Month: January 2018

British broadcaster Channel 4 wants to make it easier for advertisers to buy digital video inventory during live broadcasts outside of its own properties, while boosting its own bottom line, and BT Sport is the first broadcaster on its books.

BT Sport holds the rights to the UEFA Champions League — comprising over 40 Premier League football games — as well as Premiership Rugby and European Rugby. Now, Channel 4 will programmatically serve ads to viewers of these matches during the ad breaks of the streams on BT Sport’s mobile and tablet apps and sites. To do so, Channel 4 will use technology it has developed for the last six months in partnership with video ad company FreeWheel.

Channel 4, home to popular British TV shows like “The Great British Bake Off” and “Gogglebox,” already sells BT Sport’s linear TV advertising, along with other non-Channel 4 broadcasters like UKTV and ESPN. Adding the digital rights is the next logical step, which the broadcaster hopes will help it compete against the dominance of the Google-Facebook duopoly.

“There’s an opportunity for a premium publisher video-on-demand sales house, a one-stop shop for agencies to buy premium inventory programmatically that can directly compete with the digital giants,” said Jonathan Lewis, Channel 4’s head of digital and partnership innovation.

The deal marks the second strategic play Channel 4 has made in the last six months to increase its scale, making it a more attractive proposition for agencies and advertisers that might otherwise be seduced by the duopoly’s reach. The first was joining the European Broadcaster Exchange, a Pan-European broadcaster programmatic video alliance, last November. “This [VOD sales house] is the response to how we tackle things on a local level,” said Lewis.

In the coming months, Channel 4 will be able to target the BT Sport ads based on its own first-party data, like viewer age, gender, location, interests and behavior, gathered from the 16 million registered users of All 4, Channel 4’s on-demand service.

Against the backdrop of heightened safety concerns due to brand ads appearing next to inappropriate user-generated content, the time is right for the broadcaster to play to the strengths of its premium environment. According to Lewis, some of Channel 4’s clients shifted their spend from YouTube to the broadcaster’s video on-demand service last November and December, though he wouldn’t reveal which ones or how many.

Google and Facebook tend to dominate short-form video revenues. Channel 4’s move to increase its audience and inventory for VOD also defends itself against the likes of Amazon Prime and other longer-form video content providers, said Dino Myers-Lamptey, managing director of MullenLowe Mediahub.

“Channel 4, as with all traditional broadcasters, needs to open up to the long tail of advertisers, which is the model that has made Google and Facebook so successful,” he said. “Simplifying access to buying inventory and providing more flexibility in the buy is what more businesses need.”

The goal is for Channel 4 to boost the number of publishers it sells digital ads for, increase its scale and, in turn, boost its own revenue. “It would be hard to speculate how successful Channel 4 will be, but it’s in a strong position,” said Tom Harrington, media analyst at Enders Analysis. “Online broadcaster video is of a quality that is unmatched amongst other ad-supported digital video and advertisers appreciate this, so it will be an increasingly lucrative battleground.”

The increasing threat of the duopoly to TV ad dollars has spurred broadcasters to put rivalries aside and join forces before video ad CPMs are squeezed to the same extent as display’s. Premium video demand from advertisers still outstrips supply, but broadcasters are wary of facing the same fate as publishers. Last summer, rival media companies Sky and Virgin Media teamed up to boost the scale of the addressable audience advertisers can reach to over 30 million viewers.

The post Channel 4 launches video ad sales house to rival tech giants appeared first on Digiday.

Although the fashion industry has struggled with its chatbot strategy, beauty brands are placing more confidence in the technology. Brands including Sephora, Estée Lauder and L’Oréal have all rolled out chatbots in the last year, with more planning to launch in the coming months, including Coty and at least four undisclosed brands partnering with AR platform ModiFace.

Beauty’s edge in the space can be attributed largely to its reliance on AR technology, thanks to its virtual try-on capabilities that have helped solve for the industry’s oft-cited “try-before-you-buy” conundrum with e-commerce. Now, beauty brands are incorporating the technology into their bots for the same effect.

“Intuitively it makes sense that you’d have better use-cases with beauty brands using chatbots,” said Christian Brucculeri, the CEO of Snaps, a chatbot startup that has worked with companies including L’Oréal and Sephora. “Fashion is much more of a social experience, whereas beauty is more personal, and messaging succeeds with personalization.”

Divya Gupta, the executive director of Estée Lauder’s digital technology team, said the company has seen both conversions and website traffic driven by the five bots it has introduced in the last year, though she declined to share specifics. The use-cases across its bots include the Foundation Finder (available in two versions for the U.S. and U.K.), which helps customers identify the best foundation shade from Lauder’s namesake brand; The Regimen Finder, for La Mer, which utilizes a Q&A to develop personalized skin-care regimens for shoppers; and a U.K.-only app for Smashbox that provides tips and inspiration.

“Chatbots are allowing consumers to reach our brands 24/7 on platforms they’re already on, like Facebook Messenger,” she said.

Though the technology was initially used to field more mundane customer service questions, like how to find a store or return a faulty product, it’s now become a savvier virtual store associate for many brands, often tying in augmented reality to offer personalized product recommendations and beauty tips, as well as try-ons.

Sephora’s Virtual Artist and Estée Lauder’s Lip Artist (it’s fifth and final bot, for now) allow customers to try on a wide range of makeup shades by uploading a photo of themselves into messenger. They can either select a shade themselves or use the app’s skin-matching technology to get a recommendation for their skin tone. Afterward, they can click out to each brand’s respective website to shop the product and download the image to post on social.

Other bots — including Sephora’s Reservation Assistant and Smashbox’s bot in the U.K. — help facilitate appointment bookings at local stores.

Not every category in the industry has adopted the technology as readily as cosmetics. Tackling hair care remains a challenge, as hair strands are known to be harder to track with augmented reality than facial features.

There have been attempts in the space: Professional hair color company Madison Reed has a bot called Madi that offers hair dye suggestions based off of images uploaded by the user. Flawless by Gabrielle Union, a hair-care line that sells exclusively at Ulta, launched a Hair Profiler bot in September that is only text-based, offering hair damage and maintenance tips based on a series of questions, such as “Do you ever use heat on your hair?” and “Is it chemically treated?”

According to Mahi de Silva, the CEO of the chatbot platform Botworx.ai, which developed the bot with Flawless, the lack of a visual component hasn’t been a problem. The brand reported a 400 percent increase in product engagement from users who engaged with the bot, with 50 percent of them sharing their experience and prompting others to try it on social media. But actual conversions are likely much lower. Only 21 percent of users clicked through to the Flawless website to consider a purchase, said Kylie Garcia, Flawless’s digital media manager.

Indeed, many in the industry believe that those visual components are key to a chatbot’s success.

“The ability to send a photo or video to try on, say, a lipstick significantly adds to the engagement,” said Parham Aarabi, the founder and CEO of ModiFace, which has worked with Estée Lauder on its chatbots. His team is focused most on perfecting the AR integration of these chatbots. “The less someone has to type, the better the experience,” he said.

As technology in the chatbot space advances, beauty brands will still have to find the proper home for them, as discovering the bots in the first place can also prove tricky.

While companies like Flawless and Sephora promote their chatbots across their social media channels and with targeted ads, “there’s still a relatively small percentage of users looking to discover chatbots” via Messenger itself, where most are hosted, said Brucculeri. Facebook’s new web plug-in for Messenger, which allows for chatbot conversations to take place on brands’ e-commerce sites, is slated to help solve for that by building more awareness.

Victoria Buchanan, a fashion and beauty researcher at The Future Laboratory, thinks connecting with other platforms like this will be vital going forward: “For chatbots to improve and remain relevant in the consumer conversation, they can’t be a stand-alone medium.”

The post Why beauty brands keep investing in chatbots, despite growing pains appeared first on Digiday.

Tesla underwhelmed Wall Street with sales of its new Model 3 sedans in the fourth quarter, raising questions about whether the Silicon Valley luxury electric-car company can spark production this year and transform into a mainstream auto maker.

The final week of the National Football League’s regular season sacked the Nielsen Social Content Ratings for the week of Dec. 25. The league’s week-17 slate accounted for seven of the top 10 televised sports events in terms of interactions across Facebook and Twitter, as well as four of the overall top five. CBS’ presentation…

Along with the holiday season’s cookies and gifts, the past week has also been packed with digital marketing stats. Here are six data-based stories that stood out to us. 1. Live views Sorry, Dick Clark, but smartphones have taken over how people celebrate New Year’s Eve and they aren’t necessarily watching the ball drop in…

Soundtracks can drastically change the emotional tone of a video. BBR Saatchi & Saatchi cleverly leverages this fact in a campaign for an Israeli nonprofit serving people with hearing loss. Three ads for the group, known as Bekol, use Facebook’s in-feed video format, which runs automatically but stays silent until clicked, to pair striking visuals…