Month: June 2018

The global ad market is set to grow even faster than forecasted. Why? It’s the duopoly, folks. In a report released Monday, IPG-owned Magna Global significantly revised its global ad market growth projection from 5.2% to 6.4%, which translates to $551 billion in global ad spend. In Q1, Google and Facebook’s collective ad revenue increased… Continue reading »

The post Magna: Global Ad Spend Is Set For Monster Growth In 2018 (Google, Facebook: ‘We’ll Take That, Thanks’) appeared first on AdExchanger.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Tom Weiss, chief technology officer and chief data scientist at Dativa. The recent uproar caused by the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal has made the ethical use of data one of the… Continue reading »

The post Data Ethics: Permission Is Not The Problem appeared first on AdExchanger.

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Ann Green, managing partner of creative development at Kantar Millward Brown. As the battle for consumer eyeballs gets more challenging, advertisers are trying anything to get viewers to pay attention, with one of the… Continue reading »

The post Live Ads: Fad Or The Future Of Advertising? appeared first on AdExchanger.

R/GA’s Steven Moy on why information is the newest creative challenge

by Dave Goldstein, senior director of partnerships and channel at Braze (formerly Appboy)

There’s a shift happening right now, a shift toward embracing technology as central and critical in every aspect of the business landscape. We’ve all heard the buzzwords, but at its core, digital transformation isn’t about a particular technology—it’s about using technology to accomplish things that weren’t possible before.

To dive into how agencies are embracing technology to fuel creativity and set their clients apart in a shifting competitive landscape, we sat down with R/GA’s forward-looking U.S. CTO, Steven Moy. According to Moy, technological “evolution is accelerating, and the pace of innovation is changing.”

Creativity is no longer just about copy, design, and scripts. Staying ahead of the curve requires agencies to be more strategic and innovative in their use of technology. If you save all your creativity for your creative, you won’t be able to keep up.

Multi-Dimensional Data and the Deconstructed Customer Journey

The rise of technology—from PCs to mobile devices to emerging platforms—has made it possible to capture more meaningful customer data than ever before, and to use that information to gain a profound, multi-dimensional understanding of consumers as individuals with distinct wants and needs. It’s not about knowing that a customer visited a client’s website or made a purchase; it’s about understanding what those actions mean for each customer’s relationship with that brand.

That’s incredibly powerful, but it also represents a major shift for a lot of agencies and brands. The days when you could engage 80% of your target audience with a single TV spot are long gone. You can’t just reflexively favor any individual channel; you need to start by identifying the specific goal you’re trying to reach, then use data to pinpoint the content and platform that fits your target audience in a given moment or situation.

Today’s nuanced customer data supports better targeting and more effective personalization. But that doesn’t necessarily mean more personalization. “Less is more,” Moy explained. “It’s not about bombarding your target audience with communication. It’s about precision…By doing less, with higher personalization, the conversion rate is much higher.” Consumers are looking for the brands they patronize to make their lives better and easier; if you aren’t reinforcing that value, it’s time to rethink things.

How Agencies Can Move Forward

Dreaming up a stunning ad or attention-grabbing cross-channel messaging campaign takes hard work and creativity. But too often, agencies find themselves coming up with bold ideas on paper that prove to be difficult or even impossible to implement. To avoid that, take a page from the R/GA playbook and start projects by leveraging cross-departmental teams and ensuring you have cross-team clarity on six central questions that can make the difference between success and failure:

• How can this project help differentiate the brand?
• How will this project add value to the target audience?
• Is this initiative culturally relevant to the audience being targeted?
• How can this project unlock more growth for the client?
• Do all stakeholders understand the tech ecosystem needed to support this initiative?
• How can our teams achieve transformation at speed, commercializing our innovative ideas in months instead of years?

You can see the fruits of this approach in R/GA’s recent work with Nike. By leveraging customer data to identify ideal exercise times, R/GA effectively used technology to nudge Apple Watch users to take runs on Sundays. Because the experience and the messaging supporting it were built right into the new Apple Watch, the initiative created a frictionless, phone-free exercise option that showcased the Nike+ ecosystem and encouraged increased consumer engagement with the Nike brand.

“Brands need to think of an ecosystem of products and services that they can provide,” said Moy, “adding value throughout the user journey to retain [customers] and nurture them and build loyalty.” Otherwise, he added, “someone else will steal them.”

The post Put the creative in “creative”: How agencies can handle today’s deconstructed customer journey appeared first on Digiday.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. AT&TV With DirecTV, AT&T has had two minutes of ad space per hour to sell as its own inventory. Time Warner’s Turner cable channels, which include CNN, TNT and TBS, will give AT&T around 14 more minutes per hour, reports The Wall Street Journal.… Continue reading »

The post AT&T’s TV Inventory Infusion; AppNexus Battles Bots appeared first on AdExchanger.

Pandora is going beyond the standard yacht to entertain clients at the Cannes Lions this year, as it tries to capitalize on creatives’ and buyers’ growing interest in audio.

At this year’s festival, Pandora is unveiling a 45-minute showcase where guests will be blindfolded at points to showcase how audio can drive or influence campaigns. Called “The Six Dimensions of Sound,” the experience walks attendees through different sensory experiences such as augmenting taste by listening to particular sounds while eating chocolate.

For Pandora, Cannes is a way to show off its scale. While Apple and Google expand their audio offerings, and although Spotify’s number of monthly active users far exceeds Pandora’s, Pandora claims to be the largest publisher of digital audio ads in the U.S., and it owns two-thirds of all digital audio inventory, the company reported in its quarterly earnings last year.

“We’re first and foremost a music company, but we’re also a data and analytics company,” said Roger Gehrmann, Pandora’s group creative director of ad creative. “We’ve been playing music to people more than a decade now, so we have the data to back up. Everything we do within the headphone space affects how we can keep audiences on our platform and continue to be comfortable with the ads that they listen to.”

Gehrmann said the so-called headphone space — or audio industry — has reached new heights, with 368 million headphones sold in 2017. On a personal note, he shared that his 1-year-old’s first word, uttered earlier this month, was “Alexa” — yes, the name of Amazon’s voice assistant. Even Snapchat’s Cannes experience, called “Sound Stories,” is dedicated to audio.

“Sound is important not just in music and advertising, but it’s important to us as human beings,” Gehrmann said. “We’re experts in the way we can manipulate, augment, amplify and influence our audience. “

Pandora’s Cannes activation is exclusive and invite-only. The company will run four sessions, led by Lauren Nagel, Pandora’s vp and executive creative director, and it will host six agencies and three major brands, including General Mills.

Digiday got a preview of Pandora’s experience, where Gehrmann explained each of the six dimensions and played several sounds related to each of those categories. For example, for the first dimension, called Connection, Gehrmann played waves and described how and why they conjure feelings of relaxation while bird songs can range from calm to alarming.

To describe the dimension called Identity, Gehrmann played Intel’s theme.

“There was a test that found Intel’s sound was the second most recognized after a baby’s cries. I call it the world’s greatest media plan ever,” Gehrmann said.

That type of brand association via audio can travel across mediums, from TV to radio to when people simply read “Intel” or think of it. As Gehrmann said, sound effects are meaningful, but can also be far less expensive than other creative.

“I like to call it cheap art direction,” Gehrmann said. “Shooting a car down the beach is expensive, but playing the sounds is cheaper.”

The post How Pandora is pitching itself at Cannes appeared first on Digiday.

Insider Inc. is joining the pack of publishers going over the top.

On June 18, the lifestyle publisher is expected to announce that it will launch Insider TV, an OTT app that will live on Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire starting this fall.

Insider TV will feature all the content Insider has spread across platforms, from its unlikely product videos to its snapshots of weird small businesses, but minus the shows it’s produced for Facebook Watch, which include series like, “Why Are We All So Stupid?” It’s Insider’s latest move to diversify away from Facebook, which served as its initial springboard and remains the source of most of its video views and audience.

It’s also part of Insider’s longer-term bid for TV ad dollars. Over the past few weeks, Insider has begun using Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings, a currency jockeying among many others to become the currency that girds video ad buying in the 21st century, to measure its digital video audience. According to that Nielsen methodology, Insider reaches an average of 19 million Americans every day.

While Insider is bullish on OTT as a platform for video consumption, it recognizes that it could take years for audiences and advertisers to migrate there. It wants to be ready when they do and monetize its video clips in the meantime.

“It’s very clear that consumption of linear TV amongst people under the age of 35 has dramatically decreased,” said Pete Spande, Insider Inc.’s chief revenue officer. “If you’re looking for young people, that migration [to OTT] is already underway. But we’re also playing the long game.”

Insider doesn’t officially break out where its 3 billion monthly video views come from. Tubular Labs shows more than 80 percent of them come from Facebook; its Watch pages accounting for 1.1 billion views in May, an Insider spokesman said. Insider also has grown views elsewhere, particularly on YouTube, where it got 224 million views in May, 10 times as many as it did a year ago, according to Tubular Labs. A spokesman said that growth is a testament to its strategy of platform diversification.

Most of those views happen on mobile devices, but Spande said one reason he’s confident in Insider TV’s prospects is because Insider has gotten more than 5 million subscribers (per Tubular Labs) on YouTube, and a growing share of the viewing is happening through YouTube TV.

But where Insider became a top Facebook video publisher with short, inexpensive video clips, it will compete with very different kinds of content on these OTT platforms. Over the past half year or so, traditional TV networks like CBS have been promoting their own OTT products featuring linear TV programming.

Insider’s large YouTube subscriber base suggests it has built something that audiences are interested in, said Alan Wolk, the co-founder of TVRev. But the key to Insider TV’s success may rest in how much of that audience wants to watch that same content on their living room TVs rather than on their phones.

“That’s a very different use case,” he said. “There’s a world of difference between two- to three-minute videos and TV programming.”

The post Insider is moving into OTT with Insider TV appeared first on Digiday.

Since Facebook changed its algorithm earlier this year to prioritize users’ content over brands’ and publishers’ content, some media companies have found a way to boost their Facebook audience, using, of all things, Facebook-owned Instagram. Some are using Facebook to grow their Instagram audience, and others see an opportunity to use Instagram to fortify their Facebook audience.

On June 1, digital media company First Media began cross-posting two of its publications’ Instagram Stories to Facebook Stories. First Media was able to increase the Instagram followers for its So Yummy and Blusher accounts when Facebook viewers tapped on the cross-posted Stories to view the publications’ Instagram profiles. Within 10 days, So Yummy was increasing its Instagram followers by 34 percent to 6,358 new followers a day from what it was adding previously, said Yuval Rechter, First Media’s head of digital. On the same basis, Blusher saw its average daily additions increase by 284 percent to 2,301 new followers, he said.

That growth is important for First Media because it helps the company diversify beyond Facebook, but also drives referral traffic from Instagram through the swipe-up links that Instagram Stories can feature. Links within Instagram Stories perform much better for First Media than Facebook Instant Articles, said Rechter, adding that some links have received up to 40,000 swipe-ups.

Professional surfing league World Surf League has similarly turned to Instagram to get people to tune in to its live broadcasts on its own properties as well as on Facebook. The WSL’s Instagram follower base has increased by 20 percent over the past year to 2.8 million followers, helping offset challenges it had getting Facebook users to watch the events on WSL’s own properties, said Tim Greenberg, the WSL’s chief community officer.

The WSL plans to start exclusively broadcasting its events on Facebook next month, but in the interim, the league has seen that Instagram Story links perform well enough that it’s become a primary driver to send people to its own properties and to its Facebook Live broadcasts, Greenberg said.

CNN has also been upping its Instagram game since January. In February, the network increased its Instagram Story output to one a day after adding a new video producer to its social team, and it cross-posts the vast majority of those stories to Facebook Stories. That helps CNN get in front of its Facebook audience in a new way, not to mention atop their news feeds where Facebook Stories appear, said Ashley Codianni, CNN’s head of social.

Codianni said the cross-posting hasn’t led to a significant increase in Instagram followers for CNN, but it’s a way to distribute CNN’s vertical videos to a different, larger audience. Given that CNN has 30.1 million followers on Facebook and 4.9 million on Instagram, “the people that engage on Instagram are probably not the same audience watching Stories on Facebook,” said Codianni, who declined to share viewership figures.

The post How publishers are bridging their Instagram and Facebook audiences appeared first on Digiday.

Media companies have been cashing in on the world’s appetite for the royal family this spring, and ITN Productions, the in-house production company for U.K. TV news and content provider ITN, was no exception.

ITN Productions’ revenue has mainly come from selling original and syndicated digital content to publishers like the Daily Mail, HuffPost, the Guardian and The Independent to use on their own sites. For the last two years, ITN Production News been distributing this content on YouTube.

ITN Productions has seen a 40 percent growth year over year in revenue from its news, entertainment and royal family coverage on YouTube, although the company wouldn’t share actual numbers.

“Initially, we used this content to grow audiences online, but the revenue from the platforms has become much more prominent. It’s showing greater movement in a positive direction, so we’ve been paying it more attention,” said Joanna Boyd, video syndication account manager at ITN Productions, speaking of YouTube and Twitter.

Boyd said the ITN Production News team of about a dozen staffers post between eight and 10 two-minute videos a day across its three core channels: the Royal Family Channel; ODE, for on-demand entertainment; and ODN, for on-demand news.

SocialBlade data shows total subscribers for the royal channel have more than doubled since the beginning of April to 320,000, and average views per day are 1.2 million, up from 300,000 since early April due to an increase in content around Prince Louis’ birth and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding. Subscriber growth for ODE and ODN have been steadier, with 300,000 and 500,000 subscribers, respectively.

Armed with the knowledge that people are avid consumers of royal family content, ITN Productions began focusing on this YouTube channel last year, posting more content — footage that would never make it on broadcast, like Queen Elizabeth II getting off a train, for instance — and creating more video playlists to keep people on its channel as well as suggesting relevant videos at points where people drop off.

“We’ve seen the growth in the last year when we started focusing on it as a core part of the news cycle,” said Boyd, adding that on June 14, the second top news story featured the queen and Markle visiting the county of Cheshire. “That’s how big they have become to be the second news story.”

A royal wedding and birth in quick succession is unlikely to happen again, but Boyd is confident the interest will continue. “The children have huge appeal on our channel; people want to watch them grow up,” she said. Equally, the popular videos are ones that typically fall outside the mainstream, like Prince Harry and Markle attending Prince Charles’ 70th birthday party, with 1.6 million views. “Everyone has the royal wedding; we have the story afterward,” Boyd added.

Twitter has become more meaningful in the last five months. ITN Production News monetizes its clips through Twitter’s Amplify program. Since the beginning of the year, their partnership has deepened, with the platform asking which cultural events the company will cover heavily. Twitter paired ITN Production News with supermarket chain Lidl, which wanted to sponsor content about Prince Louis’ birth to promote the launch of its baby products. ITN Production News took a cut of the fee from Lidl and Twitter to create five videos and three moments, promoted by Twitter.

“That campaign really opened our eyes about what we could do on Twitter — it’s something new for us to explore,” said Boyd.

The post How UK producer ITN mines YouTube revenue from its royal family coverage appeared first on Digiday.

Google’s and Facebook’s preparations for the General Data Protection Regulation have caused a headache for marketers that relied on the platforms for ad targeting.

Marketers said they now struggle to comprehensively measure their targeting across the platforms within their own data management platforms, forcing some to turn to third-party measurement partners and others to be complacent with piecing together the data they do have strictly within Google and Facebook. Say a marketer ran a campaign across Google and Facebook. Now, they can no longer see if an ad reached the same person on Google as well as on Facebook.

Google’s changes to its data sharing came ahead of the GDPR enforcement deadline on May 25. The Google DoubleClick IDs once let buyers transfer files of DoubleClick impressions from across Google’s ad products from Google’s DoubleClick Campaign Manager to their own DMPs. At the end of April, Google disallowed ad buyers from using the Google DoubleClick ID to export data.

Facebook made a similar move, citing the need to protect people’s privacy. As a result, their view tags are no longer usable by other platforms such as Google’s DoubleClick. Already, some marketers’ say that within their DMPs, they cannot measure views across their Facebook buys, only clicks.

Not only can marketers and agencies no longer track whether an ad reached someone on Google, but not on Facebook, and vice versa, the changes also complicate the ability to see if their ads are being seen by new audiences or people who have already seen the ads on another platform.

“This evolution is creating issues for marketers and agencies alike,” said one agency executive, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution by the platforms. “In some ways, it’s not surprising. Walled gardens want to make their walls taller because it benefits them and protects them against GDPR, but it makes achieving what all brands wants to achieve — one view of the customer, one view of the journey, a comprehensive understanding of how effective their marketing is — more challenging.”

Brandon Solis, strategy director at R/GA, said that being able to use the DoubleClick ID and Facebook view tags within their DMPs created efficiencies for marketers. “We knew we could guarantee an impression some way,” said Solis. “That was the benefit of audience sharing: If we don’t capture you somewhere, we can see that we’ve captured them somewhere else. Now, there’s not that guarantee.”

To cope, marketers are adopting more third-party measurement companies. One marketer at an international company, speaking anonymously, said it was now working with Amazon and Nielsen to target its ad buys across all platforms since it can no longer do so through its DMP.

Agency executives said GDPR has only strengthened walled gardens and had the effect of pitting one tech giant against the other. Now, to measure accurately, marketers will have to tailor their campaigns to each individual platform or just go all-in on one, Solis said.

“This just shows how competitive the data and the measurement is and how the platforms are all staking their claim to that,” said another agency executive, who asked for anonymity. “It’s a battle between Facebook and Google.”

The post Marketers struggle to track audiences after Facebook and Google scale back data for GDPR appeared first on Digiday.