Month: May 2018

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, he sought to bring a user-first approach to the legacy newspaper. Out of that came reductions in page load time and ads that load fast.

Today, the Post named Jeffrey Turner as head of ad product overseeing the Post’s Research, Experimentation and Development team, also known as RED. The Post created in 2015 to bridge editorial, advertising and technology, and to help counter rising ad-blocking rates. Turner said one of his goals would be products that offer some utility to the user, starting with a new product called Showcase. Turner spent 10 years at AOL and HuffPost, most recently as senior director of product at Oath, the Verizon unit that now includes AOL and HuffPost.

Showcase — as shown in the mockup below — is an event recommendation ad unit that combines an advertiser’s message with things like recipes and ticket sales. Designed with sports, entertainment and real estate advertisers in mind, the ad displays a feed of a venue’s upcoming events and a buy button that takes the user to the venue’s site.

“You hear users don’t like ads,” Turner said. “They respond very well to good ads, but it’s bad ads that are bringing down the industry. A brand doesn’t want a negative experience for a user. So it’s the value exchange we’re really after. RED’s done a great job initially around making light, fast-loading ads. Now, we’re thinking about how the user can engage and interact with the ad.”

Turner succeeds Jarrod Dicker, who left in February to lead a blockchain company, Poet. One difference is that Dicker oversaw ad ops and reported to CRO Jed Hartman; Turner won’t oversee ad ops and will report to Jason Tollestrup, vp of programmatic strategy and yield. Hartman said in separating the two, he wanted to send the message that RED was solely focused on creating the ads of the future.

“We want RED to have that sandbox, garage feel of having fun and developing product, and testing and listening to the marketplace and the brand studio, and ad ops is just different,” Hartman said.

The Post doesn’t release financials, but Hartman said he expects the Post to grow ad revenue in the double digits this year for the fourth year in a row, and RED plays a part by building ad products for the video and branded content divisions that are expected to power the Post’s ad revenue growth this year.

“RED is driving a good share of growth, by being embedded throughout the organization,” he said.

Since its inception, RED has rolled out 20 products such as customizable native ads and PostPulse, which shows readers a carousel of Post articles that the advertiser chooses. RED has also done work for the editorial side, like a pop-up called Re-Engage that suggests other stories to readers if it looks like they’ve stopped reading. The formats from the RED team become part of the Post’s Arc suite of publishing tools that it’s selling to other publishers.

Looking ahead, the pace of new product rollouts may slow down, as Turner said he’ll look for ways to introduce new ad products designed to have features that can be added on, like Showcase.

The post The Washington Post wants to create ads that emphasize utility for users appeared first on Digiday.

With less than a month to go until the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation, publishers are still working hard to vet ad tech partners.

Publisher executives gathered at the Digiday Hot Topic UK: GDPR event in London on May 1 to share how they’ve approached getting compliant.

Here are the takeaways:

GDPR will speed the ad tech winnowing
With the GDPR looming, ad tech partners that can’t guarantee compliance with publishers will be dropped fast. For instance, ad tech companies must be able to tell travel publisher Lastminute.com’s sales team how their technologies track readers legally under the regulation; otherwise, they won’t be able to access its inventory, according to Alessandra Di Lorenzo, chief commercial officer for media and partnerships at Lastminute.com.

However, a shorter supply chain won’t necessarily equate to a GDPR-proof commercial model, as GiveMeSport discovered. The sports publisher went from working with 23 different ad tech partners to five partners last year in an attempt to gain more control over how its inventory is sold. Despite the move, it didn’t realize how many companies were plugged into its site until it did a test that found up to 500 companies were processing its visitors’ personal data in ways that could be illegal under the regulation.

“We looked through all the partners plugged into the site and recognized 8 percent of them — that’s pretty shocking,” said Ryan Skeggs, gm at GiveMeSport. “We didn’t have any idea who 92 percent [of those businesses] were.”

Axel Springer: Don’t let GDPR strengthen the duopoly
Two major European publishers have endorsed the arrival of the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Transparency & Consent Framework: Axel Springer and Schibsted. The framework’s concept is that participating publishers can select which ad tech vendors they wish to continue working with for programmatic from a centralized list of vendors. Once publishers have chosen vendors from the list, they must then get consent from the consumer on those vendors’ behalf. The framework produced a mixed response from some publishers when it was initially unveiled in March. The core gripe: The framework would require them to assume the legal risk in order to maintain ad tech’s status quo.

Moritz Holzgraefe, Axel Springer’s chief operating officer of corporate digital platforms, called for publishers to get behind the framework and its standardized way of gaining consent. If they don’t, publishers will fall behind while other major players like Google take control of the situation.

“Google interprets the law in a certain way and has the power to push that back to the market. But at Axel Springer, we want to have control. That’s why we have picked the IAB framework,” said Holzgraefe. “We need an industry standard and think the IAB framework has a chance [of working] — it gives us [publishers] more control of the vendors and better control over data leakage. Google will push its own solution, which is better for itself, but which we regard with skepticism.”

The wrestling match to become data controller
The GDPR puts a premium on consent. Theoretically, this is good for publishers, which have direct relationships with users, unlike unknown ad tech middlemen. But some publishers see a danger in becoming the one to ask for consent on behalf of others using their leverage. Google wants publishers to gain consent on its behalf to continue using some of its ad services. Google wants to gain co-controller status in the process, which would give it more control over the use of the first-party data. That approach has prompted major backlash from publishers in the U.S., with three media trade associations appealing to Google directly to change its GDPR demands on publishers.

For magazine group Immediate Media, publisher of consumer titles like Top Gear, accepting a co-controller status with big players like Google is inevitable.

“There are some things we’re asking our tech partners to do that we cannot ask them to do without being co-controllers,” said Duncan Tickell, managing director of advertising and international at Immediate Media. “That hot air that you’re hearing about these evil ad tech partners who are asking you to do stuff that you shouldn’t, we don’t see it like that. We see it as there are some things that you need to do as a co-controller and some things that you can take back a little bit of control — and have people just be processors.”

Jessica Davies contributed reporting. 

The post Publishers say they’ll use GDPR to shed ad tech vendors appeared first on Digiday.

Business Insider’s lifestyle sibling brand Insider probably wouldn’t exist without Facebook. But to keep up with Facebook’s whims, Insider has had to drastically reduce its total output there while looking to grow its audiences on other platforms.

Since Facebook deprioritized publisher content in its news feed in January, Insider cut its Facebook news feed video output in half, in a shift to produce longer videos. (The company didn’t give raw numbers.) As a result, its average monthly engagement on the platform fell by more than 70 percent, per Shareablee.

Insider also is distributing more video to platforms, including YouTube and Twitter, and trying to drive more direct traffic to its own site, while shifting staffers that once focused solely on news feed video to Facebook Watch programming.

“We’ve always, from the very beginning, thought it was important to start on Facebook, but as fast as possible develop multiple sources of referrals,” said Nicholas Carlson, Insider’s editor-in-chief. “The plan was never to be Facebook-only.”

Diversifying is a high priority for Insider, not just because its parent, Axel Springer, has publicly vowed to make Business Insider break even by the second half of 2018, but because Facebook’s news feed changes represent a long-term challenge to all publishers that relied on the platform as a distribution vehicle.

Facebook remains a core component of Insider’s audience strategy. The publisher drives views and traffic using a stable of vertical-focused Facebook pages, which Insider has been growing since its inception in 2015. Last year, Carlson theorized that Insider could have over 100 different Facebook pages one day; it now has almost 50.

Much of what Insider’s pages share is links. Over the past 12 months, around three-quarters of the content published to Insider’s Facebook pages has been external links, according to CrowdTangle. Three-quarters of social referrals to Insider’s homepage, thisisinsider.com, come from Facebook, per SimilarWeb.

But most of the engagement comes from video. Facebook also remains a key place for Insider’s long-form videos. It’s launched six Watch shows total in 2018, including “Bonkers Closets” and “Why Are We All So Stupid?” A seventh, sponsored Watch show is expected to be announced this week. Those videos were produced by the same 85-person team that worked on Insider’s shorter content.

In January, Insider started to cut the number of videos it publishes in response to Facebook saying its videos needed to last at least three minutes to be eligible for mid-roll advertising.

Facebook’s news feed changes affected every publisher; for publishers like LittleThings and Rare, the effects were fatal.

To diversify, Insider has begun focusing more on YouTube, taking a vertical strategy similar to the one used on Facebook. Since late January, it has launched three new YouTube channels, including Design Insider, Art Insider and Travel Insider, bringing the total number of Insider channels there to six. Its core YouTube channel, which has 1.9 million subscribers, drove more video views than its Facebook counterpart in March, according to Tubular Labs.

“We take YouTube as seriously as we take Facebook,” said Carlson, noting that Facebook’s decision to require that videos run at least three minutes to be eligible for mid-roll advertising actually made the company better at YouTube.

Building direct audience has been another priority. Monthly unique visitors to thisisinsider.com have more than doubled year over year, driven by search traffic, to 8.4 million monthly unique visitors in February, according to comScore. Insider launched without a site at all back when it was fashionable to go all-in on platform distribution.

But the drop in engagement on Facebook has consequences. Declining organic reach on Facebook means publishers now have to spend more money to distribute branded content on the platform. Other revenue streams, be they YouTube mid-roll or programmatic advertising, may not make up the difference.

“You’re not going to substitute branded content with mid-roll revenue,” said an executive on the revenue side at a digital publisher.

Carlson said revenue across the platforms Insider publishes on “remains strong,” pointing out that in addition to branded content and direct ad sales, Insider also makes money from content licensing and affiliate commerce revenue.

The post ‘The plan was never to be Facebook-only’: Insider continues to diversify amid Facebook reach declines appeared first on Digiday.

Unlike publishers that use Instagram to repurpose magazine content, Vogue is using the platform to highlight emerging creative talent.

The new @vogue account launched March 20 with eight featured creators covering a mix of fashion, beauty, photography, illustration and art. (This is separate from the U.S. Vogue account, @voguemagazine.) Each creator’s story is told over a week in six daily posts, which are a mix of images and video. For instance, the story of Richie Shazam, a model and artist who lives in New York and Berlin, highlights the importance of inclusion, diversity and self-confidence. Maria Saporito, a 21-year-old fashion illustrator from Milan, shows how she sees fashion in everything, including sushi. Nienke Hoogvliet, a designer and textile researcher based in the Netherlands, visually details her research into using seaweed in her work. The account is still in its infancy, with around 450 followers, while accounts like U.S. Vogue and Vogue Paris have 18 million followers and 4 million followers, respectively.

“The account is to see how far we can go with community-focused storytelling,” said Hannah Ray, head of social strategy and storytelling for Vogue International, explaining the account deviates from the content strategy on other Vogue Instagram accounts. “The crux of it is community. What we’re doing is taking a step back and putting the community first, giving them the platform to tell their story in their voice. It’s against the grain of how publishers distribute content on platforms and the perception of social media in general, which is more around broadcast. We’re building that native approach here.”

Although the account is an experiment, Ray is cautious not to impose many limitations, like dictating the time that new content is released or what formats are used. “We want to experiment with a more lean-back, episodic way of storytelling,” she said.

The account has been in the works for the last 18 months and is part of Condé Nast International’s wider efforts to overhaul all the global Vogue Instagram accounts. Over the last year, Vogue’s global accounts have shared Instagram Stories content for three series, “Vogue Plus One,” “Vogue First Look” and “Vogue Backstage.” International accounts add their own local clips or flavor.

“Even ‘Vogue Backstage’ is an older method of storytelling where Vogue editors are telling the story. Instagram has always been about community. That’s where the platform’s roots are,” said Ray, who spent three years working at Instagram. “It can be difficult for brands to understand how to partake in that.”

The @vogue account is the first outward-facing collaboration between all the Vogue teams globally since Condé Nast International decided to centralize editorial efforts in 2016, with the London office acting as the global hub for the additional 21 overseas titles. Vogue in the U.S. will also feed into the new Instagram account to a lesser extent.

“There’s an insane amount of knowledge from the Vogue editors around the world. The account will be rich because of the expertise of the editors inputting into it,” Ray said. Vogue’s international editors interview the creators and together decide on the content that’s posted to the Vogue account, but the stories are told through the creators’ words in what Vogue is calling a weeklong “residency.”

Publishers like Bustle and GQ are using Instagram Stories for episodic content that they can sell to brands, akin to the TV network model. For now, there are no plans to monetize Vogue’s account. Instead, it’s an editorial project designed for Instagram, while Vogue’s other accounts have too many followers to experiment in this way.

“Vogue has always been a place for highlighting emerging talent. This drills down specifically into only that,” said Ray. “Over the years, accounts that give a platform for people to share stories have been really popular — the more authentic, the better.”

Image courtesy of Vogue

The post How Vogue is shifting its global Instagram strategy appeared first on Digiday.

For all the bleakness in Snapchat’s first-quarter earnings call on May 1, there was one shining ray of hope: The platform saw a 16 percent year-over-year increase in the number of augmented reality lenses sold. The same day, Facebook had its own slew of AR news. At its annual F8 conference, Facebook announced AR features it would bring to advertisers, including AR ads on Instagram.

Ad buyers aren’t surprised. AR and VR are slowly moving mainstream, but while the majority of marketers foresee an uncertain future ahead for VR ads, they aren’t saying the same about its slightly less technical cousin — AR ads.

Ad buyers say they are seeing increases in spending when it comes to AR ads, and with new AR features coming from Facebook, they believe budgets will only expand, according to four ad buyers Digiday spoke with for this article.

“Brands are definitely spending more on AR ads,” said Jeremy Sigel, global svp of content and innovation at GroupM’s Essence.

In the past year, both Snapchat and Facebook have introduced new features to make AR more accessible for users and advertisers. Facebook launched its Camera Effects Platform and AR Studio, while Snapchat introduced its Lens Studio, a self-serve platform for AR, and in April, Shoppable AR lenses, a way for advertisers to include a button that redirects users to a video, website or app store.

So far, most AR budgets have been directed toward Snapchat because of improvements like these, according to ad buyers.

“We are seeing broader interest from advertisers with AR-enabled lenses. Much of this is still with Snapchat, where their platform has the most expansive ad opportunities,” said James Douglas, svp and executive director of social media for IPG Mediabrands-owned Society. “For advertisers that have run AR-enabled lens placements, we have seen positive sales and engagement impact, which is helping justify additional investment.”

Snapchat has also been actively working to prove to advertisers that its AR lenses drive sales, using third parties Nielsen Catalina, Neustar and Placed to measure their effectiveness across users. According to Snapchat, Nielsen found that across 22 consumer packaged goods AR lenses campaigns, the average sales life was 10 percent, while lenses drove a 19-point lift in ad awareness and a seven-point lift in brand awareness.

At F8, Facebook announced a slew of new AR features, the most significant being that it will bring AR to Instagram’s 800 million users. Along with adding AR support for Instagram, Facebook is introducing support for third-party AR filters in Messenger, Instagram and Facebook Lite, and it’s working with a handful of brands, including Sephora, Kia, Nike and Asus, on a private beta test ahead of time. Sephora, for instance, will use an AR overlay that allows users to try on makeup, and users can then share photos taken with the filters with friends on Facebook. It is also allowing developers to download 3D models or place their own custom animations into AR Studio, without taking the tedious time to write code.

“Facebook is a smart competitor and continues to roll out its own version of features that at one point seemed unique to a certain competitor,” said Will Warren, evp of digital investment at Publicis’ Zenith Media. “These new features will only strengthen Facebook’s position.”

Whether Facebook will steal away market share from Snapchat because of these new features is yet to be seen, but ad buyers say to expect budgets to only increase for AR ads. “It’s a really exciting development that will 100 hundred percent increase spending,” said Sigel. “Facebook is making it easy for brands and agencies to create, publish and engage.”

The post For all the hype about VR, advertisers are more excited by AR (for now) appeared first on Digiday.

Banks like to call themselves technology companies. And most large ones are currently focused on fighting — and winning — the war for talent against Silicon Valley.

The problem is, they have issues when it comes to incentivizing their many tech employees to create great products.

Banks’ digital transformation seems to have slowed over the past year. M&A isn’t as much or as frequent as many observers of the space had anticipated. Banks have put millions of investment dollars in technology companies and fintech startups, but since they’re still plagued with legacy technology and systems, implementing new digital processes and features is a long-term project.

In this installment of Confessions, in which we trade anonymity in exchange for honesty, we spoke with a fintech CEO who spent 15 years as a trader in a handful of major Wall Street firms about how banks are shaping up in the innovation race with fintech startups and other competitors, why having a mission is central to incentivizing strong bank engineers to do good work and how not having one can make “waiting for the future boring.” Edited highlights below.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

The post Confessions of a former trader: Incentives at banks are misaligned appeared first on Digiday.

Highlights from the first day of Facebook’s F8 annual developer conference in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday include adding a touch of Tinder to the social network’s flagship mobile applications and a new way for people to share content from other apps to Stories on both Facebook and Instagram. Highlights follow: Dating Facebook said it will…

Apple flexed its financial muscle with a record $100 billion plan to buy back stock from investors, as it reported strong gains in revenue and profit even as growth in the number of iPhones sold remained weak.

Snapchat is close to breaking 200 million daily active users, but that milestone wasn’t enough, at all, to impress the stock market.

The self-proclaimed camera company failed to meet revenue estimates for its first-quarter earnings report and admitted to difficulties in several parts of its business, from slowdown in ad revenue growth to user frustration with the redesign.

Here’s what you need to know from Snap’s first-quarter earnings report:

The key numbers:

• 191 million daily active users (an increase in 4 million from the previous quarter)
• 42 percent of daily active users are from North America
• $230.7 million in quarterly revenue (down 19 percent from the previous quarter, but up 54 percent from the year prior)
• 74 percent of its revenue came from North America
• Net loss was $217.9 million
• Capital expenditure was $36 million (an increase of $15 million from the previous quarter)
• Average cost per app install and average cost per swipe in the U.S. are less than half what they were the year before
• Snap Ad impressions (excluding Story Ads, formerly Promoted Stories) were up 450 percent from the year prior
• Snap Ad pricing (excluding Story Ads) was down 65 percent from the year prior
• 95 percent of Snap Ads (excluding Story Ads) are programmatic

What Wall Street wanted:
Snap blew investors away in the fourth quarter of 2017 in both its revenue growth and user growth. Yet despite making major changes to the product and releasing new experiences, the money just didn’t come this quarter.

Snap reported $230.7 million in revenue. That’s down from $286 million in the previous quarter and up from $150 million reported in the first quarter of 2017. The stock dropped 10 percent and later slipped past 16 percent in after-hours trading.

Programmatic is what’s happening
In 2015, CEO Evan Spiegel went to Cannes to convince advertisers vertical video was worth it. It took a bit, but now, vertical ads are happening (thanks Instagram), and Snapchat wants to drive demand for more. About 95 percent of Snap Ads impressions, excluding Story Ads, were delivered programmatically in the last quarter. It was 90 percent in the prior quarter. But that growth is causing some pain.

“We’re not playing the pricing game to maximize short-term revenue,” said Snap’s chief financial officer Drew Vollero.

Chief strategy officer Imran Khan said the demand for ads has increased, but the prices aren’t in Snap’s favor. For example, Snap sold 16 percent more branded lenses in the first quarter, yet the average order value was down 37 percent. Khan said those numbers were similar for Snap Ads.

“We’re not really focused on pricing right now. We’re more focused on bringing advertisers into the platform and helping them understand our platform,” Khan said.

Snapchat craves smaller advertisers
Snap led its prepared remarks with a focus on ads: “We began 2018 with several major Snapchat updates, and we continue to make progress in growing our advertising business and building tools for advertisers,” Spiegel said.

Snapchat has been investing in its self-serve product to help onboard smaller advertisers. Snap’s revenue from small businesses grew 30 percent from quarter to quarter. The number of advertisers spending actively on Snapchat has increased twentyfold over the last year.

Still playing the big game
Snapchat is testing a tool for Snap Ads to measure reach and frequency with a handful of big advertisers: Unilever UK, Procter & Gamble U.S., Google USA and UK, and Microsoft UK. That tool is built within Snap’s self-service platform and can help buyers evaluate real-time delivery and pricing. Facebook offers a similar system. For now, Snap’s is still in beta. 

Redesigning the redesign
Snap cited the redesign as one reason for its disappointing earnings, so it’s doing more to fix it. One change: another redesign, or as Spiegel said, “optimizing the redesign.” Snapchat is moving Stories from friends back to the right side of the application after frustration from users.

“We’re going to create an environment where people feel the power to express themselves,” Spiegel said.

But can advertisers trust Snapchat given all the negative reaction to the redesign?

“The way to win is to prove ROI,” Khan said. “I think it’s important to understand Snapchat’s position in the millennial audience.”

No more Rihanna incidents
A Snap Ad asking if people should either “Slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown” ignited a firestorm of anger from celebrities and Snapchat users. Rihanna’s response on Instagram to Snap’s earlier apology included, “Shame on you. Throw the whole app-ology away.”

Snap did not address that incident directly, but alluded to a need for more security to evaluate ad quality.

“We have a lot of sympathy for the ad reviewers and call them digital-first responders. We want to give them more tools to help them do their job,” Spiegel said.

The post Cheatsheet: Snapchat’s programmatic transition is messing with its ad prices appeared first on Digiday.

Shares drop as revenue disappoints, and Snapchat redesign seems to have little effect on user growth.