Month: June 2018

Food Network, Travel Channel and other former Scripps Networks Interactive properties are focused on making digital video series for multiple platforms, including TV.

Fully 85 percent of the short-form shows across these properties were conceived of as cross-platform projects. The former Scripps properties are now part of Discovery following a merger, and they will release roughly 40 digital video series through the Digital Lifestyle Studios unit, which includes the digital properties of Food Network, HGTV, Travel Channel and youth-aimed food sites Genius Kitchen and Spoon University.

The company tends to launch shows on social platforms or its own sites or apps before rolling them out more widely. For instance, HGTV’s “The Find & The Fix” premiered on Facebook Watch, but now also airs on HGTV.com and will soon expand to other areas. About 10 percent of the shows, such as Food Network’s “Treat Yourself with Skyler” for Snapchat Discover, are exclusively made for a social platform. The remaining 5 percent of shows are intended for sites and apps.

Vikki Neil, gm of Digital Lifestyle Studios, said the company doesn’t always go into a new project knowing where it’ll be distributed. Often, the programming strategy is informed by the format — does it feature a celebrity or an influencer who has a following across platforms? — and what type of programming its audience is interested in and where.

The cross-platform approach also ensures that Discovery’s properties are not overly reliant on any one platform — especially one whose whims and algorithm it can’t control. Plus, it’s still easier for publishers to monetize on their own sites and apps, where pre-rolls can flow freely. (Facebook, on the other hand, still struggles to deliver significant video ad revenue to most publishers.) The approach has helped make short-form video a profitable part of the digital business, Discovery said.

“Over the longer term, we’re thinking about developing an ecosystem and brand experience where our consumers are touching all of our brands in all of the places that they can,” said Neil. “While social has been having a big moment in the food category, it’d be limiting to think that’s the only place where we can reach the consumer — and for that to be your sole business, over the longer term, is risky.”

Neil said Food Network, HGTV and the other lifestyle brands have pulled back on creating the short, stand-alone social videos that used to dominate the Facebook news feed in favor of short-form and mid-form shows. A lot of this programming is evergreen, which gives the company flexibility in when and how it programs the show across platforms.

Digital Lifestyle Studios is also experimenting with putting digital programming on TV. An after-show for “Chopped” that was originally made for Food Network’s digital platforms now airs on its linear network. And during commercial breaks of “Holiday Baking Championship” in the fourth quarter of 2017, Food Network aired some hands-and-pans baking videos.

Food Network, Travel Channel and the other lifestyle brands frequently bring editorial and sponsored videos to TV when they’re contextually relevant, Neil said. (These same social recipe videos also appear on Food Network’s website.)

Some of these social-to-TV videos included brand integrations with advertisers such as Pillsbury, whose video centered on making bear-shaped cookies.

“Advertisers value an association with [Food Network] and integration into their content,” said Matt Denerstein, managing director for cross-platform investment at Mindshare North America. “That applies anywhere the content is running, whether it’s on social networks and certainly on air where there’s different audiences.”

Facebook — and especially Watch, where Discovery has 23 total shows, including several funded by Facebook — remains a place of experimentation for Neil. It’s still a question whether Facebook can make Watch a place for destination viewing, and Discovery doesn’t make a ton of revenue there, Neil said. But the Digital Lifestyle Studios can use it to experiment and take the shows that resonate to other platforms where the revenue potential is greater.

“If anyone has the perfect answer for where media is going to be three years from now, we would have retired,” Neil said. “Our goal is to place multiple bets and understand everything we can about the consumer — and we get better at that every time we experiment and try more with other platforms.”

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The arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation a month ago led to a flurry of activity, clogging email inboxes and flooding people with tracking consent notices. But experts say much of that activity was for show because much of it fails to render companies compliant with GDPR.

Part of the issue, experts say, is the vague regulation has been interpreted in wildly different ways. GDPR consent-request messages vary wildly across sites. There are default pre-ticked opt-ins, buried options that require users to hunt for them, consent banners with information only available at a further click but no button to reject, and implied consent approaches. Others have used what some industry execs refer to as “nuke buttons,” which let the user reject everything without explaining what they’re rejecting or what they’re agreeing to. Others have simply reskinned cookie-banner messages required under the existing ePrivacy directive.

“Many publishers [and marketers] seem to have shot themselves willfully, or ignorantly, in the foot,” said Adrian Newby, chief technology officer at Crownpeak, parent company to privacy vendor Evidon. “They have bombarded their audiences with entirely unnecessary and noncompliant consent and opt-in emails.”

A tumultuous few weeks after the law’s arrival on May 25, in which programmatic ad volumes plummeted mostly as a result of Google’s last-minute GDPR policy changes, programmatic spending is returning to pre-GDPR levels. Jangled nerves are calming, but experts warn against feeling a false sense of security.

“Pretty much everyone is breaking the law right now,” said Denmark-based media analyst Thomas Baekdal. “There is not a single consent dialogue box anywhere that is easy to understand. We [publishers] have not really realized how much this is going to hit us. Everyone is trying to make things work the way they used to, rather than thinking about privacy.”

“The European Union is very aggressive about privacy. This won’t stop just because we have a found a way for people to ignore it. This is coming,” added Baekdal. “They’ll likely attack Google and Facebook first. That’s how it will start, but through that, we will realize that as publishers, we’re just as bad.”

GDPR has been criticized for being vague and open to interpretation, which is what led to such disparate consent-gaining methods. Publishers across Europe are divided between those that have taken softer legitimate interest-based approaches or opt-out methods to claim compliance, while others have gone the harder consent-based route that requires people to opt in.

For example, Bloomberg and Forbes appear to be taking strict active consent approaches, while others like the Guardian and MailOnline are running consent banners. Several publishers have divided explainers on their cookie use into those used for advertising and tracking, and those used for site analytics — though users aren’t always able to pick one and reject the other; in many cases, it’s all or nothing. Others are simply hoping to stay under the radar until they have figured out how to be compliant in a way that doesn’t damage the business model.

“Confusion will continue to reign, and until someone actually gets burned, everyone is trying to fly as close to the sun as possible,” said a publishing executive.

But those who choose to do less now won’t necessarily be better off in the long run, according to some industry executives.

“Just being compliant and talking to users in a legal language won’t take publishers very far and fail to make the best of the potential advantages GDPR is presenting to them,” said Alessandro De Zanche, independent publishing consultant. “Inaction will just play into the hands of the duopoly.”

There are many examples of businesses simply repurposing the existing EU cookie directive policy and running cookie banners at the base of sites, to which users can click “OK” to proceed.

“GDPR consent requires an affirmative action, which leads you to conclude you need an explicit yes button,” Newby said. “No data should be collected until the user says yes. But a lot of publishers have gotten confused and taken a more similar approach to ePrivacy.”

Publishers went on a soul-searching mission when ad blocking reached crisis levels in 2017. A lot of focus returned to ensuring the user experience wasn’t neglected for the sake of hitting short-term revenue targets.

“With Y2K, there was so much freaking out,” said Brian Kane, co-founder and chief operating officer of ad tech vendor Sourcepoint. “But it came and went, and was never talked about it again. It’s the exact opposite with GDPR. It came on May 25, and it was the start of the conversation. We’re in conversations with publishers about how they approach consent, how they tie it with their subscriptions offerings and monetization strategies.”

The post ‘Everyone is breaking the law right now’: GDPR compliance efforts are falling short appeared first on Digiday.

Digital video network Studio71 is getting into the podcasting business to diversify its revenue and extend its deals with advertisers beyond videos on YouTube.

Studio71 is best known for operating a network of digital video creators, like YouTube star Lilly Singh, and producing original video shows starring that talent. Now, it’s formed a new division, Studio71 Podcasts, to also create podcasts with its creators. Overseen by Adam Boorstin, Studio71’s evp of global digital distribution, that five-person team has produced 11 podcasts since March that star Studio71 creators such as comedians Christine Sydelko and Harley Morenstein. By the end of this year, Studio71 expects to have nearly doubled its number of podcasts, with 80 to 100 episodes airing per month across its slate, said CEO Reza Izad.

Ten of the podcasts are part of a deal that Studio71 has with podcasting platform Castbox. Studio71 and Castbox distribute the podcasts on and off Castbox’s app and jointly sell advertisers on host-read ads that air during the shows, with both sides splitting the revenue.

Studio71 decided to get into podcasting last year after seeing some of its creators like YouTube stars Rhett & Link create their own podcasts without Studio71’s involvement and fielding questions from its advertisers about podcasting opportunities Studio71 could provide, said Izad. Because its creators could move their audiences from one platform to another, Studio71 wouldn’t need to spend much in marketing the podcasts to amass an audience it could sell to advertisers.

The podcasting business model is also familiar to Studio71, which sells ads against creators’ videos and advertiser-sponsored videos on YouTube, not unlike podcasting’s host-read promotional messages. That enables the audio format to be “very much an extension of what we do on our branded content business,” said Izad.

Studio71’s entry into podcasting coincides with creators’ continuing frustrations with YouTube, especially the platform’s response to its brand-safety issues that boiled over last year. To address advertisers’ concerns, YouTube took a more conservative approach when deciding whether a video was eligible to carry ads, but that has resulted in creators losing revenue and led many to turn to other avenues to bolster their businesses, such as podcasting. For example, YouTube star Cody Ko started his “Insanely Chill” podcast for that reason last year, and he now says the podcast is “one of the best things I do.” Ko said the podcast’s average ad price is “way higher” than what he makes per ad on YouTube, and he can distribute the podcast in video form on YouTube to add supplemental revenue.

YouTube’s adpocalypse did not factor into the Studio71’s move into podcasting, but it accelerated it, said Izad. The move corresponds with a yearslong trend of digital video creators and networks diversifying their businesses.

YouTube remains an important part of Studio71’s distribution. In addition to releasing the podcasts on audio platforms like Castbox, Apple’s Podcasts app and Spotify, Studio71 also uploads video versions to YouTube, where it can promote them to creators’ core audiences and run pre-roll and mid-roll ads to supplement the revenue from host-read ads.

Peter Vincer, Castbox’s head of global strategic partnerships, said one of the shows that Studio71 has produced with Castbox, “Don’t Mess with Christine Sydelko,” averages 75,000 to 100,000 podcast listens per episode and an additional 250,000-plus views on YouTube, “which is uploaded in its entirety with the [host-read] ads.”

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Within a week of Instagram launching IGTV, its YouTube-like section for long videos, companies including Chipotle, Netflix, Nike and Everlane have begun testing it with original video or repurposed Instagram Stories.

In a twist, Bacardi is merging user participation in Instagram Stories with IGTV. The rum maker is putting a sponsored music video on IGTV that will be directed by people’s votes in polls within Instagram Stories.

The music video will feature the dancing duo Les Twins, who have 970,000 followers on Instagram at @OfficialLesTwins. Starting at 1 p.m. ET on June 29, @OfficialLesTwins will begin posting Instagram Stories asking followers to vote on elements of the video, such as choreography, lighting, camera angles and even the length of the video. Based on followers’ choices, Les Twins could take their moves from a New York City subway all the way to Coney Island, so the music video could easily span an hour. The results will be incorporated into Les Twins’ next Instagram Story, and the final version will be posted to Bacardi’s and Les Twins’ IGTV channels at noon the following day.

Laila Mignoni, director of creative excellence for Bacardi, took the interactive approach to draw attention to the company’s new IGTV channel and chose influencers because they already have followings there. Bacardi saw more room to be creative and get more viewer response with IGTV’s long format.

“A lot of social platforms only allow you to only communicate with such short clips,” said Mignoni. “That has been a frustration at times. Platforms dictating how a story should be told because of the length is a downer. We need both — the short and longer formats where you can land emotions in narratives.”

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The post Bacardi tests IGTV by getting users to participate in video creation appeared first on Digiday.

CMOs love a good talking point.

Over the last year, it’s become en vogue for top marketers to pick an issue they believe is broken in the marketing ecosystem — whether it’s Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard on fraud and cleaning up metrics, HP’s Antonio Lucio on diversity or Unilever’s Keith Weed on just about anything. The loudest narrative thread running through this has been “taking back control.”

The post The Rundown: CMOs take back control — but why did they lose it in the first place? appeared first on Digiday.

To prevent spam accounts, Twitter is requiring new users to verify an email address or a phone number. While some marketers, including Unilever CMO Keith Weed, welcomed it, others called the process long overdue and still not enough.

Influencer marketing has been getting more interest from brands, but marketers are increasingly wary of fraud, which was illuminated by The New York Times’ deep dive on Devumi, a company that creates and sells fake Twitter followers. Twitter’s update this week comes shortly after Weed and other executives at the Cannes Lions festival spoke out against fake followers, bots and other fraudulent practices in influencer marketing.

“I am very pleased that Twitter is taking a concrete stand against the hordes of fake accounts and bots that are polluting the system,” Weed emailed. “We must continue to take bold steps to rebuild trust in digital back into society. We should all encourage such steps.”

Twitter’s new requirement is still far from bulletproof for brands hoping to enlist Twitter users for influencer marketing.

“Restricting API access and introducing two-factor authentication for new users is a start, but emails and phone numbers are still relatively easy to manipulate,” said Liz Gottbrecht, vp of marketing at influencer marketing platform Mavrck. “There’s still significant progress to be made in order to verify that a new or existing account is ‘human.’”

As Gottbrecht noted, Twitter’s fraud and bot culture is years in the making. While its new policy may help restrict the creation of bot accounts, old bot accounts remain on the site, as active Twitter user Geoff Golberg has uncovered, so it’s still hard for marketers to identify and prevent fraud in their campaigns on Twitter.

One way marketers can help prevent that is to refrain from blindly selecting influencers based on their follower accounts.

“Performance should not be determined by how many ‘followers’ an account has or its engagement rate, but rather by how many people — real, actual humans — were inspired to take a desired action as a result of viewing that account’s content,” Gottbrecht said. “The traditional means of measuring performance, such as reach or engagement, was not designed for the digital age. As long as the money flows and marketers continue to rely on impressions and retweets as indicators of impact, fraud will persist.”

The influencer marketing industry and platforms have taken steps to clean up the practice. Richard Wong, vp of marketing and creator relations at influencer marketing company #Paid, recalled the Purge, the name given to Instagram’s crackdown of spam bots in December 2014, during which celebrities like Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez lost millions of fake followers.

“Each of the networks have been making a conscious effort to clean up their ecosystems and ensure that both users and advertisers have confidence that their followers, engagements and connections are authentic,” Wong said.

Platforms have continued to delete spam accounts. Robert Levenhagen, CEO of influencer marketing software company InfluencerDB, said his company has seen an increase in deletion of accounts on Instagram.

“The increased media attention and criticism from notable individuals and brands has put social media platforms on notice,” Levenhagen said.

Platforms and brands are still dealing with fraud, though. Digital marketing agency Mediakix recently conducted an experiment on fraud by emailing hotels from an Instagram account with purchased and fake followers. The account was offered four discounted stays and other accommodations. That happened even though the account was previously identified as fraudulent due to the company’s last stunt. Instagram did not ban the account.

“Facebook and Instagram could do more to identify fake and bot accounts, but it seems that the problem may be so significant that it’s hard for them to keep up with the sheer volume of bot accounts created,” said Evan Asano, CEO and founder of Mediakix.

Barbara Soltysinska, CEO and co-founder of influencer marketing tech platform indaHash, said bots like chatbots can be powerful tools. These bots just shouldn’t pretend to be something they’re not.

“Bots should not have the ability to fake real users’ activities, as this is something that stands against the ‘social’ aspect of social media,” Soltysinska said.

The post Marketers debate whether Twitter’s new user policy will stop influencer fraud appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook said it’s about to adjust its political ads policy to create a separate section in its archive to separate news publishers’ promoted stories from traditional political and issue ads, but won’t exempt news publishers from the archive as they hoped.

In a June 26 update, Facebook’s head of global news partnerships, Campbell Brown, wrote that in the days ahead, Facebook would launch a news publisher-specific section of its ads archive called Promoted News, which will carry the articles publishers have paid to promote that fall under what Facebook considers political topics. The policy was enacted after the fire Facebook came under for its role in Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election.

News organizations that have protested the policy said it still treats promoted news stories like traditional political ads. The most telltale sign of that is the umbrella archive is still called “Archive of Ads with Political Content.” Facebook’s position is that the archive is for any ad from any advertiser that includes text or images that Facebook defines as political content.

“Facebook continues to conflate journalism with political advertising, which is just plain dangerous,” said David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, which represents some 2,000 newspaper companies, including The New York Times and News Corp, and is one of seven news organizations that have protested.

Facebook continues to put the promotions in the “political archive,” which “confounds the distinction between journalism and political advocacy,” said Michael Golden, president of WAN-IFRA. “They somehow believe their users will notice a difference since the ads are in a subarchive within political.”

The blog post also doesn’t deal with the stories that Facebook has mistakenly flagged as political. That was the case with a story about mistreatment of migrant children that investigative reporting site Reveal tried to promote on Facebook.

“In trying to combat the spread of fake news and other disinformation ahead of 2018’s elections, Facebook is putting barriers in front of legitimate news organizations that want to get their stories in front of a wider audience,” said Byard Duncan,
engagement reporter for Reveal. “On top of that, its system for identifying so-called ‘political’ content is already running into problems, both technical and philosophical.”

One local publisher called Facebook’s addition of publishers to the political ad policy “wildly infuriating,” saying Facebook blocked promotion of a story about a county fair because the story mentioned a politician, even though the politician wasn’t running for re-election. Rather than spend the energy fighting Facebook, the publisher is shifting its spending to Twitter, this person said.

News publishers have protested the policy. Publishers pay Facebook to boost exposure of their articles, and they say having those articles in the same archive as political ads would make their content appear biased. Some publishers have stopped spending on Facebook rather than be subject to its policy.

Facebook says its process won’t be perfect but that there’s an appeals process to deal with situations like that.

Jon Slade, chief commercial officer of the Financial Times, said on the Digiday Podcast last week the view of many publishers: “It is dangerous to describe journalism as political content. Journalism is journalism, and political lobbying is political lobbying. To conflate the two is an extremely dangerous precedent, particularly in this era when there are so many question marks about the veracity of news.”

The process has also revealed how Facebook has dealt with opposition from the publishing industry. The loudest opposition came from the News Media Alliance, but Brown said she would deal with publishers directly rather than their trade organizations. On June 26, she emailed details of the archive update to around 18 publishing execs. In the message, she wrote that Facebook worked with four other organizations, including the Local Media Consortium and Local Media Association, to determine what news outlets should be in the archive. None of those organizations were among the seven that protested the policy, though.

The ads policy is one of several sore spots in publishers’ relationship with Facebook, which has frustrated publishers in their attempts to find audiences and make money from the social network. Facebook also has been testing subscription sales, which it says has had promising results so far, but it only has one month of results.

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PayPal-owned Venmo is using a debit card to work with retailers — and (finally) make money.

This week, it rolled out a limited-release Venmo debit card issued by the Bancorp Bank that customers can use anywhere Mastercard is accepted. It’s a lever the company can use to elevate the Venmo brand’s reach from the digital to the physical world — an entry point for profitable tie-ups with retailers.

“A card familiarizes [Venmo’s] brand with merchants as a payment mechanism – and merchants are going to be the biggest factor in Venmo achieving profitability,” said Rachel Huber, payments analyst at Javelin Strategy and Research. “Think marketing and loyalty tie-ins, integration fees, and promotional deals. Venmo has access to an extremely desirable consumer segment – expect them to use that to their advantage.”

While rolling out a physical card may seem odd for a mobile-first payment platform, it’s a recognition that mobile payments aren’t quite mainstream yet, and most transaction activity still occurs in physical stores. According to Huber, nine out of 10 transactions are still carried out at the physical point of sale, allowing PayPal to bridge the gap between physical and online transactions.

Venmo’s social feed is of particular interest to retailers. Transactions that take place through the debit card will be logged in Venmo’s user history, much in the same way peer-to-peer payments are recorded — adding possibilities to promote purchase activity through Venmo’s social feed. It’s a largely untapped method for consumer companies to acquire social endorsements from the Venmo feed, and push targeted ads to users based on their behavior.

“The unique social aspects of Venmo could provide a path to advertising revenue — few other payment platforms make it fun for users to share their payment activity with friends,” Morningstar analyst Jim Sinegal wrote in a recent report.

Over the past year, PayPal has accelerated its efforts to profit from Venmo through partnerships with e-commerce brands. Last year, it launched Pay with Venmo, which let customers use Venmo as a payment method with 2 million online retailers, including Grubhub, Seamless and Williams Sonoma. In January, it rolled out instant transfers for a $0.25 fee, but growth of Venmo as an e-commerce vehicle has been slow. Between January and April of this year, just 11 percent of Venmo users engaged in a “monetized experience”  — in other words, used Venmo to pay for consumer goods — according to the company.

Venmo wouldn’t comment on its broader monetization strategy, but a company spokesperson said it’s been focusing on offering customers more ways to use Venmo. A physical card may generate some interchange revenue, but it’s not likely to be significant; the objective is to expand Venmo’s reach, which in turn, can set the stage for new types of revenue-generating partnerships.

“[The thinking is] ‘let’s solve the scale problem first and deal with monetization later,” said Omri Dahan, chief revenue officer of Marqeta, an API platform that powers prepaid debit and credit cards.

By putting a physical card in the customer’s hand, it opens up additional revenue streams beyond charging transaction fees to merchants and consumers, including co-brand relationships and customer incentives.

Despite the growth of bank-backed peer-to-peer payments tool Zelle, PayPal is banking on Venmo’s stranglehold over the millennial market to grow its reach among consumer brand partners. During the first quarter of 2018, Venmo processed $12.3 billion in payment volume.

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Lego is focusing increasingly on Amazon, not just Google, when it comes to search advertising.

Online retail and voice assistants are fast-growing areas for the advertiser’s ads, said Luis Navarrete Gómez, head of global search marketing at Lego. Amazon dominates both areas, which has resulted in the online seller taking a larger slice of Lego’s paid search budget. Gómez said that growth is admittedly from a low base, but is showing no signs of slowing down, particularly now that Lego has an established Amazon store and a two-month-old Alexa skill for the Amazon Echo.

“[Spending on] Amazon ads has increased over the last three years, and it does a job for us now that it didn’t do before,” Gómez said. “If Amazon keeps growing consistently [for Lego], then its role will become more important.”

Lego’s Amazon store acts as a dedicated landing page on Amazon where no competitors can advertise, making it an ideal place to drive traffic from external sources such as Facebook. Nearly 6 in 10 (56 percent) of shoppers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany and France start their product searches on Amazon, according to a Kenshoo study of 31,000 people.

Amazon shoppers are generally lower-funnel purchasers that aren’t as engaged with Lego as those who go to the company’s site and usually take time researching and then searching for specific ranges.

“By investing on their own presence on Amazon, [Lego] at least get to control key points of their overall brand experience and deliver a sense of remaining special and valuable,” said Rob Sellers, who leads the shopper marketing arm at ad agency Grey.

Voice is another area the toymaker thinks could one day take more of its search budget. But Gómez sees early marketing gains to be made in developing content for kids who might not be old enough to search for Lego content with their fingers. Last month, Lego launched a skill on Alexa called Lego Duplo Stories that gives parents and kids a selection of stories with audio prompts that guide physical play.

“It’s in the interest of the platforms to make sure voice assistants help people buy the products they want to buy, so we see voice search as more an opportunity than a challenge,” said Gómez.

Despite Amazon’s rise in the eyes of Lego’s marketers, it’s not the only retailer to catch their attention. “Whether it’s Amazon, Argos or Walmart, we don’t see any retail platform that we work with as competitors because we respect what the user’s preference is and try to offer them the best products for that particular experience,” Gómez said.

Lego’s attempts to get closer to retailers comes amid pressure to sell more toys. Earlier this year, it revealed it would spend more on data and analytics after sales in 2017 slipped 8 percent to 35 billion Danish krone ($5.5 billion), its first drop in sales in more than a decade. Some of that money could go toward a data management platform, said Gómez, who is in talks with Adobe to find new ways of improving the effectiveness of Lego’s media buys.

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On Wednesday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the system and the nation by handily defeating 10-term incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th congressional district, an area that represents Queens and the Bronx. A Democratic Socialist who worked on Bernie Sanders’ campaign, the 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez stood on her own merits, positions and energy, backed by a…