Month: February 2018

Since establishing their joint ad sales alliance last September, Le Figaro and Le Monde have shed 12 ad tech vendors from their digital trading supply chain. Within a few months, Le Figaro’s video ad revenue soared 50 percent.

The French newspaper giants set up the alliance, called Skyline, as a show of strength to the French ad market in the face of competition from Facebook and Google.

Shedding vendors was one of the first steps they took to regain control of their inventory — a move both publishers believed would return revenue that ad tech middlemen have siphoned off for years. Skyline’s core partners are now AppNexus and Google. Le Figaro has several other vendors like Rubicon Project, according to its ads.txt file, which is plugged into French premium publisher marketplace La Place, of which Le Figaro is a member.

“We’ve cut pretty much everyone,” said Alexis Marcombe, chief operating officer at Le Figaro.

Le Figaro sells 100 million monthly video impressions, and in the weeks after dropping video ad tech vendors such as Teads, Advideum, Mobvalue and Sublime Skinz, its pre-roll revenue rose 50 percent. Le Monde didn’t respond to an interview request by press time but Marcombe said he believed Le Monde’s results have been similar to Le Figaro’s.

Like an increasing number of publishers, Le Figaro has implemented ads.txt to crack down on unauthorized selling of its inventory.

“The goal of the publisher is not aligned with the goal of the vendor, which becomes apparent as soon as you start working with one,” Marcombe said. “As a publisher, if you plug everyone in and they offer you a minimum guarantee, but you don’t know how it is generated, you can be sure something is not right. You have to operate with your own technology.”

Skyline is the only way advertisers can buy Le Figaro’s and Le Monde’s inventory other than directly through the publishers themselves. So far, 125 campaigns have run on the platform since its launch, representing 50 brands, all of which have repeatedly booked, according to the publisher. Marcombe wouldn’t say how much revenue Skyline has generated so far, but industry sources estimate it’s around €1.5 million ($1.9 million). That figure is expected to rise to between €2.5 million ($3.1 million) and €3 million ($3.7 million) in the next few months, according to industry sources. Big ad spenders including Carrefour, Volkswagen, Qualcomm and Citroën are among those to run campaigns on Skyline.

“Since we started Skyline, every time we have cut an ad tech vendor, we have made much more money,” added Marcombe.

While publishers may think wistfully of shedding vendors, the idea of pulling the plug on any short-term revenues is a major deterrent. Marcombe confirmed this is a challenge for smaller publishers that don’t have the resources of Le Figaro or Le Monde. “It was a relatively seamless transition because we have the engineering capability, and we could bear the expense,” he said. “But the money returned to us was pretty instantaneous.”

That said, it was still difficult. The main challenge for Le Figaro was to ensure it could offer the same ad formats that its former ad tech partners offered. As a result, Le Figaro developed four new ad products in-house with the help of AppNexus.

Dropping vendors from a publisher’s ad stack doesn’t have to pose a short-term risk to ad revenues, Marcombe said. “If you can ensure your own ad stack offers the same level of quality as what’s available from vendors, then you can get your money back quite quickly,” he said. “We prefer to get back [control of] our inventory and offer full transparency on what advertisers are buying to ensure they’re getting the real value of our inventory.”

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The NFL’s marketers in the U.K. face a challenge. The biggest opportunity to grow the sport’s fan base is the Super Bowl, but then there’s a seven-month gap until the next season starts. So to keep fans interested after the big game, they’re tapping the league’s personalities and treading into lifestyle content.

The Super Bowl on Feb. 4 is the biggest event for the NFL on the U.K. marketing team’s calendar, said Sarah Swanson, head of marketing for the NFL in the U.K. That’s especially the case this year, given Jay Ajayi, a Philadelphia Eagles running back who is British, will compete. Ajayi will “return home” with his own Twitter emoji ahead of the game, after becoming the first NFL player to have his own emoji in September, Swanson said.

It’s an extension of the influencer strategy the league has developed over the last two years, which included working with YouTube star Bateson87 and fans from other sports such as former footballer Rio Ferdinand.

The NFL in the U.K. is also getting into lifestyle content. It’s creating films with publishers like Joe Media showing fans what a tailgate party looks like. It’s working with an agency to get feature articles placed in non-sports, lifestyle magazines such as GQ and celebrity tabloid Closer as well as producing features on video competitions for the Madden video games and players learning British customs during their visits to the U.K.

The use of influencers, combined with the league’s deals with publishers such as Joe Media and Sportbible, lets sponsors tap an audience and messaging that they wouldn’t get from the NFL in the U.S., said Aaron Duckmanton, head of marketing and content at video tech platform Grabyo. (It’s also cost-effective, given the NFL doesn’t pay influencers in cash.) The use of influencers also gives sponsors more freedom to produce content that drives engagement and action, which is becoming much more valuable for sponsors across digital platforms, Duckmanton added.

The NFL’s marketers in the U.K. don’t have sponsorship assets, like the front of a jersey, or the fan base to justify funding several owned channels as their U.S. counterparts do, so Swanson takes advantage of social networks, especially Instagram. Most of the content posted to the NFL UK account between the start of the season in September and January was pictures (513), followed by video (223) and then 11 carousel posts, according to Socialbakers.

The content posted throughout the season drove a higher proportion of engagement from likes than comments, per Socialbakers. The majority of comments to the NFL UK account came last month, corresponding with a flurry of posts pushed out around the playoffs. This pattern of interactions was similar — albeit relatively larger — in the U.S., per Socialbakers.

Instagram is a double-edged sword for NFL UK, though, because there’s limited visibility of the platform’s reach.

“If the NFL UK is doing an Instagram Story, then I can tell you how many people are looking at it,” Swanson said. “But if I take a bunch of influencers to a Philadelphia Eagles game like we did a few weeks ago and they all post Instagram Stories, then I can’t see exactly how many people watched and wouldn’t have been able to grow those views over a longer period because they would’ve vanished.”

Despite those reservations, Swanson has enough other indicators to know the league is resonating with young men. The league said that over 830,000 people attended the NFL on Regent Street event in London last September, and it beat two attendance records this season, with the games at Wembley and Twickenham Stadiums attracting 84,592 and 74,237 fans, respectively.

The post How the NFL UK plans to keep fans engaged post-Super Bowl appeared first on Digiday.

To fête its newest product, the Early Defence Glow Activating Serum, the skin-care and makeup brand No7 is rolling out its largest influencer marketing campaign to date. But more than just product placement, the campaign aims to showcase concrete product results.

That concept is trending in the beauty industry right now, with successful brands ranging from Rodan & Fields to Deciem relying on results-based lingo and creative to drive impressive sales.

The digital campaign, which involves a combination of paid social and programmatic advertising, centers around three influencers: actress Meghan Rienks, beauty vlogger Iris Beilin and the husband-and-wife YouTube duo Kate Albrecht and Joey Zehr, of Mr. Kate. Together, they have over 2.2 million followers on Instagram.

The group, which is being paid, was tasked with participating in a seven-day challenge of sorts, dubbed #Glowin7: Use the serum every day for a week and chronicle the results with their respective followers on Instagram and YouTube.

No7’s new Early Defence Glow Activating Serum

Rienks kicked off her challenge on Wednesday with a post on Instagram. The other influencers will announce their challenge participation over the course of the next two weeks. According to Iris Beilin, No7 was explicit about the fact that she was to truly use the product for a full week and provide honest results to her audience. “It was important to stay committed to the daily routine to get the best results,” she said. Altogether, it required two weeks of her time, with one week for planning.

For those ads rolling out across social platforms and the web, each influencer also created a separate, short testimonial film with the brand, documenting their daily progress.

“We were specifically looking for people who embodied the millennial mindset, and they fit the bill,” said Hillary Hutcheson, No7’s senior brand director.

Crucially, the influencers chosen for the campaign will also be encouraging their myriad followers to try out the challenge for themselves. Each of them, as well as No7’s own social media team, will be hosting serum giveaways to help promote the product.

No7 held a party with Coveteur to celebrate its latest launch

With hundreds of product mailings also having gone out in the last few weeks, the company has engaged over 500 influencers for the launch. Data from the influencer marketing companies Octoly and Tribe Dyamics helped the brand whittle down who to target that would trend well with millennials.

According to Hutcheson, No7 has recently moved to focus on long-term influencer partnerships, a strategy increasingly shared by other brands, from Sephora to Alala. The brand has worked with Mr. Kate before, and hopes to continue working with BeilIn and Rienks.

“Longer-term partnerships are ideal for raising awareness among [millennials] and, ultimately, for driving steady sales,” she said. “It adds authenticity to the endorsement, which is, of course, important to our consumer.”

Of course, that’s only the case if the initial partnership pays off. No7 will be tracking the engagement rate and impressions garnered from these influencers’ posts, as well as how many followers clicked through from their channels to learn about and purchase the serum.

To drive extra buzz around the launch and cement it in the influencer community, the brand also held an exclusive VIP event in Los Angeles last week hosted by Stephanie Mark, co-founder of the popular site Coveteur. Over 150 fashion, beauty and lifestyle influencers were in attendance, and Coveteur featured it on their site.

“They are a highly respected, elevated media brand,” said Hutcheson. “Partnering with them allowed us to engage a new set of tastemakers and industry insiders.”

The post For No7’s largest influencer campaign to date, the focus is on results appeared first on Digiday.

The Financial Times is bolstering its commercial offering for clients with the acquisition of London-based research company Longitude.

With 910,000 paying print and digital readers, according to the publisher, the FT is better situated than ad-reliant publishers to weather a tough ad market. But advertising, along with branded content and events, is still important to the business newspaper.

The FT plans to use Longitude’s research and thought leadership to complement its media distribution of advertising and branded content, plus its creative and video production from Alpha Grid, a content marketing video company the FT recently acquired. The publisher wouldn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal.

“[The acquisition] is a big opportunity to shift gears on our commercial offering,” said FT chief commercial officer Jon Slade. “There is a requirement for a commercial revenue in a balanced business, and talking to commercial clients is equally important as reader revenue.”

Longitude counts Barclays bank, energy consultancy DNV GL and law firm Simmons & Simmons as clients. Slade said Longitude and the FT have mutual clients, but it’s too soon to say if any of them will take on additional services.

Projects with Longitude’s clients typically last four months, from the advising phase to designing and conducting research, analysis and then content creation. Longitude CEO Rob Mitchell said Longitude’s clients have been moving away from project-based work to long-term campaigns, in keeping with a trend in the industry. Longitude’s research typically focuses on businesses rather than consumers, often targeting the C-suite. For Accenture, Longitude surveyed 32,000 people about their attitudes toward banking services.

“The conversation with clients has changed in the last couple of years,” Mitchell said. “Thought leadership didn’t often involve discussions about KPIs and measurement. Now, every conversation starts with it. It’s something clients still struggle with.”

The FT has increased its focus on proving effectiveness of its ad campaigns and growing client services over the years. It runs roughly 100 studies a year that measure the effectiveness of its ad campaigns, so it knows what content format a brand should use to improve its reputation and how much improvement it can expect, Slade said.

Over the last four years, the FT has grown its client services team, doubling the number of people involved in execution and client relations on the sales side to 40 people. The importance of campaign delivery has also increased: The ratio of sales to delivery people was 6 to 1; now, it’s 3 to 1, Slade said.

In the next year, the FT will move back to its original headquarters near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, freeing up space for Longitude’s 33 employees. Longitude plans to hire about 15 people in the next 12 months in all its departments, including commercial, editorial and research, Mitchell said.

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The ability to see a customer’s finances as an almost-tangible, visual representation may not be a mainstream part of online banking, but Ally is launching an augmented reality game to coincide with the Super Bowl to nudge customers to grow their savings.

Called Ally Big Save, customers can use the savings app during Super Bowl commercials this Sunday. Upon launching the app, customers drag falling bills superimposed on their home environment into a digital piggybank and based on their performance, accumulate points. They can win cash prizes, but the main purpose of the activity is to help customers think of their personal finances in a different way.

Ally bank is the latest to experiment with augmented reality, which developers can use to create experiences that bridge the physical and online worlds.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

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Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. reported record quarterly financial results on Thursday as they extended their dominance over swaths of the global economy.

AdExchanger |

Alphabet posted revenues of $32.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017, up 24% compared to the same period last year. The earnings showed a spike in traffic acquisition costs [TAC] as Google paid more to publishers in its Google Network Members’ properties revenue segment. The segment also includes revenue from Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager,… Continue reading »

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Apple Inc.’s move to jack up prices on the iPhone paid off with record quarterly revenue and profit even though the world’s most valuable company sold fewer of its most important product.

Alphabet Inc. swung to a loss after taking a $9.9 billion charge related to the new U.S. tax law, though its core advertising business continued its strong run.

As we inch ever closer to yet another Super Bowl Sunday, all eyes are on the Philadelphia Eagles, the New England Patriots and their standout players, not to mention the many brands that will serve as the game’s true stars. But the NFL’s own Big Game spot will focus instead on one of the teams…