Month: January 2018

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If there was any doubt that digital media has taken center stage in political marketing, it was put to rest by top execs, operatives and consultants speaking at MediaPost’s
Marketing Politics conference here Tuesday. While traditional media remains a mainstay for many local races, public affairs and issues-oriented campaigns, top digital and data officers of the two
major U.S. parties and others made the case that digital is taking the lead in national and important state races, mainly for the same reasons it is beginning to dominate the mix for conventional
consumer marketers: because it’s efficient and it works.

It’s an underappreciated fact of good design: Sometimes imperfections are what make a design look perfect. We’ve seen it with Google’s “G” logo, which isn’t a perfect circle. And now, Fast Company has posted an intriguing article this morning pointing out something most people have never noticed about Starbucks’ mermaid logo–that her face is asymmetrical….

While there are many reasons that Americans get science news, the most common driver of attention to science news is curiosity, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study. But people are also motivated to seek out science news for different reasons depending on the issues they care about most, with the environment being a prime example.

In 2017, voice was coined as “the technology to watch.” At this year’s CES, voice stole the show. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Samsung all made voice or AI announcements that will fundamentally change
how we experience some of their products.

YouTube is ordering workers to review thousands of hours of its most popular content and setting new limits on which videos can run ads, in moves to ease advertisers’ worries that their brands are showing up alongside offensive or controversial videos.

AdExchanger |

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by David Kohl, president and CEO at TrustX. The industry has been doing the math wrong. For years media buyers have tolerated the waste everyone knew was part of cheap CPM media buys because, well,… Continue reading »

The post The High Cost Of Low CPMs appeared first on AdExchanger.

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Spotify was an early mover in programmatic audio, and it’s taking that momentum into 2018. “Marketers are moving so much money to programmatic. We’ve seen that channel explode,” said Brian Benedik, global head of ads monetization at Spotify. “We’ve seen brands [come to Spotify] that have never invested in audio because we’ve made it programmatic-enabled.”… Continue reading »

The post Spotify Will Turn Up The Volume On Programmatic And Podcasting In 2018 appeared first on AdExchanger.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. PE Strikes Again Private equity firm Diversis Capital has scooped up Marketron, a revenue and marketing software provider used mostly by television and radio stations. “We are excited to see Marketron’s commitment to growing new technologies as well as developing unique opportunities that are… Continue reading »

The post Pubs Seek Alternatives To Facebook Referrals; PE Firm Diversis Capital Buys Marketron appeared first on AdExchanger.

There’s a short history of publishers fancying themselves as technology companies and building a business selling their tech to other publishers. Publishers realized that building a whole new side business around licensing their tech is a headache and that they needed to focus on what they’re good at, and leave the tech to others.

New York magazine is trying out a different approach. It built its own content management system (publishers like to give their homegrown CMSes cute names; this one is called Clay, for the magazine’s founder Clay Felker) in 2015 and then licensed the software to the online magazine Slate. Slate started using Clay a year ago and was set to fully migrate its site to Clay this week. But instead of New York charging Slate a licensing fee, Slate is paying New York in the form of code. The CMS is open-source, and developers from both titles contribute to it.

This works for New York because it doesn’t have to devote precious staff to support a client, said Daniel Hallac, the magazine’s chief product officer. Sharing code benefits both parties, too. Slate developed a plug-in so it can access Getty Images, and New York also plans to use the plug-in, for example.

For Slate, the open-source nature of the Clay CMS made sense because Slate has a development team that is comfortable operating without the outside support that a big tech company could supply, said Greg Lavallee, Slate’s director of technology.

He said he likes Clay because it turns all editorial elements such as taglines and pull quotes into their own building blocks, which makes it easier to meet the growing need to publish to distributed platforms like Facebook and Apple News. “It takes a firm stance on trying to componentize everything. It makes most of the distributed platforms much easier because all the platforms work that way,” he said.

Clay also doesn’t force its users to adopt every update; the publisher can pick and choose. And with Clay, Slate can control access to all its audience data.

It’s too early to say where New York magazine will take Clay, but it’s casually marketing it to others to see if there’s interest, especially small publishers that have some tech resources and want to build some tech on their own, but can’t afford to do everything in-house.

Slate and New York magazine have similarities, as independent, midsize publishers focused on politics and culture. Some publishers might be leery of sharing their technology with a competitor. Hallac sees the advantages outweighing any risk, adding that the two aren’t sharing things like editorial content, ad models and user experience, which he considers more important differentiators.

“By partnering with Slate, we’ve been able to increase the amount of people working on this because we’re pooling our resources,” he said. Plus, New York covers such a wide range of topics editorially, from food to fashion to politics, its potential competitive set is limitless.

“If we were to say we won’t talk to our competition, we wouldn’t be able to talk to anybody,” Hallac said. “But we’re also confident in our abilities. We’ll talk to anybody.”

The post New York magazine is making its CMS available open-source appeared first on Digiday.

The Facebook algorithm change that has publishers panicking may be good news for a certain group inside the industry: influencers and their followers.

As Facebook decides to favor content from friends and family over posts from (certain) publishers, agency buyers are telling clients to focus more on influencer content.

“By prioritizing [user-generated content], Facebook is giving brands an opportunity to double down on influencers that maintain authentic relationships with their audiences,” said Corey Martin, who heads influencer marketing at 360i.

Martin said he takes Facebook’s explanation of the news-feed change at face value — that it wants to clean up a cluttered news feed and potentially cut down on fake news. Facebook is telling agencies they won’t see any major changes for paid promotion, although ad rates might increase.

But influencer marketing seems poised to benefit the most from the change: When done on its own, influencer content essentially mimics content from friends and family.

“I would tell clients to do more influencer content,” said Martin. “Facebook has more control over influencers and they have less control over media partners. I don’t think it’ll negatively impact buying ads within the Facebook environment.”

Marco Hansell, CEO at Speakr, said his company found that influencer content performs between five and 10 times better in terms of engagement when an influencer rather than a brand posts it. And if Facebook is already removing brands from the feed, it increases engagement among accounts with organic engagement.

“It’s now this awesome dynamic where brands show up less in the feed,” said Hansell, “and what’s showing up is content coming from public-figure pages, friends and family.”

The “handshakes” — how Facebook shows customers that content was created by influencers for brands — in this case wouldn’t punish the brands. Instead, brands might get some overflow likes from people clicking through to the brand page, too.

Boosting influencer content could be great for Facebook, which has long asked brands and agencies to create a paid strategy for influencer content. By doing that, it can get more ad dollars while getting credit for “cleaning up the feed.”

Noah Mallin, managing partner and head of experience, content and sponsorship at Wavemaker, said he expects Facebook to explore ways to make influencers a bigger part of the platform. While Facebook has plenty of influencer activity, it’s not as popular with influencers as Instagram or YouTube. But Mallin said that the same brand-safety issues that have impacted news also exist around influencers. “What are the safeguards around that?”

Organically speaking, influencers rank better than brands in the news feed, and deprioritizing news can be favorable for influencers. And the new algorithm is expected to mostly punish clickbait-style language, which means brands will need to make meaningful and “authentic” content, which creates room for more influencer partnerships.

In a note sent to its clients this week, agency RPA said as much: “With this new directive at the platform level of making Facebook a place for facilitating and rewarding meaningful social connections, brands who haven’t already made that a fundamental filter for their creative will absolutely need to do so — not only to appease the algorithms, but to ensure that they have a natural, authentic role in what could be the newly characterized Facebook experience.”

Justin Moore, founder at Trending Family, sees one potential glitch, though. Facebook last year pushed many influencers on both Facebook and Instagram to convert to “business” pages. (Most were previously categorized as “public figures.”) There wasn’t any access to full analytics on Instagram without being a business profile, and for larger influencers, brand campaigns required whitelisting and paid media access to an influencer handle. And under the new algorithm, business pages would be punished.

“At at first blush, it does not seem like good news,” said blogger Grace Atwood, who has a business profile.

The post ‘Awesome dynamic’: Influencer marketing gets a boost with Facebook changes appeared first on Digiday.