Month: June 2018

The BBC has a long history with speech radio and podcasts, with BBC Stories, its 18-month-old documentary division, it’s testing ways to use audio to reach younger audiences.

BBC Stories draws on dozens of journalists — all under 30, according to the broadcaster — from BBC Stories and BBC Trending, which covers viral news from social media. The unit filmed podcasts with U.S. broadcaster Katie Couric interviewing U.K. guests, including “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes, actor and writer Sharon Horgan and presenter Graham Norton, and will condense them into 15-minute audio clips and three-minute videos for distribution on social media as well as the BBC Stories site.

“What we’re trying to think of now is: How does audio work that isn’t radio and isn’t a podcast?” said BBC Stories editor Jeremy Skeet. “Can you get people to listen to a six-minute-long piece of audio on social media? Not many people are doing that.”

Publishers like the Financial Times and The New York Times have distributed audio clips from podcasts and put them on social media to drive downloads. BBC Stories has the luxury of not having to chase views and downloads like other commercial publishers, so it can use audio clips to introduce people to the BBC.

“It’s about how can we get this to the largest number of audiences, the underserved audience,” said Skeet.

A lot of media is consumed on Facebook with sound muted, which could limit the reach of audio, though.

Slicing podcasts into audio clips for social media makes sense as a way for the BBC to grow audience, but putting audio on social media is unlikely to get much ad support because audio that’s distributed this way is a passive medium, said Alex DeGroote, an independent media analyst at DeGroote Consulting.

“Audio-only on social media has historically been a contradiction in terms,” he said. “Even uploading user-generated audio on Facebook is not intuitive.”

Succeeding in digital media is all about getting efficiencies out of content, and BBC Stories is also turning radio shows into formats with an eye toward a young audience. Earlier this month, for instance, a BBC Radio 4 show on a commemoration of last year’s Grenfell Tower fire was turned into an interactive article.

“A lot of BBC Stories content is evergreen,” Skeet said. “We want to be able to tell the story in different ways a year after a documentary has gone out. It’s about how can you recirculate in different forms and formats.”

BBC Stories creates up to four videos a week and roughly five text stories on current affairs. Skeet said BBC Stories is now doing fewer, longer videos, partly in response to Facebook’s algorithm change that deprioritized content from brands and publishers.

As a public service broadcaster, Skeet’s team has an eye on how its videos affect the communities they’re about. With one video doc, “Like Minds,” the aim was to involve the audience by getting them to share their ways of dealing with mental health problems.

Skeet acknowledged that putting a value on such conversation isn’t linked to vanity metrics, saying: “What’s the value of someone saying that this video helped them with their problems with alcohol versus 10 million views?”

Image courtesy of BBC Stories

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AT&T can claim victory in the wake of its acquisition of Time Warner last week, but media buyers also see benefits for themselves in the deal.

“Our clients want the highest-quality programming informed by the highest-quality data with the least amount of waste. We welcome the announcement and hope it is a big step on the road to complete addressability in premium video content,” GroupM CEO Kelly Clark emailed.

AT&T, having hired Brian Lesser from GroupM North America last summer to head its ad business, is pitching a future with fewer commercials, John Stankey, CEO of the newly minted WarnerMedia, told Reuters this week. Indeed, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has been open about the teleco’s plans to decrease the ad inventory and improve analytics across the company’s properties. AT&T already announced it will release AT&T Watch TV, an ad-supported skinny bundle that includes Turner content except for sports.

Seemingly overnight, AT&T has become a media empire. WarnerMedia, the new name for Time Warner, includes Turner (which owns CNN, TNT, TBS and other cable channels) along with HBO and the Warner Bros. studio. That’s some of the most lucrative content in media, including CNN’s news programming, TNT’s rights to NBA games, HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and Warner Bros.’ “Wonder Woman.”

AT&T couldn’t comment for this story because the company is in a quiet period ahead of next month’s earnings for the second quarter of 2018, an AT&T spokesperson said.

One media buyer, who requested anonymity due to his company’s work with AT&T, said the telecommunication company’s user base is much smaller than those of Facebook and Google, for example, with AT&T’s 170 million direct-to-consumer relationships. But since AT&T owns the pipes, it can guarantee ads get seen while other platforms continue to battle ad fraud, the buyer said.

WarnerMedia’s Stankey told Reuters that AT&T plans to use customers’ mobile phone and video data to sell targeted ads, with explicit permission.

But Andy Groisman, CEO of NoiseGrasp, a predictive marketing platform, wondered how AT&T will keep its promise of fewer ads in the era of the General Data Protection Regulation, where data sharing and privacy are under such strong scrutiny.

“They’ll be forced to rethink targeting beyond just pixel-driven media analytics in order to drive marketing ROI, a method that relies heavily on user-specific data,” he said.

Further innovation in AT&T’s ad tech stack may come from acquisitions, AT&T’s Stephenson told CNBC.

“We’re standing up a significant advertising platform. You should expect some smaller, not like Time Warner, but some smaller M&A in the coming weeks to demonstrate our commitment to that,” Stephenson said in the interview.

AT&T was valued at $205.7 billion as of June 19 compared to Alphabet’s $798 billion, Facebook’s $564.8 billion and Amazon’s $834.8 billion. But it’s anticipating big investments akin to Verizon’s push to build a strong brand with Yahoo and AOL.

“The pendulum is basically coming back to some kind of middle ground between traditional and digital advertising only,” Groisman said. WarnerMedia is “certainly another example of how traditional media is not dead as many claimed. It’s more of a convergence between the traditional and digital worlds and how each is forcing the other to somehow reinvent themselves.”

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The influencer backlash has washed up on French shores.

The early days of the Cannes Lions festival saw some strong words against so-called influencers and influencer marketing from top chief marketing officers.

It began with Unilever CMO Keith Weed, who announced early Monday that the advertiser will not work with influencers who buy followers, and its brands will actively look to eradicate from its spend any influencers with fake followers, bots or any other fraudulent practices.

Weed also said Unilever would also prioritize vendor relationships where commitments were made to eradicate fraud.

Weed is also convening a meeting with the World Federation of Advertisers, Instagram and Edelman chief executive Richard Edelman to work on a project on bringing transparency to the influencer space.

“In February, I said we needed to rebuild trust back into our digital ecosystems and wider society,” Weed said. “One of the ways we can do that is to increase integrity and transparency in the influencer space. We need to address this through responsible content, responsible platforms and responsible infrastructure.”

Dan Salzman, the global head of media at HP, said he agreed in principle with Weed. HP works with influencers for its gaming business, and Salzman said the influencer backlash was inevitable. “Each category of marketing is going through a reckoning,” he said. “Three years ago, influencer marketing was growing in scale. Now, people are looking at it critically. It’s a natural shaking out.”

It’s also a shakeout that’s right on trend in a year where a reckoning seems to be the theme. Top marketers are pushing back on platform power, and questioning where their money is spent is en vogue as they look to wrest back control from platforms as well as agencies.

Speaking at The Economist’s “Wake Up with The Economist” session on Monday morning at the Cannes Lions Beach, eBay CMO Godert van Dedem said he will try “shift his influencer spend” toward eBay sellers — who he said are a bigger priority and more authentic for the eBay brand. “What I want us to do is give our sellers a voice, rather than influencers who happen to have a following that we use and pay for a post,” he said.

Samsung CMO Marc Mathieu, who recently worked with YouTuber Casey Newton, said he did so for Newton’s “creativity,” not his influence. “I’d rather not just use influencers, but the people that use our products be the people we market,” said Mathieu. And Diageo CMO Syl Saller said that while the company works with celebrities, it is looking more critically at any influencer relationships that engage in shady practices like buying followers.

Influencer marketing, which seemingly burst on the scene a few years ago as Instagram — the preferred platform for so-called social stars — gained popularity, is attractive to marketers because it feels arguably more real than advertising. But authenticity can be faked: Anti-fraud company Sway Ops found that a single day’s worth of posts tagged #sponsored or #ad on Instagram contained over 50 percent fake engagements. Out of 118,007 comments studied by Sway Ops, only 20,942 were not made by bot followers.

It’s ironic that this backlash comes the same year that the Cannes Lions festival itself has announced for the first time the Social and Influencer Lions, a category meant to, in the organizers’ words, “celebrate creative social thinking.” The idea is to focus on reach and engagement. The jury, which is expected to announce a short list and winners Wednesday, will see if the campaign had any impact.

Get all of our Cannes coverage (plus event invites, interviews and more) delivered directly to your inbox: Subscribe to our daily Cannes Briefing, delivered at 6 a.m. Cannes time each day this week. 

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With Google, Apple and Facebook more interested in news than ever, Microsoft is rebranding its news efforts and expanding their distribution. On June 20, Microsoft is expected to rename its mobile apps and its news distribution service that powers MSN as Microsoft News. The rebranded Microsoft News will be incorporated into more Microsoft products, including Skype and its Xbox video game system. MSN.com will still be called MSN, though it will be described as “powered by Microsoft News.”

In the past year, 23-year-old MSN has also expanded distribution outside its platform, most recently Amazon’s Silk browser as well as devices sold by global telecommunications companies Orange, APUS and America Mobile.

“For us, it’s important to not only establish that daily connection with our audience, but it’s also critical for us to leverage that connection to help our partners,” said Rob Bennett, Microsoft News’ editor-in-chief and gm of Microsoft’s global content operations.

MSN is a bit player in online referral traffic, with Parsely ranking it as the 16th-largest referral source. While hard news is front and center on MSN’s homepage, the site does well in driving traffic for health and food content, per Parsely.

Publishers say Microsoft’s audience is different enough from their own audiences that a revamped Microsoft News could help them diversify their audiences, though, particularly when it comes to video. Christy Tanner, evp and gm of CBS News Digital, said Microsoft’s audience was particularly engaged by livestreaming video.

“MSN is incredibly valuable for driving livestreaming viewership,” she said.

Microsoft has worked purely as a referral channel for publishers and, more recently, collaborated with publishers such as Newsy on original content. For the past four years, it’s hosted content from over 1,000 publishers and handles all the monetization, with publishers getting a cut. Microsoft says it’s paid $600 million to publishers around the world. The impact on publishers’ bottom lines varies from a small stream of revenue to as much as three-quarters of all revenue for some foreign publishers, Bennett said.

The operational lift for publishers is minor. Publishers pipe their content over to Microsoft News automatically, where software slots it into appropriate categories and pairs it with images or other media. Staffers browse the content that’s been sorted by Microsoft’s software and choose what to highlight; visitors who have indicated what kinds of content they’re interested in will get a personalized feed.

Microsoft claims MSN has a global monthly audience of 500 million. Just 16 percent of its audience is U.S.-based, according to Alexa data. According to Bennett, though, about half of MSN’s monthly traffic comes from U.S. users.

The content inside Microsoft News is free to the audience, but in the past year, in response to publisher desires to diversify their revenue, Microsoft has run tests that let publishers target readers with subscription or newsletter sign-up offers in the body of MSN-hosted content. Publishers keep 100 percent of the revenue.

“We know that’s top of mind for a lot of partners,” Bennett said.

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Two months ago, it was Nuseir Yassin’s turn to experience the gut punch of Facebook’s algorithm familiar to social gaming companies like Zynga and publishers like LittleThings that had built businesses on Facebook, only to see them collapse when Facebook deprioritized non-user content. The news feed change that Facebook had announced in January seemed to have finally made its way to Yassin’s Facebook Watch show, “Nas Daily.” For a week, he saw his videos’ viewership fluctuate.

“It was the hardest week of my life. It was really difficult not knowing what’s happening and if I own my audience,” said Yassin, a former Venmo engineer who has more than 6 million followers on the platform. Viewership stabilized after a week, and since then, the viewership of his daily videos has increased. But Yassin had felt how his livelihood could be turned upside down overnight. “Every day I make a video, I stress for 10 to 15 minutes over if it’s doing well or if the algorithm has changed,” he said.

Facebook has become a serious business for digital video creators like Yassin, who said he expects to make more than $300,000 this year from the pre-roll and mid-roll ads that Facebook attaches to his videos. And Facebook has an opportunity to attract the digital video makers who have suffered collateral damage from YouTube’s brand-safety crackdown. But other platforms like Snapchat are also looking to seize the moment. That competition, combined with Facebook’s maturation as a moneymaker for creators, has created an urgency for the company to prove that it is serious about creators’ businesses and not just its own, a subject on which Facebook has a spotty track record at best.

To make its case to people who make a living independently producing digital videos, Facebook hosted its first “Creator Day” on June 19 at the 25,000-square-foot Smashbox Studios event facility in Culver City, California. Facebook invited 120 creators from around the world — including Colombia, England, India, Mexico and the U.S. — to attend the all-day event, where the company announced new products for creators and held workshops with Facebook product managers to go over the announcements and listen to creators’ questions and concerns.

One concern that creators — and anyone making money by distributing content on Facebook — share is when, not if, Facebook will again change its news feed algorithm in a way that could hurt their businesses. Fidji Simo, Facebook’s vp of product, addressed that concern in a keynote speech that opened Creator Day.

“I can’t promise you that we won’t make changes,” she said. “But I can commit to work alongside you every step of the way to understand why we make the changes and give you tools to adapt.”

Those may sound like hollow words to anyone who’s been on the other side of Facebook’s algorithm. But at the moment, at least among the creators Facebook invited to attend the event, Facebook has made good on its word.

“They’ve definitely supported creators,” said Charles Wieand, whose show on Watch, “Wild Charles,” has more than 87,000 followers. He has a partner manager at Facebook that he can contact when issues arise and receives a weekly email newsletter that Facebook sends creators to tell them about new and updated features.

Yassin was similarly complimentary of the platform that generates a six-figure annual income for him. He’s even begun evangelizing Facebook to other creators. Next week, he’ll fly five of his Facebook followers to Turkey for a five-day “creator camp,” he said. And the 25-year-old plans to form his own network of Facebook creators that’s reminiscent of YouTube networks like Maker Studios and Fullscreen.

Yassin remains mindful of the fact that, like its algorithms, Facebook’s commitment to creators could change. “I’m not a Facebook slave. If there’s a more attractive option, I’ll consider it,” he said.

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For many direct-to-consumer companies trying to diversify their marketing away from Facebook and into traditional media, TV stands as a new opportunity. Some DTC companies that have been experimenting with TV for a few years say it’s paying off in web traffic and sales.

HelloFresh, the 7-year-old food delivery service, has bought national TV spots since 2015 and continues to see its TV ads pay off, according to David Webb, director of growth and analytics for media strategy at HelloFresh U.S. Webb said HelloFresh attributes its TV ads to an 88 percent year-over-year increase in site and app visits.

Webb wouldn’t share any other numbers, but a May 23 study by the Video Advertising Bureau of 50 DTC companies found a correlation between HelloFresh’s TV advertising and its revenue. In 2016, HelloFresh spent around $26,000 on TV ads and brought in a little more than $663,000 in revenue, the study found. In 2017, HelloFresh increased its TV ad spend to nearly $36,000, and revenue increased by 52 percent to over $1 million, according to the study.

HelloFresh is just one example. The study said DTC companies like Peloton, Chewy, Carvana, Ancestry, Poshmark and Stitch Fix also saw their revenues jump after they increased their TV spend. The companies seem to think TV is working because they’re spending more there. According to the report, DTC companies spent $1.3 billion on TV ads in 2017, $650 million more than they did in 2016, a 98 percent year-over-year increase.

For some DTC companies, TV’s cost is still a barrier. TV means higher production costs, longer lead times and often the need of a traditional agency that knows the space.

But DTC companies that have been buying TV for years, and even some that have just started, maintain that it can be cost-effective. Webb said because digital is a one-to-one medium, marketers buy more for individuals, placing more pressure on the CPM than with a one-to-many medium like TV.

“A lot of people oftentimes don’t understand the economics of TV and how to measure it,” said Webb. “TV can be less expensive and more beneficial than digital. It just takes more to get an initial test off the ground, but from a CPM basis, it’s comparable, if not better, in some places, especially now that people are buying for these hypertargeted custom audiences in digital.”

Tophatter, a mobile shopping app that sells items in 90-second auctions, also said TV is worth the cost. The company demands that new ad channels pay off within six to nine months, and TV is already doing so, said Malcolm Scovil, head of marketing at Tophatter. He wouldn’t give specifics, but the VAB report found that as Tophatter increased its TV advertising in 2017, its website views, search queries and social actions shot up as well.

Another hesitation when it comes to TV has been measurement limitations versus online. DTC companies say TV has become more attractive for marketers who need to track ad spending’s impact on sales. Measurement vendors like Conversion Logic or TVSquared can track second- and third-screen data, measuring whether a person is on their phone or tablet while they are watching TV.

“Increasingly, TV provides you with just as much analytics and ability to attribute where customers are coming from,” said Scovil.

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At the Digiday Video Summit last month in Scottsdale, Arizona, we asked 51 publisher executives about their digital video strategies. Check out our research on where publishers get most of their video revenue here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Only 37 percent of the publishers surveyed said their video strategies focus on their owned-and-operated sites.
• Nineteen percent of publishers said ad revenue is the biggest advantage of distributing videos on social platforms.

Sixty-two percent of publishers say ads are their biggest source of video revenue, with 79 percent of publishers making at least half of their video revenue from their owned-and-operated sites. Despite this, only 37 percent of 51 publisher executives surveyed at the Digiday Video Summit last month said their video strategies focus on their owned-and-operated sites. Just above one-quarter of respondents said their video ambitions are in over-the-top services or social platforms.

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Get all of our Cannes coverage (plus event invites, interviews and more) delivered directly to your inbox: Subscribe to our daily Cannes Briefing, delivered at 6 a.m. Cannes time each day this week. 

There’s no doubt this year’s Cannes Lions festival is a more subdued affair than it’s been in years past, but it isn’t just ad agencies and ad tech vendors pulling back — it’s Facebook and Google, too.

Google and Facebook have significant presences at the festival this year, with spots on the beach in addition to the requisite speaking slots for their executives on the main stage of the Palais. But their efforts feel somewhat muted compared with some of the past five or six years, when “tech giants invade Cannes” was the festival’s most prominent headline.

Both companies have shunned large-scale parties with expensive musical acts in favor of smaller, more targeted events and dinners, while attendees say their execs aren’t as prominent along the Croisette and in its hotels.

And neither seems to be courting press attention the way they previously have. In prior years, Facebook has tied new ad product and feature announcements to the festival, for example, while this year it seems less eager to make a splash.

Google said its presence with its Google Beach and two Palais sessions is “consistent with previous years.”

Facebook did not return requests for comment.

For agencies and vendors, the belt-tightening at Cannes is directly tied to their shaky business models. Agencies are under fire more than ever, as clients attempt to take more marketing functions in-house and as publishers and consultancies increasingly attempt to swoop in to steal their business. And ad tech has seen its opportunity shrink as publishers and ad buyers try to cut out middlemen, and as GDPR limits their data collection capabilities.

But for Facebook and Google, the pullback has more to do with optics than any business model concerns, attendees say.

It’s been something a rough year for both companies on the public relations front. Facebook has come under fire repeatedly for its data and ad practices, most prominently around the Cambridge Analytica scandal. With that in mind, it perhaps doesn’t seem as appropriate to brag about how advertisers use its granular targeting data in all manner of creative ways.

And Google has had its own issues on the brand-safety front, as advertisers continue to complain about their brands showing up next to unsavory content on YouTube and across its display ad network.

“Given the current situation, I think they’re conscious of making just the right amount of noise,” said one ad buyer who met with both companies this week.

Other attendees suggested there isn’t as much upside for those pitching to buyers at the festival this year, given that Publicis Groupe has reduced its attendance significantly. The platforms might have simply adjusted their effort and spending to compensate, they suggest.

But another theory is Facebook and Google simply don’t need to make as much of an impression these days. As the pair continues to suck up the vast majority of digital ad spending, it’s clear marketers don’t need convincing about the value of their ad products. Why risk rocking the boat or drawing too much attention to that fact with lavish parties?

Whatever the reasons, the pullback from Facebook and Google has also had its benefactors. Spotify has taken the crown from Google for the must-attend beach party, for example, with musical performances from The Killers on Tuesday and Travis Scott on Wednesday. And Pinterest has various attractions along the Croisette, in addition to embedding itself in agencies’ spaces.

And then there are the consultancies, of course, which have descended on Cannes in greater numbers this year than ever before and already formed one of the week’s major talking points.

It’ll be interesting to see how the next year shakes out across the industry and the impact that will have on the tone of next year’s festival overall. With Publicis back on board, and despite the industry’s woes, it wouldn’t be surprising if next year’s event returns to the chaos of previous years. But by the same token, it wouldn’t be surprising if more of the festival moves upstairs into hotel suites and to private meetings as the parties continue to fade. — Jack Marshall

Overheard on the Croisette (and beyond)
“We’re viewing publishers more as partners here than either Google or Facebook. It’s publishers that we’re focused on meeting with this week, less so the platforms.” — Publishing executive

“Facebook is yesterday’s news. We spend too much time on the duopoly. The obsession with the duopoly is misplaced. Amazon and Google with the connected home, what is media going to be?” — Publishing executive

“It feels like the ‘I’m sorry’ year — a real ‘mea culpa’ time.” — Agency executive

“I don’t really know what’s going to happen with Snap. Its share price has gone down, but its costs continue to go up. It’s going to have to do something differently if it wants to have a sustainable business.” — Publishing executive

The Digiday Podcast Cannes Edition hosts Jen Wong

Reddit has 330 million monthly users on its platform, but still struggles to woo advertisers. That’s why Jen Wong, its newly minted chief operating officer, is at the Cannes Lions festival. “Ads will be a big business for us because all things they want, we have — authentic word of mouth, mind hive for people deep in their categories,” Wong said on the Cannes edition of the Digiday Podcast. “To ignore it from an advertising and insights perspective doesn’t make sense.”

Read more excerpts and listen to the episode here.

Influencer backlash
It feels like a year of reckoning in Cannes, and one casualty may be the influencer marketing landscape. Long unchecked, influencer marketing is in the crosshairs of top CMOs from Unilever’s Keith Weed to eBay’s Godert van Dedem, who are publicly questioning the value of influencers and concerned about the amount of fraud in the space. “Each category of marketing is going through a reckoning. Three years ago, influencer marketing was growing in scale. Now, people are looking at it critically. It’s a natural shaking out,” said HP global head of media Dan Salzman. Read more.

Coming up
10 a.m.-noon: Brian Morrissey, Digiday’s president and editor-in-chief, will host a breakfast panel with Domo at La Palme d’Or, located on the rooftop of Hotel Martinez. They’ll discuss everything from brand safety to ad blocking, focusing on the complexity and volume of factors (and data streams) at play.
Noon: Angela Ahrendts from Apple takes the Cannes stage with Tor Myhren, vp of marketing communications and former agency exec.
5 p.m.: Carolyn Everson from Facebook joins UM’s Daryl Lee and Unilever’s Weed for a chat about the power of platforms.

Tonight
6 p.m.: The “boss lady soiree” at the Girls’ Lounge in the Martinez.
6:30 p.m.-1 a.m.: News UK party at Château de Garibondy in Le Cannet. Superstar DJs including Idris Elba, Fatboy Slim, Matt Darcy and Kate Lawler and Kylie Minogue.
10 p.m.-2 a.m.: Spotify Beach Party. Performances by Chvrches and Travis Scott.
6 p.m.-9 p.m.: Live Nation at Alang Alang.

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LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner skyrocketed up the list of Glassdoor’s sixth annual Employees’ Choice Awards Top CEOs in 2018 list, while his counterpart at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, continued his slow decline. Weiner shot up from No. 35 on the 2017 list and a 94 percent approval rating to No. 8 and 97 percent this year….

CANNES, France–A popular mobile app that uses facial recognition is becoming an essential tool for Brazilian citizens as election time grows near, and it impressed the Mobile jury at the Cannes Lions, winning the category’s Grand Prix prize and an additional gold Lion. “It’s a perfect embodiment of creativity, the power and utility of [mobile…