Month: April 2018

June 2015 was an ebullient time for Mic.com. The company closed a $17 million funding round. The news site for millennials was chasing hard-hitting stories about the racially fraught police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and sexism in gaming. To celebrate its list of 50 young trailblazers, Mic threw a Grey Goose-sponsored party at Marquee, a swanky nightclub in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood decked out with red leather sofas and LED screens. It was a big step up from the parties that co-founder and CEO Chris Altchek had held at his apartment when the company, founded in 2011, was even younger. “It felt like we were doing something cool and awesome,” a former employee reminisced.

It’s become something of a cliché in digital media: Digital upstart gets funding on pitch to reinvent news for millennials by scaling the Facebook algorithm, only to fall back to earth when Facebook pulls the rug out from under them. Mic looks to some to be another casualty of the social network’s strategy change, after the likes of LittleThings and Attn. It’s massively reliant on Facebook, and its views there have fallen sharply in the past year to 11 million views in March, down from 192 million in April 2017, according to CrowdTangle.

To Noah Mallin, head of experience, content and sponsorships at Wavemaker, the question is whether Mic can find its footing as a small player as the social media landscape changes and show it’s different from other millennial-aimed news sites.

“It’s hard to see how they go it alone and kind of keep things going. It’s hard to stand out even in the niche that they have,” Mallin said. “There are a lot of others saying, ‘We’re going to bring news of the day to millennials with deep dives.’ BuzzFeed has pivoted into being a real, quality journalism machine. NowThis, this has been their niche for a while. That makes Mic less differentiated.”

Altchek has painted a much different picture. He’s said the company, having raised $60 million in funding in total, just had its best quarter yet — and it is on track to break even in 2019, by shifting away from display advertising and to long-term branded content deals for companies like GE and Walmart. Clickbait may have defined its early days, buy Mic has hired seasoned journalists Cory Haik and Kerry Lauerman from The Washington Post to emphasize quality journalism. Last summer, to get ahead of the Facebook algorithm change and help reach profitability, Mic laid off 25 people.

“We started focusing on taking our voice and turning it into what we found most successful with audience,” Altchek said on the Digiday Podcast. “For us, it’s not doom and gloom because the audience wants this kind of journalism.”

Site traffic has plunged
But in and outside the company, there’s a counter-narrative brewing that Mic waited too long to pivot away from clickbait and won’t be able to support the high cost of the high-quality journalism it says it wants to do. Three sources who were privy to the numbers directly or from employees told Digiday that, as of earlier this year, Mic was on track to run out of funding by late 2018. In a shuffle at the top, the company’s president, Jonathan Carson, is leaving the company after a year on the job and hasn’t been replaced.

Altchek wouldn’t comment on the record for this article, but a spokesperson for the company said: “Mic is in a strong cash position and on track to break even in 2019. Our business is on very solid ground and anything to the contrary is false.”

Mic isn’t alone in trying to survive the changing distributed media landscape, but other publishers have been further ahead in increasing traffic to their own sites through things like newsletters and targeted Facebook posts. Mic’s traffic to its own site has plunged in the past year, though, to 5 million uniques from 17 million a year ago, per comScore.

The decline in site traffic might be OK if it were offset by big increases in views elsewhere. But the vast majority of Mic’s social followers remain on Facebook. Its Facebook views declined to 16 million in March from 51 million in January, and it hasn’t been able to replace those views. Mic’s YouTube views doubled in that time, but were still less than 1 million, according to Tubular Labs.

Mic has enthusiastically embraced platform initiatives like Apple News as well as Facebook’s Instant Articles and its live video product, even trying a BuzzFeed-exploding-watermelon type of experiment at one point. But none of these products have become material or ongoing sources of revenue to publishers. Mic has developed a documentary series for Hulu and has said it has other video partnerships that are just waiting to be announced. But profits for non-syndicated video are usually low.

Mic faces a crowded news market
Declining site audience and social reach on Facebook raise questions for Mic’s business model, which is predicated on making branded content that matches Mic’s editorial style. That kind of advertising is labor-intensive and hard to make highly profitable, though, and the less owned traffic Mic has, the more it has to pay Facebook to meet the advertiser’s distribution requirements, which cuts into profit margins.

Mic has repeatedly said comScore’s numbers don’t take into account its social distribution and that it actually reaches an average of 50 million monthly uniques, as measured by Nielsen. (That’s still down from 76 million monthly uniques that it claimed last summer.)

Ad buyers still use comScore to gauge a site’s health, though. People who come directly to a site on average stay longer and visit more pages.

“ComScore, you can quibble about how accurate it is, but as a comparative standpoint, it’s helpful,” Mallin said. “Having traffic to your own site is becoming more, not less important.”

 

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The trend of global advertisers taking more marketing in-house is gaining momentum, reviving the oft-debated topic of the future of the agency model. For the latest installment of our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for honesty, we talked to a senior marketer at a global advertiser who feels no other alternative exists but to take more control from agencies when they can’t be trusted to make the right calls.

Here are excerpts from the conversation, edited for clarity.

You’re taking parts of your programmatic and media-buying efforts in-house. Why are you doing that when you could pay an agency to provide that service?
The agencies have caused marketers like myself and others to bring more knowledge in-house. Yes, in-housing that expertise is beneficial for us because we control and track the data, and so can have a more transparent supply chain with internal media specialists, who will also care about and understand the brand better. But I prefer working with agencies because while we might spend loads of money recruiting the best media expertise, we have to find the resources to sustain that expertise. Things move so quickly that we as marketers need agencies who know more about these technologies than us. Because agencies are in such a competitive market, they thrive off the need to innovate, whereas things can get stagnant with in-house expertise because businesses have internal politics and processes preventing decisions from being made fast.

Despite your misgivings, do you still think there’s a role for agencies?
I think it’s better to have more agile agencies rather than try and in-house all programmatic skills. The processing of in-housing skills and technologies on the client side can be long because you’re bound by certain policies or restricted by internal politics as to how reactive you can be to issues and trends. For us, it’s more about trying to build a hybrid model that you’re seeing other brands adopt at the moment, where you have the knowledge in-house, but the execution is more on the agency side.

You’re in-housing parts of your media management despite knowing the pitfalls. Why?
I know people say the agency model is broken and that clients should pay more to fix it, but it’s hard to think that will solve things when you see how petty things can get when working with multiple agencies. Agencies know they need to collaborate — some even want to — but they don’t. And that’s because those businesses all have different agendas which aren’t aligned to mine, so they’re all just focused — understandably — on winning the biggest part of my budget, but in a way that sabotages other agencies on the account or campaign. I think it starts with looking at the business model of those businesses and how they adapt for the future.

So, while competition among agencies can be good for driving innovation, you’re saying that competitive streak is having a negative impact?
Let’s say I have a million dollars to drop on a campaign that will then get shared across my global agencies. What has happened in the past is the media agency, for example, is pushing to take as much of that budget as they can, so they’ve sabotaged parts of the campaign they think they could take from creative agencies. I’ve seen things like agencies using the wrong assets on a Facebook campaign to make out like the creative agency has provided the wrong format, while other times I’ve seen agencies fail to share deadlines with others working on a campaign to make them look bad. This is what it’s like when it comes to trying to get agencies to work together — it’s like babysitting kids.

How do you get your agencies to work together?
It sounds basic to say, but I find running workshops, where I’m in the room, is the best way to get them to work together. … Agencies needed to be open to collaboration, which effectively means agreeing on processes and strategies upfront as well as agreeing on the reporting, which they work together on. That’s not about me telling my agencies what to do. It’s a team effort because all parties in that workshop have to see the value in it.

The issue with those workshops is I have to be there; otherwise, they won’t always work. If they still can’t play nice with others, then I change the agency. There’s a first warning, and a second one, and then if nothing has improved after that, then I’ve had to tell them that we’re looking for another agency. That’s happened at every company I’ve worked in on the brand side. It doesn’t matter how big you are [as an agency]. If you have a bad attitude, then that’s one of the biggest killers for me.

Download Digiday’s complete agency confessions collection. 

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The Digital Content NewFronts were designed to create an upfront marketplace for digital video, where media companies could present upcoming programming to advertisers — just like the TV upfronts. But the NewFronts have become less about securing immediate upfront ad commitments — which is harder to do when digital can be transacted year-round — and more of a place for presenters to lay out their overall positioning to marketers.

In such an environment, it’s no surprise that big media companies such as ESPN and Viacom — both of which are making big investments in original digital video, and want marketers and other industry professionals to know about it — are presenting at this year’s event.

“There is going to be an aspect of our show where it’s going to be about the content, which, frankly, the IAB wants. The IAB has positioned the NewFronts to talk about compelling programming designed and built for digital, and we want to be respectful of that,” said Travis Howe, svp of digital ad product sales and strategy at ESPN. “But in the digital space, it’s difficult to talk only about content. We’re taking this opportunity to talk about our scale, size and the ways we can support advertisers in reaching sports fans.”

This will be ESPN’s and Viacom’s first NewFronts presentations. In addition, ESPN’s parent company Disney is hosting its second NewFronts presentation for its Disney Digital Network unit.

ESPN still plans to host its annual upfront presentation at the Minskoff Theatre in Manhattan on May 15. More than 1,800 guests are expected, while roughly 300 are expected at its NewFront at the Cedar Lake venue in New York City.

Howe said ESPN is treating both presentations as two parts of one big show. While ESPN plans to include digital programming and initiatives at its upfront presentation, the company thought that given its big investment in digital, it should have a separate event to showcase those activities, which include a new subscription streaming service, ESPN+, and original content deals with Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.

As for their presentations, expect ESPN and Viacom to showcase original digital shows that extend existing TV franchises, as they do with “SportsCenter” and “MTV Cribs,” respectively, on Snapchat.

Viacom, meanwhile, is also using its first NewFront to market its digital investments — specifically, it’s the coming-out party for Viacom Digital Studios, a 300-person division responsible for digital video programming across the Viacom media portfolio. Kelly Day, a veteran of AwesomenessTV and Discovery, leads the division.

Day didn’t say what programming or partnerships Viacom Digital Studios would reveal during its presentation on April 30 at The Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers in New York City, pointing to existing partnerships such as Viacom’s show production deal with Snapchat as an example of what to expect.

“We have been building to this point, where we feel like there is a new story for us to tell [with Viacom Digital Studios],” said Day. “And this is the right time and right venue and the right way to pull everything together and deliver that message to our constituents.”

Unlike ESPN, Viacom is not hosting an upfront, but instead has been hosting private dinners with senior advertising and marketing execs plus Day and Viacom leaders including CEO Bob Bakish. Viacom Digital Studios has been brought up during these dinners, but similar to ESPN’s argument, there isn’t enough time during these settings to cover all of the messaging and announcements across the Viacom portfolio, Day said.

“In future years, we might take a different route, but this year, it’s such a big message and a new message that we couldn’t do it justice in just a dinner setting,” Day said.

ESPN, Disney and Viacom are not the first big media companies to host NewFronts presentations. In the past, NBCUniversal and Turner have hosted NewFronts events. Neither have returned for this year’s show.

A source at a big media company that has previously presented at the NewFronts said the company decided to beef up its upfront presentation this year instead of having separate digital and TV events. “Because a lot of our portfolio is brand-focused, it does not make sense for us to continue siloing new and emerging platforms,” this source said.

This source also said deal-making still begins after the upfronts end, which minimizes the need to host a lavish NewFronts party. In terms of ad dollars that could be attributed to the upfronts versus the NewFronts, it’s “like the NBA versus junior varsity,” this source said.

Others push back and argue that the NewFronts can be valuable, especially as big media companies continue to make investments in digital content and advertising.

“To some extent, part of the reason why you’re seeing more traditional media companies this year [at the NewFronts] is because we’re finally at an inflection point where traditional media companies are really taking digital more seriously,” said Day. “There’s real investment in terms of both resources and dollars toward it.”

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If you don’t succeed, try again. Snapchat really wants Spectacles to happen, again. But this time, Snap’s retail strategy involves a lot less hype — no fancy vending machines — and a lot more by-the-books tactics. 

The second generation of Spectacles has several improvements from the first, including taking photos (not just videos) and faster-loading and better-quality snaps. The sunglasses are also sleeker and lighter than the previous model, and they’re water-resistant. Snap also announced an official partner for making prescription lenses, Lensabl.

Yet the biggest shift isn’t those changes in the product. It’s the marketing. Starting at launch, Spectacles are available to buy on Spectacles.com, within the Snapchat app and through Lensabl. If that sounds practical, that’s because it is — and is very different than the original Spectacles debacle, which came with a $40 million write-off due to overestimating demand. Snap suddenly introduced its first-generation Spectacles with distribution relying on mysterious vending machines dropped seemingly randomly around the world to offer a limited number of glasses for a limited amount of time. The approach paid off with lots of buzz — winning three Gold Lions at Cannes  — but didn’t rack up much in the way of sales.

“The first round for Spectacles was mediocre for selling glasses, but very successful for showing how Snap can innovate as a marketer first and product manufacturer second. It let the product live to see another day, too. This time, they have to show off the product, not the marketing,” said David Berkowitz, marketing lead at Storyhunter.

Indeed, Snap only sold 220,000 of the first-generation Spectacles, despite the Snapbot drops and the later move to sell on Amazon and via Spectacles.com. Snap also bought outdoor displays, such as buckets at airport security, and ran programmatic ads. The company set up more permanent Spectacles stands at high-end retailers and on college campuses, and still, 0.11 percent of Snapchat’s daily average users purchased them.

The exclusivity in their early days did create an expensive online resale market and stir up interest with some Snapchat superfans who weren’t nearby any of the first few drops.

“My friends were snapping about it and being in line for hours. I saw that everyone wanted one, so I wanted one,” said Cyrene Quiamco, a Snapchat influencer. “My first thought was, ‘Why would anyone want to turn their phone?’” Quiamco said, referencing Spectacles’ ability to take 180-degree videos. That was a focus in Snap’s promos.

But after getting her first pair thanks to a friend, Quiamco started using her Spectacles and Snapchat’s creative tools (like text and doodling) to make videos that encouraged her followers to turn the phone. Now, a year and a half into wearing Spectacles, Quiamco said she’s planning to buy the second-generation product.

“It’s similar to cell phones whenever you get a new version,” Quiamco said. “It’s faster. It’s sleeker. Technology is kind of like that. It’s more stylish. I think the second version is more usable.”

Of course, wanting Spectacles when you, in part, make your living isn’t too surprising. When it comes to the mainstream consumer or really the 187 million people who use Snapchat every day, Snap introduced new marketing strategies.

While Snap previously did not allow media outlets early access to Spectacles (other than WSJ. Magazine), the company gifted tech outlets, including The Verge, Mashable and Wired as well as Time and Refinery29, with the second-generation product for a quick review. That earned press helped spread the word at launch rather than just having a surprise drop of a Snapbot nearby the headquarters in Venice, California.

“Although there was hype with vending machines, I don’t think it achieved a desired measurable success. They are likely more confident in this product with its tweaks in function and design,” said Tyler Hayes, content manager at tech product startup Xcentz. “But ultimately, can’t you really only do a secretive marketing campaign once before it’s played out and predictable?”

On launch day, Snapchat ran an ad for Spectacles in the Discover section of the app, where users could swipe up to buy. The company plans to show more of these ads on the app, a Snap spokesperson said. Snapchat also will create Our Stories that feature snaps captured by Spectacles. To celebrate people who buy them, the Actionmojis (live Bitmojis on Snap Map) will show if a user has their Spectacles connected or recently took snaps with them.

A Snap spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company will run TV ads or any other type of paid ads, like billboards or online ads, as they have in the past. Snap has two promotional videos on the Spectacles YouTube page. The videos emphasize the summer launch of the product, which is indeed a pair of sunglasses in addition to a camera.

Snap could use those promos for ads and continue to market Spectacles in other creative ways. Or not. 

“It would have been cool to open Snap Map and hunt for very limited pairs of Spectacles in AR, [and] if found, shipped to you for free or at discount,” said Nick Aguirre, a law student who is an investor in Snap. “But I think they maybe just didn’t want any gimmicky marketing this time around. Just straight to the point.”

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A year after creating an interactive news team, Politico says it’s paying off. The content has drawn 7 million unique visitors to more than 20 interactive graphics such as one detailing White House visitor logs and a fact-checking analysis of the State of the Union address, and it gets seven times as much readership as the average story, said Politico editor Carrie Budoff Brown.

The five-person interactive team’s work has also sparked advertiser interest. Politico got AARP to sponsor a series called “The Deciders” that will focus on U.S. voters who are 50 and older heading into the midterm elections. That series will include polls conducted by Politico and AARP that the interactive team will convert into charts and other visualizations, which will then inform articles in Politico’s print magazine.

“The fact that we have a team that can do visually compelling interactive graphics is a selling point for us as we do ambitious projects that might have an underwritten component for sponsors,” said Brown, who emphasized that sponsors have no role in the editorial content they underwrite.

Brown took a personal interest in establishing the interactive news team, which she did soon after taking the reins of the publication after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. One of Politico’s first reporters, having joined a month before its 2007 launch, Brown always wanted to tell stories in multiple ways.

She shared that objective with Paul Volpe, who was hired from The New York Times in November 2016 as Politico’s executive editor. At the Times and The Washington Post before that, Volpe had worked with visual journalists and interactive developers, and he saw the importance of visual journalism as an enabler of transparency and accountability journalism, he said.

Politico’s interactive team illustrated that importance with one of its first projects. After the Trump administration decided against releasing public White House visitor logs, Politico reporter Andrew Restuccia worked with the interactive team to create an unauthorized version. “We were trying to tell a story on the surface level for anyone who just popped in and wanted to gain some information,” Volpe said. “And then we were also able to provide users a tool to go deeper and look at the types of people, whether it was from industry or by race or gender, that were visiting the White House.”

Beyond individual articles, the interactive team rebuilt the technology underpinning Politico’s election results coverage. It also created a custom content management system to make who’s who lists like the Politico 50 more mobile-friendly and a chat tool to have Slack power its live blogs.

All of that work can overextend the interactive team, particularly as more members of Politico’s newsroom want to work with it. To deal with that, the team has built back-end tools for other reporters to do their own visual journalism, such as a chart maker that can be used in daily news coverage.

While Politico’s interactive news team has more than doubled from its two members at launch last April, its members can still be counted on one hand, though it will add a sixth member by June. “I wish we had more of them because really, the demands are that strong,” said Brown.

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Digital Content NewFronts kick off this week, so cue the brand-safety pitches. One of the first comes from NBCUniversal, which is pitching the market on a new way of buying its short-form video.

NBCU Choice bundles video across NBCU’s own clips from its shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers” as well as short-form video from the partners it sells for, BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Snapchat and Apple News. An estimated 50 percent of that inventory exists on YouTube. With the many public ad-safety debacles that YouTube has had this past year or so on other channels, NBCU saw an opportunity.

“There’s enormous demand from clients for brand-safe video, and places they’ve been buying from aren’t delivering on brand safety,” said Trevor Fellows, evp of digital sales and strategy at NBCU. “But they don’t want to go brand by brand. It’s a real issue.”

NBCU defines “short-form” video as anything that’s not episodic, which is priced lower than long-form video and has the advantage of having less ad clutter by virtue of its shorter length. Fellows said NBCU opted to sell this way because agencies tend to buy by format. NBCU isn’t requiring a minimum spend, but he said he expects deals to be at least in the “hundreds of thousands” of dollars and that he’d “love to be doing in the hundreds of deals in the first year.” CPMs are expected to be in the low teens to high 20s.

NBCU Choice builds on NBCU’s move in 2015 to begin selling ads against “The Tonight Show” clips on YouTube.

There’s been a drumbeat of headlines about ads appearing next to racist, pedophilia and other offensive YouTube channels. Many marketers paused their spending on the platform, and the company has responded by adopting stricter ad policies, hiring more people to review videos and giving advertisers more control over where their ads appear. There hasn’t been a wholesale shift by advertisers off the platform in part because it’s hard to replicate those huge audiences elsewhere, though.

Fellows doesn’t have any illusions that NBCU Choice, which can reach 10s of millions of viewers, can compete with the scale of YouTube, whose users upload hundreds of hours of video a minute. But he said the benefit of NBCU’s pitch is that the content is guaranteed to be brand-safe and can be targeted to audience segments, which could end up shifting share from low-quality video. “The challenge is not YouTube as a delivery of quality — it’s YouTube as a guaranteer of brand safety,” he said.

If NBCU can offer a brand safety advantage along with a guarantee that revenue isn’t shared with owners of user-generated content, it could have some merit, said Rob Auger, vp and group director, media technology at Digitas. “The thought of advertising dollars possibly funding unethical individuals/groups makes our more conservative advertisers uncomfortable,” he said.

JoAnna Foyle, COO of video analytics firm OpenSlate, said for advertisers that don’t require huge scale, NBCU’s pitch could be a viable option. “You can get to a very clean version of YouTube, but it takes time,” she said. What you’re trading would be scale and a very different audience. Part of the reason our advertiser [clients] are committed to YouTube is, there are audiences they can’t reach elsewhere.”

We’ve asked YouTube for comment; we’ll update this story if it responds.

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One emerging tactic in turning readers into subscribers: get them involved.

The Financial Times often asks for reader contributions to its projects, either through submitting essays, like during its Future of Britain initiative, or sharing personal experiences. Dutch publisher De Correspondent involves members throughout the process, from reporting to proofreading. The Guardian’s gambit: Reader surveys form the basis of articles across its news desks to encourage loyalty.

“Our readers know a huge amount about the topics that we cover,” said Lilah Raptopoulos, community editor at the FT. “If they’re not experts, they often have relevant experience around what we’re reporting on or have really good questions that our reporting can help answer. Opening up the traditional reporting process to include them is a no-brainer to me.”

Publishers have long invested energy in their comments sections not just to mine them for editorial direction, but to encourage loyalty and boost frequency of visits with audiences. Others, typically subscription publishers, have gone further. Just as giving access to editorial talent through events can encourage subscriptions, giving the most engaged members a look behind the curtain is a perk.

The FT considers the gap in coverage it wants its reader to fill and the best way to reach the reader — whether a survey, a prompt at the end of a story, questions on a podcast — as well as how responses are used and how to measure success. This week, Simon Kuper, life and arts columnist at the FT, published a callout on the site and on Twitter asking how young people plan to watch the World Cup. In December, the FT ran its seasonal appeal for Alzheimer’s Research UK, including a call to readers to share their experiences having or caring for someone with the disease. The three collections of stories and photos that were published had some of the highest dwell times of the series.

According to Raptopoulos, subscribers who respond to the FT’s callouts are 35 percent more engaged for eight weeks after submitting their response compared to a control group.

Becoming more customer-centric is a natural evolution for publishers looking to grow reader revenue, said Nial Ferguson, a consultant who works with publishers on setting up reader-revenue streams. “The word ‘funnel’ will be used more and more by all publishers,” he said. “Every ounce of reader data will be called upon to improve conversions and connection.” He also added that in terms of content, value and control will be key.

De Correspondent, which now has 60,000 paying members, has no audience engagement team. Instead, it’s the responsibility of everyone in the organization. Writers are contracted to spend 50 percent of their time interacting with members, who can contribute their own experience in publicly accessible reporters’ notebooks, said Jessica Best, engagement editor at De Correspondent. This stems from believing that a number of health care professionals will have more knowledge that one health care correspondent.

When reporting on the porn industry, De Correspondent sent out a wide range of requests, including asking for academics to talk about the sociological impact, asking readers to scrape data from porn sites and inviting actors from the industry to the publisher’s office. This range offered all readers opportunities to get involved as much as they wished.

Another byproduct of involving readers to this degree is it encourages entrenched reporters to think more objectively and avoid falling into their unconscious biases around topics they have covered for some time. De Correspondent writers are encouraged to share when they change their mind, too.

Ernst-Jan Pfauth, De Correspondent co-founder and publisher, said the publisher is in the process of introducing a reward system for readers to boost their reputation on the site. But even without visible kudos, offering readers the chance to get involved has benefits.

“The journalistic value of this translates into commercial value,” said Raptopoulos. “Even just the callout being there sends a message to our readers that we respect them and know we can learn from them. All of this work builds trust. And that builds loyalty.”

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With video blazing new audience and brand engagement, the 2018 NewFronts should be an important pivot point for producers and platforms as well as marketers getting more comfortable using video as a branding tool. That will include direct-to-consumer brands eager to spin first-party data into next-generation marketing including video in all its forms, ranging from…

When the Digital Content NewFronts launched in 2008, no one could have predicted the issues digital video would one day face, such as brand safety, misleading political ads and conspiracy videos. However, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which operates the NewFronts, says that hasn’t deterred advertisers–and it has the research to back that claim up. IAB…

It started for me with a new television. When I set up my new smart TV, I noticed that there, right next to the traditional networks, were upstart new publishers–sharing space on my screen like equals. That, it struck me, is the new consumer economy. People now have access to publishers, to brands and to…