Month: May 2018

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Ivan Ivanov, chief operating officer at PubGalaxy. In the months before enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) began, publishers – and the wider digital industry – were unsure how the new legislation would… Continue reading »

The post Could GDPR Create A Server-To-Server Golden Age? appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Find Your Audience Some publishers, still reeling from Facebook’s news feed algorithm change, are migrating to YouTube. Hearst, for example, is focusing more efforts on long-form episodic content from flagship magazines like Seventeen, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Cosmopolitan, Business Insider’s Tanya Dua reports. Hearst… Continue reading »

The post Pubs Turn To YouTube; Google Gains From GDPR appeared first on AdExchanger.

The switch to reader revenue is in full swing, and a talent squeeze is following as publishers hunt for experts in areas like product design, user retention and data crunching.

According to Martin Tripp, managing director at headhunting consultancy Martin Tripp Associates, which typically works with business media companies like Thomson Reuters, applications to fill C-suite level roles at business media companies requires experience in driving subscriptions.

“You need to have prior experience. It’s ubiquitous; it’s a very pronounced trend,” he said. “Getting the right subscription proposition is tough. The key performance indicator is renewal rate: You can persuade people to subscribe for one year, but if they haven’t got that value from the product, then they won’t subscribe again.”

Greg Harwood, director at strategy and marketing consultant Simon-Kucher & Partners, said publishers are looking for experience at the executive level in monetizing audiences as effectively as possible. Often, that’s experience in driving subscriptions or from a background in online platforms like eBay or Graze, which rely heavily on understanding audience needs.

Publishers are interested in candidates with knowledge and understanding of product design — content and distribution — as well as marketing, sales and data analytics. Harwood said this means more traditional marketer skills when subscriptions are part of the mix, as well as the ability to use and understand predictive analytics, promotional tactics and the appreciation of the editorial product from a customer point of view.

Publishers are hiring chief customer officer roles in an effort to evolve into more customer-centric organizations. Now, Harwood said, decisions on subscription pricing happen at the executive level. A more common path is from the CCO to the CEO. But this skill set is increasingly in demand.

“The supply and demand ratio is completely off-kilter,” said Tripp. “Fifteen years ago, there was only a handful of real subscriptions businesses. Now, there’s a huge increase in businesses moving into the space and not a lot of experienced people to share around. Salaries in those areas have increased dramatically.” Over five years, a salary for a global head of sales role at a business publisher had increased by 50 percent, according to Tripp.

“It’s inevitable there will be a squeeze on capacity and resource, but it hasn’t manifested yet [in the consumer space]. There could be a lag on that,” Harwood said. “The switch to reader revenue has definitely happened in the last 12 months. There will be a transition period where people will still monetize their ad business as much as possible.”

Instead, publishers are hiring from within and reorganizing teams. For instance, The Economist combined its sales and circulation teams in April to form a new publisher team headed by Michael Brunt as chief operating officer and publisher.

Business publishers have been in the subscriptions business for longer, charging higher prices for valuable information people can’t do without. More consumer publishers are turning to subscriptions, innovating with new products and exploring new revenue options. Bloomberg’s announcement of its consumer paywall this month, while it already has a healthy business subscription product in the Bloomberg Terminal, indicates the direction of travel.

While Tripp believes consumer publishers can learn from business counterparts, moving from a business to consumer publisher has its difficulties. “Consumer audiences are more of an amorphous mass,” he said. Identifying the needs of potential client base and how to meet them is easier when a company helps them make financial market decisions, less so if it’s general news or lifestyle audiences. “A business publisher executive’s skills could become unstuck quickly.”

Movement is still possible, especially through acquisition or career development.

“You have to be sector agnostic: Hire for value; train for skills,” said Liz Dowling, founder at headhunting and talent consultancy Liz Dowling & Partners. “What’s the difference between growing subscriptions and increasing the number of followers online? The acquisition is the same, even if the transaction is different.”

Publishers need to balance their advertising and subscription models, often prompting questions about where each discipline sits in the business. They are, of course, linked: Ad businesses are becoming more customer-centric as the knowledge of their audience improves through subscription models.

Previously, said Dowling, executives with ad-sales backgrounds have been driven on operations and commission rather than implementation and delivery. Ad sales have key accounts, are negotiator-led and can carry heavy discounts.

“The routes [to C-suite level] are transitional,” said Harwood. “It’s fairly fickle, but if advertising is growing year on year, people will hang their hat on whichever part of the business is growing.”

The post The pivot to paid leads to talent squeeze at publishers appeared first on Digiday.

Now that the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe has taken effect and begun wreaking havoc, it’s worth looking at GDPR-like laws being put on the table in the U.S. Last month, a couple senators introduced the CONSENT Act. And later this year, California will vote on a privacy law that has already earned the ire of Facebook and Google.

Like GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act aims to draw people’s attention to the personal information that companies collect from them and how that information can make its way into other companies’ hands. But the similarities don’t extend much further than that.

Is the California Consumer Privacy Act just the US version of GDPR?
Hardly. Like GDPR, the California act gives people the right to know what information companies collect about them. But very much unlike GDPR, the California bill wouldn’t require companies to get people’s permission to collect their information in the first place. Companies wouldn’t even have to let people opt out of having their data collected.

“It gives an expanded right to know and an opt-out requirement once the request is made. Contrast that with a knowing consent requirement under the GDPR,” said Ron Camhi, managing partner at law firm Michelman & Robinson’s Los Angeles office and chair of its advertising and digital media industry group.

What would it require?
Companies would have to tell California residents what kind of personal information they collect, but only if the resident asked to know. Then, if a company sells or shares that information with another company, it would have to tell the person who those other companies are, but only if asked. And if the company sells the information — but only if they do — the person could ask the company to stop selling it, and the company would have to honor the request.

Only California residents?
Yep, and only when those people are located in California. If an Angeleno is visiting New York, they wouldn’t be covered. But considering California counts roughly 40 million residents, it’s unlikely that a company doing business in the U.S. would be able to avoid the law, if passed.

OK. So what counts as ‘personal information’?
All kinds of information. It includes the standard stuff like a person’s name, mailing address, Social Security number and driver’s license number as well as their digital equivalents, such as a person’s email address, unique ID and IP address. It also covers demographic data like race or ethnicity, plus gender and job-related data.

But it would also include people’s web browsing and search histories and any information tied to what people do on a site or app, or how they interact with an ad. And e-commerce sites like Amazon and third-party data providers like Acxiom and Datalogix would be affected by the inclusion of data related to what products people buy and what services they use. The act also looks to head off how data from the “internet of things” ecosystem can be used by including face-, voice- and health-related data. Finally, any information inferred from the aforementioned information (like a company inferring someone is a new parent because they bought baby food) would be subject to the law.

What else?
People would be able to ask companies for what types of personal information they collect, and companies would be required to tell them. And if a company sells or shares that information “for business purposes,” a person could ask which types of information were sold or shared and to whom, and the company would have to tell them.

What are ‘business purposes’?
It’s vague. Regarding advertising, it includes a lot of the programmatic processes that put ads on a site or app, such as impression measurement, viewability verification and ad serving. And if a company uses other companies for things like customer service, payment processing or cybersecurity and shares people’s personal information through that work, that would also qualify.

So unless a company operates its site or app in complete isolation — without any programmatic ads or traffic analytics software — it’s probably collecting people’s personal information and sharing it for business purposes?
Pretty much.

But the company can keep collecting people’s personal information and sharing it for business purposes, so long as it complies with people’s requests to know what kind of information is being collected and who it’s being shared with?
Yep.

And even if a company sells a person’s information and that person asks it to stop, the company can still collect that information?
Right.

What do the tech companies like Facebook and Google think about it?
They’re not fans. Both Facebook and Google — as well as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon — have donated $200,000 apiece to the Committee to Protect California Jobs, an organization that is lobbying to oppose the bill. Since donating to the organization — and coinciding with Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal — Facebook and Verizon have withdrawn their support of the opposition group, though not the money they had already sent.

Facebook, Google, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon all either dominate or want to dominate the digital advertising industry by using people’s data to target them with ads. So this is an anti-ad targeting bill?
Not according to Alastair Mactaggart, campaign chair of the committee behind the bill, Californians for Consumer Privacy. “We still allow advertising, and we still allow targeted advertising,” he said. And Facebook has already curbed the use of third-party data to target ads on its platform.

So why are Facebook and Google opposed to the bill?
Good question.

The post WTF is the California Consumer Privacy Act? appeared first on Digiday.

Despite Papa John’s financial difficulties and controversies last year, the pizza chain brought people joy in May with a simple offering: Tweet #GarlicSauce and the pizza emoji, and Fooji will steer you to a private url where you can buy an 8-pound bottle of garlic sauce. Cue the loving tweets, even if it cost people $20 per bottle.

@PapaJohns One for each hand! That’s how we #garlicsauce pic.twitter.com/qreO980FuC

— Chad Jones (@ChadJPhotos) May 12, 2018

Guys it’s real I am the proud owner of 8lbs of @PapaJohns #garlicbutter and I’ll probably die happy (from clogged arteries) pic.twitter.com/9ag39xyRyV

— Sharon (@invictushearts) May 11, 2018

Papa John’s didn’t pull off the stunt alone. The company hired Fooji, a tech startup that helps coordinate the logistics of selecting winners and delivering them their prizes. Over the last few months, Fooji has worked with Hollywood studios for “Incredibles 2,” “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Silicon Valley” as well as cable TV network Fox Deportes, streaming service LiveMe and convenience store chain Wawa.

Beyond buying ads on social or via influencers, advertisers have been paying companies like Fooji to market new products, concerts or premieres. The campaigns vary in length and cost, but the overall hope is that they create fans out of the winners and spur excitement from the enthusiasm shared on social media.

“Papa John’s was unique because it was a large-scale campaign where the fans actually purchased the product,” said Erik Zamudio, Fooji’s co-founder and chief business officer. “After tweeting out the call to action, fans were taken to a microsite where they were able to purchase exclusive Papa John’s merch and gallon jugs of garlic sauce.”

Fooji started in 2015 with a focus on emoji-based food ordering. The company admitted to ABC News that it was inspired by Domino’s pizza emoji-based ordering.

“We thought it was a novel idea and cool, but very limiting to just use a pizza emoji. Why not do the entire menu of emoji characters available?” Gregg Morton, Fooji’s co-founder and CEO, told ABC News in June 2015.

Three years later, Fooji still gives away pizzas via emoji. The company, based in Lexington, Kentucky, has 27 full-time employees. Fooji has raised $4.2 million to date, according to the company, and has expanded beyond delivering pizza and beyond serving Manhattan.

To promote the season five premiere of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” in March, Fooji delivered 714 pizzas in customized boxes in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Some pizzas were delivered by drone, a first for Fooji. Fooji later used drones again to promote a French Montana concert for LiveMe.

“The delivery mechanism depends on the goals and requests of the client,” Zamudio said. “We’re always adding new, exciting delivery partners to help our clients make the biggest splash and deliver the best experiences to their fans.”

@streamLiveme dropping off party invites like.. Imma have to come thru drippin to the #ConcertAtTheCastle with #FrenchMontana pic.twitter.com/FhTmL8xlgY

— Dyvon (@ItzDyvon) May 12, 2018

For the “Silicon Valley” campaign, Fooji said it generated about 19,000 tweets and 11.6 million impressions. Like typical marketing campaigns, companies provide Fooji with a number of free items and an overall campaign budget. Average activations cost between $50,000 and $300,000, Zamudio said. Fooji supports giveaways and sweepstakes.

Fooji isn’t the only giveaway company. Surkus, also founded in 2015, helps advertisers connect with potential fans based on interests and demographics. Companies provide a free experience or other giveaways. Some companies, like Samsung, have paid hard cash to get people to attend events.

Surkus closed on a $10 million funding round this month, and it said it plans to expand internationally and incorporate blockchain tech into its platform.

Meanwhile, Fooji fans are praying the pizza doesn’t go away.

We have plenty of nationwide promos coming up So stay locked in

— Fooji Help (@gofoojihelp) May 29, 2018

The post Why advertisers tap pizza delivery app Fooji for giveaways appeared first on Digiday.

Some U.S. publishers have blocked visitors from the E.U. to their sites rather than comply with the wide-ranging General Data Protection Regulation to protect people’s online privacy. The Washington Post went an extra step and put up a paywall for E.U. visitors, upselling them to a $90 a year “premium EU subscription” in exchange for no ads  — and the privilege of not having their data tracked. The premium subscription is $30 more than the cost of a basic online subscription to the Post.

“This is something we’ve been working on for a long time to create transparency, minimize friction for our readers and ensure compliance,” emailed Miki King, vp of marketing at the Post. “Our approach was to give readers an additional option beyond our consent-based offerings of free limited access or a subscription. We’ve now added a third option that offers no third-party tracking or advertising at a premium.”

The Post wouldn’t comment on the legal basis for the offer, but some question the offer’s legality. The GDPR requires businesses to justify collecting people’s online data, by getting their consent or through other means. The question is whether the Post’s offer flies in the face of the law’s requirement that consent be freely given.

Tim Turner, a U.K.-based independent consultant who trains companies in GDPR, said the Post is “forcing consent for the free option and making you pay for the tracking-free option. Forcing those who can’t/won’t pay to accept tracking seems to kill legitimate interests. Either way, I think it’s likely to be a breach.”

IAB Europe last fall published a paper saying that “private companies are allowed to make access to their services conditional upon the consent of data subjects.” Johnny Ryan, formerly head of ecosystem at anti-ad blocking firm PageFair, disagreed, saying the GDPR forbids such “tracking walls.”

“It’s all measuring what does it mean for something to be freely given,” said Gary Kibel, partner in the digital media, technology & privacy practice at the law firm Davis & Gilbert.

Kibel, who represents clients in advertising, publishing and ad tech, wouldn’t offer an opinion on the legality of the Post’s approach, but did point out that a question is whether this approach arises to the level of violating that “freely given.” Employees, for example, can’t be considered to be freely giving consent if their job depends on it. “Is viewing a website equivalent to that?” he said. “Probably not.”

U.S. publishers have reacted to GDPR with various strategies. Some like Tronc have simply chosen to turn away E.U. visitors. Gannett’s USA Today is offering a bare bones version of its site that some are noting as a far better user experience. The New York Times does not appear to be running any programmatic ads. (The Times has not responded to requests to confirm this.) The Post is taking a novel approach in literally putting a price on taking data-tracking out of the media equation.

The issue for ad-supported publishers is that their business model is predicated, to varying extents, on their ability to track and retarget people with ads. The Post tactic is reminiscent of how publishers have pushed back against ad blockers by asking or demanding that they disable the ad blocking software in order to access the site, or giving them the choice to pay for an ad-free experience.

Brian Kane, COO and co-founder of Sourcepoint, which helps publishers monetize ad blockers, predicts publishers will try a variety of options as they figure out how to balance access with monetization. Sourcepoint, for its part, has a consent management platform that lets publishers give users payment options when they are asked for their consent, and Kane said “a lot of publishers” are talking about trying it out. To be GDPR-compliant, he said, the CMP lets people dismiss that option and continue on to the site, though.

The move to cut off E.U. visitors altogether is likely to be a short-term approach, but as Kane and others have pointed out, it has larger consequences.

“There’s a problem with society in that we’re going to go back into our fiefdoms from an information-sharing perspective” he said. “Publishers have to figure out ways to fund their operations. [The CMP] is a way of marrying that strategy with transparency and data use, as long as you can thread the needle in terms of compliance.”

The post The Washington Post puts a price on data privacy in its GDPR response — and tests requirements appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers are griping about Google’s power play regarding General Data Protection Regulation compliance. Axel Springer is taking matters into its own hands on one front by offering fellow publishers the use of its own consent management tools for free.

The German digital media group, which owns Business Insider, Bild and Welt, has spent the last 18 months developing a GDPR consent management tool, which can also be adapted to address cookie-consent requirements under the pending ePrivacy Regulation once it is finalized, according to the publisher. A consent management platform is a technical capability needed by any company that wants to capture what personal data its audience and customers have given it permission to use. That information is then relayed to all partners that publisher works with in its digital advertising supply chain. The aim is to ensure that all data needed for activities such as personalized advertising is only used when the user has given consent.

Axel Springer’s first partner is one of its competitors in Germany: media group Hubert Burda Media.

“One extreme [scenario] is we [publishers] give our fate to someone else, and let others control this very important interaction point with the consumer,” said Stephanie Caspar, president of data and technology at Axel Springer. Referring to Google’s Funding Choices CMP, she said: “For some, this could be less hassle. They [Google] know what they are doing and are experts in software. But there may be limitations with how many partners you can work with and how transparent your business is because there is someone else between you and the consumer, which is always a bad thing as a publisher.”

Axel Springer has made the tool open source, so companies can embed the code into their sites and customize its consent-request messages depending on their GDPR strategies. Once the code is embedded, users can manage their data settings through a preference center. The tool is also integrated with the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe and IAB Tech Lab’s Transparency & Consent framework, which Axel Springer has openly endorsed.

Axel Springer said the tool won’t restrict publishers to using a certain number of ad tech vendors. Publishers using Google’s Funding Choices can only gain user consent on behalf of 12 ad tech vendors. The rest of the industry viewed being restricted by Google to gaining consent for 12 vendors as a controversial move. However, Google has countered by highlighting its other consent tools publishers can use besides Funding Choices. Publishers that don’t want a vendor limit can choose how many they want to work with by using the ad tech controls available in Google’s AdSense, DoubleClick for Publishers and AdMob.

Under GDPR, all businesses will need some form of CMP to capture and store details on who has given consent and who hasn’t. Publishers have two options: Use an ad tech vendor’s (either Google’s or an independent vendor’s) CMP, or build their own. Axel Springer is now offering a third and has promised there are no strings attached. There is no long-term plan to monetize the Axel Springer tool.

Axel Springer’s tool, dubbed opt in and transparency layer, or “OIL,” includes both an opt-in and opt-out option for companies. The vagueness of GDPR has led to wildly different interpretations across the industry. Some businesses have favored opt-in approaches, while others prefer opt-out ones. Axel Springer has gone for the opt-out approach, believing it to be the best option to align with Germany’s privacy law.

“Our current CMP is flexible regarding the legal interpretation,” said Moritz Holzgraefe, chief operating officer of corporate digital platforms at Axel Springer. “That means everyone can adapt it to their interpretation of the law. Google has said it will probably focus on a hard opt-in requirement everywhere. But we would not have flexibility if we used this. We want this [OIL] to be a flexible option for publishers.”

The CMP isn’t a managed service, and Axel Springer sales teams won’t actively pitch it to businesses. But the publisher will aim to make its staff available, should publishers or any businesses require information on how to implement its CMP or what the publisher has learned from its extensive CMP tests. It will also be up to the individual titles within Axel Springer to use the software.

Axel Springer has created two different tech platforms to address nonregistered users (OIL) and registered users (Verimi). The concept of Verimi is that users can create a single login, which lets them visit all Verimi companies’ sites without having to remember numerous passwords and change consent settings.

Other publishers are watching Axel Springer’s developments with interest, though it’s likely most big publishers will build their own CMPs. “Who better to develop a CMP for a publisher than a publisher?” said an exec at a U.K. national publisher, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s very different to how ad tech has typically worked.”

The post Axel Springer counters Google with its own consent management tool appeared first on Digiday.

Kristin Lemkau, the chief marketing officer at JPMorgan Chase, prefers a “healthy tension” when it comes to ad agencies. It began in 2015, when the company launched Inner Circle, an internal agency, as part of its marketing department. Inner Circle began with doing mostly creative, but has since expanded to almost every part of marketing for the JP Morgan, Chase and JPMorgan Chase business lines.

Inner Circle’s launch was a major move, leading to a serious decline in JPMorgan Chase’s reliance on external agencies. (The company now works only with Droga5 and VaynerMedia for big brand campaigns and voice, respectively.)  

Inner Circle, which is mostly based in Columbus, Ohio, and Wilmington, Delaware, now includes a video production team as well as influencer marketing and corporate partner marketing. Run by chief brand officer Susan Canavari, the agency does the lion’s share of both creative and media for Chase, which spends $5 billion annually on advertising. The company declined to say how many people work at Inner Circle, except to say it’s “growing.”

“We’re stewards of the Chase brand,” said Canavari. “The Chase brand needs to be infused in everything we do, across product development, across creative ideation and across innovation.”

Canavari said the argument for bringing things in-house is simple: Communication channels, especially with the advent of digital, can’t operate in silos. “We need to look at where our customers are, and where are the right places we should intercept them.”

“They have an advantage in terms of real client contact and really understanding products and services,” she added. 

Chase made headlines last year when it slashed the number of sites it had ads appear on from 400,000 to 5,000. That number has crept back up, but Lemkau said being able to make those moves, find that they didn’t affect ad performance and figure out a whitelisting approach across platforms that makes sense is something an in-house agency can do much better.

Of course, it’s also cheaper. Canavari said one of the biggest impetuses for Inner Circle was that Chase looked at how much it spent with external agencies and realized it was “a lot.”

Lemkau said she’s taking a hard look at what else the company could do in-house. The key challenge, for her, as for any brand, is weighing that against what agencies, particularly media agencies, bring to the table: Heavy rate discounts and close relationships with key media suppliers.

But Lemkau isn’t convinced a marketer can’t achieve the same results. She said despite rate discounts being used time and time again as evidence of why advertisers should use external agencies, cost savings are never passed on.

“One question I have for agencies — respectfully — is that they are all always talking about the rate discount, which is fine,” Lemkau said. “Then why do I have all these [full-time equivalents] doing media planning for a pre-negotiated rate?” To Chase and Lemkau, the great promise of economies of scale from holding companies isn’t quite working. “What ends up happening is brands keep switching holding companies, and they bring it down to a lower rate by squeezing the media companies,” she said.

Last week, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Data Center of Excellence released the results of a new survey that found that 65 percent of brands now completely or partially buy programmatic media in-house. Most of the reasons related to taking back control of strategies and having more control over their data. Of course, cost was also a concern: Marketers said they can reduce costs by doing programmatic themselves.

Other major brands with in-house agencies include Verizon and Pernod Ricard.

Chase was early to embrace the transparency issue in client-agency relationships, conducting what it says was a thorough audit of its media agency, ZenithOptimedia, which got a clean bill of health. Still, soon after that, Chase brought programmatic buying in-house. 

One big advantage Chase has is that unlike other companies in industries like consumer packaged goods, it has loads of first-party data and isn’t reliant on data providers. For marketers looking to do more media themselves, that can be a huge boon. Being able to integrate first-party data and control it in their own data management platforms, as well as dictate how it flows over to demand-side platforms for execution is yet another way marketers can assert control and get the most bang for their buck.

“[In-house] has been a home run for us,” Lemkau said. “We will not go back.”

The post ‘Home run for us’: Inside Chase’s in-house agency appeared first on Digiday.

It might seem like the promises of blockchain have arrived out of nowhere and not without a crypto wallet full of doubt. Even so, executives are ready to take the technology–which creates an unchangeable digital ledger of transactions–more seriously. Industries ranging from healthcare and financial services to CPGs and television are exploring how to utilize…