Month: January 2018

AdExchanger |

Podcast network Wondery is riding high into 2018. Launched in 2016 by former Fox International Channels CEO Hernan Lopez, with backing from 20th Century Fox, Wondery produced its first breakout original hit last fall. “Dirty John,” a true crime mystery created with the LA Times, has been listened to over 15 million times since it… Continue reading »

The post Riding On “Dirty John” Success, Wondery Wants To Advance Podcasting In 2018 appeared first on AdExchanger.

AdExchanger |

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is by Paul Bannister, co-founder and executive vice president at CafeMedia. Contextual targeting is one of the original forms of targeted marketing, hearkening back to the days when Chevrolet might have run an ad next to a local newspaper’s feature story on… Continue reading »

The post Contextual Targeting’s Resurgence In The Year Ahead appeared first on AdExchanger.

AdExchanger |

“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 Nico Neumann, assistant professor and fellow, Centre for Business Analytics at Melbourne Business School. One key theme in 2017 was the domination of Google and Facebook, which grabbed large shares… Continue reading »

The post Why Google’s And Facebook’s Dominance Is Normal Market Evolution appeared first on AdExchanger.

AdExchanger |

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. OurTube JPMorgan Chase isn’t satisfied with YouTube’s brand safety review, so it’s taking matters into its own hands. The bank’s in-house programmatic team has begun to whitelist channels where it can buy media at scale, Business Insider reports. With 17 filters, the bank uses… Continue reading »

The post JPMorgan Chase Builds Tech For YouTube Screening; EU Weighs New Regulations Around Data appeared first on AdExchanger.

To prepare for the coming General Data Protection Regulation, publishers have a new important role: data protection officers.

The Information Commissioner’s Office advised companies to hire DPOs last year, but unlike in Germany, where DPOs are now common at publishers, the U.K. has been far slower to embrace the role. News UK, which owns The Times and The Sun newspapers, was among the first to appoint a chief data protection officer. Haymarket and magazine publisher Future are planning to appoint one. Others have working groups comprised of staff across different parts of the business working on compliance. Ad tech companies and agencies are also bringing on data protection czars.

The DPO role comes with challenges. The ICO insists the DPO isn’t to be held accountable if decisions they make aren’t good for business.

“It’s the new important role at publishers, but it’s a strange role that’s virtually un-sackable,” said Paul Lomax, an independent publishing consultant and recently the chief technology officer at magazine group Dennis. “You can’t give them guidance on or take issue with how they approach it [GDPR compliance]. Basically you can’t fire them.”

Some publishers are simply choosing to expand current roles, such as privacy officers and heads of data. But with GDPR, the DPO cannot have any conflict of interest with other responsibilities across the business. So if it wasn’t a dedicated role before, it will have to be now, according to Lomax. In some cases, that may lead to some hasty job title changes, rather than investing in an unknown new hire.

Given GDPR is uncharted territory, real expertise and experience is thin on the ground. And with any role shortage, particularly in an area that requires senior, specialist skill sets, salaries are high. Industry sources have said DPO roles tend to be in the six-figure range.

In short, hiring a DPO is fraught with challenges. Whether or not a company must appoint one comes down to size and the extent to which they use data. Companies that have to renegotiate thousands of contracts with tech suppliers in order to ensure they’re compliant will likely already have a DPO or have plans to hire one. But for smaller businesses, outsourcing to external DPOs will be a more popular option.

Companies like Skimlinks, which provides affiliate link services to publishers, will likely outsource to a DPO in the spring, after the company has done the heavy lifting on its data mapping and other internal processes. The DPO will then just be tasked with auditing and validating all that’s happened, meaning the business can control how strictly it approaches the law. “That way it’s [GDPR knowledge] not all locked up in the mind of a DPO,” said Skimlinks co-founder Joe Stepniewski.

The post Thanks to GDPR, the chief data protection officer is a new key role at publishers appeared first on Digiday.

This article appears in the latest issue of Digiday magazine, a quarterly publication that is part of Digiday+. Members of Digiday+ get access to exclusive content, original research and member events throughout the year. Learn more here.

Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp, says platforms need to change their ways to benefit publishers’ long-term business models, but he doesn’t let publishers off the hook, either. Our recent conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.

The tech platforms have been the big story of the past year, with advertiser backlash and talk of regulation. How do you see it?
The surprising thing about the scrutiny is how long it’s taken to come to pass when you think we’ve been discussing these issues actively for well over a decade. It is at last good to see how the publishers are speaking up. Why they were so mute for so long — did they feel intimidated, was it an affront to fashion? There’s no doubt in Washington, there is a time of reckoning. The digital world is dysfunctional from a content creative perspective. When you do a search now, so many answers are people gaming search optimization or clickbait. I think we imagined, perhaps naïvely, that the web would become more sophisticated not less. There’s no doubt it can play a role, but it’s become clogged.

Is regulation going to help publishers, though?
I’m not normally in favor of regulation. The type of regulation I would argue for is self-regulation, a change in behavior that’s benefit to our long-term models. We’ve been engaged with Brussels and their investigation. We’re in constant discussions with both Google and Facebook. We hope we can come to agreements with everything from confronting piracy to a more coherent systemic issue of prominence. There’s obviously a debate in Facebook about its role, commercial and social. They’re in the midst of a storm that’s not going to go away anytime soon. The base issue for any digital company is, are you compliant or are you complicit? Facebook is a publisher, and like all publishers, you have a responsibility for what you publish. Even if the word “publisher” is hard to utter.

How does your global view affect how you see publishers’ challenges?
For us the issues are fairly constant, whether it’s Australia or the U.K. or India, for that matter. But different countries have different regulations and different countries have different cultural approaches. Some countries in Europe, there’s almost an artisanal attitude, so they are particularly concerned about the commodification and blandification of news. They immediately saw the potential social consequences.

You’ve been warning for a long time about the threats posed by Google and Facebook. Do you feel vindicated?
Finally, some credibility! Well, it was never personal. At times I would use pretty phrases. But you needed to deploy language. And alliteration. And it’s not only myself, it’s Rupert and Lachlan. But it certainly was a soliloquy for many years. That is an indictment of media that we’re so naïve or so complicit that we’ve allowed the standardization of practices that have been abuse of prominence, have undermined authenticity and damaged our ability to be publishers.

How do publishers get out of being serfs on platforms’ land?
Well, surf is up for the serfs, at the moment. There’s clearly a different attitude in Washington, there’s an activist attitude in Brussels, in Australia. The government is concerned, even if media companies are not.

What’s on your list of demands for the platforms?
At Google, [we want] subscription mechanics and permissioned data about our users. I have to give a shout out to Google and in particular Sundar Pichai. The end of first click free is a first step. At Facebook, [we want]  subscription mechanics. We didn’t take part in their trial because at 10 articles, the system is too easy to game.

It’s been 10 years since you acquired The Wall Street Journal. Has it met with your expectations?
The opportunity for The Wall Street Journal in a digital world is enormous, dare I say because when I was editor, it became the best-selling paper in the country. The Saturday paper became the best selling of the editions. Print will remain strong among Journal readers for a long time. But digitally, it has an opportunity and a strong advantage because of the ability of the company to upsell those readers to premium business products. When you add the professional information business on top of a consumer news business, it’s a particularly potent product.

The post News Corp’s Robert Thomson: ‘The digital world is dysfunctional’ appeared first on Digiday.

Diageo is starting the new year with a resolution not to advertise on Snapchat — at least not until it can be sure of the social network’s ability to keep its ads away from users under the legal drinking age.

The alcohol advertiser has stopped all advertising on Snapchat while it tries to understand how its ads may have inadvertently reached the social network’s youngest users. Diageo has not taken “sufficient” care to prevent its ads from reaching kids and teenagers, the Advertising Standards Authority concluded after an investigation, the results of which were announced on Jan. 3. The ASA banned Diageo from running a sponsored lens for its Captain Morgan rum brand ever again.

While the lens debuted last summer without sparking any complaints from the public, the ASA decided it needed to be investigated due to concerns it appealed to people under the legal drinking age. The regulator wanted to set a “precedence” in this space, revealed an ASA spokesman, who added Captain Morgan is the first branded Snapchat lens to be banned in the U.K.

The rationale behind the decision was simple enough. By adding a beard and a pirate hat to a user’s face, the lens broke strict alcohol advertising rules on targeting kids, specifically on how ads must not use real or fictitious characters who are likely to encourage kids and teenagers to drink.

The ruling relies on the assumption that a significant portion of Snapchatters claim to be over 18 when they are not.

Diageo, however, stressed it bought the lens, which typically cost between $500,000 (£368,000) and $1 million (£736 million) per day, last year based on assurances Snapchat had given it. At the time Diageo ran the campaign, Snapchat had not launched the interest-based targeting it has since claimed allow brands to supplement age with behavioral data to infer the ages of potential audiences. Those updates are currently being discussed between the platform and the alcohol advertiser.

Captain Morgan took “all reasonable steps to ensure the content we put on Snapchat was not directed at under 18s,” said a spokeswoman for the brand. Diageo has now stopped all advertising on Snapchat globally, the spokeswoman added.

Any future investigations could stunt Snapchat’s plans to win over more alcohol advertisers. The social network has been trying to convince alcohol brands they have nothing to fear about marketing on the teen-friendly app but announcements like the ASA’s ruling threaten to undermine those efforts. Snapchat may have age-gating restrictions not to dissimilar to rivals Facebook and Instagram, and yet its status as a kid-friendly app potentially leave it open to greater scrutiny.

For example, Instagram does not ask for age. Instead, the social network pulls the age from a person’s Facebook profile if they have connected accounts. If not, Instagram prompts users for their age but does not use additional signals to determine whether the figure given is true, making it potentially less secure than Snapchat.

The issue with age verification on social media platforms is that if people want to circumnavigate it, they can and will, said Norm Johnston, chief digital officer at Mindshare Worldwide. “Brands that operate with age restrictions around advertising, whether that is alcohol, gambling or something else, always have the potential to run into this kind of trouble,” added Johnston.

The post After ad watchdog slap, Diageo pulls advertising from Snapchat appeared first on Digiday.

YouTube can be a harder place for publishers to grow viewership compared to Facebook. But those that put in the time to publish and program for YouTube can see dramatic growth.

Take digital video startup Great Big Story, CNN’s social video experiment for young viewers. It’s been publishing to YouTube since its launch in 2015, but in 2017, it quintupled its YouTube subscribers to 1.6 million subscribers.

Today, YouTube is Great Big Story’s biggest platform in terms of time spent, accounting for almost half of the publisher’s total minutes watched across platforms, which includes Facebook, Instagram and the GBS site and apps. On average, YouTube users are watching more than 100 million minutes of Great Big Story content every month, according to Khalil Jetha, vp of audience development for emerging brands at CNN, which has put $70 million into Great Big Story to date.

“Over 90 percent of our [YouTube] growth has been organic,” said Uyen Tieu, gm of Great Big Story. “Because we’ve been able to systematically build a library of evergreen content, which gets served up over and over again by the algorithm, we hit a tipping point last year on YouTube.”

Great Big Story’s YouTube catalog has more than 1,400 videos covering evergreen topics spanning science, food, travel and nature. This means a video such as “The Amazon’s Boiling River Kills Anything That Enters” will be as relevant today as it was when it first published two months ago.

And once a user watches one video, it’s likely that they’ll be lured into watching other videos in the GBS YouTube library. For instance, a YouTube user might find a GBS video on the most remote pub in England, and through that interest, find other videos produced by GBS that cover interesting far-off places. Roughly 75-80 percent of GBS’s YouTube views come from the back catalog, Jetha said.

“Our back catalog is directly attributable to the subscriber growth,” said Jetha. “We don’t have the type of news or entertainment videos that traditionally go viral and have a huge velocity of views in the first five days but not much long-term traffic.”

It also helps that YouTube remains one of the only places on the web where people actually go with the express purpose of watching videos instead of videos being forced on them within a news feed. Other publishers including Vox.com, The Atlantic and Al Jazeera’s AJ+ have grown subscribers and watch time on YouTube by focusing on evergreen and longer-form videos that can be routinely served up by the platform’s algorithm.

So far, most of Great Big Story’s videos on YouTube have run two to three minutes. Now, the company is creating videos that can run 10 or 20 minutes or even longer. This includes producing more original documentary-style pieces under the Great Big Films moniker (GBS has published 11 such videos so far on YouTube) as well as stitching together multiple short videos into packaged “Great Big Reels” (GBS has published 177 of these).

“For a distributed content creator, the real challenge is keeping people engaged with us enough that they’re going to keep up with us for 20 minutes-plus,” Jetha said. “Because that means they’re really watching you; you can’t watch 30 minutes of something willy-nilly.”

The early results are promising. According to Jetha, Great Big Story’s YouTube videos average a 70 percent retention rate, regardless of whether the videos are three minutes long or 30-minute pieces.

Great Big Story’s expansion into longer-form content is also a precursor to a GBS-branded streaming video network, which was announced last year but hasn’t gotten a launch date. In addition to going longer on YouTube, GBS recently struck distribution partnerships with streaming services Pluto TV and Xumo to distribute a GBS-branded channel on those services. Data from these platforms, as well as GBS’s own Apple TV app, where session times average 37 minutes, will inform how the streaming network will look and be programmed, Tieu said.

“2018 is going to be a big foundational year for us as we closely watch the platforms where people actually spend time with us, such as YouTube, so that once we do launch the [streaming] network, we have a convertible audience that is already used to spending a lot of time with us, versus just a shot in the dark,” Tieu said.

The post CNN-backed Great Big Story sees YouTube success with evergreen videos appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers will enter 2018 more focused than ever on diversifying their revenue streams away from display advertising. For many digital local news publishers, which have been hit the hardest as ad dollars moved to Google and Facebook, that shift is already underway as they eschew display advertising to focus on branded content and consumer revenue.

The Charlotte Agenda does not sell display ads on its site. Instead, it lets advertisers sponsor sections of its site. WhereBy.Us, a Knight Foundation-funded startup that runs The New Tropic in Miami and The Evergrey in Seattle, gets most of its revenue from branded content and $60-per-year memberships. California Sun, a newsletter startup created in November by former New York Times and Washington Post reporter Mike McPhate, plans to make money by selling subscriptions.

Display ads are hardly a growth area in digital media, with most of the digital ad pie going to Google and Facebook. But the market is even tougher for local media, as evidenced by the closure of Gothamist and DNAinfo and Spirited Media’s pivot to memberships, that some are just ignoring it.

“We don’t sell that stuff because other people are better at it,” Charlotte Agenda founder Ted Williams said. “You need to have really integrated advertising that makes sense. We continue to attract really good clients that need good brand advertising.”

Most local ad spending in the United States is going to traditional ad formats like direct mail and local TV advertising, according to BIA/Kelsey data. But advertiser demand for contextual relevance offered by a publisher websites has dried up as ad dollars have gone programmatic.

“Two years ago, we were doing almost exclusively direct site buys,” said Jason Tabling, svp of digital at BrandMuscle, a local agency that helps national brands including Allstate and T-Mobile allocate their local brand budgets. “Today, it’s all programmatic. We’re looking for behavior, not sites.”

Even small businesses that used to be local media’s bread and butter are losing interest in direct buys with publishers. When BKLYNer, an award-winning digital publisher that covers several neighborhoods in Brooklyn, saw many of its advertisers shift their budgets toward the duopoly, it was forced to launch an emergency membership campaign in December to avoid going out of business. “It’s not that we couldn’t get ads,” BKLYNer founder Liena Zagare said. “It’s that we need a more predictable stream of revenue to make payroll.”

Some local news publishers have plugged into ad networks like Nucleus, a joint venture from Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy and Hearst, or platforms like the one that local publisher Patch offers, which offers local publishers the chance to be part of a scale play that demands advertisers commit to certain spending minimums.

Increasingly, local publishers are selling non-display ad formats, though. At Whereby.Us, that includes paid placement in local events calendars, native ads in newsletters and co-branded events along with custom content that runs on multiple platforms.

Rather than trying to compete with national publishers with large branded content studios, Whereby polls its audiences and segments them based on their interests and behaviors, then tries to sell advertising based on those interests. It worked with the Miami-Dade County Department of Transportation on a multimedia series about public transit in Miami in 2016, for example, on a campaign that remains ongoing.

“The advertising model is disconnected from the value proposition of media, especially when it’s local,” said Whereby co-founder Chris Adamo. “The key is not, ‘How many people do you have?’ It’s, ‘What are they doing, how do they spend their time?’, and solving for that.”

Consumer revenue is another area of focus for local publishers. Consumer revenue represents 10 percent of Whereby’s revenue, and Adamo said he expects that to triple in the next couple years as Whereby identifies more services and programs to offer to members.

The Charlotte Agenda has just under 900 members paying $60 per year for coupons and other perks, including the chance to contribute to a monthly op-ed that Agenda staffers write after talking to them about a key local issue.

Not everyone sees reader revenue as a viable option for local publishers. “Some folks in the market are centrally focused on subscriptions, but I tend to believe that’s a really hard thing to do,” said Jed Williams, chief innovation officer at the Local Media Association. “You have to have really exclusive, really valuable content, and an incredibly tight relationship with your audience.”

The post Local digital news publishers are ignoring display revenue appeared first on Digiday.

With publishers realizing that they can no longer be wholly dependent on ads for their revenue, Purch is getting more serious about selling proprietary technology to other publishers.

Purch — a commerce-focused publisher that owns tech and product review sites such as Tom’s Guide, Top Ten Reviews and Live Science — is profitable. It makes about $120 million a year in revenue, with about 20 percent coming from ad tech products that it licenses to 25 publisher clients, said Purch CRO Mike Kisseberth. Over the next year, the company plans to grow its number of publisher clients to roughly 40, and have its tech licensing operation account for about 25 percent of its overall revenue, he said.

Purch began developing its own ad platform nearly four years ago. What’s changed is that the company has gotten more serious about licensing it to other publishers. In December, Purch broke out its tech licensing business into a separate unit, called Purch Publisher Services. About 60 of Purch’s 400 employees work on Purch’s tech platform at least part of the time, and 10 work on it full-time, Kisseberth said. These employees are made up of salespeople, engineers, data scientists and support specialists.

By licensing software, Purch is aiming to build a revenue stream in an area that most publishers have avoided. This is because most publishers don’t have the resources or patience to build their own ad tech, let alone build tech that can be licensed to other media companies.

One exception is The Washington Post, which calls itself a tech company and sells ad products to other publishers. But the Post is an outlier due to the fact that its owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, is a tech enthusiast who happens to be the richest person in the world.

What has driven the growth of Purch’s tech licensing business is that it was an early adopter of server-side bidding. Unlike on-page header bidding — where publishers simultaneously offer inventory to multiple exchanges before making calls to their ad servers — going server-to-server speeds up page-load times since the ad calls are hosted on publishers’ servers and not on users’ browsers. For over a year, Purch has sold all of its programmatic inventory through server-to-server connections.

The benefits of server-to-server might sound enticing, but as publisher tech teams are typically stretched thin, few publishers have shifted over to selling the bulk of their programmatic inventory this way. This is where Purch pitches itself as a vendor.

Purch’s server-side solution operates on a revenue share, but Kisseberth wouldn’t disclose monetary terms. It is a managed-service product where Purch takes control of the setup and maintenance, ad ops and relationships with the 30 supply-side platforms that are plugged into the product.

Purch last summer tested a self-service bidding product with some of its clients but found that it required more tech and service support than was worth it. As self-service gains steam within the ad tech industry, Purch is open to shifting its products to be self-service in the future, but that likely won’t happen in 2018, Kisseberth said.

Other tech products that Purch sells publishers include commerce management and CRM platforms. But these products are more geared toward B2B publishers. Purch’s programmatic bidding product is the main driver of its licensing business.

Purch doesn’t limit itself to selling its tech to non-competitors; its publisher clients include tech sites like VentureBeat, Mobile Nations and How-To-Geek. Purch figures that selling products to other tech sites, as long as they’re brand-safe, can bolster the reputation of Purch’s ad tech with buyers and in turn help Purch’s case when it comes to setting up private marketplace deals, where the ad rates tend to be much higher than on the open exchange.

Kisseberth emphasized that Purch isn’t looking to simply grow an audience extension. If a publisher already builds its own ad tech or runs its auctions server-to-server, then it’s likely not a fit as a client. Unlike the Washington Post, which licenses self-service products to a wide swath of publishers, Purch is focusing on selling its products to niche sites that want another publisher to control and scale their programmatic selling.

“This is not a huge land grab where we are signing thousands of publishers,” he said. “It is signing publishers who we think are good additions to our portfolio.”

The post Purch is a publisher with a $24 million business in licensing ad tech appeared first on Digiday.