Month: January 2018

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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 Rob Finora, senior vice president of data at ShareThis. Marketers now use data-driven initiatives as the backbone of their campaigns more than ever. But with this boom comes the exponential concern about data transparency and… Continue reading »

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“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an independent audience strategy consultant. A lot has already been said about how General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ePrivacy offer an opportunity for publishers and advertisers to kickstart a new,… Continue reading »

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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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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Search For Attention Search advertising has been a sleepy mainstay of digital marketing mixes for the past half-decade, but this year “is poised to experience a late-stage renaissance,” writes Forrester associate analyst Brandon Verblow. For one thing, search budgets will benefit because other ad… Continue reading »

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Facebook launched its fast-loading Instant Articles format in the spring of 2015, and Google followed with its version, Accelerated Mobile Pages, in early 2016. Both were an attempt to make webpages load faster. But while Instant Articles’ use has stagnated, AMP has only grown in importance to publishers.

Google launched the open-source AMP with news publishers, giving them a stripped-down way to formulate their pages so they’d load lightning fast and help them get surfaced in Google search results. Since then, AMP has been extended to all publishers. Their AMP pages now power other parts of Google’s ecosystem, including its mobile news app Newsstand and content suggestions in Google Chrome. Helped by Google’s lobbying power, AMP has been adopted by Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Flipboard.

Instant Articles, meanwhile, has fallen out of the conversation as Facebook increasingly prioritizes video over text articles in its news feed. Several prominent publishers, including The New York Times and the Guardian, have stopped using Instant Articles altogether.

With AMP’s help, Google has overtaken Facebook as the top source of external traffic for publishers, according to web analytics firm Parsely. Parsely said Google now accounts for 42 percent of publishers’ external traffic. Instant Articles, meanwhile, just replaced publishers’ links to their sites so it didn’t grow overall referrals from Facebook to publishers in Parsely’s network.

The mixed success of these two features, Instant Articles and AMP, speaks to a few things: The divergent business models of the competing tech giants, the importance of publishers to those models and the implications for publishers as they try to survive in a digital landscape that’s largely dictated by two tech giants.

Publishers’ and Google’s interests are closely aligned. Facebook, on the other hand, is foremost a social platform and a closed system. Facebook has been on a listening tour with publishers through the Facebook Journalism Project and thrown some bones their way. But Facebook’s fundamental goal is still to get people to spend more time inside its app so it can show them more ads, and the way it’s doing that is by pushing them videos and posts from friends and family, not publishers.

For publishers like CNBC that have bet big on AMP, the wager has paid off. CNBC considered the pros and cons of Instant Articles and AMP as traffic and ad revenue sources and ended up adopting AMP in the summer of 2016. Since then, it’s become the publisher’s fastest-growing distributed traffic source, without cannibalizing existing search traffic, as well as a good source of monetization, said Deep Bagchee, svp of product and technology at the financial news outlet.

“Overall, we’re super happy with it,” Bagchee said of AMP.

Instant Articles and AMP have gone in different directions since they launched. Because Google’s business is predicated on the open web, it was motivated to apply the standard widely. Rudy Galfi, an AMP project manager at Google, said AMP was initially about solving page speed for news publishers, where the speed problem was worst. Then came features that would support interactive pages, which benefited publishers and e-commerce sites alike. So publishers wouldn’t have to build specific pages for every platform, AMP worked with Pinterest, Twitter and others to link to AMP pages. Google is working on adding publisher subscription support to AMP pages.

“We always thought AMP could play a very big role solving that problem of mobile web speed,” Galfi said. “That was all it was about in those early days. Since then, we’ve built features to add more engaging experiences, help with advertising and subscriptions.”

All this has had a network effect. Parsely now counts AMP traffic on seven different platforms, including non-Google ones. Flipboard started supporting AMP at the end of 2017 after seeing more publishers test it, said Sarah Gallagher, Flipboard’s head of publisher partnerships. “From the get-go, we wanted to create a sustainable model for publishers and content creators, so it made sense for us to support AMP,” she said.

Facebook, meanwhile, has expanded ad opportunities in Instant Articles, introduced newsletter sign-ups and begun testing publisher subscriptions on their Instant Articles pages. Last year, it made an effort to make Instant Articles pages work on Google and Apple News.

Facebook said the number of publishers using Instant Articles, monetization and traffic are up.

“Instant Articles is the best format to distribute articles on Facebook, and we continue to be committed to delivering value to publishers,” the company said in a statement. “We’ve made significant ad monetization improvements in the last year and are encouraged that the most recent feedback from the majority of publishers is that the ad revenue they generate from a pageview in Instant Articles is higher than an equivalent pageview on the standard mobile web. We’re also in the early stages of making Instant Articles work for publishers’ subscription businesses and look forward to continuing to collaborate with publishers on building new products.”

One area that publishers said they could stand to see improvement on AMP and Instant Articles is monetization. Both have some restrictions on the types of ads that are supported, in the name of user experience and speed, and both platforms say better monetization is a priority. Here, too, though, AMP seems to have an edge. Publishers have more control over sales on their AMP pages than with Instant Articles, and there’s less Instant Articles traffic to monetize anyway. Facebook’s effort to make Instant Articles pages work on Google and Apple News was shrugged off by publishers, which said they were more concerned with monetization and data. Many publishers say higher ad rates for Instant Articles are irrelevant since the traffic volume is small.

Alex Skatell, founder of political news site IJR, said Facebook has done some good things, but Google is way ahead in sharing data with publishers about their posts’ performance. “Publishers need more information from Facebook — they’re only giving us part of the story.”

Publishers still have their gripes with Google — its search algorithm has always been a black box to them, for example — but initiatives like AMP and others have top executives at such prominent media companies as News Corp and the Guardian publicly praising Google CEO Sundar Pichai by name while deriding Facebook. Publishers said Google’s dashboard gives them an easy view into errors in AMP pages so they can fix them fast, provides generous technical support and is helping them make more money through ads on AMP pages.

“They’ve innovated,” said another publishing exec of Google, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation by Facebook. “They’re giving publishers tools. And they’re giving us more ways to monetize. That’s more than we’ve gotten from Facebook in the past six months.”

Publishers can’t ignore Facebook, with its sheer audience size, but see a lot more to gain these days from cozying up to Google and AMP.

“Google is working with publishers like ourselves on a regular basis to optimize what we do with AMP,” said Mark Kortekaas, evp and CTO at Univision and Fusion Media Group, which experiments with Instant Articles on its publications but doesn’t use it by default. “We do not have the same level of direct engineering engagement from Facebook. Google is very invested in working with us on a number of fronts on how we improve mobile performance, and AMP plays considerably into that.”

The post How Google AMP beat Facebook Instant Articles appeared first on Digiday.

As more and more digital video makers look to pivot to TV, skinny bundles are presenting a new opportunity for those that have the chops to program a 24-hour streaming channel.

Millennial-focused business video network Cheddar, for instance, already distributes on Dish Network’s Sling TV and plans to aggressively expand its distribution footprint in 2018, according to CEO Jon Steinberg. CNN’s Great Big Story and independent YouTube news network The Young Turks have also said skinny bundles are a major focus area for distribution expansion in 2018. E.W. Scripps-owned streaming news network Newsy, meanwhile, is already on Sling TV and YouTube TV — and available in some 26 million traditional cable TV households, thanks to a carriage deal between parent Scripps and distributors such as Comcast, Spectrum and AT&T. Even Crunchyroll, which is already helping build a digital streaming bundle, has TV ambitions.

“[Streaming skinny bundles] are the immediate future of the cable business,” said Steven Oh, chief business officer of The Young Turks Network, adding that he’s in negotiations with five different carriers on getting a TYT-branded channel on their services by April or May. “Whether this lasts decades the way the existing cable business has, I don’t know — everything changes so much more quickly now — but in the meantime, streaming bundles are the next big thing. And it allows folks like us to be competitive with the CNNs and MSNBCs of the world.”

But there’s a catch. Are distributors willing to pay digital publishers subscription fees to distribute their channels? These publishers don’t have the history and name recognition that existing broadcast and cable networks do, which could make it more challenging to convince distributors to pay up. That doesn’t mean digital publishers won’t at least attempt to draw subscriber revenue.

One option is to simply give it away for free — like what Cheddar does. To get on the base bundle of a service, Cheddar charges no carriage fee in exchange for 50 percent of the ad inventory available inside the channel. Of course, that takes away a distribution revenue stream, but it also increases the possibility of getting on a distributor’s cheapest — and, therefore, most popular — package, according to Steinberg. Cheddar then sells that reach to potential advertisers, creating a new, but incremental revenue stream.

“I want people to come to me as the only news source [for their base bundles] and not have to deal with an NBC or a Fox,” said Steinberg, who plans to launch a general-news offshoot for Cheddar in 2018.

Not every publisher is willing to give away their stuff for free in hopes of pulling in additional ad dollars. Great Big Story, which is working on a subscription-based streaming network that it might also distribute through streaming bundles, said it would look to find a model that includes subscription revenue.

“This is where us coming to the table with our data and the ability to convert subscribers is going to help us in getting more flexibility and the best terms with distributors,” said Uyen Tieu, gm of Great Big Story.

TYT Network, meanwhile, is looking to net subscription revenues from streaming bundles, but it hopes to do so by underpricing competitors. According to Oh, his plan is to sign short-term deals at lower carriage fees — coming in at a fraction of what a big cable news network such as CNN today would cost — in order to get on the bundle. Once TYT can prove it can drive an audience, it would be easier to negotiate a better fee per subscriber.

One thing’s for sure: The opportunity is certainly there as more and more digital TV distributors enter the market. Sling TV, AT&T’s DirecTV Now, Hulu and YouTube have all made significant investments in launching internet-based TV services. After a series of fits and starts, Verizon is still expected to join the fray next year. Most recently, T-Mobile acquired web TV startup Layer3 TV in preparation for its own service next year.

The thinking is, all of these services will need cheaper programming either instead of or to supplement some high-priced broadcast and cable networks. This is where the digital publishers can come in.

Plus, while it makes sense that digital publishers would try to grab some subscription-related revenues from distributors, it’s likely that they won’t ask for — or even expect — much, said Alan Wolk, TV industry analyst for TVRev.

“I don’t think Cheddar, Newsy, TYT and others are looking for sizable carriage fees, at least not yet,” Wolk said. “The more services they’re on, the more people they’re conceivably reaching, the higher their ad rates can be and the more like a real network they become.”

The post ‘The future of cable’: Looking beyond Facebook, publishers eye streaming TV bundles appeared first on Digiday.

The French government is the latest trying to clamp down on the spread of fake news online, a notion that, while admirable, is also full of complications.

This week, French President Emmanuel Macron outlined his bold ambition to rid the internet of fake news. Details are scant, but Macron has announced that legislation will be introduced that requires social media sites to be more transparent about who is paying for sponsored content. That way, anyone who seeks to spread partisan views and false political propaganda via social platforms like Facebook will be held to account — at least that’s the theory.

It’s common for fake propaganda to spike around political campaigns, but Macron wants to stunt the spread of misinformation about political parties or campaigns while elections are ongoing by ensuring governmental authorities can take emergency legal action to remove content or block websites.

French publishers aren’t wholly keen on the idea, but they’re caught between wanting the platforms to take more responsibility for the spread of fake news and fearing this could harm free speech or lead to censorship.

“It’s very dangerous to have state control on information issues, mainly because people spreading fake news are already often convinced of the collusion between mainstream media and governments or corporations,” said Samuel Laurent, head of Les Décodeurs, the fact-checking team at national newspaper Le Monde. “This kind of announcement will probably trigger their feeling of censorship and bias.”

Aimee Rinehart, partners and special projects manager at fact-checking organization First Draft News, echoed this, saying Macron’s idea to “patrol the internet” and block websites that a government deems nefarious is “naive, dangerous and, frankly, impossible.” Teaching people what trusted information looks like is far more valuable, she added.

“Macron’s point for advertising transparency has legs,” said Rinehart, “but much of the misinformation out there is not political advertising.” Macron’s party has previously accused Russian state-funded news outlets Sputnik and RT for allegedly spreading Russian propaganda on social networks through sponsored posts, which Macron’s proposed law would try and stamp out. The amount of money platforms could charge for sponsored content would also be capped.

“The best way to tackle fake news is to show it’s false and not to cut or block it. [This proposal] is a bit useless,” said Xavier Grangier, head of digital at Libération, adding that most newspapers already have a fact-checking team.

Libération has also developed a tool through which readers can ask journalists specific questions. Since May 2017, readers have asked about 700 questions. The publisher also has five people working on debunking roughly 20 stories spread on Facebook each month as part of Facebook’s initiative to work with French media companies to debunk false stories, which launched in February 2017.

Publishers will have to wait and see what the specifics of Macron’s proposal are. There will be questions around what is classified as fake news and how it can be removed, as well as the efficiency of this process. In Germany, where the government has passed a law making platforms more liable for the content they host, legal experts have criticized the lack of finer details about how the law will be implemented.

Some publishers are more open to Macron’s proposal than others. “Of course, it is complicated, but we need to wait and see what is behind the idea. In general, this is the right direction,” said Bertrand Gié, Le Figaro’s head of digital. “[This proposal] is trying to put more responsibility on the platforms as publishers, rather than just pipes, and that’s very important to us.”

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The Instagramming and unboxing mass of inspirational lifestyle gurus known as influencers are only becoming increasingly central to the marketing strategies of fashion and luxury brands in 2018.

There are still frustrations, as brands figure out how to track the results of campaigns and sponsored posts, including conversions and the value in engagement. But as data tools become more sophisticated and platforms start to share more insight with both brands and influencers, brand strategies are maturing. The good news: As the space has become more established, power has shifted in favor of the brands, who have gotten smarter than to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an Instagram post from an influencer with a lot of followers.

“As influencer marketing continues to mature, it’s becoming more and more measurable,” said Mike Froggatt, director of intelligence at L2. “Brands are relying less on cherry-picking from a list of influencers with big follower counts, and throwing money at them to see what does and doesn’t stick, and starting to utilize more data to find the right fit and actual benefits.”

As brands continue to funnel money into this space (according to L2 research, the influencer marketing industry is estimated to exceed $2 billion in contract value by 2019), expect to see brands righting the power imbalance, and platforms like Instagram and Snapchat building tools to get a piece of the pie. What’s more, there will be a rise of the influencer roster — a group of social media personalities a brand keeps on rotation, in order to create more transparency and drive clearer results in the murky influencer marketing space.

The roster is the influencer “holy grail”
Brands have been burned by dropping a lot of money on one-off influencer partnerships that made little impact. The real value, brands are finding, is in recruiting a strong group of influencers — micro-influencers up to supermodel-caliber influencers, depending on budget size — who are repeatedly called on for long-term campaigns, event promotions and sponsored posts. The more recognizable the group’s association becomes with a brand, the better.

“That’s the holy grail: relying on a stable of influencers that have a closer relationship with the brand,” said Froggatt. “It benefits everyone to have a long-term relationship, not a series of one-offs.”

Froggatt pointed to Victoria’s Secret Angels as the most distinguishable influencer roster, but smaller brands can take advantage of this setup, as well. Microinfluencer Cyndii Yu frequently works with athletic apparel startup Alala, both appearing on the brand’s account and posting photos of herself in the brand’s gear.

“We work with a lot of NYC-based influencers, and that’s how we connect with people the most. We do a fair number of immersive events to get to know them better, like inviting them to take classes with us, where we connect with them one-on-one,” said Danise Lee, the founder of luxury women’s activewear brand Alala. “Everyone gets bombarded with so many product requests, it helps us stand out when they have a face to put to the brand. We spend a lot of time developing those relationships.”

Tonight’s plans? Alala and chill @milkcyndii #alalaallday

A post shared by Alala (@alala) on Jan 3, 2018 at 3:03pm PST

This strategy requires brands to play the long game and carefully vet the influencers they want to recruit on their teams. But the more time is spent on making sure the influencer is right with the brand, the higher lift in engagement and sales they’ll see down the line. Overall, brands might end up devoting more marketing dollars to influencer relationships, but they won’t be flushing a bulk spend on one influencer for one Instagram.

“Total spend might go up, but individual spend will go down,” said Gil Eyal, the CEO of HyprBrands, a platform that serves as an influencer directory for brands. “The audience wants to see that the influencer really likes the product and is using it in the long-term. So the brands that will win are the ones creating their own influencer rosters and activating those rosters again and again. Especially in the crowded world of micro-influencers, you want to build an ongoing relationship so you’re not starting over every time.”

Brands are laying out clear expectations before paying up
Measuring the success of an influencer campaign or post will become less murky as brands establish what they want out of their influencer partnerships at the beginning — and work to actually track measurements.

“Blindly following the number of followers an influencer has is over. Brands are focusing on the kind of return they’re going to get,” said Eyal. “We’re shifting from an economy of likes and shares, to cost-per-click and conversion.”

According to Eyal, Amazon is testing a tactic that only pays an influencer once they drive a certain number of purchases through affiliate links, not before. Eyal predicts more big brands will head in that direction. Smaller brands are managing expectations around the value of raising awareness with influencers, even if that doesn’t lead to sales.

Nadia McCarthy Kahane, the CEO of online jewelry retailer Stone & Strand, said that a partnership with two Instagram influencers paid off in brand awareness, but didn’t drive sales. That’s harder for a big brand with levels of executives to explain a budget to, but smaller brands are taking advantage of more nimble collaborations.

“If we measured success of the collection on response, it had a great reception,” said McCarthy Kahane. “We were looking to raise awareness, get feedback from these followers. It hasn’t done super well from a sales perspective.”

From the influencer perspective, knowing a brand’s intentions off the bat helps them comb through and find the best fits for partnerships.

“For micro-influencers especially, it all comes down to picking and choosing the right partnerships,” said Froggatt. “On the plus side, they have an actual live feedback loop with their audience, who knows them and will give their feedback. So if a partnership doesn’t work, they’ll know that right away. They can read the tea leaves of their audiences much better than a group of brand marketers sitting around, figuring out the next hottest thing.”

Platforms will be pulling more strings
As spend on the influencer marketing space continues to rise, the platforms that house these partnerships — like Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat — will look for ways to get a cut.

“It’s important to note that platforms are not neutral players in this space, and they are looking to innovate and make money from it,” said Froggatt. “I think we’ll see more platform strategies around this.”

Instagram inserted itself in the middle of paid posts when it gave brands and influencers the option last year to denote that an Instagram had been part of a paid partnership, with a geotag. That tag wasn’t just a disclosure mechanism: Posts using that paid partnership tag also pulled up data around engagement and click-throughs that both brands and influencers could access.

That can be valuable, as brands are still searching for the best data management tools for influencer marketing. But it also means that influencer marketing could end up costing more for the brands.

“Influencer marketing has grown a lot, but brands still haven’t fully jumped in with both feet,” said Evan Asano, the CEO of the influencer marketing agency Mediakix. “Brands are going to end up putting a lot more money into this space, in more creative ways.”

The post For fashion brands, 2018 will be the year of the ‘influencer roster’ appeared first on Digiday.