Month: December 2017

President Donald Trump tweeted that the U.S. Postal Service should charge Amazon.com and other companies more to deliver their packages.

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The past year was a tough one for agency holding companies. WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, IPG, Dentsu Aegis Network and Havas posted little to no growth in 2017. The agency business has been in flux for years, but 2017 offered the “perfect storm” of challenges that caused growth to stutter, said Greg Paull, principal analyst… Continue reading »

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In 2017, five industry developments caused the ad tech industry to rethink how auction dynamics and quality controls should work in programmatic. These factors, detailed below, stem partly from header bidding, which made it harder for exchanges to win auctions and created a huge burden on DSPs to listen to more impressions. Supply chain issues… Continue reading »

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“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 Toby McKenna, senior vice president of global advertising at Bazaarvoice. Thanks to today’s connected world, companies are sitting on vast amounts of consumer data. Whenever consumers make a purchase, use… Continue reading »

The post Brands That Bet Big On Customer Data In 2017 appeared first on AdExchanger.

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A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem… AdExchanger: Origins AdExchanger: Crisis In Ad City (Part I) AdExchanger: Crisis In Ad City (Part II) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part I) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part II) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part III) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (The Conclusion) AdExchanger: Angels And Startups AdExchanger: Rumble In Arbitrage Plaza… Continue reading »

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With the explosion of cross-screen TV, publishers and advertisers are clamoring for better discovery, personalization and cataloging of video content, and metadata is answering that call. Metadata, put simply, adds more context to data. Metadata in video can range from the contents of that video (e.g., colors, products, characters) to the way it’s classified (e.g.,… Continue reading »

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Tom Petty. Gregg Allman. AOL Instant Messenger. These are just a few of the bright lights that went out in 2017. As we head into 2018, we took stock of things in media and marketing taken from us this past year.

Scout
Scout was one of the first publishers to build a subscription business on fans’ obsession with college athletics recruiting, and in a 2014 merger, it became part of a company worth $100 million. Two years later, it collapsed, undone by a costly pivot to video and a play for scale that led it to cover non-sports topics. The company’s board also ousted founder Jim Heckman. By February, it was in bankruptcy court, where a stalking horse bid CBS Sports made for the company’s assets went unopposed.

Ad-supported Medium
In January 2017, Medium founder Ev Williams declared that digital media’s ad-supported model was broken and needed fixing. Seven months and 50 layoffs later, Williams emerged with a subscription model, which would let paying subscribers direct their fees to whichever Medium authors they liked and even get a refund if they didn’t like what they’d read.

Facebook’s Lifestage and Groups
Facebook had its share of mobile product mishaps in 2017. Lifestage, a Snapchat competitor Facebook built to encourage people to share video, shut down in August after less than a year.

That same week, it shut down Groups, Facebook’s other attempt to grow a facet of its core product into a standalone app, after months of growing bugginess and stagnating user growth.

Yik Yak
The anonymous, location-based chat app Yik Yak tore across America’s college campuses in 2014, attracted major venture capital and a $400 million valuation. But a pivot to group messaging inflamed its core user base, and advertisers had trouble seeing the value of the app’s often controversial content. It shut down in April.

Yahoo News Digest
Yahoo was never known for its design sense. An exception was the Yahoo News Digest, an app it purchased from a British design wunderkind in 2015 for $30 million. The app had nearly 10 million downloads and won multiple design awards, but it also aggregated news instead of serving up Yahoo content, so Verizon shut down Yahoo News Digest just a few months after finalizing its acquisition of Yahoo.

The post The things we lost in media and marketing in 2017 appeared first on Digiday.

Vivek Shah, CEO of J2’s Ziff Davis, knows a thing or two about surviving digital transitions. He helped lead the publisher of PCMag, AskMen and IGN out of bankruptcy by betting on ad tech, e-commerce and performance marketing. Shah, who will take over as J2’s CEO on Jan. 1, talked about the opportunity he sees in Mashable, which Ziff Davis just acquired for a reported $50 million; why not all publishers will succeed at e-commerce; and why native advertising is undergoing a correction. Here are excerpts of our conversation, lightly edited and condensed.

What’s your read on digital publishing’s missed revenue goals and consolidation in 2017?
I think it’s an expectation problem more than anything else. Many of these companies are solid growing businesses, but just not at the level that’d justify the valuations. I don’t view it as a fundamental problem with the businesses. Scale has always mattered, but it really matters now. A single-title publication, it’s harder.

What’s the value you saw in Mashable?
We’ve always loved the brand and been interested in it for a long time. With venture investment, it started to expand into other areas. We’re going to return it to its core focus on digital tech and culture. We love the core. The pressure to do it all dissipates when you’re part of a portfolio.

Talk about the commerce opportunity there.
Affiliate commerce is a big part of our business. We think the opportunity for affiliate commerce for Mashable will be big. It could be a range of things. We have product reviews and roundups, which are often collections of reviews; deals. [Direct-to-consumer] product discovery, online brands are establishing themselves on social media. There’s this intersection of content and commerce, reviews and commerce. We also see audience, SEO opportunities for the brand.

You’ve been doing e-commerce for years. What do you think when you see all these other publishers piling into the business?
You need to have a brand that, when it makes a recommendation or has a review, has credibility in that space. When you think about a PCMag or TechBargains, you come to them for deals or reviews. Then, you have the business model question. Do you want to be a merchant? Do you want to be an affiliate? But you need tech, people, a long-term commitment. Just hiring a commerce editor and expecting success isn’t going to work. If you’re a vertical publisher that has some brand permission to tell me what’s a deal and you invest, it’s huge. More horizontal brands, it’s going to be harder.

What’s your take on the pivot to video?
Everyone’s like, this pivot to video is bad. I look at it as, the television ad market is $70 million. Viewership is going to move to portable screens. The dollars are going to have to flow. The question is, how much of the digital video market is going to be six- to 15-second ads, and how much will be product placement? The former is a lot more scalable. But there’s inventory challenges. The latter is where the innovation is taking place, but how scalable is that?

Part of the pivot that’s tripping everyone up is the studio business where publishers are trying to compete. A lot of publishers are saying, look at all the content checks being cut. Being a production studio is a different business. Do publishers have an opportunity in SVOD? It’s unclear. Video has been a significant part of our business, but we’re not overextending our reach. We’ve gone on Facebook Watch, but we haven’t sold anything large to a large player doing scripted programming.

You’ve been a critic of native advertising. Are we seeing the bubble bursting there?
It’s a little like video. It’s evolved. It could be content recommendations, branded video, ads that don’t look like ads. The market’s always going to value scale, ease of execution, clear measurement. For it to get to any scale, there needs to be some level of standardization. Outbrain and Taboola have done a lot there. I’m not saying it works for the user or the publisher; we let ours decide.

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