Month: May 2018

Deloitte Digital is a fast-growing consultant-owned agency making waves in the industry. Deloitte’s agency subsidiary has more than 15,000 global employees from acquisitions such as creative shop Heat, Polish agency Digital One, design agency Flow and consultancy Daemon Quest. With $2.6 billion in 2016 revenue, Ad Age ranked Deloitte Digital as one of the world’s… Continue reading »

The post Deloitte Digital’s Heat Tries To Reinvent The Agency By Returning To Its Creative Roots appeared first on AdExchanger.

If Martin Sorrell wants to make WPP 2.0, he has his work cut out for him.

The former WPP CEO announced May 30 that Derriston Capital, a British investment company, will acquire a Sorrell-backed investment vehicle called S4 Capital. S4 Capital was set up with £40 million ($53 million) from Sorrell and another £11 million ($15 million) from institutional investors. Derriston will be renamed S4 Capital. An S4 spokesperson said the company’s goal is to make a global advertising, marketing and ad tech company, by acquisition.

The post The Rundown: Martin Sorrell’s new path is littered with obstacles appeared first on Digiday.

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Brett Wilson, vice president at Adobe Advertising Cloud. From Achilles to Hercules to Wonder Woman, many classic mythical figures and comic book superheroes are the offspring of a deity and a mortal. These characters are… Continue reading »

The post Connected TV: A Hero Is Rising appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Follow The Trends Mary Meeker delivered her famous “Internet Trends” deck (this one clocking at 294 slides) at Recode’s Code conference Wednesday. Smartphone adoption and internet user growth are slowing, but time spent online continues to rise. US adults spend on average 5.9 hours… Continue reading »

The post Mary Meeker Drops Deck; The Fortnite Juggernaut appeared first on AdExchanger.

In theory, premium podcasts should be a great tool for publishers that want to retain and grow their subscriber bases. In practice, they’re mostly a headache.

The New York Times and Slate (and, yes, Digiday) offer either early or exclusive podcast access to their subscribers, but there is no easy way to deliver that kind of content through Apple and Google, the two dominant podcast platforms.

Workarounds are labor-intensive, expensive or leaky. And while only a handful of publishers have this problem — less than 5 percent of the 44,000 podcasts hosted by Liberated Syndication, better known as Libsyn, offer a premium tier, said Rob Walch, the company’s vp of podcaster relations —  the lack of a simple solution also means some publishers have dropped exclusive podcasts out of their subscription offerings or may hesitate to include them in the future.

“It is a pain in the ass for us, and more importantly, it’s a pain in the ass for users,” said Gabriel Roth, the editorial director of Slate Plus, which made ad-free, exclusive podcast content the linchpin of the paid membership program when it launched in 2014. “What we have, essentially, is a customer service challenge.”

Over the past five years, podcasting has grown from a desktop-dominant medium to a mobile-dominated one. More than three-quarters of podcast listeners say they typically listen to podcasts on a mobile device rather than a desktop, up from 42 percent in 2013, according to Edison Research.

While there are a number of podcast hosting and distribution solutions, Apple and Google don’t have the option of paywalling or gating content. Creators are left to deliver the content through a standalone mobile app; create a separate RSS feed, then share it only with subscribers; or hide an embeddable player on an owned and operated site.

Those options strain a publisher’s resources. Slate’s only dedicated customer service representative for Slate Plus spends a large portion of her day helping people add the Slate Plus podcast feeds to their preferred podcast app. Roth said a majority of Slate Plus’ podcast listeners access shows through those feeds, and the podcast player landscape is so varied that someone has to help people figure out the process. “It doesn’t feel very digital,” Roth said. “But that’s what the subscriber model makes you do.”

Many people also access the podcast through Slate’s mobile app, which means the publisher has to maintain the show in two different environments. Moving to a standalone app comes with its own problems. The New York Times, for example, didn’t set out to make its app able to deliver paywalled audio content to its users. So when the Times decided it wanted to give subscribers early access to “Caliphate” through its mobile app, its engineering team had to figure out a plug-in that would detect if a mobile app user was a subscriber or not.

A Times spokesperson declined to share specifics about how many of its subscribers listened to the show in this way, saying only that the publisher was encouraged by how “Caliphate” had been received by both subscribers and the general public.

Just setting up and hosting a separate feed adds extra costs as well. While there are a number of hosting solutions, the costs for a paywalled or private feed are “just ridiculous,” said Mathew Passy, a podcasting consultant and the head of content at podToPod, a podcasting industry news site.

Having to wrestle with imperfect solutions also creates dissonance for some publishers that work hard to keep their content behind a paywall. Subscription sports site The Sports Capitol recently moved its podcasts out from behind the paywall and made them widely available. The Athletic, another subscription sports site, also offers its podcasts widely. It’s the only content either site offers to nonsubscribers.

Publishers simply looking for a way to extract consumer revenue from their podcasts have more options at their disposal, like setting up a Patreon or adding themselves to a bundle such as Stitcher Premium. But for publishers that haven’t made podcasts a centerpiece of their content, the hurdles may discourage some from including premium shows in their subscription packages.

“If you weren’t trying to build a program around successful podcasts,” Roth said, “the technical challenge is an additional hurdle.”

The post ‘A pain in the ass for users’: Subscription publishers wrestle with delivering exclusive audio appeared first on Digiday.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe plans to establish an independent, nonprofit board of cross-industry stakeholders to govern the industry standard it devised for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation.

The plan is to give publishers, agencies, ad tech vendors and advertisers equal representation in voting on issues that arise as businesses start to comply with the IAB Europe and IAB Tech Lab’s Transparency & Consent Framework.

For example, the framework’s ability to help with areas of GDPR compliance that affect a business’ ability to make money would be a likely subject for discussion.

The arrival of GDPR has caused confusion across the industry, with some companies interpreting the law far more strictly than others. When enforcement began May 25, demand levels dropped on ad exchanges, which many attributed to Google’s late decision to integrate into the IAB framework. The confusion will likely continue, which is why IAB Europe is calling for a separate body to oversee future GDPR framework compliance.

“GDPR is super vague, so there needs to be a code of the road: policies that bind anyone that is implementing the framework to make calls in a particular way at junctures where the law itself is not clear enough,” IAB Europe CEO Townsend Feehan said.

The IAB Europe and IAB Tech Lab’s GDPR framework wasn’t an immediate hit with publishers. Many felt its early version served ad tech vendors, which represent the majority of IAB members, over publishers. The IAB Europe subsequently worked with publishers to amend parts of the framework they were unhappy with. This effort included giving publishers more control over which vendors they work with and what purpose those vendors use their data for, along with making the framework compatible with publishers relying on the opt-out legitimate interest to fulfill their compliance.

By creating a body that represents all parts of the digital ad ecosystem equally, the IAB Europe hopes to erase any remaining publisher concerns that the framework doesn’t have their best interests at heart.

“We [IAB Europe] have been working on debunking the myth that the framework is a device to opt publishers back into an existing landscape where they don’t always know what’s going on, and it is some big take-it-or-leave-it package that we would foist upon them,” Feehan said. “It is not that. The framework must take into account everyone’s needs, or it isn’t sustainable.”

The planned nonprofit group doesn’t have any members or a formal outline confirmed. The plan is to invite people to join the “free-standing entity,” which will center on certain principles. Members will have voting rights to ensure no one group dominates the others. The idea is for the stakeholders to speak regularly via video conference and potentially meet in person three to four times a year, Feehan said. A location hasn’t yet been determined, but the IAB hopes to have an outline in place by the end of July, with the first meeting (either virtual or physical) happening in September.

“It has to be a cross-industry representation. It must be clear the ad tech part of the ecosystem cannot impose its will on others, and absolutely not on publishers,” Feehan said. “If publishers aren’t absolutely confident and serene we have nothing to sell, we understand that.”

The European Publishers Council welcomed the idea of an entity to oversee future compliance with the framework.

“It’s important that the governance of a cross-industry tool is transparent, and that it has the confidence of all participants, their users and their clients in the ecosystem,” said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council. “This can only really be achieved through an equal participation of the key players and through being separately owned and governed from the framework itself.”

To date, 375 vendors, over 100 consent management platforms and at least 15,000 publishers have committed to implementing the framework, according to the IAB Europe. If the stakeholders raise future issues that require technical changes, the IAB Europe can liaise with the IAB Tech Lab in the U.S., which looks after the technical iterations of the framework, Mills Wade added.

The post IAB Europe plans independent board to govern GDPR framework appeared first on Digiday.

Teens may curate their Instagram accounts, but there appears to be no stopping the bad advertisements on the platform. David Teicher, chief content officer of Brand Innovators, tweeted an Instagram ad he saw that included the R-word on May 30.

This ad is bad @instagram pic.twitter.com/YJgWm52yrf

— Your Fave Dave (@Aerocles) May 30, 2018

The ad was for “Hustle Castle,” a video game that uses the offensive word to describe players on the first level. The studio behind the game, My.com, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why it uses that word. People have also called out Instagram for ads that promote white nationalism and other racist products. Even Instagram itself has created a problematic ad. Instagram used a Guardian reporter’s post about her rape threat to promote the photo-sharing platform on Facebook. Of course, you could blame that on the algorithm.

The “Hustle Castle” ad “violates our grammar and profanity policy and has been disabled,” an Instagram spokesperson said. “Ads on Facebook and Instagram must, at the very base level, comply with our Community Standards. Our Ads Policies build on that benchmark, and are stricter.”

Instagram is contributing to the spread of these offensive ads. Yet the platform continues to operate without much scrutiny or criticism. Even amid the crisis facing its parent company Facebook, Instagram remains beloved among users and marketers. Instagram is expected to grow nearly 11 percent to $8.06 billion in ad revenue in 2018, which is about 16.5 percent of Facebook’s total revenue, according to eMarketer.

“If Instagram were a TV show, it would’ve been canceled,” said an ad industry executive. “If Instagram were a person, there’d be an angry Twitter mob. But it’s Instagram, so it gets a pass.”

Problematic ads on Instagram, or elsewhere on the internet, are far from a new issue. Programmatic advertising and self-serve platforms are part of the problem. There’s also human error. It was a Snap Inc. employee who approved a Snap ad that asked, “Would you rather: Slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown?” While high-profile celebrities like Chrissy Teigen abandoned the platform in the aftermath, advertisers, for the most part, have continued to buy on Snapchat. Same goes for Instagram.

Of course, Instagram users and advertisers have other things to worry about, like fake Instagram influencers and the abundance of bots, and advertisers have not made cries to stop spending there like they have on YouTube for brand-safety concerns and on Facebook regarding its return on investment.

The company behind “Hustle Castle” also created a Facebook ad that included the R-word, The Telegraph’s James Cook noted on Twitter.

Genuinely wonder if they used that term on purpose to increase Facebook interactions on the sponsored post pic.twitter.com/2uR17PMNBT

— James Cook (@JamesLiamCook) May 29, 2018

Replying to Cook, Zachary Jarvis of marketing agency Magnate guessed that it would have been “auto-approved.”

“This will get manually flagged and disapproved – would have been auto-approved in the first instance. (But yeah – definitely designed for reaction),” Jarvis tweeted.

Regardless of the game studio’s intent, Facebook’s advertising policies, which also apply to Instagram, prohibit the use of profanity.

Instagram offers a reporting feature to help police its platform. In just two taps, a user can express their concern about the nature of an ad. The first reason is, “I find it offensive.” There are no other options to clarify or add context once users select that response.

Facebook’s team of moderators receive those reports. In the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election via Facebook’s platforms, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that his company would hire more people for security and content moderation, and the staff would total 20,000 by the end of the year. According to an Instagram spokesperson, the company is adding more than 1,000 people specifically to the global ads review team. Facebook also has been investing more in machine learning and other technological solutions to help flag and take down ads.

If it’s true that Facebook is prepping Instagram to be the “next Facebook,” as The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo writes, Instagram could face more scrutiny.

“There’s a perception that Facebook has been burning in ashes, but that Instagram is untouchable,” Eric Schiffer, CEO of ReputationManagementConsultants.com and DigitalMarketing.com, told Digiday last month. “All it requires is one high-profile incident.”

The post Instagram runs problematic ads but avoids scrutiny appeared first on Digiday.

BuzzFeed has built a sizable audience on YouTube and Facebook with its entertainment and lifestyle content. But in Hollywood, the publisher’s news division has helped BuzzFeed land its first deals with big-name buyers such as Netflix and Hulu.

Last week, Hulu announced it had commissioned a documentary feature film from BuzzFeed News based on its extensive reporting of sexual abuse allegations against singer R. Kelly. A few weeks earlier, Netflix ordered a documentary series from BuzzFeed called “Follow This,” which will follow BuzzFeed News reporters on the job.

These two streaming shows join a growing slate of longer-form programming for BuzzFeed News, including the daily morning show “AM to DM” for Twitter, which recently renewed the program through the end of 2018, a cable TV show coming this fall on Oxygen, and a weekly interview show for Facebook Watch coming later this summer. BuzzFeed is also actively pitching a nightly news show to premium cable buyers, and has dozens of projects in development with external distribution partners, many of which are tied to the BuzzFeed News brand, said a company spokesperson. Recently, BuzzFeed signed up with Hollywood talent agency WME to help the publisher sell projects across subscription streaming, TV and film.

Shani Hilton, vp of news and programming for BuzzFeed, said she’s thinking about film and TV “a ton” these days. “It’s becoming a huge part of my day,” she said. “We want to extend the BuzzFeed News brand as far as it can go.”

Linzee Troubh, BuzzFeed’s senior manager of news development, oversees BuzzFeed News’ streaming and TV deals. Troubh is part of the 40-person BuzzFeed Studios group and is fully focused on working with BuzzFeed News journalists to develop show formats and ideas based on the outlet’s original reporting.

While BuzzFeed News is actively investing in producing for streaming platforms and TV, it’s taking an “opportunistic” approach to deal-making rather than signing as many deals as quickly as possible, Hilton said. “Ultimately, it really is on a case-by-case basis and how we can marry what we have going on with what the market is looking for,” she said.

Today, BuzzFeed News has the audience and the prestige of a national news outlet, with more than 300 staffers worldwide and more than 250 million page views per month, with news accounting for a quarter of the traffic to BuzzFeed’s site and apps, the company said. But even with this audience, BuzzFeed executives including CEO Jonah Peretti have been plagued by questions about whether the publisher would spin or sell off BuzzFeed News, which does not generate as much revenue as the publisher’s entertainment and lifestyle content. That programming, by the way, is mostly distributed on Facebook and YouTube, where BuzzFeed properties drove 2.9 billion video views and 731 million video views, respectively, in April, according to Tubular Labs.

Peretti has been steadfast about his commitment to keeping and growing BuzzFeed News. And with social, over-the-top and linear TV content buyers seeking more unscripted and documentary content, BuzzFeed News has an opportunity to be a bigger revenue driver for BuzzFeed while helping the company diversify its revenue streams beyond advertising. While sponsorships fund “AM to DM,” Netflix is paying BuzzFeed to produce “Follow This.” BuzzFeed was also able to snag a license fee from Apple News, which is exclusively premiering new episodes of the documentary series “Future History: 1968” before they air on BuzzFeed News’ Facebook and YouTube channels.

A diversified revenue portfolio is a big mission at BuzzFeed overall. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti recently told Bloomberg that about a third of the company’s revenue in 2018 will come from non-advertising sources, including film and TV production, licensing, merchandising, and e-commerce. Peretti said he hopes to see revenue evenly split between advertising and other sources next year.

One advantage BuzzFeed has over traditional production studios when it comes to producing for streaming platforms and TV is the publisher can absorb some of the development costs, said Robert Green, chief creative officer of Ripple Collective and a veteran digital and TV producer.

“With studios, when you’re pitching financiers, there’s an expectation that they’ll lose several millions of dollars on a development budget because it takes time to sell TV shows and gain traction,” Green said. “BuzzFeed is not dependent on the short-term hit of selling a show to Netflix because they have other revenue-generating businesses that can fund the cost of development.”

While BuzzFeed News is eyeing more projects and partnerships in Hollywood, it won’t be at the expense of its core, editorial product, Hilton said.

“We want to make this additive and not have it take people away from the great journalism that is so core to everything we do,” she said.

For more of our coverage around video and the future of entertainment, subscribe to the Digiday Video Briefing weekly email. 

The post News is helping drive BuzzFeed’s Hollywood ambitions appeared first on Digiday.

As more viewers prefer to watch video on demand, Viacom’s Nickelodeon has launched the Nick Play app in the U.K., featuring episodes of shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “The Thundermans” and “Henry Danger,” plus short-form shows and games.

In the U.K., viewers can already watch Nickelodeon shows on demand through catch-up apps from pay-TV providers like Virgin Media, Sky, BT and TalkTalk. Viacom has four other branded apps on which it offers short-form content: Nick Jr. Play, MTV Play, My5 and BET. The new app will offer shows running eight to 12 minutes long and a way to personalize content for audiences.

Linear TV viewing is still important, but today, viewers get content from many sources, said Dan Fahy, vp of commercial and content distribution at Viacom International Media Networks, adding that he doesn’t expect the app to cannibalize Nickelodeon’s linear audiences.

“We believe this will be additional viewing and grow our audience share,” he said. “The primary use case is, people gravitate to the biggest video screen in their house, the TV set. This will answer latent viewing scenarios.”

According to a report by Enders Analysis, two-thirds of children’s and young adults’ TV time is spent watching traditional broadcasters’ content, with the rest split between unmatched activities such as online, gaming and short form. Nickelodeon doesn’t disclose its viewing figures, but Fahy said Nickelodeon’s viewing trends are in line with the report.

The Nick Play app is integrated with Virgin Media’s payment system, so Virgin Media subscribers will automatically have free access.

Kids have a propensity to rewatch the same shows again and again, which helps Nickelodeon drive revenue from sales of licensed merchandise from certain show brands.

“The important thing is as many kids see the show as possible. The content is then a pure ad for a ‘Paw Patrol’ lunch box,” said Gary Pope, director of the marketing agency and children’s media research group Kids Industries. “A child doesn’t differentiate between short and long content; they consume when it suits them.”

Getting people to download additional apps when they can already access much of the content through pay-TV catch-up services will be the challenge, but from observing other markets, Fahy is confident. In Latin America, Viacom has linked its branded apps with pay-TV platforms and has had strong viewing results.

“We expect that to be true with this app, too, because Virgin Media will promote the usage of the app in their TV guide and through direct-response communication,” he said.

Image courtesy of Viacom

The post Viacom adds a Nickelodeon-branded app to its UK collection appeared first on Digiday.

Popchips’ media business used to be handled by Palisades, one of the larger media agencies in Los Angeles with $350 million a year in revenue and clients such as Netflix, Vizio, and Pacific Life. On June 1, Popchips plans to announce that its new agency of record will be PK4 Media, a privately held agency of 10 employees with little-known clients.

Popchips isn’t alone in trading big agencies for small ones. The large agency model is based on the premise that they can deliver big scale for companies, often at a discount. But as more companies become interested in targeting over reach, they’re moving their business from big to small agencies. Even holding companies have struggled to keep accounts. An August 2017 study by independent research firm COMvergence found that out of 42 pitches, 16 moved their business from holding companies to independent shops, with Sprint, Honda and Darden Restaurants moving media planning and buying to Horizon Media, RPA and The Tombras Group in 2017 after working with a holding company.

Companies that target narrow audiences in particular don’t need the scale that large agencies can provide, which is the main reason Popchips decided to abandon the large agency model, said Popchips CMO Marc Seguin. The discount rates on impressions Popchips used to get from the large agencies the company worked with in the past didn’t help the company fulfill its goals (and it wasn’t always easy to tell if its discounts were put in place or worked). Popchips is trying to make an emotional connection with its target, health-conscious women, so where its messaging appears is more important than the number of platforms it uses or the total number of impressions achieved.

Popchips started working with PK4 Media to launch Popchips’ new Nutter Puffs in the fourth quarter of 2017, leading to a 160 percent lift in purchase intent, according to Nielsen. Now, Popchips is working with PK4 Media on marketing activities, including a new campaign called “Enjoy More.”

Big agencies can also be hard for clients to navigate. At large agencies the company has worked with in the past, Popchips worked with five to 10 people on different functions, including strategy and account planning. With PK4 Media, the company only works with a couple people who participate at every level, said Seguin.

“Big agencies are more mechanical,” said Seguin. “They’re basically trying to get you to buy a number of impressions or specific result, and that’s not always what we’re looking for. I’d rather reach a few less people but reach true brand fans.”

The post ‘Big agencies are more mechanical’: Why Popchips is trading its big agency for a small one appeared first on Digiday.