Month: May 2018

Arc, The Washington Post’s technology platform, is increasingly paying off for the newspaper company.

Arc has signed five major publishers as clients this year — Bonnier Corp., Advance Local, Boston Globe Media Partners, Philadelphia Media Network and Le Parisien. With those additions, Arc supports 90 sites and apps representing 500 million monthly unique visitors, the Post said. By year’s end, the figure will be between 150 and 200 sites, the Post said.

A company spokesman said Arc revenue has doubled over the past year, but declined to provide a raw dollar figure. Its clients’ fees range from $10,000 to $150,000 per month, depending on the amount of client content Arc hosts for them and processes it supports, and the Post sees Arc becoming a $100 million business. The Post-owned Arc is powered by Amazon Web Services, generating some nice synergies for Post owner and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos.

Arc has been catering to bigger clients since its start two years ago, adding features like personalization technology, video asset management to paywalls, and growing its staff to 150.

“As any product company, to some extent, offers professional services, we offer professional services as well,” said Scot Gillespie, The Washington Post’s chief technology officer. “For us to bring the platform to life in specific markets, we know that there’s value we can add by providing a service along with the product as well.”

Arc’s growth can be attributed to a few factors. It hired its first dedicated sales head in September, Clancy Ryan. Digital publishers’ needs are changing all the time, and few have the resources to keep up.

“A lot of publishers must do six or seven things very well to continue to grow,” said Tian Chen, the chief product officer of Philadelphia Media Network. “There aren’t many CMSes on the market that do this out of the box.”

Outsourcing its tech to Arc can free up a publisher’s resources, too. One team of Bonnier’s engineers, for example, spent most of their time supporting Sandcastle, its custom-built CMS. Arc also lets clients access third-party tools at lower prices thanks to Arc’s purchasing power, Gillespie said.

But implementing new digital infrastructure or support is an enormous hassle. It takes 6-12 months, on average, to migrate a client onto its system, Gillespie said. Nearly two years after signing a preliminary agreement to explore how to use Arc, the newspaper publisher Tronc has only migrated one of its titles onto the platform. And as Arc has gone after larger clients with more varied collections of sites, the resources that Arc needs to integrate the product into clients’ systems have increased.

“We’re not going to commit to something we can’t deliver, just to win business,” Gillespie said. “If clients want us to do the onboarding, we have to make sure we have the staff to do it.”

Publishers have had a mixed track record licensing parts of their back end to peers. Purch, for example, generates more than 20 percent of its $120 million annual revenue by licensing its programmatic ad stack to more than two dozen publishers. On the other end of the spectrum, Forbes’s Falcon, the CMS that powers its contributor network, has been quiet for the past few years.

Gillespie said he has no concerns about licensing the technology to competitors. “I don’t think there’s anybody that’s off-limits,” Gillespie said.

But the company is also pitching Arc to non-publishing companies. Gillespie said Arc is in advanced discussions with multiple companies that create their own content for marketing and advertising.

Such a move opens up Arc to new clients but also new competitors. “I think they’re not just looking at other CMS businesses, but businesses like Contently,” said Ava Seave, a principal at the consultancy Quantum Media. 

Seave said she thinks the Post will have to continue diversifying to broaden its client base to grow Arc. Meantime, publishers that become too dependent on the product’s suite of capabilities run a risk of their own.

“You have to worry about a powerful vendor,” Seave said. “If they get too powerful, they can charge you because you don’t want to change.”

The post How The Washington Post is building its tech platform, Arc appeared first on Digiday.

Twitter plans to roll out a website in the next couple weeks to teach smaller publishers how to produce content, including live and on-demand videos, for Twitter and make money from the content, Twitter’s vp of emerging content products, Mike Park, announced at the Digiday Video Summit on May 22.

“This site is essentially like having a scaled partnerships team,” said Park.

The more that Facebook pisses off publishers, the more willing publishers are to embrace Twitter. “Twitter has been a breath of fresh air in that they do want to work with you more than Facebook,” said one publishing exec during a closed-door working group session at the summit.

The initiative is similar to how platforms introduce self-serve ad-buying tools to accommodate smaller advertisers. Twitter can’t work with every publisher, at least not directly. Its 100-person publisher partnerships team is occupied with the thousand or so large publishers that Twitter works with to produce videos and original shows for the platform, and to sell ads against that content. The new site will let Twitter support the smaller publishers to whom it can’t dedicate partner managers.

Twitter isn’t doing anything especially novel with its new site. Facebook created an educational site for media companies in 2014. Twitter’s site will feature similar content, including case studies of its work with large publishers and how-to guides detailing how to use its tools step by step. Also like Facebook’s Facebook for Media site, Twitter plans to publish blog posts about new features that are relevant to publishers.

However, Twitter’s new site won’t answer all the questions that publishers have for Twitter. For example, during a closed-door town hall session, one publishing executive wondered if Twitter would ever allow publishers to use third-party ad servers to sell pre-roll ads against the videos they post to Twitter. The question was then put to Park, who said: “It’s safe to say we will experiment around it.”

It seems even safer to say Twitter will take an opportunity to provide publishers something that Facebook doesn’t offer. Twitter already lets publishers take the lead in selling ads against the videos they post to Twitter. And while Facebook gives publishers 55 percent of the revenue from the ads attached to their videos, Twitter offers them 70 percent. Also helping Twitter’s standing, publishers’ video view counts on Twitter are increasing, as is advertisers’ interest in buying ads against those views.

Twitter can build on its momentum even more if it’s able to land sponsors for all the shows it presented at this year’s NewFronts, when it doubled the programming slate unveiled a year ago. Park said the company has already landed deals for a couple programs, and he thinks it’ll be able to sell out the others.

The post Twitter looks to woo smaller, Facebook-frustrated publishers with new site appeared first on Digiday.

At Consensus, the messy, sprawling crypto confab hat convened last week in midtown Manhattan, Lamborghinis were everywhere, parked outside the Hilton Midtown so everyone could know one thing: The crypto bros had arrived.

A crypto exchange had rented the luxury sports cars as a stunt, using the symbol of success in the weird, wild world of crypto, where the Lamborghini, or “Lambo,” has become the status symbol to prove success in the crypto world. After all, if you can buy one of the world’s most expensive cars using bitcoin, the whole thing can’t be a joke.

Thanks to a rash of crypto millionaires publicly spending their bitcoin on Lamborghinis, the “Lambo” has become the outward symbol for crypto bro culture. “When Lambo?” has since become the shorthand for crypto success. Any time a new coin is launched, the question is asked to denote when will the coin be worth enough to afford the car. There’s even a famous meme of Vitalik Buterin, the creator of ethereum, as Jesus, holding a red Lamborghini in his hands. Buterin, for his part, has threatened to quit the entire ethereum project if get rick quick schemes by crypto fans dominates the industry.

There’s no question crypto fuels demand: Lamborghini has been reporting sales have been rising steadily, reporting record sales in January, marking seven consecutive years of sales growth.

“Historically, Lamborghinis have always stood for new money,” said branding agency Red Peak CEO Susan Cantor. “It’s been a symbol for excess and unreasonable wealth, because nobody needs a Lamborghini.”

Just about every model has been featured in some kind of hip-hop or rap music video, from Kanye West’s “Mercy” to Rick Ross’s “Lamborghini Doors” to A$ap Mob’s “Yamborghini High.”

According to branding experts, there is a provocative bent to Lamborghinis — they’re for people who want to stand out and a clear sign you’ve made it and want everyone to know.

“Lamborghini has always stood for flash, noise and a healthy dose of testosterone,” said HL Group president Amy Hufft. “It has been a brand for people who want to be noticed immediately.”

It also has connotations about “making it” in America, which is why so many artists have used it as a way to celebrate success, said Hufft.

Cantor argues that the brand certainly could be at risk: Crypto may be making some people some money, but it is still largely seen a little bit as a joke. “Longer term, that can damage the brand,” said Cantor. “When brands that are specifically associated with individuals because of socio economic status there’s a risk to that. Lamborghini should stick to its promise or essence, which is about performance.”

The issue is obvious: Even as cryptocurrencies enter the mainstream, they are also starting to show signs of a bubble. There are hundreds of thousands of get-rich-quick schemes flooding the internet, with plenty of shitcoins, crypto trading scams and strategy consultants pumping a constant stream of “I’ll show you how to become a cryptomillionaire” Telegram posts online. And confusion is hardly something a brand wants to be associated with.

Hufft said that Lamborghinis also have a bit of a “get rich quick and die out fast” connotation, arguably a great statement for the longevity of bitcoin wealth.

There have been similar issues with so-called luxury brands in the past. In 2004, Burberry saw a sharp decline in sales after that camel check became super popular with British “chavs,” with retailers bemoaning that that association caused others to not want to buy the brand’s products.

In 2005, there was a smaller blip for Prada, which had a rash of clubs in bars in the U.K. banning people wearing Prada high-top sneakers because they became associated with chavs, as well as with gangs. (To be sure, lots of luxury brands, including Ralph Lauren, have struggled with not wanting to be associated with certain economic or racial groups because of perceived brand issues — despite, as this New Yorker article pointed out, often having histories that are inextricably linked to those groups, through streetwear.)

According to Brandwatch, sentiment around Lamborghinis are mostly positive. And within conversations about Lamborghinis, bitcoin and crypto, they’re “exceedingly positive,” according to analyst Kellan Terry, at 97.3 percent. Pointing to data that shows how often rapper Cardi B is is mentioned in discussions around Lamborghinis, Terry said that Lamborghinis have also often been mentioned in rap songs as a status symbol. “The connection here is people are starting to think about cryptocurrency the same way,” said Terry. “Both music and cryptocurrency are the avenues to become wealthy, and purchase status symbols.”

The hashtags “bitcoin” and “blockchain” are among the 10-most used hashtags within any conversation about Lamborghinis in the past month, according to data compiled for Digiday by Brandwatch. #Bitcoin accrued more than 14.8 million impressions in this time frame, while #Blockchain added another 14.5 million impressions. Thanks to a rash of crypto millionaires publicly spending their bitcoin on Lamborghinis, the “Lambo” has become the outward symbol for crypto bro culture.

For its part, Lamborghini seems to like the attention. In a CNBC interview last week, the brand’s CEO Stefano Domenicali said that young people love Lamborghinis, especially young people that are OK with high-risk and high-reward situations.

“I see the parallel between young people that are really willing to become very rich with a very high-risk investment with the fact that our customers are very young,” he said.

Cantor agrees: “Lamborghinis are being associated with a youthful way to build wealth. The downside is it could also be associated with brash, cocky arrogant bro culture. But that’s not a bad thing,” she said.

There is some history here. As far back as 2011, Peter Saddington, a startup CEO, bought a Lamborghini Huracan for about $115, cashing in 45 bitcoins to buy the $200,000 car.

In 2014, a 4chan user bought a Lamborghini Gallardo with bitcoin, spending 216 bitcoins for the car (about $209,995 at the tie.) The buyer leaked the documents, so the Reddit legend goes, and bought the car using a third-party service that verifies bitcoin. The sale’s news went viral, and Lamborghini Newport Beach, the dealership where it was bought, proudly used it to proclaim that it was the first luxury car dealer to accept Bitcoin as payment. (It also sold a Tesla Model S to someone for 91 bitcoins around the same time.)

There were lots of other similar sales at the time, with crypto enthusiasts cashing in their newfound wealth to buy the expensive cars.

One bitcoin is currently worth $8,000, about half of what its value was in December.

Woodrow Levin, CEO of 3.0, a crypto asset hedge fund, said that Lambos are from a time when crypto bros had to scream from the rooftops and proclaim that they were here. That time, he says, has passed, at least for people who take crypto assets more seriously.

“If you want to be taken seriously, and if you want this to be accepted as a game-changing technology and a new asset class, you don’t HODL, you don’t moon, and you don’t Lambo.” He likens to the dot-com boom, when people cashed in and bought yachts or jets. ‘This isn’t new but in some way the Lambo has become a symbol for the industry and its meteoric rise.”

The post When Lambo? How Lamborghini became the status brand of the crypto boom appeared first on Digiday.

Many digital publishers are trying to go Hollywood, but it’s not as easy as flipping a switch. For instance, it took Vox Media three years between creating its Vox Entertainment division and landing a deal with Netflix.

Produced by Vox Entertainment, “Explained” premieres on Netflix on May 23. The documentary-style series covers topics from Korean pop music to designer babies. In July, Vox Entertainment will release the food and travel show “No Passport Required” on PBS; the studio is also producing a four-part miniseries for CNN called “American Style.” The division also hopes to secure deals for around a dozen other shows over the next year.

“It’s a paradigm shift from the publishing model, where you can just throw up ideas, and test and see where it goes,” said Chad Mumm, vp of Vox Entertainment, during the Digiday Video Summit. “It took three years, but it’s becoming a meaningful business for us with real money.”

Instead of partnering with veteran TV production studios out in Hollywood, Vox Entertainment is making its shows internally. This has meant forgoing quick co-production deals with studios, which can quickly land development deals that go nowhere, Mumm said. And by self-producing its TV and streaming shows, Vox has greater control over the quality and direction of the content, he said.

But as a new entrant to entertainment, Vox had to convince buyers to let it produce its own programming. Eventually, Vox landed a pilot commitment from an unnamed TV network, which allowed Vox Entertainment to be the lead production studio. Even though the pilot did not get picked up to series, it set a precedent.

“Our first biggest fight was, can we sell a show where the network would let us be producers?” said Mumm. “He who controls the money controls the creative. And if you’re not the network funding the show, the next best thing is to be the lead producer.”

As a newcomer to TV and streaming production, Mumm said he was also less precious about retaining ownership over the finished tape (the final cut of the episodes that are delivered to Netflix and other network partners). Intellectual property ownership is important for Vox Entertainment, but will become more so as the studio builds out a larger library of programming and captures more interest from content buyers. Right now, especially in the case of the Netflix deal, Vox is happy to put a show that puts its brand front and center on a global streaming platform.

“Yes, they owned the finished tape, but they paid for it,” Mumm said of Netflix. “We may not own the rights to resell it internationally yet, but we have not taken on a lot of risk relative to what the [network buyers] have to. There’s no secret sauce to getting more rights — either have a compelling package where lots of people bid on it, or put up some risk and co-fund it.”

The post ‘A meaningful business with real money’: How Vox approaches producing for TV and streaming appeared first on Digiday.

In the world of podcasting, distributors are aplenty. But podcast publishers and marketers are really hoping for one major player to flip a switch.

Google has spoken with publishers, privately over the last year, about its commitment to help distribute podcasts, which would help grow audiences beyond just Apple’s dominance. Last month, Canadian branded podcast company Pacific Content published a five-part series of interviews with Google podcast product manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen, in which he described the new podcast-focused player and outlined his company’s vision to podcasts to Google search everywhere. But the first product hasn’t been formalized as an app and the latter hasn’t launched beyond Android phones.

“It’s holding everyone back,” said one major podcast publisher at VoiceCon, VaynerMedia’s one-day conference on the state of digital audio and voice this week.

Of course, priorities at Google parent Alphabet Inc. are broad and far-reaching. The tech giant is investing high-speed internet, security cameras, drone delivery, self-driving cars and disease prevention. But given that the bulk of Google’s revenues come from advertising and therefore growing its scale online, publishers said they’re confused by Google falling so far behind Apple in distribution, since it would give an easy path to an ad network.

“Google has a podcast beast just sitting there,” said one publisher, who shared that the vast majority of their traffic comes from Apple. But they’ve been frustrated by the ad solutions and data from platforms like Spotify and iHeartRadio.

Dylan Hecklau, director of product management at programmatic ads company Jelli, said Apple’s potential inability to create a scalable ad solution has opened up a window for Google.

“Apple has never been strong in advertising whereas it is in Google’s DNA, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a podcast ad network doesn’t soon follow. Google knows how advertisers think and how to address consumers,” Hecklau said.

Google has made a version of its podcast product on Android via Google Search. With that product, searching for a podcast’s name or other keywords will surface audio clips of recent episodes on the first page. Clicking through reveals more about the podcasts and an option to subscribe. Google has yet to formalize that discovery through an official app.

Creating a Google Podcast app, as Reneau-Wedeen of Google’s product team shared with Pacific Content, could boost listens and subscriptions for publishers. Out of NPR’s 12 million monthly podcast listeners, more than 60 percent came from Apple’s player as of September 2017, according to AdExchanger. That statistic is now down to more than 50 percent, an NPR spokesperson said, showing that the company’s dominance could fade.

“The fact that when you open up an iPhone, it has a podcast app and your iPhone-having friends probably have been listening to podcasts plays a big role. So we want to create an environment on Android where it’s just as easy to get started, and it’s actually the best experience possible for discovering and listening to podcasts,” Reneau-Wedeen told Pacific Content.

But more people in the world have Android phones than iPhones, and therefore, publishers, marketers and Google are each losing from Google’s lack of podcast player across platforms. Google does allow podcast discovery through Google Assistant, available on its smart speaker Google Home.

For now, publishers have been trying to increase their audiences via social media. For example, The New York Times’s Facebook group, The New York Times Podcast Club, has more than 24,000 members.

The desire for more podcast products from Google arises even as the tech giant, along with Facebook, continue to pull ad dollars and keep data from publishers. A publisher, who has spoken with Google about its product initiatives, said Google’s incredible reach via search and on phones is undeniable, and it’s better to work with them than against. Google, with its wealth of data, could also provide more analytics tools for publishers. Apple released podcast analytics at the end of last year.

Podcast publishers also expressed confusion on why Pacific Content received the exclusive and not a larger media outlet like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

“This is just the beginning, and we’re eager to work with more publishers as our product continues to progress. I know it’s a different division, but I have visited and do work closely with both NYT and WSJ podcasting teams. Their product feedback and strategic guidance have been super helpful for us in defining our roadmap. Hopefully, we can connect with their editorial teams as well in the future if they are interested in covering us,” Reneau-Wedeen wrote in an email.

Yet some publishers are feeling a bit iffy about Google’s entry into digital audio and voice. Google’s fabrication of its A.I. voice demo during its developer conference last week alarmed members of the podcast community on the ethics of voice.

“It only reinforces the need for a sort of ‘hippocratic oath’ for marketers and creators,” said Patrick Givens, vp of VaynerSmart, VaynerMedia’s agency focused on the internet of things. “We need to agree on a set of principles for how we as a community will responsibly use new tools and treat sensitive data, and a good starting point would be, ‘first, do no harm.’”

The post ‘A podcast beast just sitting there’: Podcasters want Google to counter Apple’s dominance appeared first on Digiday.

Google is set to have meetings today with media trade associations and various publishing company representatives to address their concerns about Google’s position on the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation. But the meetings themselves have become a flashpoint of controversy, dividing publishers.

Initially, Google invited four trade groups and some of their board members to meetings on May 24: the News Media Association, European Publishers Council, News Media Alliance and Digital Content Next. These were the same four that had sent Google a letter, slamming it for waiting till the last minute to reveal its plans to comply with the GDPR, which takes effect May 25.

The meetings are set to take place in New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago and London, with representatives from Google’s product, engineering, sales and legal teams attending. The main meeting is scheduled to take place at Google’s headquarters in New York; the others were set to take place as video conferences at Google’s offices.

Publishers feel in the dark on critical points. Google has said it expects publishers to gain user consent on its behalf, in order to continue working using its ad tools. In doing so, it has proclaimed itself co-controller of that data, meaning it can decide whatever it does with that data — something that would previously have been purely in the realm of the publisher. But Google hasn’t shared any detail on how it then plans to use that data with any of its publisher partners. With the risk of costly penalties, publishers aren’t willing to be kept in the dark on how audience data is used, for which they are directly liable.

Publishers have demanded that Google share this information with them immediately. They also want to know on what grounds Google deems itself a co-controller and if it has sought guidance from GDPR regulators to make such a decision.

A Google spokesperson emailed a statement, saying: “The GDPR is a big change for everyone. Over the last year, we’ve engaged with over 10,000 of our publishers, advertisers and agencies across nearly 60 countries through events, workshops and conversations around the changes we’re making to be compliant with the GDPR. We will continue to open our doors to our publisher partners to engage in these discussions on GDPR compliance.”

The May 24 meeting situation has divided publishers and trade groups. The four publishing groups that were originally invited declined to attend the meeting. Google has invited a handful of other groups — 13 in all — including the Local Media Consortium and International News Media Association as well as individual publishers, for a total of around 100 invites.

Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint, a regular critic of Google and Facebook, said his preference was that Google first answer questions that his and other trade groups put to Google about how it would implement the privacy law. Kint said more than 30 members of the association told him they’re not going. he’s “not telling [members] not to go” but that “No one thinks this is a good idea to take this behind closed doors.”

“I’m with DCN on this,” said Jon Slade, chief commercial officer for the Financial Times. “We would like to see Google respond publicly to the open letter that was sent to them. So we are not participating in meetings with Google this week.”

“The view was, give us a response and then we’ll have something to talk about,” said David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, whose members include News Corp and The New York Times. “What’s clear is their whole GDPR strategy when it came to publishers came pretty late in the game and caused us to react as a group and say, ‘Here are these problems.’ They’re not going to solve these problems in groups or one by one because these problems are pretty universal.”

The European Publishers Council’s head is also not attending or encouraging members to go, said Angela Mills Wade, its executive director.

“They [Google] can’t expect publishers to bear the risk for what they have decided to do,” said Mills Wade.

The INMA was invited but is also taking a pass, but that’s because it’s tied up with its big World Congress of News Media taking place next week.

The chairs won’t all be empty. BuzzFeed is attending, as is The Washington Post and USA Today. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, to which Google belongs, said it will have a “small group of IAB and Tech Lab representatives attending.” The Local Media Consortium, which represents 75 local media companies in the U.S. that seek to work with technology companies including Google to grow their share of digital revenue, was also invited, said its CEO, Christian Hendricks; he’s attending along with several LMC board members.

The controversy stands in contrast to the public image as a collaborative partner with publishers that Google works hard to cultivate and in many ways has worked, especially in contrast to tech giant rival Facebook, whose relationship with many publishers has soured in the past year.

Despite the late hour, many are hopeful a lot of these questions will be answered by Google.

“I remain optimistic that Google will do the right thing,” said Mills Wade. “We expect them to address our concerns and come up with solutions, technologically and legally. It wasn’t acceptable for them to expect publishers to underwrite their risk and they must address this.”

Jessica Davies contributed to this report.

The post ‘No one thinks this is a good idea’: Some frustrated publishers are sitting out Google’s GDPR meetings appeared first on Digiday.

Get your popcorn ready: Facebook created an 11-minute film, Facing Facts, to shed more light on its efforts to combat misinformation and fake news. Facing Facts can be found on Inside Feed, a new communications channel the social network created to share insight on how the company makes decisions and the people who are involved…

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It wasn’t a surprise to most in the industry when Accenture Interactive said Wednesday it would formally launch a programmatic services unit as part of its offer to clients. The Accenture subsidiary has been steadily wading into agency territory for years by acquiring creative and design shops. While it hasn’t made any major acquisitions in… Continue reading »

The post Three Challenges Accenture Interactive Will Face As It Pushes Into Programmatic appeared first on AdExchanger.

Independent agency Droga5 today announced that it has promoted executive creative director and eight-plus-year veteran Neil Heymann to the role of chief creative officer, effective immediately. Heymann will lead a 167-person department, reporting to founder and creative chairman David Droga and overseeing all campaigns produced by the shop, which was Adweek’s U.S. Agency of the…