Data-Labor-Technology

Within the industry at large, there is also a growing controversy about what constitutes AI and what constitutes an over-hyped form of data analytics

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Lotame Ignite APAC Conference 2017: The Current State of Data in Video Advertising Across Asia, brought to you by Lotame and SpotX.
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In May, data onboarder LiveRamp announced the launch of an open digital ad consortium that would utilize a single cookie linked back to its IdentityLink ID.

This week, the Advertising ID Consortium announced the addition of 16 other demand- and supply-side members, including Videology, Kargo, Adform, AerServ, Amobee, DataXu, IgnitionOne, Sizmek and Thunder.

Additionally, demand side platform (DSP) The Trade Desk said it will make its ID compatible with the Consortium’s. In May, the t
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This week we are seeing some innovative product launches, powerful collaborations and lots of career moves.
MarTech in Motion
Digimind announces its Social Wall
The social listening analytics company adds a data visualization presentation tool. Its first-to-market offering will allow brands and agencies to display simple, up-to-the-minute social listening analytics metrics and more.

CliqStudios.com selects Visual IQ’s marketing intelligence platform
The seller of custom kitchen candid
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Marketing leaders allocate more to analytics as demand for data-driven insights increases

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Amazon has a growing ad business, but its ad infrastructure doesn’t seem to be as developed as Google’s or Facebook’s. For instance, ad buyers think Amazon Marketing Services — a self-serve paid search marketing tool that is supposed to help advertisers efficiently run search campaigns on Amazon — requires lots of manual work, and its reporting is inefficient.

For now, AMS offers three ad formats: sponsored products that appear below search results on Amazon, headline search ads that show up above search results and product display ads that are located on corresponding product detail pages. Four media buyers interviewed for this story think that while AMS is critical to advertising on Amazon, the self-serve search marketing tool is not as handy as they expected.

“AMS is a growing business that is extending to both first-party sellers and third-party sellers, and AMS is becoming a competitive search engine to Google,” said Nich Weinheimer, marketing director for Amazon consultancy Buy Box Experts. “But Amazon doesn’t have the DNA of Google, whose business is built upon search ads. Amazon’s core business is still e-commerce, so it is playing catch-up in advertising to become an equal player to Google and Facebook.”

Google and Facebook have a big head start on Amazon when it comes to building easy-to-use ad systems. That make a difference.

“Setting up AMS campaigns is laborious, and budget control remains manual,” said Todd Silverstein, U.S. head of performance marketing for Edelman. “The auto-pausing of ads for out-of-stock products has its pros and its cons.”

A New York-based ad buyer, who prefers anonymity, echoes Silverstein’s sentiment. This person said “speed is the biggest limitation” with AMS because compared to Google AdWords, it takes longer to set up and manage campaigns, as well as get campaign results.

“AMS is a manual tool. It didn’t come with automation until now because AMS is built as it is used,” said the New York-based executive. “Automation of AMS is Amazon’s priority. I believe most third-party tools that were initially designed for Google AdWords will adapt to AMS in the first half of 2018.”

AMS doesn’t allow advertisers schedule and download campaign reporting in a granular and efficient manner, forcing ad buyers to manually click into each campaign in the AMS dashboard to get performance data, according to Weinheimer. This is cumbersome for advertisers, especially those with a large range of products, because one AMS campaign is typically geared toward one product. (The only AMS ad unit that lets companies group multiple products into one campaign is headline search ads). As a company’s catalog grows, its AMS campaign list lengthens, making it laborious to pull performance data per campaign and update campaigns on a daily basis, said Weinheimer.

In addition to inefficient campaign reporting, Weinheimer believes the creation of product display ads and headline search ads is clunky. This is because AMS doesn’t function the same way as Google AdWords — AMS goes beyond keyword targeting. For instance, with product display ads, advertisers must manually set up their targeting with shopper interests (fashion or microfiber towels, for instance) or target a list of Amazon standard identification numbers (an identification number that Amazon gives to each product).

“Headline search ads is a keyword-based ad unit, but you need to create a headline and decide which landing page the ad should direct shoppers to,” Weinheimer added.

Meanwhile, agency executives said although advertisers can see if their keywords in an ad campaign are low-, medium- or high-volume keywords on AMS, they can’t see their actual share of that volume, which could lead to wasted ad spend on Amazon search marketing. On Google, however, advertisers can research the volume number of a given keyword and compare that to the clicks the advertiser gets to determine how much market share they can go after, said Weinheimer.

At the same time, agency executives think it’s unfair to compare AMS to Google AdWords because they have different algorithms: Google AdWords is more focused on page information and relevancy of keywords, while Amazon ranks search ads based on product sales, product reviews on the platform and then keywords, according to media buyers. Both Google AdWords and AMS run second-price auctions.

Amazon is aware of advertisers’ struggles and working to improve its advertising tools so they can support high-volume campaign management and execution. “It’s definitely still early days,” said an Amazon spokesperson. “Agencies and advertisers have shared a lot of valuable feedback with us as we work to increase the efficiency of our tools. It’s an area on which we’ve been very focused, and that will continue to be the case.”

Despite the challenges with AMS, retailers are spending more on AMS before the holidays, and performance marketers think automation will come to AMS next year. “Amazon is already working with companies like Kenshoo on automation, and I believe more data API [application programming interface] integrations [with AMS] will go live in 2018,” said Weinheimer. “We should give Amazon credit — the company is putting amazing effort in agency support and ad product development.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said that AMS ran a first-price auction. It has been corrected to say AMS employs a second-price auction model. Digiday regrets the error.

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While publishers rushed to embrace distributed media models on platforms, Bloomberg CEO Justin Smith has sounded a note of caution. Ignoring platforms outright isn’t an option, but publishers should instead use platforms selectively.

For Bloomberg, Twitter has emerged as a critical platform relationship, with the Dec. 18 launch of TicToc by Bloomberg, an ambitious 24-hour live video news channel that will draw on reporting from Bloomberg Media’s 2,700 journalists scattered around the world as well as a dedicated TicToc team. The effort is an example, Smith said, of a “big idea” at a time when too many publishers are content to grouse about the chokehold Google and Facebook have on the industry.

“The answer to the duopoly for media owners is not to adopt a defensive stance and assume the situation is a permanent obstacle to growth, and we’re in permanent crisis, but to innovate,” Smith said. “I know it sounds cliche, but the only way out of this predicament is for media companies to do new things and that are really compelling to consumers and advertisers.”

Below are excerpts from a conversation with Smith, lightly edited for clarity.

Is digital media in crisis, as BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said last week, or are bad business models in crisis?
I don’t think digital media is in crisis writ large. The standalone digital advertising model of digital media is in crisis. The advertising-dependent business model is definitely in a difficult spot. It’s not a permanent existential crisis that can’t be resolved with new thinking, innovation, better strategy and better execution. I’m hopeful these issues can be overcome. You’re seeing tons of interesting opportunities for significant growth despite the challenges.

Does the duopoly get blamed too much?
You’ve got to deal with the environment you’re in. The duopoly’s increasing share of digital ad spend is a total reality and one everyone needs to reckon with. Where the fears are overstated are in two dimensions. One, if you look at Google and Facebook’s aggregate ad revenue totals, I would say the vast majority of that is direct-response advertising that’s transitioned to digital. The brand piece of it is still in traditional media. The battle over that has begun, but it’s not been decisively won by Google and Facebook. What’s also overstated is the assumption Google and Facebook are going to dominate forever. It’s a fluid situation — fluid in terms of consumer behavior, advertiser behavior and the regulatory environment. There are many potential cracks in the facade of these companies. They may be invisible to many now, but in all likelihood, these businesses don’t last forever. Fifteen years ago, we had another duopoly: Yahoo and AOL.

How does that point of view translate to strategy?
What we say to our teams is, let’s not let the platforms solely enjoy the spoils of this incredible moment of change. Let’s find the areas where we can also benefit tremendously and not assume a defensive position and begin attacking parts of the ecosystem ourselves.

Is media too defensive?
Yes. When people think about managing a media business in this environment, media operators tend to think about revenue diversification. Jonah mentioned it in his memo. We think about revenue diversification also in product diversification. Another way to diversify is create new products that are related to your core business but are new things. Not enough media owners are thinking that way. They’re transitioning revenue from bucket one to buckets two, three and four.

So TicToc is a product diversification.
It’s an example of that. We have been thrilled with our digital growth. We’re looking at 25 percent digital advertising growth and potentially up to 30 percent this year. The opportunity we see in TicToc is product diversification. We began streaming video on Twitter and came to understand Twitter had a large and engaged audience for news. That led us to think of Twitter differently from how many do. We think of it as potentially the largest news media company in the world. We saw a news-hungry audience living on Twitter. We thought of how can we marry the assets of Bloomberg with this audience to create a new product that can live on Twitter, and in effect, provides the best of what a journalism company can do merged with the best of what a social media network can do.

But why not Facebook? It has much more scale.
The Twitter audience is the most scaled for breaking news. I don’t think anyone goes to Facebook for breaking news. News there is more of a passive general-interest experience rather than breaking news. Twitter was the natural partner from that perspective. One of the things I said in March [at the Digiday Publishing Summit] was be picky about your platform relationships. We’re truly collaborated with Twitter on this. They’re providing access to insights and data; we’re sharing with them our different ways of creating content and video. And the economics are far more equitable than anything I’ve seen with the duopoly. An idealistic view is Bloomberg is taking its 3,000 journalists to improve the quality of breaking news information for the world. That’s a big idea.

When we spoke in March, you said paywalls have mostly failed. But there are signs of success there.
At the very premium end of the market with established and premium brands, you’ve seen a handful of success stories. The truth is, across the much broader swath of the market, paid content has not worked at all. The numbers are pretty decisive. But it’s not a permanent situation. I believe consumer behavior is shifting. The user experience has become more frictionless. Up until now, it’s been only a few companies that have succeeded. On the niche business-to-business side, that’s clearly a place where subscriptions have been solid and growing. Businessweek would fall into that business category, particularly when professionals can put it on their corporate card.

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Digiday Media is launching a monthly Amazon briefing newsletter, where we’ll compile the latest news about the retail juggernaut from Digiday, Glossy and Tearsheet. Sign up here to get the monthly briefing in your inbox.

Amazon had a busy year, seemingly extending its tentacles into every industry, from retail and advertising to entertainment and health care. Here’s the best of Digiday’s coverage of Amazon’s expansion and far-reaching influence from 2017.

Advertisers warm to Amazon’s increasing ad pitch
Amazon developed its advertising business throughout the year. Some of the world’s biggest brands began considering Amazon for their ad budgets, making it more plausible that the e-commerce giant could challenge the Google-Facebook duopoly.

Amazon courted high-level marketers at companies like Unilever, pledging in pitches to become an “ad platform leader” for advertisers that’s capable of “best-in-class service” and “strategic consultation.” Its trump card is data: Facebook knows who people are and their interests, and Google knows what people are actively looking for. But only Amazon has data on what people buy.

How Amazon is readying its blitz on the ad industry
Also on the ad business front, Amazon’s plans to open a new office in New York City — which it expects to create 2,000 jobs, mostly in advertising — emerged in October. Media agency executives in New York said Amazon reps are more persistently trying to sell them and their clients on Amazon advertising.

Saurabh Sharma, director of programmatic at Amazon, said Amazon’s big competitive advantage as a platform is that it is about the intersection of e-commerce and advertising: “It’s not only about being able to place ads in the right place and right time; it’s also the right relevance.”

Amazon is dominating server-to-server bidding
Amazon established itself as a leader in server-side bidding, header bidding’s presumed successor. A ServerBid study released on Oct. 4 found that the tech giant’s Transparent Ad Marketplace is the most popular server-to-server wrapper in the ad industry.

Publishers implement Amazon’s wrapper because it brings in unique demand, is easy to integrate, matches users across different platforms and provides competition to Google, which wields a lot of control over publishers and their tech stacks. Plus, Amazon offers proprietary commerce and behavioral data.

As Purch CTO John Potter put it: “Nobody wants Google to have more power in advertising.”

Amazon is coming for video publishers
Amazon now offers publishers a place to distribute videos and the chance to make money from the start. Last year, Amazon opened its Prime streaming platform, Amazon Video Direct, to video publishers and creators, letting them distribute individual videos, themed video collections, seasons of shows and subscription channels.

Companies with subscription streaming services, including premium cable channels like HBO, can sell them to Prime customers through the Amazon Channels program. Digital publishers can also sell shows to Amazon’s original video business, Amazon Studios.

One publisher in the Amazon Video Direct program said it earned mid-five figures on Amazon during its first month on the program last year — nearly four times what it made from YouTube ad sales during the same month.

“Most of the time, when you launch on a new platform, you have a very long ramp toward success,” said Erick Opeka, evp of digital networks for Cinedigm, which distributes three streaming channels through Amazon. “With Amazon, we saw success out of the gate immediately.”

The Amazon effect echoes across the industry
Amazon was discussed in more than 100 companies’ second-quarter earnings calls this year. Here are areas we haven’t mentioned already in this post that felt the e-commerce giant’s impact:

• Brick-and-mortar retail: Amazon’s ascent has led to an increase in online shopping and closures of brick-and-mortar stores.
• Delivery: Customers have grown accustomed to Amazon’s speed of delivery, pressuring other companies like Rent the Runway to test options like same-day delivery.
• Health care: Amazon created a team of health technology experts and tested its Echo device in hospitals. Companies like Walgreens and Express Scripts said they’d be open to having the e-commerce giant as a client.

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The Telegraph wants to grow its registered readers to 10 million. The goal is to shift away from valuing mass-reach audience numbers in favor of building a more loyal readership of logged-in users.

The benefits of doing so are clear. Advertisers will always want more detailed first-party audience data to improve campaign targeting, and registered users tend to be more ripe for converting into paying subscribers than flyby readers. That’s why there has been a flurry of registered-user drives at publishers such as The Times of London over the last year.

To get itself to 10 million, the publisher will invest in its newsroom, hiring 39 additional editorial staff. The publisher has identified six areas that it believes will help cultivate registrations and in which it wants to thrive: politics, sports, luxury and lifestyle, business of technology, money and travel.

“A registered reader — as opposed to an anonymous one — is far more valuable to the business than the vast majority of our audience as it stands now,” wrote The Telegraph’s CEO, Nick Hugh, in a letter to staff.

The publisher will also restructure teams internally to place its journalists closer to developers, data scientists, analysts and engineers in the office, though it’s not ready to give specific details. New editorial products like newsletters, events and messaging products will follow next year, though details are scant.

The changes described in Hugh’s message to staff are The Telegraph’s biggest since it dropped its metered paywall model in 2016 in favor of a hybrid model, in which 20 percent of content is behind a paywall and the rest is open-access.

The Telegraph wouldn’t confirm latest subscriber or registered-user numbers, saying only that they’d grown by some 300 percent four months after dropping the metered paywall. Naturally, both will be much lower than the bulk of its audience that consumes content for free, which was 23 million monthly visitors in October, according to comScore.

Monetizing digital ads is tough, particularly display, which Google and Facebook heavily dominate. That continued pressure on publishers’ digital ad revenues is causing many to embrace more reader-revenue models. The New York Times has undergone a total pivot to reader revenue, and the Guardian also generates more money from its paying members and donors than it does from advertising. Now, The Telegraph wants a piece of the action.

“The Telegraph has clearly looked at the success of The Washington Post and New York Times and is trying to follow their example: invest in journalism to attract paying members,” said Joe Evans, media analyst at Enders Analysis. “The [six] verticals they’re concentrating on will form the core proposition to get subscribers through the door; then, they can cross-subsidize by serving those readers profitable sponsored content or affiliate links in the high-value categories the editor name-checks: luxury and lifestyle, technology, money and travel.”

The shift to a product-first quality consumer proposition that motivates logins seems sensible on paper. To entice people to register, and potentially ultimately subscribe, the newspaper will need to do more than ever to stand out against local competitors with equally ambitious propositions.

“The question is whether the paper can really commit to the strategy. Is 39 new editorial roles much compared to the rounds of layoffs the business has undertaken when it was in cost-minimization mode?” said Evans. “Will they be able to stop worrying about day-to-day traffic numbers? The concern for traffic has led many news outlets to concentrate on entertainment, celebrity and overblown opinion pieces, things which get readers onto the site but don’t convert them to loyal, registered or paying readers, and it will remain very tempting to chase those numbers on a piece-by-piece basis.”

There has never been more pressure for publishers to prove their own audience data is unique. Likewise, it’s just as competitive for publishers pitching branded content briefs. Therefore, any major difference in approach to areas like platform partnerships and new device innovation attract agency attention.

“The Telegraph has taken a very different road to the likes of the Guardian, for instance, on its relationship with platforms, and in particular, Apple News, and that helps it stand out,” said Julian Purnell, partnerships and emerging media director at digital media agency Essence. “The fact it’s now gone in early to experiment with the Amazon Echo show is interesting because brands are still unsure of how to tap the smart-speaker space and how to monetize or capture an audience there. The Telegraph could have first-mover advantage there.”

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Digiday Media is launching a monthly Amazon briefing newsletter, where we’ll compile the latest news about the retail juggernaut from Digiday, Glossy and Tearsheet. Sign up here to get the monthly briefing in your inbox.

If 2017 was about the hype around Amazon’s ad business, then 2018 will be its reality as the online giant tries to convert that interest from advertisers into revenue. The retailer’s ad business is tiny compared to Google and Facebook, but it is quickly carving out a place for itself alongside the online duopoly. Here’s how its stake in online media will materialize, in four charts.

Eyes on Amazon
Brands may not be ready to spend big on Amazon in the same way they do on Google and Facebook, but they are taking it seriously. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of 250 business-to-consumer marketers surveyed in the U.S. said they would increase their spending on Amazon over the next year, according to a report by GroupM’s Catalyst done in September. Fifty-four percent of respondents said they would increase their Google budgets, while 53 percent said they planned to spend more on Facebook ads.

Amazon’s growing share of budgets is in part due to its being new to many advertisers. Just 15 percent of the marketers interviewed said they use all of Amazon’s advertising products, while only 17 percent said they have a fully defined strategy.

Amazon’s ad business will surpass Twitter and Snapchat
The site’s ad revenues in the U.S. are forecast to hit $1.65 billion in 2017, significantly less than that of Google ($35 billion) and Facebook ($17 billion) but ahead of Twitter ($1.21 billion) and Snapchat ($642 million), per eMarketer. Advertising on Amazon is rising faster than almost every other big ad publisher, according to eMarketer, with a 48.2 percent rise set for 2018. In 2019, Amazon will take $3.19 billion in net U.S. digital ad revenues, equating to around 3 percent of total digital ad spending.

Amazon looms large in the purchase process
Amazon is becoming as ubiquitous to product searches as Google is to general online queries. While more shoppers in the U.S., Germany, the U.K. and France use Google (85 percent) for product research and shopping, 56 percent use Amazon as the starting point for product research, according a survey in September of 3,100 shoppers by technology platform Kenshoo. Even if shoppers find a product that’s suitable on another site, more than half (51 percent) admitted they will usually check Amazon to do more research before making a purchase.

Agencies are boosting spending on Amazon
WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell has been one of the most prominent voices on Amazon in 2017. Hopeful that the shopping giant will break Google and Facebook’s stranglehold on online media, Sorrell and his peers have maneuvered their agencies to win more of the budget going into the channel. That shift is reflected in WPP’s plan to increase its spending on Amazon by 40-50 percent, to around $300 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Similarly, French holding company Publicis will increase its year-over-year spending on Amazon by 50 percent to $300 million in 2018. Omnicom is set to double its year-over-year spending on Amazon next year to around $200 million.

Most advertisers want to test the impact of Amazon ads, said Andreas Reiffen, CEO at performance marketing specialist Crealytics. “We’re mainly being asked two questions: What return on ad spend can we expect?” he said. “And how much incremental uplift can we generate by spending additional advertising money on Amazon?”

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