Month: May 2018

The price of a bitcoin is down more than 50% this year, but enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies and related projects has hardly been dented, judging by the throngs at an annual crypto conference.

Many managers are conflicted about how—or even whether—to limit smartphone use in the workplace.

The podcast industry is growing, and audio giants want a piece of it. Twenty-six percent of Americans listen to podcasts every month. These people are young and well-educated and have higher-than average household incomes, according to Edison Research. They’re also loyal and engaged, on average consuming seven podcasts per week. Ad dollars are following. The… Continue reading »

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“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Mike Rosen, executive vice president of advanced advertising and platform sales at NBCUniversal Media. Much has been written about the erosion of transparency and trust in the advertising ecosystem. The result is an existential… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Network To Get Work Turner President David Levy gave an impassioned call for television advertisers to embrace audience targeting and abandon the Nielsen currency standard at the broadcaster’s upfront presentation on Wednesday. Nielsen’s metric “no longer fully captures how to successfully measure an audience… Continue reading »

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Gizmodo Media Group turned commerce content into revenue before it was cool by serving up deals and focusing relentlessly on what its audience wanted. Now it’s hoping to use the trust it’s built to grow a full-fledged commerce content brand.

On May 17, the publisher is expected to announce the launch of The Inventory, a standalone commerce site stocked with evergreen product guides and reviews; news about products the Inventory writers have already reviewed; and a section dedicated to points, travel deals and credit cards, which are highly lucrative for affiliate commerce publishers. Kinja Deals, the editorial brand used for Gizmodo Media Group’s deals content, will live on as a vertical inside The Inventory. The site will have an editorial staff of four, though it expects to grow its headcount over time.

“[Kinja Deals executive editor Shane Roberts] has done a fantastic job building voice and trust,” said Ryan Brown, svp of business development for Gizmodo Media Group. “We’re realizing that that can extend well beyond just deals.”

Gizmodo Media Group — which has been the subject of tension with its corporate parent Univision, having recently laid off people at Gizmodo’s unit Fusion Media Group — embraced commerce content earlier than most publishers and turned it into an eight-figure stream of revenue; it accounted for around 25 percent of Gizmodo Media Group’s digital revenue in 2017, according to a spokesman. Most of that revenue comes from finding and writing about great deals on products and syndicating them across the network of sites that run on Kinja, which includes Gizmodo’s Deadspin, Jezebel and Lifehacker, plus sites including The Root and The Onion A.V. Club. That network reaches 120 million users per month.

Moving into evergreen content will enable the site to cover more product categories and leverage Google and Facebook for distribution, Roberts said. Facebook has been a crucial source of traffic for most digital publishers, it’s ill-suited for the time-sensitive deals that Kinja Deals distributed to its audience.

“Deals hasn’t been a winning play on Facebook and Instagram,” Roberts said. “It’s been fantastic on Twitter, but we have a lot more social opportunity than we ever did, with a real brand.”

Google, too, now figures to drive more audience to The Inventory. The site will launch with a library of over 500 reviews and guides, which will be updated regularly by the site’s editorial staff and Brown’s business development team.

Moving into points comes with a lot more red tape than other product categories but potentially offers the greatest savings upside, Roberts said.

“We can save readers 10, 20, 25 percent on a video game, and that’s great,” Roberts said. “But there are thousands of dollars to be saved on travel.”

The post Gizmodo Media Group is rolling out a new commerce site, The Inventory appeared first on Digiday.

The succession elephant has entered the room.

Over the past week, the question of who will take on the top job at WPP replacing former CEO Martin Sorrell, has turned into a soap opera-style drama. Reports indicate that Oath CEO Tim Armstrong is being considered, as is Unilever chief communications officer Keith Weed. There are other names being thrown into the mix, as well, including WPP Digital chief Mark Read.

The post The Rundown: Drama atop WPP appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers that recently began focusing on subscriptions know they need to figure out which visitors are open to paying up. But many small and medium-sized publications have a lot of work to do to find those readers in order to market to them.

“There’s still more digital subscriptions that can be harvested from all these publishers,” said Patrick Glennon, the president and founder of Marketing G2, which helps publishers including Gannett and Digital First Media grow digital subscribers. “But for them to get to where they need to go, there’s a lot [of work to do].”

Identifying potential subscribers is very different from segmenting audiences for advertisers, which publishers have done for years. Segmenting audiences requires coordination across different departments, mastering new technology and getting the organization to buy in.

“On the advertising side, so much of the segmentation is really still broad,” said Jed Williams, chief innovation officer of the Local Media Association. “[For subscribers], you’re trying to get someone to move from an anonymous user to a known user, and then you’re appending as many data points and signals as you can.”

This kind of marketing requires different departments to work together. For example, to see how readers will respond to a marketing message targeted against a certain set of content, you need marketing to craft the message, product to decide where to place it, editorial to support with content; ad ops and audience to ensure the right people see it. This is a new way of working for many print publications where departments have traditional operated in silos.

“For us, audience grew out of circulation, and for a while, it used to be us in a corner,” said Rosheen O’Donovan, vp of audience at The Business Journals, with over 430,000 print and digital subscribers across its titles. “Now, we have to talk to everybody.”

O’Donovan said her team only began working on segmenting its digital audience about six months ago. In that time, she’s had to meet with people one by one in different departments to get buy-in for that work.

Storing all this customer information creates a separate vendor headache, too. According to the CDP Institute, a trade organization that focuses on customer data platforms, only about 100 publishers, representing some 200 titles, use a customer data platform to store information from multiple departments. For small publishers, those can be cost-prohibitive.

Even publishers firmly committed to growing digital subscribers know that they need to do it efficiently. Tronc, with 320,000 digital-only subscribers, segments its readers using demographic information and behavior that suggest they’re likely to subscribe, such as using the sites’ search function or spending more than six minutes on a site in a single sitting.

“We can’t afford to market to [our entire audience], aggressively, either from a paid media point of view or negatively affecting the user experience,” said Gerard Brancato, vp of consumer marketing at Tronc. “We’re trying to decide which of those display a higher propensity to convert.”

Smaller publishers often have limited toolsets to learn about reader behavior, though. Jeff Howland, the digital director of Down East Magazine, a magazine about Maine, said he spent the past year convincing colleagues that the site could be used to drive more subscriptions.

Howland said the company now recognizes subscriptions are important, and Down East has been able to identify heavy newsletter users and target people on Facebook who look like they might subscribe. But finding the resources to put together five customized subscription offers every month instead of one is a leap.

“We’re kind of in the middle,” Howland said. “The business is starting to see that all different departments have to play their part to make it work. It can’t just be the online people.”

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For the last two years, CNBC International has been moving up the consultancy ladder with its in-house agency, Catalyst. The 60-person division helps shape the strategic thinking of its clients’ ad campaigns in order to drive deeper and longer-lasting partnerships.

Catalyst is now working with clients like Alibaba, Huawei and UBS, in long-term relationships that go beyond campaigns to include long-term relationships with clients that stretch the year. The group has poached ad veterans, assembled data scientists and attempted to take on more of a consulting role for clients who want to reach finance industry decisionmakers.

“It’s not smart to go into a client and say ‘we can do anything,’” said Max Raven, who leads CNBC Catalyst. “You have to focus on your area of expertise.”

CNBC International is in its fifth-year campaign with consultancy EY, Credit Suisse is in its second year of collaborating with the network on “The Brave Ones” and Total is now in its third year of sponsorship for CNBC’s Sustainable Energy series. Pre-existing clients HSBC and ExxonMobil have returned to working with CNBC International. According to the company, revenue has had double-digit growth.

“We focus hard on proving that whatever we do delivers tangible results so we can continue work with clients,” Raven said. “We need to prove what we do works. Eighty-four percent say they have taken action as a result of seeing advertising or editorial on CNBC International.”

This action could be making a purchase, clicking an ad or making a business decision, said Raven, identified through a mix of site analysis and surveys. The Catalyst data team has been instrumental in proving that the media company’s branded content works, led by head of data and insight, David Evans, who previously worked with Eurosport and MediaTel as well as running his own firm, Dres Consulting. Measuring how well the ads work is split into three pillars: campaign effectiveness testing; content testing; and campaign monitoring. CNBC Catalyst groups its services into audience planning, brand strategy, content services, data insight and events.

For Credit Suisse, CNBC Catalyst produced an eight-part video series “The Brave Ones,” with30-minutes episodes following business people and where they’ve shown moments of bravery. The series has featured heavyweights like Virgin Group’s Richard Branson, former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown and Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma.

According to Raven, more than a third of CNBC International’s global audience saw “The Brave Ones,” post-campaign analysis found that three out of four people were more positive towards Credit Suisse after viewing the series, and almost half of those said they were more likely to choose to invest with Credit Suisse.

For Schneider Electric, the company said that 97 percent of the people that watched CNBC Catalyst’s series “IOT: Powering the Digital Economy” said they were more familiar, or likely to consider, Schneider Electric after the show aired.

Being part of the wider network of NBCUniversal and Comcast means there are more tools available for the International arm’s clients, as it did with Shell last year to promote the “On top of the world” video as part of the company’s #makethefuture campaign, sharing the video across other NBCUniversal owned platforms.

“There’s a broad palette to paint from, there will only be more of these types of partnership for our clients.”

CNBC has hired agency execs from JWT, invested in data science team and retrained sales teams to sell consultative services.

“I didn’t expect how much more we’d need smart consultative selling,” said Raven. “The biggest change is we’re now an idea and results driven culture rather than a media selling division, we are consultants and have a lot of tools at our hands to do that, rather than filling digital space.”

Image: courtesy of CNBC Catalyst.

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Sometimes, being reliable goes a long way — and for smaller publishers looking to grow sustainable video businesses, that means focusing on YouTube.

This month, Inc. and Fast Company, both owned by Mansueto Ventures, will release nine new video series. All were created with YouTube in mind in the sense that the shows are weekly, focus on evergreen topics and run up to eight minutes per episode. The shows include Fast Company’s “You Have to See This,” which covers people and businesses offering experiential services, and Inc.’s “Day In the Life,” which follows entrepreneurs.

Previously, the title’s videos would be distributed only on the publishers’ websites, because early on in the video strategy, this was the fastest way to make money in video, said Scott Mebus, vp of entertainment for Inc. and Fast Company. After Fast Company and Inc.’s teams were combined earlier this year, Mebus started to explore ways to grow the video distribution and revenue off platform. That’s when he landed on YouTube.

“We need to create a video presence outside of the site, [in that context] YouTube made good sense because Facebook is unreliable,” Mebus said. “YouTube has been a fairly reliable place where the rules have become somewhat codified — it’s not as nebulous as Facebook and it’s not going to change every month.”

Facebook’s decision to devalue media content within the news feed — the latest and most seismic change in a constant series of changes to Facebook’s algorithm and video strategy — has forced many publishers to make tough decisions on where to look for video distribution. Some bigger publishers are producing and selling shows for streaming platforms; others are eyeing streaming TV bundles; and even more are taking a closer look at Twitter and Snapchat, both of which have also been wooing publishers with better monetization and distribution options.

YouTube is also benefiting from this shift. And for smaller publishers especially, which lack the resources of big digital publishers and TV companies, the video platform can be a reliable safe harbor — especially if they can cross the 1.5 million “monetizable views” threshold in the U.S. that they need to direct-sell into their YouTube channels, said Mebus.

“That number has been the same for years, which makes me even more comfortable — I’m not worried that YouTube is going to change that,” said Mebus.

In February, Fatherly started to publish videos on a more consistent basis on YouTube. Since then, it’s grown on YouTube to the point that the average completion rate on Fatherly’s YouTube videos is four times what it gets on Facebook.

“You obviously have to benchmark each platform differently, but that delta encourages us to feed our growing YouTube audience with more long-form, episodic content that encourages a deeper, lean back experience with us, as opposed to the ‘scroll-and-pause’ experience of Facebook,” said Adam Banicki, vp of video for Fatherly.

Publishers are spending more time and resources on YouTube than Facebook. Back in November, Mebus said he planned to put equal effort into both platforms. By January, he said, “Facebook had fallen off our radar.” Today, Fast Company and Inc. still use Facebook to distribute video clips, but it’s with an eye toward driving traffic back to the site and YouTube, Mebus said.

“I know what revenue looks like on YouTube; I know the goals I need to reach in order to direct-sell on YouTube; I know what an influencer on YouTube can provide me,” Mebus said. “I’m not saying YouTube is perfect, but it’s still the largest video search engine in the world, and you can monetize there and you can forecast against it.”

About a year ago, The Atlantic made the decision to go YouTube-first. Instead of licensing a video player from Brightcove or another video player technology provider, The Atlantic now uses the YouTube video player. Since then, its YouTube channel has nearly tripled subscribers from 41,000 last May to 114,000 subscribers. Average watch time on YouTube is also close to 4 minutes, and jumps up to 8 minutes for The Atlantic’s longer documentaries. Views and watch time are also up by 40 and 41 percent, respectively, on The Atlantic’s website in the first four months of 2018 compared to the preceding four months.

Another benefit YouTube has for small publishers is that evergreen videos on the platform can have a longer shelf life — and therefore provide more opportunities to monetize. Take a 16-minute documentary about Atlantic Media executive Sam Rosen’s experience in a cult that was published two years ago. Initially, the video received tens of thousands of views; then, all of a sudden, the video blew up on YouTube this spring and now it has 586,000 views with an average watch time of eight minutes, according to the publisher. It was “the perfect case study of the power of YouTube,” said Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, executive producer and gm of Atlantic Studios, which, with 14 people on staff, can’t afford to make a ton of short, news videos that have a short shelf life.

Any time a publisher prioritizes a platform that it doesn’t control, there’s risk. For Fast Company and Inc., whose on-site video is already profitable and is funding its YouTube efforts, the risks are mitigated. For other small publishers, where video is still in the early stages, YouTube’s reliability makes it attractive.

“It’s definitely something you have to consider, but it’s also something that can be a pro,” said Kim Lau, svp of digital and head of business development at The Atlantic. “For us, the opportunity [to switch over to the YouTube player] made more sense and a year in, we have no regrets.”

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