Month: February 2018

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Jelli is taking the old-school medium of broadcast radio into the 21st century. The programmatic radio platform launched in 2014 to automate and target traditional radio buys. Now, it has a demand-side platform as well as ad servers installed at 2,300 radio stations across the country. It also powers radio’s two major programmatic exchanges: Expressway… Continue reading »

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“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Chris Peterson, managing partner at R2C Group. Telling people you work in TV advertising can be exasperating. The response typically goes something like this: “Do people even watch TV anymore? I don’t.” At least, that’s… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Valley Pally Snap is giving away more free ads, this time to startups associated with tech incubators like Y Combinator, Rough Draft Ventures and Dorm Room Fund, Recode reports. Startups or former startups from these programs will get hundreds of dollars in free inventory,… Continue reading »

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Jim Lanzone, the CEO of CBS Interactive and chief digital officer for parent company CBS, was in Toronto roughly a year ago to visit the set for “Star Trek: Discovery.” Produced by CBS Television Studios, the new sci-fi series takes place in the same expansive world created by Gene Roddenberry. But the high-profile show, budgeted at more than $120 million for its first season, was not being made for Netflix, a premium cable channel or even CBS’s own broadcast network; it was to become the first original series for CBS All Access, a $6 and $10 subscription over-the-top video streaming service launched by CBS in 2014.

The television industry has been in a state of upheaval as cord cutting, declining linear TV ratings and rising internet video consumption has forced TV networks and studios to adapt their business models. It’s why media giants such as Disney and Fox are planning to launch subscription streaming products in the coming year.

CBS has been one of the most aggressive networks in capturing new and existing viewers as they shift toward OTT consumption, launching both All Access and the free CBSN streaming news channel in the fall of 2014. (Showtime’s OTT app also falls under CBS Interactive’s purview.) Today, it’s set to add another streaming channel with the launch of CBS Sports HQ, which will be followed by an entertainment-themed channel later this year.

Getting people to pay
Digital subscription products aren’t exactly new to CBS. In the past, the company has rolled out products such as the $10 monthly March Madness on Demand and $4 monthly Big Brother SuperPass; it also offers an annual $5 subscription within the 60 Minutes mobile app.

“There are superfans for many different types of content who would pay for more content, more access and deeper dives into the shows that they love,” said Lanzone. “We originally envisioned All Access as a much bigger play for superfans of CBS content — for a monthly subscription, you can have access to the entire CBS library going back to ‘I Love Lucy.’ We knew if something like this was successful, the next logical step would be to have original programming. But what we wound up seeing in 2015, 2016, as we were marching toward originals, is that the opportunity was much, much bigger.”

In the past year, CBS All Access has launched three high-profile series, including “The Good Fight,” a sequel to the Emmy-winning drama “The Good Wife;” a new “Star Trek” show; and the Will Ferrell-starring comedy “No Activity.” Overall, CBS All Access has announced seven original projects, including a reboot of “The Twilight Zone” from Jordan Peele.

These are premium cable-quality productions. According to a Variety report last year and confirmed by two sources, “Star Trek: Discovery” has a per-episode budget between $8 million and $8.5 million, which is comfortably inside the range of what HBO and Netflix pay for their biggest shows. (CBS has been able to offset some of the costs by signing a lucrative licensing deal with Netflix, which distributes “Star Trek: Discovery” outside the U.S.) CBS All Access will offer more originals as the business continues to grow, Lanzone said.

“We’re not doing anything simply as an investment with the hope that one day it pays off — we had to prove with our business plan that we can do this profitably,” he said. “The good thing about internet products is you don’t need to guess. You can model it out: If you get this many users, which can turn into this number of subscribers, at this retention rate, with this subscription fee and at these advertising rates, it will equal this amount of money. Then, you can assess what you can spend on content.”

As of January, CBS All Access had 2 million people subscribing to either of its ad-supported and ad-free subscription tiers. During its most recent earnings call, CBS CEO Les Moonves said CBS All Access and Showtime’s OTT app have 5 million subscribers combined.

Lanzone declined to say if All Access is profitable. “The business plan is that if we march toward our goal of having 4 million subscribers by 2020, it’s going to be a very profitable product,” he said.

From news to sports and soon, entertainment
CBSN, which drew 287 million video streams in 2017, an increase of 17 percent over 2016, is already profitable. CBS hopes to replicate the network’s model with CBS Sports HQ, which will offer sports news, highlights and analysis 24 hours a day across all major streaming devices.

Like CBSN, CBS Sports HQ will be free and ad-supported. It won’t offer any live sports that CBS broadcasts, but viewers can see highlights, breaking news, game previews and postgame analysis from the sports world. It will also regularly feature contributions from across the CBS Sports portfolio, which includes the CBS Sports TV network, CBSSports.com, CBS Sports fantasy football and high school sports site MaxPreps.com.

“We’ve seen the success at CBSN, and we thought there was a similar opportunity to provide a service where sports fans can get free sports news, highlights, analysis and other programming, wherever they are,” said Jeff Gerttula, evp and gm of CBS Sports Digital. “And because of the work we’ve already done in launching direct-to-consumer services within news and entertainment, there’s a lot of work that’s already been done internally that we can leverage.”

The decision to go the free and ad-supported route with CBS Sports HQ is also driven by the desire to reach younger viewers who want this breadth of sports content but don’t necessarily want to pay a cable or digital subscription to get it. CBSN, once again, is the model. The average age of the channel’s audience is 38, which is more than 20 years younger than the average ages of people who watch Fox News, CNN and MSNBC on linear TV.

CBS will also employ the free, ad-supported model for its upcoming, still-unnamed entertainment and pop culture streaming channel, which will launch in the fourth quarter, hooked to its longtime “Entertainment Tonight” brand.

That said, there’s an opportunity for the ad-supported streaming channels to earn subscription revenue. One option is getting these channels distributed on the growing crop of streaming skinny bundles, which CBS is exploring, Lanzone said.

Plus, CBSN and CBS Sports HQ are also available within CBS All Access, which acts as a “nesting doll” for all of CBS’ OTT products (excluding Showtime), Lanzone said.

OTT has boosted CBS’s digital ad business
In 2017, OTT video advertising brought in “hundreds of millions” of dollars in ad revenue for CBS, according to multiple sources. Advertising sponsors have included Verizon, IBM and Geico for “Star Trek,” Ford for “The Good Fight” and Pfizer for CBSN’s growing crop of original documentaries.

“[OTT] has been a shot in the arm from a revenue standpoint,” said David Lawenda, evp of digital sales and sales strategy for CBS.

Today, CBSN makes up 85 percent of all of CBS News’ digital ad impressions, and All Access accounts for more than 50 percent of overall digital impressions, Lawenda said.

Here’s CBS’s pitch to advertisers in a nutshell: It has OTT streaming products that have achieved a certain level of audience scale nationally; there are few other OTT services outside of Hulu that can offer that kind of reach; the audience is younger than traditional TV, including CBS’s own networks; and engagement is high. On mobile, for instance, viewers spend nearly 30 minutes per session on average on CBSN — and the number is even higher on connected TVs, the company said.

With these OTT products, CBS is able to open up additional inventory beyond broadcast TV. Since joining CBS last summer, Lawenda said the company has been focused on integrating digital within the overall ad sales pitch — especially as CBS heads into upfront season.

“We’re going to the market as one voice; it’s very much a portfolio approach,” he said. “By now, OTT has become so mainstream that most marketers know how big and important it is.”

Ad buyers are taking note of CBS’s growing network of OTT products. The issue, as always, is having enough reach among valuable audiences, said Jason Maltby, president and co-executive director of national broadcast for Mindshare North America.

“They’re still in growth mode, but they are on the right trajectory,” said Maltby. “I applaud them for being a bit ahead of the curve — particularly for a brand like CBS, which you’re supposed to think is old and stodgy.”

Image via CBS/CBS Interactive

For more on all things video, subscribe to Digiday’s new weekly video briefing, written by Sahil Patel.

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Snapchat is working on developing new commerce units to bolster its e-commerce offering, according to two media buyers who spoke to Digiday. It is unclear what the units are, although one buyer said he heard from his Snapchat rep that the unit is in beta. Another buyer said it would live as a transaction experience within the Stories feature on Snapchat, with a seamless swipe up to subscribe or buy.

Snapchat worked with Nike earlier this month during NBA All-Star Weekend, where attendees at a concert could scan a code to see the new Air Jordan III “Tinker” sneaker, then purchase it within Snapchat via Shopify. Essentially, this was a souped up Snapcode with a new way of executing on the product. Previously, Snapcodes could be used to unlock custom filters only — now, they can do more.

Snapcodes are typically offered to advertisers with upfronts or those that hit a certain spend level within a campaign.

At the beginning of the month, Snap also launched a store inside Discover to sell Snapchat merchandise like logo sweatshirts and hats. That format is not available to all, and sources say Snapchat is focused on using that store as a test before opening it to brands.

A Snap spokesperson declined to comment on any new units, but said commerce overall is a big priority for Snap in 2018.

Jason Goldberg, svp of commerce and content at SapientRazorfish, said he’d characterize the Nike work as an “event,” rather than a fundamental capability. However, he pointed out that Snap’s work with the Tinker, which let users choose shoe size and real merchandise options, shows it’s beyond how most social media platforms think of commerce transactions — something normally limited to selling just one SKU.

“Now that Snap has built that robust of a commerce capability, it’s an encouraging sign that they are further along than some of the other platforms,” said Goldberg. “Another thing social networks get wrong is that they call themselves commerce engines, but they actually hand you off to someone else at the actual transaction level. This didn’t happen here: Snap is the seller of record.” The interesting thing, said Goldberg, is how Snap will expand its capability and let multiple advertisers sell through the platform, potentially turning it into a marketplace of sorts like eBay.

Justin Marshall, vp of emerging platforms at Possible, said cracking commerce will help Snap, which has been “myopically focused on reach and traditional vanity metrics.” “For us, being able to re-enter the conversation with Snap in a way that allows us to be able to tie a direct line to sales certainly helps,” he said.

There are other indications that Snapchat has serious interest in cracking retail advertising.

Last October, the platform launched Snap Pixel, a way for brands to track customer journeys. This is a big issue for retailers — Snap Pixel essentially lets brands directly see if the platform is affecting the bottom line. Dan Rosen, head of creative at contact lens brand Hubble, has run Snap Ads for about six to eight months, but ramped up to 10 different Snap Ads since Pixel’s launch. Right now, users have to click out of Snap to Hubble’s site to make a purchase, but Rosen said he’s looking forward to something more “integrated” like the Snap store in Discover. “We get about 10 customers a day right now, but we do lose people because of the loading time getting out of Snap,” he said.

Until now, Snapchat commerce has been relegated to hacks. For example, PopSugar CEO Brian Sugar built an e-commerce app called Emoticode in 2016 that let brands or bloggers include links to products in their Snapchat Stories, which customers could screenshot for later. 

And when Snapchat decided to let brands link out to their own websites, it was expected that a flurry of brands would use it the way they use Instagram for commerce.

Whether Snapchat becomes the place people go to buy diapers is still up for debate. Most retail experts agree that it’s more of a place for purchases that are linked to a limited edition, a specific event or a product drop.

“Another interesting facet of social commerce is the idea of impulse purchases,” said Dan Neiweem, co-founder at Avionos, a customer-relationship management firm. “It’s more difficult for brands to incite impulse purchases online than in a brick-and-mortar setting simply due to general human tendencies.” But, said Neiweem, since Snapchat itself is rooted in spontaneous reaction, it can easily translate into e-commerce.

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Facebook Watch, the platform’s destination for longer-form video, has yet to roll out in the U.K., but that hasn’t stopped food video giant Tastemade creating “Feral Cook,” a five-minute show for Watch in the U.K. According to the publisher, two more shows for the U.K. market are in development and slated to launch in a few weeks.

“Feral Cook” is halfway through its first season of six episodes, which air each Sunday. The show, created by the Tastemade UK team of approximately 10 staffers, is hosted by Henry David and follows five men who cook dishes like burgers and pizzas off abandoned car parts in the woods.

“It was important for this not to be a U.S. show that’s shipped overseas, but a U.K. concept that local audiences would be excited about,” said Oren Katzeff, Tastemade’s head of programming. To accentuate that sense of Britishness, in the first episode the group makes bows and arrows to pay homage to folk legend Robin Hood before dining on Robin Hood burgers.

When contacted for this story, Facebook said there’s no update on when Watch will officially roll out internationally. Multiple publisher sources say Facebook has told them to expect Watch in the U.K. this summer, although the date has been moved in the past.

In lieu of the Watch tab, U.K. viewers can find “Feral Cook,” and other Watch shows, in the news feed or on the Tastemade UK Facebook page, which has around 2 million followers, while the U.S. page has nearly 29 million followers. The “Feral Cook” page has 21,000 followers. The first three episodes of the show have each had around 1.5 million views and around 50 shares.

“Video viewing in the news feed is a fleeting experience,” Katzeff said. “Taking that out and into Watch means we are seeing longer-form viewership, even in these first few episodes.”

Facebook’s ambition to make a separate destination for video so that people spend longer on the platform seems to be paying off. The first episode of U.S. Tastemade show “Frankie’s World” was promoted in the news feed and on the Watch page of another one of its shows, “Struggle Meals,” which features the same presenter. The videos on the Watch page had six times the number of engagements and views as in the feed, according to Katzeff.

“Feral Cook” is being monetized by mid-roll ads, but the publisher is in talks with brands about product integration for its upcoming shows. In the U.S., Tastemade had six Watch shows funded by Facebook and an additional three funded by sponsorship and mid-roll. Six months after the launch of Watch in the U.S., few of the 50 shows from launch have been picked up for a second season, according to Adweek.

“The success of Watch depends on Facebook’s ability to drive general viewership to the platform and make sure there’s a business model outside of brand sponsorship,” Katzeff said. “A million views on a video means that mid-roll becomes meaningful, but we’re not at the point where that monetization is robust enough.”

Lack of monetization and the Watch tab are the key reasons why so few U.K. publishers have rolled out their own Watch shows so far. “When Watch is available in the U.K., it will be more of an incentive for publishers to develop original content to leverage advertiser interest,” said Katie Manor, head of paid social worldwide for MediaCom. Arguably, without the Watch tab in the U.K., audiences are likely to be from the U.S., even for U.K. shows.

Hearst has multiple Watch shows that are doing well in the U.S., but in the U.K., its brands don’t have enough scale to make Watch a priority, according to Duncan Chater, chief brand officer for Hearst UK. This will only exacerbate, said Manor, as the need for paid reach in the news feed increases as Facebook puts more emphasis on content from friends and family.

From a user-experience perspective, Facebook’s slow international roll-out of Watch makes sense. “The feed is algorithms and science, while Watch is art,” Katzeff said. “Combining the two has to be done very thoughtfully with smart, surgical precision.”

Image: Tastemade UK via Facebook

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Slack, initially set up for internal collaboration at companies, has morphed into a tool for communicating outside of work. Marketers at brands, agencies and startups are using to Slack communities to get immediate answers to their most pressing questions as well as access to individuals they can connect with and possibly hire.

Much like forums in the early days of the internet, Slack communities are often created around niche topics. There’s #Launch, where marketers from brands including Uber, Salesforce and Apple connect with entrepreneurs and designers to discuss new product launches and feedback. Designer Hangout is a community for user experience designers, OpenBazaar convenes companies interested in building commerce around bitcoin and eCommTalk is for Shopify enthusiasts. There are also communities centered around women in tech, small businesses, freelancers and gaming.

Some of these groups have broader focuses. When Zach Schleien, analyst and business technology leader at Johnson & Johnson, wanted to get feedback on a Facebook ad he made for his side business Lift Protein Muffins, he turned to Online Geniuses, a Slack community with more than 11,000 digital marketers.

“It was amazing. I instantly got five people who critiqued it,” said Schleien, who has used Online Geniuses daily for the past year and a half. Now, he is in the process of hiring one of the people who critiqued his ad to manage his company’s Facebook ads. He also brings whatever he learns in the group, whether it’s information about new technologies or best practices for Facebook analytics, back to Johnson & Johnson. “It’s a great way to stay in the know on digital,” he said. “I can bring lessons I’ve learned to my business partners I support at J&J.”

David Markovich, CEO and co-founder of PR agency Jumping Squirrel, founded Online Geniuses in 2015 as a way to connect like-minded people across companies in the same industry. Today, more than 50,000 messages are shared a week, according to Markovich, in channels dedicated to specific topics such as #seo, #social and #paid. A #hiring channel also allows marketers to post job openings, and the community hosts about two guests a month for discussions where marketers such as VaynerMedia’s Gary Vaynerchuk and Allyson Davis, vp of integrated marketing at Red Bull, answer users’ questions.

Beyond quick help, the chance to build relationships with new people with different experiences draws marketers to these Slack communities.

“I don’t think I’d be able to have access to the same breadth of people otherwise,” said Jevin Maltais, president of BoomsLabs Ai, a Canadian startup that works with companies to deploy artificial intelligence platforms. “When I have questions about Google AdWords, or Facebook ads or PR, these people all have different experiences, and it’s easy to throw something out there in the channel and have a discussion around it.”

Not only are people connecting online, they are also taking their relationships into the real world. Maltais hired a person he met through Online Geniuses, and that person has become a close friend. “I was just playing video games with him,” Maltais said.

Online Geniuses itself hosts 10 official meetups a month across the world, including Sweden; Barcelona, Spain; New York; and Atlanta. The next one is in Tunisia. Attendance at these meetups ranges from 10 to 500 people, Markovich said. Having a community wherever you are is one of the best things about joining a Slack community like Online Geniuses, he added. “Wherever I travel, even to random parts [of the world], and I have a half-hour to spare, I send out a message, and within 10 minutes, someone is there,” he said. “It’s that fast-paced.”

The number of spammers on other social sites, including LinkedIn and Facebook Groups, is a large reason why marketers prefer to communicate on Slack.

“They’re just very spammy,” said Schleien. “People are just trying to push their services. It’s not about conversation, and it’s low-quality.”

While the majority of Slack communities don’t require marketers to apply, Online Geniuses has a stringent application process, designed to keep out groups known to ultimately kill collaboration — namely, recruiters and salespeople. To apply, marketers must fill out a form at OnlineGeniuses.com. Out of the 20 people who work at Online Geniuses with Markovich, there are 15 moderators who make sure applicants work in marketing. Markovich said if the group accepts everyone, it would easily have around 60,000 members.

“Running a community for marketers is the hardest thing because we naturally want to spam — that’s what marketers do,” said Markovich. “But if you’re going to make the community annoying for other people, we don’t want you there.”

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Much uncertainty swirls around the Global Data Protection Regulation, with enforcement looming on May 25. While marketers understandably fret over the vagueness of the regulation and what level of consent they need, marketers are beginning to adopt something of a nuanced approach to GDPR, seeing it as neither a nothing burger nor a revolution.

The prevailing wisdom among many marketers seems to be that legitimate interests could be a temporary solution, one that gets them over the GDPR hump. Those same marketers accept it will take some time to balance their motives for gaining consent to process personal data with customer needs.

“It’s not the technology. … It’s the motive behind why we’re using them,” said Simon Hall, data privacy officer at Asda, at a Data & Marketing Association event on Feb. 23. “If it’s for the company’s benefit, then it’s not going to work.” Hall said advertisers don’t trust customers enough to go, “’Here’s everything we’re doing [with your data], and you can ask us to stop.’ We have to be able to trust that they [customers] won’t start withdrawing consent.” He added that, “after a blip,” consent rates will rise.

Preference centers on brands’ websites are emerging as one reprieve for advertisers. Brands like Adidas are allowing customers to select the parts of the business they are willingly sharing their data with, and then customers can opt out of sharing for parts they are not interested in. It’s like an on/off switch for consent that consumers can use to regulate the amount of targeted emails or texts they receive, and it could also allay marketers’ fears that the GDPR will cause many people to invoke the “right to be forgotten” permanently.

At recent industry events and during interviews with Digiday, more marketers are treating the GDPR as an evolution of existing data-privacy law, and not as a revolution. The legal basis for processing personal data under the data protection act in the U.K. and the pan-European GDPR has not changed, experts such as Robert Streeter, News UK’s data protection and privacy officer, have previously confirmed. Yes, the threshold for consent has changed, but it was always a necessity to an extent.

There may be a calmness among big brands toward the GDPR that wasn’t there a year ago, but there is still work to do.

Dominic Chambers, Jaguar Land Rover’s head of digital marketing, said at a recent Mediatel event that his team’s preparations were on track but added there were things it is still working out. “Being a legacy business, we have many old systems across Europe that are difficult to talk to one another,” he said. “There’s going to be a manual process if someone asks to be forgotten. That’s not going to be easy, and it’s certainly not going to be automated.”

Elsewhere, eBay has introduced privacy champions, who Ben Westwood, eBay’s senior privacy manager and data protection officer, said “live and breathe data” to instill an understanding of privacy and data protection across all its businesses such as Gumtree and StubHub. Furthermore, all “new vendors,” such as ad tech partners, are put through a GDPR risk assessment audit before being onboarded, Westwood added.

More reviews are expected. According to a recent survey of 28 companies spending in excess of $50 billion (£35.8 billion) globally on marketing communications, just 10 percent said they have already ensured their programmatic activity is compliant after GDPR enforcement.

“It seems to me that a lot of energy and effort is being spent trying to find a way to avoid consent,” said U.K. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham, at the DMA event . “That energy and effort would be much better spent establishing informed, active, unambiguous consent.”

Are you ready for GDPR? Find out by downloading our new guide. 

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Another fintech startup is casting bank fees in its marketing.

Varo Money has been targeting customers of big banks whose fees they’re tired of having to understand and pay. Despite its appeal to potential customers to switch to Varo, its ads don’t call out specific companies, as some of its peers do.

“Customers have different reasons for wanting to switch banks,” said Emily Brauer Gill, director of brand and communications. “Our ethos is not to be overly aggressive.”

Varo’s ads promote a no-fee, all-in-one banking solution aimed at millennials, though its core messages speak to a broad swath of the public. Its digital ads can be found on social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest and it maintains a content marketing site called Money Diaries, which includes videos featuring customers’ personal experiences with money along the way to personal and professional success. The company, which has been ramping up efforts to build its brand, also hired a chief marketing officer, Carl Gish, who joined last week.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

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Consensus on whether Google and Facebook stand to win or lose as a result of Europe’s new data-privacy laws seems to be changing.

Popular opinion has been that the direct relationship Facebook and Google have with consumers will make it easy for them to obtain consent, and as such they will ultimately be at an advantage. But as the deadline for the General Data Protection Regulation‘s enforcement edges closer and the ePrivacy Regulation continues to loom, a different line of thinking is emerging: that Google and Facebook are also in for a thrashing, in the short term at least.

Last week, Facebook’s way of processing personal data was spotlighted for potentially being illegal under the GDPR. A recent study by Charles III University of Madrid found that 73 percent of Facebook’s European users were targeted by marketers based on personal characteristics, which will be illegal under the GDPR, the Financial Times reported last week.

In truth, any claims of what’s illegal or not under the GDPR, can only be a matter of guess work until the law kicks in. But the article has spotlighted an argument that hasn’t yet had much air time: that Google and Facebook may indeed suffer, along with everyone else.

For instance, Google and Facebook will be prime targets for privacy groups, and that will be off-putting for advertisers. “There will be a seasonal dip in ad spend as people work out what the hell it [the GDPR] is and how risky it is,” said Dan Wilson, CEO of tech vendor London Media Exchange. “The first time any privacy groups bring a case against Google, Facebook, Apple or companies like Xaxis, everyone will panic and yank spend. Facebook and Google are the obvious targets for the privacy groups, and brands will not want to be seen on the sharp end of that.”

General fear around fines could cause some marketers to rein in spend on specific ad targeting products such as Google’s Customer Match and Facebook’s Custom Audiences products, according to Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group. Plus, marketers may invest more heavily in their own digital assets and aim to deepen their own relationships with customers, rather than rely on a media owner as an intermediary, which could lead to less spending more generally, said Wieser.

“There is significant uncertainty about the implications, but it seems at least slightly negative for the two companies [Google and Facebook], and possibly worse than that,” he added.

Google and Facebook could suffer from simply having less user data to use for ad targeting because more people will opt out of sharing it. Deutsche Bank has already estimated that the GDPR will likely shave 2 percent from Google’s corporate parent Alphabet. According to Business Insider, Deutsche Bank estimates that Google generates $9.3 billion in revenue from Europe — 33 percent of its total revenue — and that 30 percent of users may opt out of data sharing, which will hurt its ability to deliver ads.

General consensus has typically leaned heavily toward the fact people won’t be able to resist giving consent, given the products of the duopoly have become such daily habits for many. Some companies, like ad tech firm PageFair, are making the case that Google and Facebook will actually face serious challenges getting people to opt in for many of their products, which will hurt their ad revenue. According to PageFair’s Jonny Ryan, consumers have “little incentive” to give consent for products like personalized AdWords ads and Gmail ads. The same can be said of Facebook’s Audience Network and WhatsApp ads — people won’t be incentivized to opt in for them, he added.

Although Google and Facebook both have enviably large logged-in user bases across their multiple product sets, they’ll be hampered from bundling consent across them. That’s a factor that some lawyers have said will restrict Google and Facebook. On behalf of publisher trade group Digital Content Next, law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz analyzed the impact the ePrivacy Regulation could have on Google and Facebook, finding that the regulation will dramatically curb the duopoly’s ability to collect and process data, with a major reason being they cannot bundle consumer consent across products. This means they can no longer target ads based on data across services like WhatsApp, Gmail and Messenger.

The debate about whether the duopoly will win or lose will likely swing back and forth for some time. Google has 750 engineers working on privacy features across its products. “They’ll win with this by throwing lawyers at the consent problem and product people to make their services even stickier,” Wilson said.

“Those saying they are losers are those who have a history of hating on the duopoly. It’s wishful thinking,” said Paul Lomax, independent publisher consultant and former CTO for magazine group Dennis. “They do have big targets on their backs for consumer action, but they’ve both been sucking up to regulators for the last few years and have built privacy tools far better than anything publishers or ad tech have.”

In Germany and France, the debate remains black and white: Platform providers will benefit strongly from the planned ePrivacy Regulation because of their continued access to their users’ personal data, which they get from having large volumes of logged-in users for their products — essentially one gigantic registration base. That’s why publishers in those countries are trying to offset this perceived additional advantage for the platforms by building their own scaled logged-in systems.

“Short term, they [Google and Facebook] will take a hit; long term, they will win — and win big,” Wilson said. “The European Union has basically screwed their publishers by trying to stop Google and Facebook.”

For more on GDPR, download Digiday’s new guide. 

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