Month: December 2017

In this short video, marketing executives talk about making smarter decisions using data.

ANA Genius Awards Website: https://www.geniusawards.com

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Identity is at the heart of knowing your customer. If you don’t get identity right, everything else will be wrong. How are organizations able to manage their CRM databases with consumer data that is constantly changing? This changing data impacts your company’s ability to efficiently manage both inbound and outbound communications and the struggle between customer experience and costs. Current and accurate identity data can help you increase IVR containment and reduce costs for inbound calls, while also reducing the risk of lawsuits and penalties from TCPA violations for outbound dials. Listen to this informative webinar to learn how to: • Ensure that your customer profiles are up to date • Clean, verify and extend your customer records for the most current, accurate, and actionable identity data • Ensure outbound communications are efficient and compliant with current TCPA regulations • Improve IVR containment rates by automatically identifying more inbound callers • Implement best practices by reviewing industry case studies of organizations that are successful in managing proactive and up-to-date identity data across the enterprise.

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Augmented Reality hologram company, VNTANA, has been used by brands like Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz and Pepsi to engage and collect data on potential customers.
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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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