Month: February 2018

At the Digiday Hot Topic: Future of TV event last week in New York City, we sat down with over 60 media, television, and advertising executives from major companies to better understand the OTT landscape. Check out our earlier research on top performing OTT and online TV services here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Only 32 percent of respondents believe programmatic TV to currently be a viable advertising channel.
• Lack of campaign measurement and attribution were the most often cited challenges associated with programmatic TV
• Of people who said programmatic TV was three to five years away, 70 percent cited campaign measurement as its biggest challenge.
• Programmatic TV ad spending is coming from a multitude of sources, but primarily from TV and digital budgets.

It seems those hungry for “the year of programmatic TV” might find themselves waiting a little longer.

The post Digiday Research: Programmatic TV is still 1 or 2 years away appeared first on Digiday.

For the more than 200 publishers attending Digiday’s Publishing Summit in Monte Carlo this week, the main issues that were front of mind were plain: how to diversify platform distribution in the wake of Facebook’s news-feed changes, what more can be done to fight ad fraud, and how the arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation will affect business.

We asked attending publishers to jot down their biggest challenges, and we then collated ideas around how they’re planning to tackle them, across a series of themed sessions throughout the summit.

Here are the takeaways:

Diversifying platform strategies
Facebook’s latest news-feed changes fueled conversations around how publishers can pull back on throwing all resource at Facebook, and explore how to widen distribution strategies to other platforms. Twitter, Google Amp, Pinterest and LinkedIn took a far larger share of the conversation than they have to date at the Digiday Europe Publishing Summit. Attendees spoke of how Twitter has begun driving a lot more referral traffic back to them. “Twitter is having somewhat of a comeback,” said one publishing executive. Said another: “We have been talking with Pinterest, and they want to be more of a content creator and traffic driver, so that will be an area to watch for us.”

Earlier in the day, Condé Nast’s chief revenue officer, Jamie Jouning, referred to how the publisher has been working to make the content output across its numerous international Instagram accounts more consistent. That point was seized on by another publishing executive as a reason to invest more in social media managers.

“We as an [publishing] industry haven’t invested enough in social media managers. In traditional media, we still treat them as kids and pretend we can do it all. But we can’t. We need to invest more in graduates and the skills to make publishing to platforms work better,” said the same executive.

Ad fraud definition getting muddied
Thanks to the YouTube scandal last year, when advertisers pulled spend after finding their ads running alongside terrorist content, the definition of ad fraud has become muddied to the point where buyers and publishers don’t agree on the definition.

Ad misplacement — an issue that’s long existed on user-generated content platforms — has become intertwined with the original definition of ad fraud, which is bot-traffic. That’s causing publishers some headaches, making it even harder to monetize hard news.

“Advertisers now regard that [ad misplacement] as ad fraud. That’s migrated to news brands with some advertisers not wanting to advertise across hard news. So part of the problem is that what once was a simple definition [of fraud], has become skewed because of all the audiences coming into play,” said a publishing executive.

“We can’t allow clients to dictate an article they don’t like as ad fraud. It’s fine if they don’t want to appear next to certain content, but we must take a stand on that and not confuse the lines but be very clear on the definition of ad fraud actually is,” said another executive.

The arrival of Google’s Chrome ad blocker and Apple’s anti-tracking Safari update was described by executives as “painful and annoying” but “welcome” changes. “These browser changes will actually help condense the discussion back into bot inventory and non-human engagement of content,” said a different exec.

Another bone of contention: the somewhat opportune arrival of blockchain companies claiming they can fix ad fraud. “Just confuses and clouds what can be addressed by simpler, human measures,” said one executive.

GDPR: A game of wait and see
The arrival of the GDPR was the most common challenge that publishers noted. But there was relatively little discussion to move the topic forward. The atmosphere around the new law, preparing for it, and how it may affect business has become a game of wait and see for many publishers. Naturally, many have been busy getting ready for it, but confusion still remains around the definition of what constitutes personally identifiable information, as well as how to make gaining consumer consent for all products bulletproof.

One publishing executive spoke of a collaboration with a different publisher in their local market, which has opened up meaningful revenue for the two companies. But when it came to how to connect the dots on what they needed to do for joint permissions to ensure GDPR compliance, they admitted they’ve had to default to just wait and see what happens when the law kicks in. That view was echoed, with one executive adding that a “GDPR shrug” has developed in the industry.

The post ‘Twitter is having a comeback’: What’s on the minds of European publishers appeared first on Digiday.

In Europe, Vice Media is working out how to balance having a unified strategy around branded content while adapting to specific countries.

Publishers who underestimate a region’s cultural differences strike an awkward tone. Vice is moving away from simple translation, according to Nina Kennedy, head of media for Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Vice has ad operations in Germany and branded-content teams in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In Germany, Vice has around 20 people on the media side and 22 in Virtue, its creative agency, according to Kennedy. While in Austria, which has a population of 8.7 million, a tenth of Germany’s, Virtue has around 100 people working across media strategy, social strategy, campaign and account management. Despite the larger market, the creative agency landscape in Berlin is much more competitive.

“We need people in the country who understand the overall strategy but know how they need to adapt it,” said Kennedy, speaking at Digiday’s Publishing Summit in Monaco this week. This can be simple things, like including an Australian in this campaign for airline ANA that ran in Australia and Germany, changing the voice over to Swiss-German, or making the content more relevant to the interest points of that region.

“We have one strategy that’s easier for the client to monitor, one contact person, one media strategist, a consistent brand, and it’s easier to keep up with the reporting,” she said.

At the end of 2017, in order to gain more understanding of its audience, Vice surveyed its readers in European and U.S. markets on education, interests and income. As well as high levels of interest in fashion, food and travel, it found that 33 percent of respondents in Europe had an income level of over £50,000, ($70,000). Now the Vice analytics and data science team in the Netherlands is collecting this data collectively for the German-speaking market — Germany, Austria and Switzerland — so it can offer clients data at both levels.

For instance, the sharing economy is popular in Germany, so Vice is working on a campaign for an auto brand featuring the sharing economy targeted to German big cities. “In Berlin, there’s a lot of things you can do as part of the sharing economy,” said Kennedy, “but those won’t be the same opportunities for someone in a small town in Austria, so it’s not going to be a point of interest.”

Vice is working with the Berlin University of the Arts on research into the media consumption habits of Gen Z, which platforms are relevant, how Vice can seed content there, and what content is relevant to this age group. Speaking broadly, Kennedy said that early findings indicate Gen Z is more health-conscious, political and concerned with their environment thanks to millennials.

“Diversifying platforms is part of the master plan. We’re finding ways to get organic reach on Facebook and not be too dependent on the algorithm,” said Kennedy. Platform diversification was a topic much discussed at the Summit: In the first session, Duncan Chater, chief brand officer Hearst UK, revealed the magazine brand was publishing video content to Musical.ly, a platform that Kennedy said that has users typically in the younger teens.

“We can’t be too dependent on one target group,” she said, “just like we can’t be too dependent on one traffic-referral source. As a youth media brand, we have to be on top of trends and informed.”

The post How Vice localizes branded content across Europe appeared first on Digiday.

Google has done several things to make publishers smile lately: From its work on fast-loading mobile pages to ending first-click-free to promoting subscription sales, Google has positioned itself favorably with publishers, especially as Facebook’s relationship with publishers has become increasingly strained.

But it’s not all rainbows when it comes to publishers’s Google relationship. There’s Google’s new Chrome ad filter where Google’s setting the rules for what ad formats get blocked. Europe is battling it over accusations that it’s squelching price competition. One critical concern: Some worry about Google’s propensity to show more and more information in its search results. Publishers are grumbling about the trend even as Google has become a growing part of publishers’ referral traffic.

In December, Google expanded the size of snippets, the two- to three-line blurb that appears under search results. In the years up until then, the search page has gotten progressively crowded, with featured snippets, also called answer boxes, that showcase the top search result, FAQs and structured data like movie showtimes. (And of course, ads.) All function to provide more answers on the search page itself and crowd out publisher content.

“Google is becoming the home page,” griped one publisher anonymously.

Publishers should focus on making content that’s great, current and in a good user experience, rather than try to optimize to every change Google makes, said another, Neil Vogel, CEO of Dotdash, parent of SEO-driven sites like Verywell and The Balance.

“That said, if you’re a publisher, it’s concerning that Google is putting more information on the search results page,” Vogel said. “The more Google answers on this page, the less they have to go somewhere else.” Right now this expansion hasn’t had a noticeable effect on Dotdash’s brands but the company’s keeping an eye on it, he said.

The issue is even more noticeable on mobile than desktop due to the screen size. Search for diabetes symptoms, for example, and you’ll see an ad, info box that Google calls a knowledge graph panel and before any publisher links appear.

“There’s less real estate, so when you see more Google-published information, it just means more scrolling down that you need to do,” said David Siegel, CEO of Investopedia, which gets more than 60 percent of its traffic from Google. According to SEMRush, 14 percent of keywords that Investopedia ranks for now contain a featured snippet.

The content creep affects publishers in all categories, particularly those that trade in content that’s commoditized, like definitions and straightforward answers to questions. Getting a simple question answered on the search page obviates the need to click through to the publisher’s site, and Google’s goal is to answer users’ questions quickly, as illustrated by a recent Outline article about CelebrityNetWorth.com, which said it was a casualty of Google’s snippets.

Google will increasingly seek ways to provide “zero-click answers” to search queries because it gives the company a competitive advantage, said Andrew Montalenti, co-founder and CTO of Parsely. Publishers should be aware of the possible impact of Google’s increasing focus on making search less about finding web pages and more about finding instant answers, he said.

Google said it does take into account snippets’ impact on publishers and that featured snippets do drive traffic for them.

Over time, Investopedia has insulated itself from this trend by reducing its reliance on definitional content from more than 50 percent of its content to under 30 percent, Siegel said. “It forces us to do a better job, to give the context,” he said.

It’s hard to say if the increasingly crowded search page has impacted traffic to publishers because traffic is made up of a lot of factors and Google traffic has been generally increasing anyway.

Those who are practiced search optimization say that publishers can work their way the featured snippet or answer box and tailor their content for longer snippets. If it’s in the featured snippet and first result, Investopedia will get 10 to 20 percent more clicks than if it’s just in the first result, said Siegel. “It doesn’t necessarily help you a lot, but it doesn’t hurt you.”

“Absolutely, in some cases Google is providing the platform where people get more of their questions answered without a need for clicking off to the publisher,” said Shahzad Abbas, vp of digital media at SEO firm Define Media Group. “In some cases, they’re providing opportunities for publishers to actually get more traffic. There is one potential downside in that the expansion of the snippet is going to push down a little bit what comes after. If people have to scroll down to get to you, that ends up dramatic impacting the CTRs.”

And with Google using snippets for voice searches, now, too, publishers are wise to master them.

The post Publishers warm to Google, but still worry about getting crowded out in search results appeared first on Digiday.

After months of asking to get their content into Amazon, publishers finally got their wish. For the past several months, Amazon has been running a test with a small group of publishers where versions of publishers’ commerce-focused articles are accessible directly inside Amazon’s website.

The articles can be found through Google search or through searches for specific keywords inside Amazon and are shoppable just like they’d be on a publisher’s own site. For some commerce-focused publishers, particularly smaller or less-established ones, these tests represent an opportunity to get in front of an enormous number of shoppers. “They were helping us to reach their massive audience,” said an executive at one publisher that has worked on a number of different content initiatives with Amazon before.

But that scale and exposure comes at a price. Amazon is not offering publishers licensing fees to run their content. Instead it is tying publishers’ content fees to performance in driving purchases. If a reader decides to buy a backpack recommended in Wirecutter’s guide to travel, for example, a click on that backpack directs them to the product page inside Amazon, where they can complete a purchase. Wirecutter earns a commission on the purchase. 

The commission rates, according to people familiar with the arrangement, are identical to the ones Amazon would pay out if the transaction originated on a publisher’s own website. Amazon is not paying a licensing fee for the content, according to one publisher. Amazon confirmed the tests were underway but would not answer questions about how publishers are compensated.

For some publishers, the tests signal something much scarier. If Amazon, which already claims more than 40 cents of every dollar spent on e-commerce in the United States, trains its customers to look for third-party recommendations inside its platform, it will be able to exert even more control over the affiliate commerce world, potentially dropping affiliate commission rates to a fraction of their current levels. The program also comes at a time when the sheen is decidedly off distributed media strategies that give control over to platforms.

“When will publishers learn?” said an executive at a commerce-focused publisher that’s not taking part in the tests. “The goal is to build a direct, habitual relationship with consumers. The more you train them that they don’t need to come to you, the worse off you are.”

Amazon has experimented with publisher content before. In 2015, it created holiday gift guides with lifestyle-focused publishers including PureWow, Allure and Oprah Winfrey’s O, The Oprah Magazine. This past year, O also worked with Amazon on a shoppable page that compiled beauty products that Oprah called best in class. Representatives from O did not respond to questions about its work with Amazon.

The current test is more modest. Amazon’s Wirecutter guide to travel, for example, is an abridged version of a pre-existing article, without any of the added bells and whistles of the Oprah collaboration. Wirecutter declined to answer questions about its Amazon collaboration.

Amazon sees the addition of content to its site as making it easier to discover products on its sites, publishers say. “We’ve had so many conversations with them about helping them with [product] discovery,” said one executive at a commerce-focused publisher. “They’re looking for a way to add to their recommendation engines.”

But while Amazon dangles detailed information in front of agencies and marketers to entice them to spend advertising dollars, it offers only high-level information to publishers, according to multiple publishers. “I’d rather them give us some form of guidance,” another commerce-focused publishing executive said, such as Amazon’s underlying rationale for the kind of content it wants or what works with its users.

That dynamic could start to change, however. One publisher that has worked with Amazon said the company recently created a brand strategy team to work with publishers on collaborations. That strategy, one publisher said, will allow publishers to better coordinate tests run with Amazon across multiple fronts. A separate publisher, who also isn’t involved in the tests, said he’d noticed “momentum” around creating better communication between departments but hadn’t met anyone in brand strategy.

Until recently, many of the content tests Amazon has conducted with publishers have been run independently by executives from different corners of the company. The decision to pay publishers to make content for Spark, an Instagram-esque photo-sharing product, was made by executives in Amazon Associates, while the decision to pay other publishers to make videos about products came from another corner of the company, according to publishers that have been involved in these respective tests.

Should opportunities arise to work with Amazon more closely, publishers will have to figure out if that’s worth it, not just for the additional expenditure of time and energy but the prospect of becoming overly dependent on them. “That concern, writ large, is the problem we face with every single platform on the distributed web,” one publisher said.

The post Publishers warily embrace Amazon program to run their content on Amazon.com appeared first on Digiday.

The ultimate status symbol today is being “well,” a process that, naturally, involves lots of exercise. Eager to capitalize on this trend, beauty brands are creating product lines meant to be best for before, during and after the most rigorous sweat session.

Meet “active beauty.” Pretty Athletic, Sweat Cosmetics, SweatWELLth and Yuni Beauty are just a few of the brands devoted to the category that have cropped up in recent years. The products they encompass are wide-ranging, including foundation that withstands sweat, perfumes meant to motivate, post-workout blotting papers and sunscreen that blocks exposure to pollution. They’re reflective of a larger cultural desire to look and feel your best at all times, regardless of your surroundings — after all, the gym is an Instagram opportunity-in-waiting (not to mention the new church).

“Consumers are not slowing down anytime soon when it comes to their lifestyles,” said Alison Gaither, beauty analyst at Mintel, which dubbed active beauty a top beauty trend for 2017.

Tarte and Birchbox kicked things off in 2016 with their (respective) athleisure-inspired assortments. In skin care, there’s Clinique’s Fit line, which targets exercise-specific concerns like clogged pores and redness, and Supergoop’s Barre to Bar beauty set. Last year, the buzzy E.l.f. Beauty launched its Active range last year, complete with products like a Workout Ready Eyeliner Pencil and Sweat Resistant Mascara.

But the concept of long-wear products isn’t exactly novel, and some industry sources believe the trend is largely a case of different, smarter marketing. New packaging may emphasis an older formulation’s workout appeal, for example, while bundles may simply bring older products together under a new gym-approved theme.

“Beauty brands are just responding to the athleisure focus in fashion that’s been going on, and the overall increased emphasis on wellness,” said Kathleen Hou, beauty director at The Cut.

“With all of the new classes and fitness programs, especially for women, it’s no wonder makeup and beauty lines are jumping on this trend,” echoed Dr. Alan Parks, the dermatologist and founder of DermWarehouse.

But, according to Gaither, there are some interesting innovations taking place, pointing to Sweat Cosmetics as an example. Founded in 2015 by five former professional and Olympic athletes, the brand uses mineral ingredients and a rigorous testing process to create long-lasting products made to survive a workout.

“We saw a huge gap in the beauty and fitness markets,” said co-founder Leslie Osborne. “More and more women are striving to be active, and we wanted to create a product that would not just hold up in our professional sports careers, but in any active lifestyle.”

Its foundation required more than 18 months — and 8 different rounds — of testing with a chemist before its launch. The powder formulation was also tested by the founders’ teammates, moms, friends and people at local gyms, who all provided feedback. The founders themselves tried it out during 90-minute soccer games, hot yoga sessions, long runs, SoulCycle and more, she said.

Dr. Parks believes that the category does have potential beyond marketing, especially at the rate that new technologies are currently being developed. “[Advances in technology] make it easier for companies to come up with products that will do well in different environments and under different circumstances,” he said.

According to Rebecca Killian, the executive vice president of creative and product development for SweatWELLth, it’s her brand’s special “SW Encapsulated Defense Technology” that provides a unique benefit in the market. The proprietary formula is said to prevent harmful fungus from growing, and has antibacterial properties for relieving skin irritations and healing wounds. When it launched earlier this month, sources told WWD they expect the company to bring in between $2 million and $5 million in first-year revenues.

There’s certainly a market for these lines — just look to athleisure, which NPD estimates will surpass sales of $178 billion by 2019. Active beauty is likely to grow in step with this larger category, said Joyce Lee, the founder and CEO of Talk to Her and a beauty consultant for Opening Ceremony.

“Functional and multitasking products are embedded in our lives, and the demand for them will only grow,” she said.

And, even if the wellness bubble were to unexpectedly burst, said Hou, the core elements of these long-lasting products will still appeal to consumers: “Who wouldn’t want a lip and cheek tint that can last you the whole day, including at the gym?”

The post Brands new and old are cashing in on ‘active beauty’ appeared first on Digiday.

United has found that bringing more resources, especially video, in-house has allowed it to bypass long lead times and back-and-forth calls on the phone with its agencies.  

Last July, United hired Megan Mitchell, previously head of social media and video for publisher TravelZoo, as senior manager for integrated digital engagement. Her job: guide United’s growing in-house team in creating content on United’s social channels. Mitchell is one of three people who provide the direction for social content, but they are part of a larger creative services team that handles strategy as well as creative execution. United would not share how big its larger team is, only that it’s hard to pinpoint just how many people create in-house content.

“We’re ramping up our in-house capabilities, especially for video, so that we can stay relevant and move at the speed of social,” said Mitchell, who said United’s in-house capabilities really started to take off in the same month she was hired.

By moving more video in-house, Mitchell said United has been able to increase in speed and efficiency. Since July, United has more than doubled the number of videos it shares to platforms, which has resulted in video views increasing by 245 percent and minutes watched increasing by 311 percent, according to Mitchell. Mitchell said the company does not comment on the cost of bringing more resources in-house or how much it is saving by doing so.

For its current Olympics campaign “Superheros,” however, United has seen its new speed payoff. It’s working with Wunderman to create 40 pieces of social content for Facebook, where United has 1.1 million followers, and Instagram, where United has 513,000 followers, for the winter games, but United is creating some of the videos in-house in order to pull off a quicker turnaround time, although the airline pointed out that no work is being lost to Wunderman, which Untied uses for social campaigns and Socialcode, which United uses for media planning and buying.

For example, United discovered that Olympic figure skater Bradie Tennell’s family had created a GoFundMe page to raise the money needed to visit the Olympian when she performed in South Korea. It was an opportunity for United to make an impact, but it needed to be able to be nimble and turn the surprise and a video about it around in 24 hours. So United did the whole thing in-house and posted it to Facebook where it received nearly 70,000 views.

Another major reason for bringing video resources in-house is to have the flexibility to promote United employees, said Mitchell.

“United is a big brand, and we want our customers to know the people who are serving them and helping them to get to their destinations,” said Mitchell.

One way United is sharing stories of its employees is through a series of Facebook albums called “Behind the Wing.” Starting in November, United shared photos taken by its employees as they go about their daily work. Every month, United highlights another employee’s photos in a Facebook album. “[Our employees] are able to give a perspective of our operation that customers don’t normally see,” said Mitchell.

Other times, employees will share content directly to their own social accounts. Airline pilot Mike Morgan, for instance, shares photos he takes from the air to his Instagram with the hashtags #mikeshot and #unitedjourney.

And in March, United plans on launching a social campaign called “Women United” for Women’s History Month. Every day, United will post a piece of content highlighting the company’s female employees.

The airline has certainly taken a lot of PR nosedives on social media. The peak was in April 2017, when security officers dragged off a bloodied United passenger after they refused to give up his seat for an airline employee. That led to a barrage of upset customers sharing their outrage online. In the past year, the company has also received flack for denying a woman to board a plane because she was wearing leggings, stopping a woman from carrying on her “emotional support” peacock and for canceling a woman’s ticket when she was on her way to see her dying mother.

According to United, the incident last April isn’t what made the brand double down on telling the stories of its employees. Rather, the idea was set in motion beginning in October 2016, when United hired Dana Brooks Reinglass as its first Chief Storyteller, who first began to build out the company’s in-house creative team. However, Mitchell said that it was in July that United really wanted to and, because of the new in-house resources, had the ability to “step up and make a pointed effort to start telling those stories and make them external and socialized.”

Image courtesy of United’s Instagram 

The post How United Airlines is taking more video content creation in-house appeared first on Digiday.

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