker, which launched last month with support from a handful of brands and publishers. Diageo was among the early adopters, intrigued by the addition of a screen to Amazon’s range of smart speakers, a feature Diageo believes makes the device perfect for the kitchen.

Rather than adapt an existing skill, the name for apps on Amazon’s voice-controlled devices, Diageo has created a new one for the Echo Show. The advertiser took the concept behind thebar.com, a site it launched in 2013 to tap into the trend of mixing drinks at home, and built a voice-controlled version called “The Bar.” The skill gives people three options: People can ask for a recipe and then be talked through the recipe; it offers cocktail suggestions based on user preferences such as sweet or sour; and it teaches people mixology techniques.

Ingredients for the cocktails can be saved to shopping lists that are then sent to the Alexa mobile app, where the user can buy the ingredients. The skill also gives users the option to purchase certain ingredients and 12 of Diageo’s brands, including Smirnoff, Captain Morgan and Johnnie Walker, by directing them to Amazon.

“Technology is changing the way we socialize in and outside of the home,” said Periklies Antoniou, new technology and media innovation manager at Diageo. “With the new The Bar skill, we’re tapping into the growing number of adults using voice-enabled devices to take them on a journey toward mastering mixology.”

Antoniou’s enthusiasm for the new skill reflects how quickly and aggressively Amazon has flooded the market with its range of smart speakers. Forty percent of U.K. households will own an Echo by next year, according to the Radiocentre. Wise to the possibilities that scale could bring, Diageo has cozied up to the online behemoth’s voice-controlled offering, so much that the advertiser was wheeled out during Amazon’s first upfronts to the U.K. advertising industry earlier this year.

Should the Echo device become ubiquitous in households, then it could potentially become a sales channel for Diageo, which has struggled with direct selling for years like most consumer goods companies. While Diageo’s latest Echo skill is focused more on brand awareness than e-commerce, the brand has previously talked up the latter’s potential on voice-controlled devices. A recent report in the U.K. from Accenture found that 60 percent of people want to use the Echo to help them shop, and 7 percent already do so.

Search will be fundamental to any full-fledged strategy Diageo concocts for voice-controlled devices.

There will come a time when many search queries won’t be “mai tai” in text form; instead, it will be “how to make a mai tai” as a verbal query, the company’s head of digital innovation, Benjamin Lickfett, has said. When that time comes, brands that exploit the most relevant conversational, long-tail search terms will be able to monetize voice searches, which is why Diageo is trying to have a plan in place before its rival brands.

Image courtesy of Diageo

Facebook operates on a truly unprecedented scale. Managing such incredible amounts of data and traffic requires unconventional thinking and coming up with lightning fast solutions in real time. Our work is as bold as it is fast and impacts billions of people every day.

Facebook operates on a truly unprecedented scale. Managing such incredible amounts of data and traffic requires unconventional thinking and coming up with lightning fast solutions in real time. Our work is as bold as it is fast and impacts billions of people every day.

SoftBank and Mubadala are in the round.

Chinese ride-hail behemoth Didi Chuxing just raised $4 billion, the company announced on Wednesday. Before this round, the company had raised upward of $15 billion.

Participants in this round included SoftBank and Mubadala. Didi would not disclose the current total funding. This round valued the company at around $56 billion; the company most recently was valued at $50 billion.

After Didi acquired Uber’s China operations in August of 2016, it expanded its international footprint through investments in companies like Brazil’s 99.

The company expects to continue that expansion. Part of the funding will also be dedicated to the development of AI, according to the announcement. Earlier this year, the company launched an AI lab in the U.S. to focus on the platform as well as self-driving.

Didi also has dipped its toe in dockless biking by participating in a recent $700 million round investment in Ofo, which recently expanded into the U.S.

This is developing …

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Sure, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and blockchain have been a hot topic for the past several months. But is either of them more than just a buzzword? I spoke to some marketers to see what they had to say about what 2018 holds for these two trends.

Blockchain could solve all our problems — or not
Seems like everyone is talking about blockchain, the distributed shared ledger that promises to keep transactions secure and anonymous. Most know it as the technology behind bitcoin. Ye
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