Month: May 2018

The U.S. and China have agreed on the broad outline of a deal that would save imperiled Chinese telecom giant ZTE, as the two sides move closer to resolving their trade dispute.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Lindsey Harju, co-founder at Blinc Digital Group. Many in the marketing and ad tech worlds believe we’ve evolved as a society into superior beings, and in many ways, that is… Continue reading »

The post For Better Targeting, Look For Clues In The Human Mind appeared first on AdExchanger.

By Justin Choi, CEO and founder of Nativo

For Facebook and publishers of the open web alike, the feed is considered sacred ground for users, delivering a direct stream of content and in-feed ads. Because these highly visible ads are mixed in with regular content, they can be powerful vehicles for influence and engagement. But just like any powerful tool placed in the wrong hands, this type of advertising can become a weapon to spread false news or influence with malintent.

But despite all the coverage about fake news, let’s not lose sight of the fact that in the right hands, in-feed advertising can be a force for good.

Research from The World Media Group (an alliance of media companies including The Washington Post, Bloomberg Media, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, National Geographic, The New York Times, Time, and The Wall Street Journal) found that ads seen on trusted media websites are more attentively viewed by consumers. In-feed ads on sites like these can also be an especially big opportunity for cause marketing and social impact initiatives whose “good news stories” may not be able to garner earned press coverage.

Puerto Rico knows this challenge all too well. After the Caribbean was devastated by Hurricanes Irma and Maria last fall, The Puerto Rico Tourism Company used in-feed advertising to let the world know that the island is still around and open for business.

Despite the historic damage dealt by the two storms, stories about the plight of Americans on the island quickly disappeared from Facebook News Feeds and news coverage. The US territory’s Herculean effort to quickly rebuild and resume its tourism business was largely ignored. To keep Puerto Rico relevant and top-of-mind, The Puerto Rico Tourism Company and lead agency KOI Americas partnered with media agency Grain Group and Nativo to build an in-feed advertising campaign to boost tourism. The branded content featured vibrant photos and video that accurately portrayed the island’s current state as a beautiful and visitor-friendly destination.

Nativo conducted a Content Influence Study (CIS) to measure the campaign’s impact on business outcomes. The study showed significant lifts through every stage of the customer decision journey, from awareness to intent. Pre-exposure, respondents indicated that Puerto Rico was the vacation destination they would consider the least; post-exposure, this number jumped 58 percent, making Puerto Rico the most-considered vacation destination.

The Puerto Rico Tourism results are no outlier. Travel content naturally translates to native content, since it’s both visually enticing and a meaningful resource when readers are parsing the complex decision-making involved with planning a trip. As a result, Nativo saw more growth in the Travel vertical last year than in any other segment.

Health and fitness is another market where native advertising is growing, showing an investment in native that doubled from 2016-2017. The Oklahoma Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust (TSET) used in-feed advertising when trying to spread the simple message that smoking is bad for your health. The leading causes of death in the state of Oklahoma—obesity and tobacco use—are preventable, meaning that these in-feed ads could inspire direct action. The Oklahoma TSET is devoted to preventing cancer and cardiovascular disease, and regularly publishes practical and actionable information about healthy living on their website. The challenge is that readers do not typically go to individual brand sites to discover and engage with content, even when a large investment of time and money goes into creating it. In-feed ads helped share the message without relying on their audience to click through to the Oklahoma TSET site.

In-feed ads, whether served on social media or the pages of premium media sites aren’t just a way to advertise and sell product, they’re a way to give exposure to positive stories. When we have the opportunity to help cause marketing and social impact initiatives, it’s a reminder that there are countless great stories that need to be told—and countless positive outcomes to support.

The post Forget fake news: How in-feed native ads can spread positive news appeared first on Digiday.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Rewinding Videology Videology, once the agency world’s preferred solution for online video, declared bankruptcy earlier this month after a tough few years. Digiday recounts how in the early days of digital video, Videology’s ad network model offered TV buyers an easy and scaled way… Continue reading »

The post How Videology Stumbled Into Bankruptcy; Trust Busters Vs Google appeared first on AdExchanger.

Publishers hunting for subscribers like to say they’re delivering an experience worth paying for. Increasingly, that’s starting to mean “one that has no mobile ads.”

Over the past few months,  Salon Media Group and Gannett have all begun offering ad-free versions of their mobile apps to subscribers. For Gannett’s USA Today app users, an ads-free experience is sold as a standalone service for $2.99 per month. 

For Salon, an ads-free experience is one of several features bundled together into a pricier offering. Salon Premium, which also includes access to a library of video content and documentaries, costs $4.99 a month. Talking Points Memo, which has had a premium tier, TPM Prime, for six years, has leaned on an ad-free experience for a while, though this year it’s focused on putting content behind a paywall.

Selling an ad-free experience is a way to appeal to people who block ads, who essentially deliver zero revenue to publishers. But it also risks cutting off ad revenue from what’s usually the most engaged segment of a publisher’s audience, and a segment that can be monetized through ads more effectively than the typical anonymous visitor.

The idea of getting rid of ads in exchange for digital subscriber or membership fees is not new. Salon began experimenting with an ad-free paid tier in 2001, and Ars Technica has offered ad-free experiences to members for over a decade. Today, Ars Technica offers two: For $25 per year, subscribers get ads blocked, while for $50 per year, subscribers can read Ars Technica in “clean reading mode,” a new article template that doesn’t have any space devoted to advertising at all.

The idea of charging for an ad-free experience is also the idea behind Scroll, a startup led by Chartbeat founder Tony Haile. When it launches, which is set to happen later this year, Scroll users will get an ad-free experience when they visit participating publishers’ sites for a monthly fee, which the publishers will share. It’s signed up publishers including Gannett, Fusion Media Group and Business Insider.

Talking Points Memo offers subscribers a reduced ad experience on its desktop. But these newer ad-free offerings are mobile-only, in part because there’s less revenue for publishers at stake. Mobile site visitors tend to be less valuable than desktop visitors because there’s less real estate for advertising on the smaller screens.

In theory, the lower value of desktop visitors could be offset through higher advertising prices commanded by subscribers. Logged-in readers, whether they’re subscribers or registered users, are much more valuable to advertisers. Gannett calculated that logged-in visitors are worth twice as much in advertising revenue as their anonymous counterparts. Bloomberg Media built a registration wall (and, later, a paywall), in part to deliver more targeted, more personalized advertising to more of its visitors.

But developing new ad experiences for a small subset of users is tricky because most publishers don’t have the subscriber scale that advertisers typically covet.

Jordan Hoffner, Salon Media Group’s CEO, said he’d rather make Salon’s advertising better for everyone, not just subscribers. “The onus is on the publishers to find the best possible ad experience for everybody.”

The post Publishers try to use ad annoyance as a lure to subscribers appeared first on Digiday.

Luxury car brand Maserati will only run TV ads in Europe if it can buy the right target audiences rather than inventory around the shows they might watch — anything else is just waste.

The advertiser is using Sky’s targeted TV technology to target ads for its luxury SUV Levante to individual households in the U.K. based on viewing behavior or lookalike audiences. It’s the first time Maserati has bought any TV media in Europe. Like other luxury advertisers, Maserati has viewed TV’s reach as too broad. The Levante sells for £56,690 ($76,075), and Maserati shipped around 51,000 cars last year.

“If Maserati were to try and run a traditional TV campaign, then we would probably end up wasting something in the order of 95 percent of the investment,” said Mike Biscoe, Maserati’s gm for its Great Britain region. “It’s either addressable TV or nothing because I can’t afford to go broadcast. If I had an infinite marketing budget, then I could afford to wait to get payback over 15 years. The power of TV as a creative medium is undeniable, but it’s something which hasn’t been cost-effective for us in the past.”

Maserati’s targeted TV ads are targeted to locations near its dealerships. Households will be served variations on messages that either espouse the brand’s values or promote the price of the car and its monthly finance rate, depending on whether those in the catchment areas either resemble the brand’s target group or are likely to be in market for a car, respectively. On the latter point, the advertiser is targeting specific audiences on the basis of factors such as vehicle ownership and household composition. The frequency of those targeted ads is capped, and only the ones played at least 75 percent of the way through at normal speed are bought. Visits to Maserati dealerships will be tracked over the length of the campaign, which ends in September.

Beyond dealer visits, the campaign’s success will also hinge on the number of visitors it drives to a site created solely for the launch of the Levante.

Pressure is mounting on Maserati after a lackluster 2017 was compounded in the first quarter when both shipments and revenue slipped a fifth compared to the same period last year. Sagging demand has consequently pushed Maserati to lean more on marketing that can deliver faster returns.

Should targeted TV ads prove their worth over the summer, then Biscoe believes they could be bought in other markets across Europe. Advertisers can already buy targeted ads on Sky’s AdSmart inventory in the U.K., Italy and Ireland, while there are also plans to launch the technology in Germany and Austria. Further scale for Maserati could come from the broadcaster’s expansion into more households over the next three years. By 2021, the broadcaster expects to be in around 60 percent of households in the U.K., up from 28 percent now, and driven by Virgin Media’s decision to serve Sky’s addressable ads to its own subscribers. For an advertiser like Maserati that considers itself too niche for the broad reach of TV, the prospect of more households not just in the U.K. but Europe is making its marketers rethink the role TV could play in media plans that are increasingly influenced by its own data.

The post Maserati looks to targeted TV ads to find rich car buyers appeared first on Digiday.

Agencies have long relied on freelancers to fill their ranks, but that is about to get tougher in California.

The California Supreme Court ruled in April that a worker can only be hired as an independent contractor if they perform a job that is not part of a business’ “usual course.” For instance, an agency could employ a video producer on a freelance basis if it doesn’t have an in-house video team. If, however, an agency already has a video team, that additional person would have to be hired as an employee and granted all of the benefits that come with it.

Freelancers are a regular facet of agency life, offering the workers freedom to take on projects as they wish and employers needed flexibility to manage costs and boost utilization, not to mention skirt paying benefits. Changing the status of freelancers could hit agencies hard.

“For a company that is playing the margin game, they’re going to hurt from this because it’s going to be a massive investment,” said one agency executive, requesting anonymity. “There will be massive layoffs,” said another executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

While the cost of onboarding more employees is still a burden, most smaller, independent agencies are more worried about losing talented freelancers that would rather maintain their independence. That’s why some agencies are actively working on finding a middle ground — a solution that won’t push freelancers away, but still adhere to the law. Three of the five executives Digiday spoke to for this story are in the process of meeting with their freelancers to discuss next steps forward.

“Our fear is not whether the company can afford to comply with the law — we’re fully able to do that. The fear is that employees will reject what the state is requiring and will make it difficult for us to recruit,” said one executive at a small, independent agency, requesting anonymity.

The agency employs 17 freelancers, nearly double the agency’s 10 full-time employees. That not just to the benefit of the business, the agency owner said.

“There’s a large sector of our industry that doesn’t want to work in-house permanently,” he said. “They love the freedom to be able to do it on their own, whether that is working on several jobs simultaneously or having the ability to travel or work remotely. That’s why in the short term, an agency that does not adhere to the law will have an advantage over those that do.”

Indeed, the life of an agency freelancer can be pretty good.

“I like having the freedom to work for whoever I want, whenever I want,” said a freelancer who is on the fence about transitioning into a traditional employee role.

For some agencies, that means laying out the true cost of full-time employment. After all, the cost of employees is not just salary.

“We’re meeting with our freelancers about this, saying if we could offer you benefits, if we could offer you a relationship that looks like you get a W-2, you have taxes withheld, we invest in your Social Security, you get a 401(k) and health care, but you can still control your own workflow and work when you want to,” an agency exec said. “For the most part, people we’ve talked to are excited about that.”

Another agency executive said they are considering hiring more freelancers through freelancer firms like The Creative Group where the freelancer is technically an employee of the firm, which handles taxes. Digital agency Liquid said it ended up paying a markup of 10 percent when it went through a freelancer employment firm. “People were complaining how it was impacting their project margins as well,” said Liquid CEO Scott Gardner.

Regardless of whether some workers want to remain freelancers, some agencies don’t want to take any chances.

“We’d rather err on the side of caution and classify someone as an employee than risk denying them benefits or otherwise treating them unfairly,” said Laura Small, vp and director of people at Los Angeles-based creative agency RPA, which employs around 20 to 40 freelancers at any given time on top of its 725 employees. RPA’s freelancers are usually hired for creative roles and are therefore subject to the new law because their roles tie into the agency’s core business.

“Freelancers are a vital aspect of our staffing strategy, and we rely upon their expertise to solve for critical business challenges,” said Small.

The post Ad agencies are forced to adjust to a new California freelance worker restriction appeared first on Digiday.

Do you GDPR? Some agencies are quizzing their employees on the ins and outs of the General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect this week.

At Interpublic Group, every single U.S., U.K. and Europe employee, both corporate and on the agency level, is receiving GDPR training, with translated versions of the training in various European languages offered. The holding company set up what it calls a network of 200 “GDPR Champions,” who are heads of the compliance program and in charge of coordinating the agency’s efforts. “The primary focus of the course is to educate our talent on the impact of this new legislation,” said an agency spokesperson.

Similarly, at Omnicom Media Group, mandatory GDPR training has been implemented for all employees.

An OMD spokeswoman declined to comment further on how the training will be implemented, saying only that the company plans to work with clients and partners to prepare for GDPR enactment.

And at GroupM, training consists of town halls for every employee. The sessions happened in February and March, with additional training for employees that deal more directly with customer data.

One Publicis agency employee, under condition of anonymity, said there is also plenty of training there. “The testing and training mostly underscore that none of us really know what’s happening,” said this person. “I failed it three times.”

We asked agencies to send us questions from their quizzes and put them together to test your knowledge of GDPR.

The post Take the quiz: How agencies are testing employees on GDPR appeared first on Digiday.