Month: June 2018

You know stuff is getting real when the consortiums start forming consortiums. Over the past two years, two scaled initiatives have emerged to build a common ID that would reduce data loss, tags on page and site latency issues resulting from cookie syncing across dozens of ad tech companies. One is Open ID Consortium, led… Continue reading »

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Ad servers’ primary goal is to deliver direct-sold campaigns in full, so a publisher earns all revenue promised by the advertiser. But ad servers are dumb. They can deliver direct-sold campaigns too quickly, leaving an advertiser without active ads toward the end of the month. Or to ensure that direct campaigns deliver in full, they… Continue reading »

The post Schibsted Boosts Revenue By Making Its Ad Server Smarter appeared first on AdExchanger.

Anheuser-Busch InBev isn’t crying in its beer over the sorry state of transparency in the supply chain – it’s taking action with a mobile campaign built on the blockchain. It may sound like a stunt, but this is a serious experiment, said Andy Chang, AB InBev’s global head of media and content. “There are a… Continue reading »

The post AB InBev Gets Its Buzz On With A Blockchain-Enabled Mobile Campaign appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Weed Whacks Influencers Influencer marketing has a fraud problem, and Unilever CMO Keith Weed has had enough of it. At the Cannes Lions festival, Weed said Unilever will no longer work with influencers who buy followers to inflate audience and engagement metrics. Unilever will… Continue reading »

The post Unilever Pulls Back On Influencers; Amazon Kills It With Twitch appeared first on AdExchanger.

Is there a socially conscious, ethically responsible way for publishers to pursue commerce revenue? Good Media Group is about to find out.

On June 19, the parent of Upworthy and Good Magazine will announce the launch of the Public Service Apparel Supply Company, or PSA Supply Co., a clothing brand created with Social Imprints, an ethical product manufacturing company.

PSA will begin with six product lines, including T-shirts ($29), pins ($10) and tote bags ($19) that bear positivity-focused slogans like “Hater Hater” and the date “Nov. 6” to remind people to vote in the midterm elections.

PSA is part of Good Media Group’s marketing and strategy group but draws from different departments, including editorial, marketing, creative and design. Social Imprints will handle PSA’s storage and fulfillment, while designers, editors and marketers at Good handle PSA’s creative side.

PSA is attached to some worthy causes. For the next three months, 10 percent of the proceeds will go to the Center for Community Change Action, a nonprofit that provides training, resources and networking assistance to grass-roots organizations and activists. The workforce at Social Imprints consists primarily of at-risk adults who have battled substance abuse and homelessness, or who lack high school diplomas.

In PSA, Good Media Group sees the chance to diversify its revenue and grow its brand beyond the internet as Facebook wanes as an audience builder and branded content distribution gets more expensive. Today, branded content  accounts for 60 percent of its revenue. Its consultancy, which advises clients on how to operate more ethically and sustainably, drives another 25 percent; the rest comes from programmatic and other sources.

“Wearing a T-shirt or a button or a pin is the same as sharing a piece on Facebook or Twitter,” said Jenn Lindenauer, Good Media Group’s chief strategy and marketing officer. “It’s an opportunity to promote our shared values.”

PSA will be promoted on a standalone digital storefront and storefronts on both of Good Media Group’s sites. Both will routinely write stories about PSA’s partners and use paid promotion on social platforms, particularly Facebook, to get the products in front of people.

Good will also programmatically target site visitors reading stories about things that align with PSA and its mission. For example, a story about Rob Scheer, a onetime foster child who founded a nonprofit designed to give foster children backpacks, will have PSA ads appended to it.

The launch of PSA adds Good to a list of publishers including The New York Times and The Chive trying to use commerce to grow revenue by leveraging their audience’s passion for their brands. Over time, Lindenauer said she could see PSA becoming like a platform for designers, nonprofits and other third parties to sell cause- and issue-related merchandise.

“Culture is changing so fast,” Lindenauer said. “I can’t imagine that the idea of sharing your values doesn’t continue to be a high priority.”

The post Good and Upworthy are getting into the commerce business appeared first on Digiday.

While Toronto-based sports publisher theScore makes most of its revenue from its mobile app, the company has created a team to experiment with new products and features on different platforms.

Formed last year, this emerging products group has about six staffers across product and engineering, and is exclusively focused on testing new ways of using platforms, said Benjie Levy, theScore’s president and chief operating officer. So far, that’s led to two products for Facebook Messenger: a bot that gives users the latest news and sports scores for their favorite teams and leagues as well as a fantasy sports pick ’em game called “Instant Game.”

Since January, the Messenger bot has surpassed 500,000 monthly users, and Instant Game has crossed 7 million installs. Levy said the Messenger bot is also getting repeat usage, with users coming back to use it 30 to 40 times per month. (TheScore’s mobile app, which averages 4 million to 5 million daily users depending on the season, gets 100 to 120 repeat visits per month, Levy said.)

TheScore’s core business is still its mobile app. The publisher said it made $26 million from September 2016 to August 2017 and has generated $15.5 million during the first two quarters of its current fiscal year. “Substantially all” of those dollars come from advertising on the app, Levy said.

The focus of the Facebook Messenger bot, fantasy sports game and other emerging products isn’t on making money in the near term because it’s too early to see if there’s a real business there, Levy said.

Ninety percent of the mobile app’s audience comes from the U.S. and Canada, but by creating products on Facebook and spending more time focusing on sports such as soccer and basketball, theScore has found new users in Europe and Asia. Ninety percent of the Messenger bot’s audience is outside the U.S. and Canada.

When possible, theScore will also look to convert some of its social followers into app users, but Levy stressed that isn’t the primary goal of every platform or product the publisher experiments with.

Asked how he balances making investments in products that don’t have a quick path to revenue, Levy pointed to theScore’s success with its mobile app. Those investments were made due to data demonstrating that sports fans were increasingly going mobile, even if the ad demand wasn’t immediately there. In a similar way, Levy said some of the products and platforms the publisher experiments with now and going forward will ultimately bear fruit.

“It’s about taking shots on goal: With some, we’ll score, and others will get blocked or we’ll miss the net, but it’s about maximizing the number of smart shots we take,” said Levy. “We do a good job of balancing current versus future investments.”

The post Sports publisher theScore’s Facebook Messenger bot has 500,000 monthly users appeared first on Digiday.

Along with publishers, TV and entertainment companies are producing a ton of programming for Facebook Watch — but they’re not treating the fledgling video-viewing section like TV.

Take “Five Points,” a scripted drama about high school kids from Chicago’s South Side from producer Kerry Washington and studio Indigenous Media. The show has a polished look like a drama you’d see on cable TV. But Indigenous Media is also programming additional “Five Points” content for Facebook including a show-centric fake Instagram account and a Facebook group for people to discuss the show and the social issues it raises, like LGBT identity, gun violence and drugs.

In this way, Watch shows are different from what you’d see on linear TV or Netflix.

“Facebook’s an interesting hybrid,” said Jake Avnet, chief operating officer of Indigenous Media. “They want to make strong shows with great people, but they also want to have a community aspect to them.”

This year, Facebook has been telling production partners that it wants to buy original video series that have an interactive or community element. At a TV conference in Cannes, France, this spring, Matthew Henick, Facebook’s head of content strategy and planning, said Facebook was looking for “social entertainment” for people to watch on their phones. This style of content, naturally, would most likely be unscripted, Henick added, though Facebook was open to scripted projects such as “Five Points” and “Skam Austin,” the latter of which has its fictional characters posting content on social media accounts. (Later this year, Facebook Watch will also roll out a few traditional, scripted series starring big names such as Catherine Zeta-Jones and Elizabeth Olsen.)

Facebook is not the first company to test so-called transmedia programming. “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” (a YouTube-based adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice”) and AT&T and The Chernin Group’s “@SummerBreak” have done this style of programming. The question is whether viewers care about interacting with content, having conversations or following fictional characters’ social media pages. Watch producers say that’s fine and that all viewers don’t have to interact with the social elements of a Watch show.

“For Facebook to become just another premium buyer and nothing else, that’d be less cool than if they can lean in to the social and tech components that they have,” said Hillary Power, svp of short form for Turner-owned studio Super Deluxe, which has released 14 shows on Watch. “That’s exciting for us because it pushes the entertainment experience in a different direction. Sure, let’s get users used to longer videos on Facebook, but don’t forget the community aspects, either, and do more things like a live telenovela or a choose-your-own-adventure-style show.”

Facebook is too big to ignore
Facebook is spending less on entertainment shows for Watch than big spenders such as Netflix, Apple and Hulu pay for shows. This year, Facebook has been willing to spend more — well into six figures per episode on some top projects — for longer programming. But it’s hinted that it does not plan to fund Watch programming forever.

Still, as long as Facebook is paying for original programming, it will receive interest from entertainment companies of all types. Big media companies have more time and resources than digital publishers to let Facebook figure out a video monetization system that works. Their patience is not limitless, but even for media giants, Facebook is too big to ignore, even if it’s struggling to convince users to go to Watch directly.

“Can Facebook honestly change the perception of maybe the majority of people who don’t see it today as a place where you would go to watch longer-form content? Our goal is to be there for that ride, and see if we can understand our consumer better as we try these experiments,” said Vikki Neil, gm of digital lifestyle studios for Discovery Inc.

“Go back in time when Netflix was not what it was today and was just breaking into originals,” Avnet said. “The idea of doing an original show for Netflix was laughable — why would you want to? Who’s gonna watch your show? Now, everybody in the business would love to work with a platform like that. You look at Facebook: It’s the largest platform there is in terms of community, and there’s a huge opportunity to make a show that connects with an enormous amount of people and creates an enormous amount of conversation.”

Guaranteed revenue, more creative freedom
Facebook has other draws for big media companies. One TV studio exec with a Watch show praised the platform for its hands-off approach to the content.

“A lot of people in our world are happy and interested in participating in their space because they are light with notes,” the exec said. “Production companies are getting a great deal of creative freedom, and often, people will take slightly less to deal with fewer executive notes. So that’s definitely a factor in considering whether we’d do more shows with Facebook.”

And while Facebook, just like Netflix and many TV networks, increasingly wants total ownership of the shows it funds, sometimes it’s better to take the guaranteed money now rather than hope for more revenue down the road from licensing and syndication deals, this exec said. “If a seller is just looking to hit an annual bottom line, he’s inclined to take the most money now.”

TV networks, meanwhile, continue to see Watch as a marketing vehicle for their brands. MTV, for instance, has more than 46.3 million followers on Facebook, and creating content for that audience will remain important, said Kelly Day, president of Viacom Digital Studios.

“We hope that eventually there will be better monetization, but if you are a media company approaching Facebook with the angle of building a business on Facebook, that’s challenging right now,” Day said. “Facebook is a community experience, and we’re very much focused on building engagement around our brands and shows.”

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The post Even for big entertainment companies, Facebook is too big to ignore appeared first on Digiday.

There’s more than one way to build a paywall. Over the last year, Swiss news publisher Neue Zürcher Zeitung has been using a payment system that is personalized to the individual based on hundreds of criteria.

NZZ requires people to register and eventually, pay. But when readers get these registration and payment messages and how those messages look varies based on predefined rules, dozens of A/B tests and machine learning.

“If we’re to be successful in paid content, we need to individualize the experience with our product and the product itself, and automate our marketing approach,” said Steven Neubauer, managing director at Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “Based on that hypothesis, this approach will increase engagement, retention and conversion rate.”

The 200-year old German-language publisher said it has increased conversion rate by fivefold in the last three years by using this system, with 2.5 percent of people who view a payment message prompted to subscribe.

NZZ now has over 150,000 paying subscribers, over half of which have digital as part of their subscription package and have accessed the site digitally in the last three months, Neubauer said. The site has nearly 600,000 registered users, an increase of more than 40 percent in 2017, and is adding between 10,000 and 12,000 per month, he said.

NZZ uses 100 to 150 rules that account for data like reading history, device and time of day to alter the messaging, text, placement and color of the pay prompt readers see. For instance, between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. when people are commuting, they’re reading on their smartphones and won’t want to put in payment details, so no payment messages are shown during this time and people can freely access the site.

NZZ is constantly testing different combinations of these rules while machine learning identifies patterns that are fed into its algorithm. Since 2018 it has scored registered users on some 30 different attributes, like time spent on articles, frequency or how many newsletters that receive, to score them on a propensity to subscribe scale. When readers reach the top 20 percent of the propensity score they are served the payment prompt that suits their needs. For instance, heavy users who have registered but not yet subscribed tend to convert higher when they see an offer for a monthly rather than an annual subscription. NZZ has also linked article metadata with user journeys, so someone who has read a high number of articles on banks in Zurich, for instance, will receive a payment message on the next relevant article they read. Adding personalized greetings to landing pages increased conversion by 25 percent.

Rather than change the subscription product for each reader, the way that the value is communicated changes.

“We play around with the threshold,” said Neubauer, adding that people can see payment messages after they have read five, eight, 11 or 13 articles. “Ultimately, the goal is to not disrupt the product experience; we only want to disrupt when someone is willing to pay. You will never hit 100 percent success. Sometimes there is the need to indicate this is a pay product — ideally only when the lead is warm enough, willing to pay, and it’s an offer that fits the needs they are looking for.”

Advanced publishers have been using propensity modeling and machine learning to spot patterns in reader behavior to subscribe for some time, said Greg Harwood, director at strategy and marketing consultant Simon-Kucher & Partners, citing The Wall Street Journal’s ongoing work in this area.

“Market conditions can change, competitors behave irrationally, external factors come in to play, none of which can be solved for through predictive analytics,” said Harwood. “Treat it as a lever to achieve the defined strategy, rather than being the strategy itself.”

NZZ gets 60 percent of its revenue from subscriptions and less than 40 percent from advertising. Roughly 10 years ago, direct reader revenue accounted for one-third of the total. Ad revenue will further diminish, with print advertising revenue declining by double digits year over year in Switzerland, said Neubauer.

Until recently, NZZ offered subscribers two bundles: 45 Swiss francs ($45.20) a month for digital access and a PDF version of the newspaper, or 65 Swiss francs ($65.30) for digital plus print. Last November, it introduced a digital-only access offer for 20 Swiss francs ($20.10), which is proving popular, particularly with younger readers. In the U.K., a print and digital subscription to The Times of London equates to 51.37 Swiss francs a month ($51.60).

According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 12 percent of people in Switzerland pay for news, less than the U.S., where 16 percent pay for online news, and more than the U.K.’s 7 percent.

The post How Swiss news publisher NZZ built a flexible paywall using machine learning appeared first on Digiday.