Month: May 2018

Facebook is still a risky platform for marketers looking to build their brands in a brand-safe environment.

Many believe low vMVPD price tags may not last — especially as sport TV rights fees rise on a nonstop basis, even with mediocre, but mostly steady, sports TV viewing.

A look inside ZTE’s Axon 3 smartphone reveals how much the telecom giant depends on U.S. technology: 60% of the electronic components come from U.S. companies including Qualcomm, SanDisk and SkyWorks.

This is the latest installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world.  Kim Perell learned at a young age that it’s OK to fail. “Failure is a great opportunity to learn,” she said. “I saw my parents fail [when I was] growing up. It was more… Continue reading »

The post Amobee CEO Kim Perell’s Resilient Rise To The Top appeared first on AdExchanger.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jaclyn Stewart, senior director of strategy at The 614 Group. Many publishers today are wrestling with whether they should decouple their data from their impressions. Do they want to help advertisers understand their audiences… Continue reading »

The post Leveraging A DMP As A Sales Channel And Not Just A Platform appeared first on AdExchanger.

At the Digiday Retail Summit in February in Austin, Texas, we discussed with 53 retail leaders how their organizations are using online consumer data. Check out our earlier research on retail companies’ subscription services here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Seventy-nine percent of companies surveyed by Digiday said they use online data to improve marketing campaigns.
• The least popular use of online data was creating targeted in-store advertisements.
• Only 25 percent of surveyed companies plan to work with others to create multibrand stores.

Marketers use online data in many ways
Retailers today have access to massive amounts of online data on consumers such as online purchase history, web browsing habits from cookies and location data from mobile traffic. As competition between companies increases, online consumer data can play a critical role in developing a competitive advantage. Seventy-nine percent of companies in Digiday’s survey said they use consumer data to enhance their marketing efforts, and 74 percent use it to improve brand visibility. Less than one-third of retailers said they use this data to create in-store advertisements.

The post Digiday Research: Retailers put data to work appeared first on Digiday.

“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 Alexei Chemenda, chief revenue officer for apps and managing director, US, at Adikteev. Most marketers use return on ad spend (ROAS) as the benchmark for their retargeting campaigns. The problem… Continue reading »

The post Vendors Shouldn’t Fear Incrementality appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Onboarder Offloaded? Acxiom is shopping LiveRamp, a linchpin of data-driven advertising, Mike Shields reports for Business Insider. LiveRamp, the strongest player in the data-onboarder category, would have many suitors, with marketing tech giants like Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and IBM likely to make a bid.… Continue reading »

The post Acxiom Is Shopping LiveRamp; YouTube Evolves Revenue Model appeared first on AdExchanger.

The Financial Times has been steadily cultivating a following of younger, new audiences on Instagram after giving the platform renewed focus in 2016. Since then, it’s been linking back to its site through Instagram Stories, driving traffic and ultimately subscriptions.

The FT posts between two and four Instagram Stories a week as a self-contained narrative based on a published piece. Previously, the FT told Digiday that Stories on dense topics like bitcoin and discussions on interest rates that were a dozen clips long typically got a completion rate of 50 percent. But getting the production to a standard the FT is happy with has taken time to perfect.

“Instagram’s status as a visual-heavy platform means it takes a great deal of creation and production to do well. It’s not like doing a Facebook post or tweet, where something can do well without a significant time investment,” said Jake Grovum, the FT’s U.S. social media editor. “The nature of what works on Instagram means that it is a time-intensive platform to work on.”

Before Instagram Stories, the platform was limited to driving traffic back to publisher sites. Increasingly, media companies like the BBC and National Geographic are using links in their Instagram Stories to funnel audiences to their properties, mostly newsletter sign-ups, where they have a more direct connection and can monetize audiences more effectively.

Outside of Stories, the FT’s posts on Instagram are distinctive because they don’t often relate to published stories. In the last year, three of the top 10 most engaged with Instagram posts linked to stories, the most popular about how Meghan Markle will bring a “breath of fresh air” to the royal family, with nearly 13,000 likes and 150 comments. Daily posts from the FT photo diary — in line with Instagram’s conventional style of beautiful scenes globally — do well, like this image of fighting on the Gaza Strip, with 6,000 likes and 400 comments. Sketches from the FT’s in-house illustrators and charts also see high engagement. The FT developed a social-specific chart style with a black background to stand out on the platform, and the publisher can see in the analytics that people save them to their profiles to refer to later.

The FT has 700,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 4 million followers on Facebook. The Instagram account is growing at a clip of 5,000 followers each week, according to Socialbakers data, thanks to regular posting from Grovum and five social media staffers split across London, New York and Hong Kong, who together usually post up to four images a day.

According to data from NewsWhip, the average number of engagements — likes, shares and comments — on the FT’s Instagram posts between April 2017 and April 2018 was 2,703 per post, far outstripping the number engagements on Facebook, which was 201. For other U.K. news publishers, Facebook typically remains the most engaged platform by post. Across the month, engagements on the FT’s Instagram content have doubled to 300,000 since last July.

Images: The Financial Times via Instagram

The post How the Financial Times uses Instagram Stories as a traffic driver appeared first on Digiday.