Month: June 2018

Nielsen and FreeWheel, the video advertising platform owned by Comcast, will expand their measurement of viewing to over-the-top and set-top-box video-on-demand inventory.

When Star Trek: Discovery debuted last fall on CBS All Access, it was the first new Star Trek TV series in 12 years. Now CBS Television Studios is making sure there will be a much shorter wait for the next one. The studio has signed a new five-year deal with Star Trek: Discovery co-creator Alex…

Nothing says “let’s celebrate our industry” more than hiring freelancers to attend the biggest advertising gala on the planet and put together a “live creative studio” to create a global campaign in a mere five days. Who needs an agency when we’re in the Gig Economy? The campaign, a partnership between freelance marketplace Fiverr and…

Facebook Watch is less than a year old, but Facebook is already transforming its section for original shows to include all videos from companies and creators.

Facebook has begun to add non-episodic videos from publishers, creators, companies and other pages to Watch to appear alongside the episodic shows the section was originally dedicated to. Any videos from all of the pages that people follow on Facebook will be eligible to appear within Watch, as will videos from pages that people don’t follow, Fidji Simo, Facebook vp of product, said in an interview.

The new videos are appearing in a new version of Watch’s Discover feed that’s being rolled out to users, Facebook was set to announce June 19, along with other product news. That feed is governed by an algorithm designed to promote videos that people seek out to watch, as opposed to the passively popular ones that had dominated people’s traditional Facebook feeds. Watch shows now carry a new “show” label to distinguish them from one-off videos. Facebook has no plans to let companies pay to promote their shows and other videos within Watch, said Simo.

Facebook also plans to test folding the “Watchlist” tab — which lists the shows that people follow — into the Discover tab that currently showcases shows by various categories, such as personalized picks and recommendations based on what a user’s friends are watching. In the test, the Watchlist would appear atop the feed of show and non-show videos.

Facebook decided to open up Watch to nonshow videos from pages after hearing from viewers that, after they caught up on Watch shows, they wanted other videos to watch, said Simo.

By making Watch more of an overall video section a la YouTube than a shows-only hub like YouTube Premium (previously known as YouTube Red), Facebook’s thinking goes, people may be more likely to get in the habit of pulling up the Watch tab to watch videos. In other words, Facebook appears to be attempting to cultivate the intentional viewing that publishers have found lacking on its platform, leading them to shift their focus to YouTube.

“I understand the motive for them to give people a reason to go [to Watch]. But if everything shows up in Watch and is searchable in Watch, that’s YouTube,” said an executive at one publisher that has produced Watch shows.

Facebook’s Watch gamble could lead more people to regularly tune in to serialized shows, but it could also crowd out those shows, or at least the ones that Facebook isn’t paying to be produced.

“It creates a lot more competition and makes it harder to be discovered, and definitely harder for monetization unless Facebook can demonstrate that users are shifting behavior into this tab,” said the publishing exec.

In case the addition of one-off videos to Watch doesn’t seem like enough of a resemblance to YouTube, Facebook is also looking to get individual creators to upload videos to Facebook Watch. In a familiar move, Facebook will pay individual creators to upload videos to Facebook and promote those videos through ads on its platform, and it will also let the creators make money by running mid-roll ads within their videos. This new, six-month-long program is called Facebook for Creators Launchpad. Facebook’s aim is that participants will amass a big enough regular viewership that they can sustain themselves from the associated ad dollars, said Simo.

Facebook will also introduce a new tool to let advertisers find creators they can pay to produce sponsored videos and other content. Called Brand Collabs Manager, the web-based tool will be available to advertisers with at least 25,000 followers, but Facebook will not levy any other requirements for advertisers to use the tool, such as mandating that any sponsored content created as a result of using the tool has to run as an ad on Facebook.

The post ‘That’s YouTube’: Facebook opens Watch to all videos from publishers, creators appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook continues to add tools and features for video creators on both the interactivity and monetization fronts. Vice president of product Fidji Simo and director of entertainment partnerships Sibyl Goldman detailed all of the updates in a Newsroom post Tuesday. Creators can now add polls to both Facebook Live and on-demand videos. Polls enable creators…

Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times, used a speaking slot in Cannes to give his report card on platforms: Google is getting better, Twitter is a bit perky, Facebook is failing.

First, the good news: Google is coming up with the goods. The platform has listened and acted on the publisher’s concerns, which has resulted in the lifting of Google’s first-click free policy last October, where it allowed three articles a day from subscriptions publishers to be open access. Now the Times can set its own parameters, choosing for five articles a week to be free within Google to have their content surfaced in search.

“Although we have a long list of things we’d like to talk to Google about, it’s actually a genuinely quite creative, positive environment,” said Thompson.

Twitter also got brief but noteworthy mention from Thompson. “Twitter is becoming an exciting and interesting platform again,” he said.

The Times’ relationship with Facebook however is more fractious, as he has previously called out, and which he reiterated at Cannes. “Facebook we have found to be very difficult,” said Thompson. The latest bone to pick: the social platform’s issue-ads policy which lumps news articles in with political and advocacy ads. The Financial Times and New York Media suspended their paid promotion on Facebook due to their concerns. Facebook now has an archive for ads with political content. This is not satisfying Thompson, however.

“The other week we had an ad for our cooking product: a recipe for a pistachio, rosewater and semolina cake,” he said. “It may contain nuts, but it contained no political content whatsoever, but went into straight into the archive. We have lots of nice meetings with their [Facebook’s] partnerships people, but not the same kind of dialogue we have with Google.”

Thompson overall continued his criticism of platforms for having very little accountability for the impact they have.

“The fundamental issue is that citizens have too little transparency about how choices are made,” he said. “There are incredibly complex algorithms which are changing, optimizing and changing the whole time, which neither the marketing industry, publishers nor the public have any detailed understanding of. We constantly hear about good intentions from all the platforms. But I do feel this is the moment where, whether it’s voluntary or through regulation, that we have a statutory [law] or that we understand exactly how these things are happening.”

The post New York Times CEO: ‘Facebook is very difficult’ appeared first on Digiday.

“Don’t mess with Texas” is not just a catchy phrase for Texans to boast about the solidarity of their statesmen. In fact, it started as an ad. In particular, an anti-litter campaign that debuted in 1985. And EnviroMedia, the Austin, Texas, environmental and sustainability agency that worked on “Don’t mess with Texas” for 14 years,…

IBM and Mediaocean are collaborating on a blockchain-enabled advertising network focused on making the programmatic buying process more transparent. This week, the companies are unveiling a pilot program that will let brands, agencies and publishers better track how their campaigns are spent across digital, TV, print and out-of-home channels. The network–which uses a custom blockchain…

Changes in marriage and childbearing have reshaped the American family. These shifts are playing out somewhat differently across urban, suburban and rural counties.

Ogilvy & Mather unveiled the results of its 2018 Global Media Influence Survey at Cannes Lions yesterday, which shows that trust in traditional media outlets is continuing to decline. The fifth annual survey of over 350 journalists found that 50.4 percent of reporters surveyed said that traditional media was the most trusted platform, down from…