Month: April 2018

Apple wants publishers to distribute higher-quality videos on Apple News. But publishers want to see higher revenue from those videos. Apple has told publishers it knows the money isn’t yet there, and it has begun to show them how the company hopes to raise their videos’ profiles and revenue prospects.

Last month, Apple added a Top Videos section to the app’s main For You tab to make the 60 million people in the U.S. that use Apple News every month more aware of publishers’ videos. And it has begun inserting skippable interstitial video ads between these videos, which publishers hope will generate money they’re not getting from the videos they distribute on Apple News.

Apple is keeping 50 percent of the revenue from those ads and divvying up the remaining 50 percent among the publishers whose videos appear in the feed when an ad runs, according to three publishers. Based on a document published to Apple’s developer site and dated “April 2018,” the interstitial video ads are currently “only available as Apple inventory.” An Apple spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

The Top Videos section within Apple News mirrors the Top Videos section that Apple added last fall to the app’s widget that people can access by swiping left on their iPhone home screen. The Apple News editorial team selects the videos for both sections, and they play in sequence. Videos featured in these sections outperform the average video on Apple News, accounting for a majority of the views for some publishers, according to two publishers. However, in the experience of one of those publishers, people are quick to skip through these videos, which can have median watch times of less than 20 seconds.

Publishers are interested to see if the in-app Top Videos section will lead to longer watch times, but they said it’s too early to know and will be hard to determine for sure; Apple doesn’t break out the two placements separately from one another in publishers’ measurement dashboards. Besides, there’s another reason that video watch times would increase.

The Apple News team is pushing for longer, more original videos from publishers, coinciding with the additions of the in-app Top Videos section and interstitial video ads. To date, publishers typically distribute the same short, sound-optional videos on Apple News that they post on their own properties as well as platforms like Facebook and Twitter. If they do tailor those videos, that usually means making sure a video features text for audio-averse viewers and that it is edited into a square or vertical format to be eligible for the Top Videos sections. But since adding the in-app Top Videos section in March, Apple has solicited longer videos that exceed two minutes.

“They’re trying to find ways to put more premium, evergreen content in the experience,” said a publisher.

Apple is seeking more serialized programming for its news app. For example, Apple has run what are described as “takeovers” within the Top Videos section, in which all the videos relate to a specific topic and can even be from a single publisher. Videos within these takeovers tend to receive a higher viewership than the standalone videos typically included in the section, according to two publishers. Another example of Apple’s interest in higher-quality programming: Last week, BuzzFeed News premiered the first three episodes of its docuseries “Future History: 1968” on Apple News.

However, for publishers to invest more in the videos they distribute on Apple News, Apple needs to show they’ll receive a return on that investment. So far it hasn’t, and Apple knows it.

“At this point, the money is not there,” said one publisher.

NBCUniversal has sold ad inventory for Apple News for the past year. Trevor Fellows, evp of digital sales and strategy at NBCU, said it’s taken time for that effort, announced in late 2016, to ramp up, but that ad sales in the app should be “significant” this year. He acknowledged that the amount of revenue each publisher sees will vary depending on how much content they distribute and traffic they get on the app, and Apple’s cut will also influence it.

“2017 was a startup year,” he said. “We’re seeing significant ad revenue this year.”

While big money may not be there yet, publishers aren’t giving up on it, thanks in part to Apple’s transparency about the issue and the size of the app’s audience. “They’ve been patient with us, and we’re patient with them. A lot of people have iPhones,” said one of the publishers. But that patience won’t last forever, particularly as publishers see the money they could be making.

Publishers receive 70 percent of the revenue from the pre-roll ads that Apple sells against their videos through NBCUniversal in the U.S. and The Telegraph in the U.K. But given that the Apple News audience skews toward affluent people in their mid-20s to mid-40s, publishers would prefer to sell that inventory on their own. And while they can, Apple hasn’t made it easy to do so. Apple has begun letting more publishers use Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers to serve ads against their Apple News inventory, but limits on targeting and third-party verification impose “a major burden,” said one publisher. As a result, publishers are left for now to largely rely on the revenue share and to approach Apple News as more of a marketing play than a business driver.

The post Apple News ramps up its video push while publishers wait on revenue appeared first on Digiday.

Programmatic advertising is changing too fast for many marketers, who are being pushed out of their comfort zones into an ad tech landscape they know little about.

Marketers at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit Europe in Estoril, Portugal, privately confessed to finding ad tech a baffling environment that would require more time to tame than it’s worth.

“We shouldn’t rely on our technology partners to fix all our problems with advertising, but we do because media is still a small part of what we do versus our other responsibilities,” said one marketer.

The challenge, said Gawain Owen, Jellyfish’s digital strategy director, is in thinking about the technologies not just as a way to reduce display spend. Instead, Owen said marketers need to dig into the strategies their buying vendors use.

“Very rarely do brands understand what an SSP is,” said Owen, who previously handled media budgets at Diageo and Nestle. “That’s the point in the supply chain where I [as an advertiser] invested a lot of my time to understand. … I would ask publishers: Which supply-side platform would you like me to me to use, and why do you want me to use that particular one? Was it due to costs, or is that due to operational efficiency? If it was due to costs, then we would split the benefits with the publisher.”

Even for a more progressive advertiser like Duracell, pushing out from its comfort zone further into the supply chain is hard, said Jon Ones, head of digital for Duracell’s international markets.

“We trust our technology partners to choose our SSPs and negotiate the right deals with them for us,” he said. “It’s not something we’re focused on [in-housing] today because what we’re already doing [with the DSP] is bringing us so much already.”

Some advertisers like Siemens have brought programmatic talent in-house to make those calls after growing frustrated with the lack of help received from their agencies. As one agency executive during a closed-door town hall discussion said, “I’ve been at a network agency when a client has said they don’t want to use a certain partner, and the agency has countered with, ‘You are using that partner.’”

A marketer picked up on the point and urged agencies to help tackle advertising’s problems with technology. “It is really frustrating that when you ask a question [about transparency in ad tech], you get a bunch of spreadsheets,” this marketer said. “We need the transparency because we’re under pressure from different departments to look at where our money is going. It is no longer the case of just having a black hole we can throw money at in the hope it sticks somewhere.”

The post Marketers still shy away from venturing too deeply into ad tech appeared first on Digiday.

For the luxury industry, blockchain technology can provide an invaluable assurance of trust.

In luxury, an industry in which customers want to feel confident about where their items are made, their authenticity and their backgrounds, the blockchain can act as an official keeper of that information along every step of a product’s journey, verifying whether or not something is what the brand claims it is. At least that’s the promise, anyway.

“The word ‘blockchain’ is just the latest bright, shiny thing,” said Jason Kelley, the gm of blockchain services at IBM. “Put the word aside and think about the outcomes: The customer wants to make sure they can have confidence in a brand, in an industry, in what they just purchased, especially when something is high value. They want to make sure they can trust it.”

Blockchain is an open-source distributed ledger that, for consumer products, can compile and track every movement and piece of information related to a specific item as it travels through the supply chain, validating each point of the journey from sourcing to manufacturing, to retailer, to consumer. Once submitted to the blockchain, no information can be changed or removed.

“Blockchain acts as the gatekeeper in the emerging trust economy, where the supply chain plays a central role. The efficiency of a supply chain relies on trust between different stakeholders, and it can assist in increasing the traceability and reliability of information along the chain,” Patrick Laurent, a partner and technology leader at Deloitte, wrote in the company’s 2018 report on blockchain and the Internet of Things.

The problem, of course, is that blockchain requires open-source cooperation among participants to ensure that every point of interaction along the supply chain, from source to retailer, is accounted for. The luxury industry isn’t known for freely sharing secrets among competitors. But through technology like IBM’s new TrustChain platform, which uses blockchain technology to create a network of information surrounding product history, the fine jewelry industry is getting on board with the idea of a trusted database. As the network gets off the ground, it could serve as a template for other facets of the luxury industry to open up.

The power of authentication
What blockchain can bring to an industry like the diamond, gold and fine jewelry industry is a permanent digital record. The supply chain is often a complicated web of different players, and typically, records, transactions and data are kept siloed among each point of the supply chain, like the mine, the refiner, the manufacturer and the retailer.

“There’s so much power in data that you know is absolutely correct, especially in this industry,” said Kelley. “You can’t have one brand saying, ‘We’re going to fight counterfeits.’ It’s not going to work. In a blockchain network, all points are now connected, different companies are sharing their data, and that increases the level of transparency to be traced and tracked. You can then, to the consumer, give context and transparency.”

As the luxury industry begins to put emphasis on sustainable manufacturing and sourcing practices by eliminating fur from collections, opening up vertically integrated fabric labs, suppliers and manufacturers, and cleaning up their supply chains, the blockchain creates a level of accountability for practices that have been historically tricky to prove. Blockchain is at the core of startup investments at luxury accelerators, as well, demonstrating an interest but lack of internal capabilities.

“There is huge potential for luxury on the blockchain,” said Julie Rodgers Vargas, the director of digital solutions at Avery Dennison. “People buy and discard clothing from H&M without thinking much about where it’s from. When you’re spending thousands of dollars on a Birkin bag, that changes. You could learn where each piece was made, what it’s made from, who designed it and when it was made. That really matters in a luxury purchase.”

According to Kelley, as the TrustChain onboards its first official partners in the fine jewelry industry, including Asahi Refiner, Helzberg Diamonds and the Richline Group, having a detailed ledger of an item’s history on the blockchain isn’t going to be the first factor that convinces a customer to make a purchase — that will always be price and style. But transparency could be the tiebreaker.

Adopting the digital handshake
Mark Hanna, CMO of the Richline Group, attempted to get every company in the group, which owns diamond and gold manufacturers and marketers, to log its records in a cross-company server in 2006. Called The String, the product program would transparently track every action in the supply chain process in an internal database. The goal was to have a universal record that held individual diamonds’ paths from mine to manufacturer to retailer. It didn’t really work.

“It was premature for the retail world; it made them nervous, so it wasn’t a commercial success,” said Hanna. “We didn’t push it out in a big way, either, because we didn’t want to be accused of greenwashing, but our attempts at transparency were sincere.”

Hanna helped coordinate Richline Group’s participation in IBM’s TrustChain after recognizing that blockchain in fine jewelry had to be an industry-wide effort, considering how many different hands touch these pieces at different parts of the journey. For that, Hanna said blockchain’s potential in the industry extends beyond building customer trust. For everyone involved, it makes the process more efficient.

“Our goal was to not be a paper-based company, but to be a digital, data-based company across this entire chain. The benefits of this are far greater than showing your customer you sell a trusted product,” said Hanna. “We can create a greater level of efficiency because of the digital handshake. It’s opening up a chain of communication that couldn’t have happened before.”

On the customer end, that internal efficiency supports external transparency. Hanna said that Richline’s retail partners, which include major jewelry retailers like Helzberg Diamonds, can pull up an engagement ring’s full history of authenticated information, including the diamond’s composition and its sourcing. There’s also a customer-facing web database that can be used by customers to explore product history.

“The younger customer does much more research around each purchase, and that research should and will include the integrity and the ethics of each company they’re supporting,” said Hanna. “You can’t overestimate it — in 10 years, documenting sustainable practices for the consumer will be a requirement.”

Creating a template
While the TrustChain’s first execution is centered on the fine jewelry industry, Kelley said that it can be applied to any industry with a complex supply chain. The next step is convincing companies that the payoff is worth the upfront investment.

“Getting started is the obstacle. This is a new business model and new is not easy. The outcome is high when you think about it: It provides an increased level of trust to an industry where trust is critical,” said Kelley. “But it’s not easy to bring the players across an industry together. Getting started in that process is the biggest hurdle.”

Companies like Burberry, LVMH and Farfetch have started investing in blockchain technology, but getting it off the ground is genuinely a team effort. Clashing competitors will be the hardest hurdle to overcome.

“Even in luxury, we’ll start to see different companies overcome their hesitations about ‘open-source,’ said Laurent. “It’s happening in sustainability. This is the natural next step.”

The post The gatekeeper to trust: How blockchain could infiltrate luxury appeared first on Digiday.

What do Bill Harvey, David Poltrack, Irwin Gotlieb and Dr. Jim Spaeth have in common? Each has won the “Erwin Ephron Demystification Award” given by the ARF over the past four years to celebrate Erwin
and his legacy. Those of you who remember Erwin and perhaps one or two of his inimitable presentations or writings that make the latest complex concepts appear easy to understand and embrace know the
qualities he brought to the industry. Our prior winners are justifiably proud to have earned this accolade named after one of the titans of our industry.

I saw this unattributed study stat in a story this week: “34% of millennials said they need to have a personal experience with a tech brand before making a purchase, compared to 25% of Gen X and 17%
of baby boomers.” Unfortunately, the author did not go on to define what millennials means by having “a personal experience with a tech brand.” So naturally, I am confused (again).

Augustine Fou, ad fraud researcher and consultant, joined Digiday+ members for a Slack town hall on April 26 to talk about the state of online ad fraud. The full conversation is available exclusively to Digiday+ members, but lightly edited excerpts appear below. Click here to join Digiday+.

Here are Fou’s views on:

Buying ads through exchanges and intermediaries 
“Marketers should get as close to the inventory sources as possible. … As long as marketers continue to look to buy ‘scale,’ they will be ripped off by ad fraud because there is no scale to real humans visiting sites — that is a finite and scarce commodity (which should cost more). The only way to achieve ‘scale’ and more impressions is by manufacturing it.”

Ad fraud detection vendors
“Vendors are cashing in on the fraud problem, and the companies paying for it are not getting what they thought they were buying (protection against fraud). The bad guys and the tech they use are far superior to fraud and bot detection companies’ tech, so most fraud gets marked as clean, and the client (marketer) continues to get ripped off, thinking they are fine. Bad guys simply get a subscription to the fraud detection vendors and A/B test their bots and fraud methods to ensure they get marked as clean (or they get a friend to get a subscription). … [Companies] are paying for fraud detection services that don’t work, and they are still getting ripped off.”

Premium publishers benefiting from ad fraud
“For good publishers who can survive until then, there is a lot more money coming back their way when marketers wake up and realize all of this digital programmatic stuff was a complete scam, and there aren’t 100 billion unique users going on the internet and generating the 70 trillion ad impressions every year that they are buying. The amount of real ad impressions shown to real humans on real publisher sites that have real content is extremely small — like less than 1 percent of what is out there now.”

The post Ad fraud detection ‘does nothing’: A Digiday+ Slack town hall with ad fraud expert Augustine Fou appeared first on Digiday.

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