Month: July 2018

After a three-year stint as Havas CEO, David Jones realized the agency model needed more than a revamp. It needed a complete restart. “It got to a point where it would be far easier to build a technology company that does marketing than to try to change a big legacy business into that,” he said.… Continue reading »

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“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 Tim Webster, co-founder and chief strategy officer at The Exchange Lab. Advertising automation promises to give the advertising industry speed, efficiency and opportunities for precise audience targeting and messaging on… Continue reading »

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“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.  Today’s column is written by Michael Lehman, vice president of supply at TripleLift. The original promise of PMPs was impossibly compelling: Marry the high CPMs, large revenues and control of direct sales with the efficiency and data of programmatic… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Media Diet On average, US adults spend 11 hours per day consuming media, with six of those hours spent watching video, according to Nielsen’s Q1 Total Audience Report. Read it. Total video consumption grew 11 minutes over the previous quarter, with six of… Continue reading »

The post Connected TV Growth Driven By Adults; Moonves Mess Could Trigger CBS-Viacom Merger appeared first on AdExchanger.

Key takeaways:

• Half of marketers believe they can save money on media-buying by using in-house resources
• Forty-five percent of marketers believe in-house buying could result in greater control over campaigns

A growing number of companies are now taking some media buying functions in-house amid a prevailing sense of distrust and a lack of transparency in digital ad buying. According to marketers surveyed by Digiday, however, the primary motivation for going in-house isn’t increased transparency or trust, but the prospect of greater cost efficiencies. Only 21 percent of marketers said they were taking media buying in-house because they lacked trust in their media agencies or trading desks.

Agencies often try to prevent clients from taking media buying in-house by arguing they can purchase ad inventory at lower rates because they aggregate spending from multiple clients. Despite that, companies are finding the money saved from improved efficiencies with in-house buying to be substantial. Just by conducting a quarter of its ad buying internally, Pernod Ricard said it saved $71.5 million in the first half of 2017.

The post Digiday Research: Cost efficiencies are driving media buying in-house appeared first on Digiday.

The Financial Times is hoping to boost repeat advertising business with a new audience mapping tool that makes it easier for its advertisers to reach audiences across print, online and app.

The tool calculates reach by platform, region, audience and frequency and incremental reach of each new channel. At the planning stage, it shows how often the target audience will see the ad. For instance, for a global monthly campaign targeting FT C-suite readers across web, print and app, the advertiser will show the audience the ad 3.2 times based on a certain number of impressions or print page ads.

Laura Milsted, the FT’s global advertising director at B2B & insight, said the service will be baked into the FT’s commercial offerings.

“Fundamentally, what agencies need to bring commercial propositions together in a multiplatform world, we weren’t doing well enough,” she said. “We saw a need in the market which played to what we stand for: transparency around editorial and commercial.”

The tool was developed over the past 15 months by a team of about 10 people from the FT and consulting firm PwC. The FT’s monthly global reach is calculated based on Ipsos Mori data on its print audience and the FT’s online first-party data that’s audited by PwC. The FT’s reader survey data is used to provide de-duplicated data.

Milsted said the tool showed less audience crossover on FT platforms than expected. While print and digital audiences overlap, there’s an audience distinction across time and day.

The use of third parties gives the tool credibility and will encourage more global and pan-regional bookings, said Mark Holden, global strategy director at agency Starcom.

“Reach and frequency-based planning doesn’t sound groundbreaking, but you’d be surprised how many more digital campaigns are planned on the basis of impressions served than on guaranteed or managed reach and frequency, which means the actual reach and frequency can be unpredictable,” he said. “This will protect and cement bookings rather than bring new business in.”

While the tool takes out the heavy lifting, in theory, agencies already have access to a lot of audited third-party data. “I’d be reticent of using publisher tools,” said John Thomson, head of media at 360i Europe. “The onus is on the people buying advertising to demonstrate effectiveness to clients from a neutral perspective. ‘Moving X amount of money will give you this amount of reach’ is an argument that publishers have been using for a long time.”

The Financial Times was an early proponent of time-based sales, using time as a proxy for attention and trading display ads on a cost-per-hour basis. While this tool will help calculate audiences across platforms and plan campaigns based on reach, advertisers can still buy based on attention for campaigns where KPIs based on non-media metrics like propensity to purchase.

“Reach is still important,” said Milsted. “These are the core metrics for media planning and buying. I can’t see that we’d switch this off completely.”

The post The Financial Times creates audience mapping tool to boost repeat ad sales appeared first on Digiday.

ComScore announced on July 31 a new product to measure actual viewers — not the number of screens — across multiple platforms like linear TV, OTT and mobile.

Called Campaign Ratings, the tool provides cross-platform measurement of unduplicated audiences by working with several of comScore’s existing customers including publishers ABC, CBS, Fox, Viacom and Hulu. It’s launching in beta in September and will focus on a few campaigns in the fourth quarter.

The tool is the first big initiative under CEO Bryan Wiener, who left 360i to lead the struggling measurement company in May. Wiener said this move was a “very straightforward” answer to what the more than 60 customers he met with over the last two months were asking.

“What became really clear is the inability to understand reach and frequency across the devices. It was creating a friction to be able to transact for buyers and sellers,” Wiener said.

ComScore’s top competitor Nielsen also has a similar tool called Digital Audience Rating, or DAR. Buyers and sellers emphasized the need to have a race between comScore and Nielsen to ensure both stay innovative.

“Everybody’s working toward the same goal, which is comprehensive measurement across all platforms. It’s just a matter of moving quickly,” said Julie DeTraglia, Hulu’s vp and head of research.

The need to measure viewers across devices and avoid duplication is growing as OTT viewership rises and viewers forego cable subscriptions. DeTraglia said 78 percent of Hulu viewing happens in the living room on connected TVs, 13 percent of viewing is on desktop, and 9 percent is on mobile. Hulu’s ad-supported subscriptions have grown by more than 40 percent from the year prior.

“We know how much consumer behavior is changing in terms of watching on multiple screens, and we still don’t have great solutions to help advertisers understand what the advantages are to buying across the screens. To me, it seems obvious, but they need some proof,” said Beth Rockwood, Turner’s vp of portfolio research and chief of staff.

Ed Gaffney, GroupM’s director of implementation research and marketing analytics, said his team has been asking comScore for a solution like this for the last two or so years. GroupM’s parent WPP is an investor in comScore.

“We hate all measurement companies equally. They don’t do what we want them to do, but we’re polite with all of them,” Gaffney said. Gaffney said GroupM told comScore, “You have this great digital thing and this great TV thing and the problem is that you have two things. You need one. It’s something we wanted and knew the industry wanted.”

Wiener said that comScore had the assets, as in set box data, OTT data, digital data, mobile app data, but that they weren’t connected. Wiener set the focus and launch date about three months into his tenure.

Rockwood said Turner’s commitment is only to the upcoming beta test with comScore. Turner shared a “unified plan” for accurately measuring audiences at its UpFront presentation earlier this year, which mostly involved working with Nielsen, Rockwood said.

“This will be a learning experience. Our commitment is to be supportive,” Rockwood said.

Wiener said the partners involved in the new tool will help shape comScore’s roadmap. Buyers and sellers hope that comScore’s new Campaign Ratings tool is just the start of more reporting on audiences together so that media planners can work with publishers more efficiently.

“One of the things we’re pressing upon comScore and Nielsen is this kind of data to be transformed into a planning data set because right now it’s more than educated guesses but less than absolute clarity in planning. We need post-campaign reporting. That’s where the real change will come,” GroupM’s Gaffney said.

The post ‘Everybody’s working toward the same goal’: comScore creates tool to measure video ads across platforms appeared first on Digiday.

Quartz is expected to unveil a new version of its site on Aug. 1 that’s aimed at increasing newsletter subscribers, keeping readers on site longer and delivering advertising through private programmatic marketplaces.

The redesign, the site’s fifth in six years, will also make it easier to implement a paywall or other product features required when Quartz begins to go after subscription revenue, a priority of Quartz’s new owner, Japanese media company Uzabase.

“We wanted to adopt a new, more modern tech stack to put us in better position for the next six years,” said Zach Seward, Quartz’s chief product officer. “Once we knew we were going to rewrite the site from scratch on the engineering side, that presented the opportunity to revisit everything else.”

As with many other recent publisher redesigns, improving site speed was a top priority. Quartz’s page-load speed already ranks in the top third of websites, according to Google’s page-speed test, but Seward said he wanted the experience of navigating Quartz’s site, particularly in moving from one page to another, to feel faster.

Quartz dumped infinite scroll from its mobile site two years ago, and the forthcoming version won’t have it on the desktop version either. In its stead, Quartz will run three tests aimed at growing user time on site. An article-recommendation widget will show either a trending story, an article that is closely aligned to the topic or a story that deals with one of Quartz’s core editorial coverage areas. In the latter two cases, the stories can be hand-picked by editorial staff or automatically chosen by the CMS.

The ad load will remain the same, but the site will accommodate more kinds of ads beyond the branded content that remains Quartz’s focus. In May, Quartz joined Concert C-Suite, a private ad network that features titles including Vox Media’s business-focused sites and CNBC, which offers ad units that are new to Quartz. The new site will also feature full-page display ads like ones Quartz began tinkering with last year when it launched two sub-brands, Quartzy and Quartz at Work.

To improve navigation and help first-time mobile visitors sign up for email newsletters faster, the site’s newsletters, along with Quartz’s editions and beats, moved to a navigation bar at the bottom of the mobile page. About two-thirds of Quartz’s audience visits via mobile devices.

The post Quartz redesigns to improve speed, time on site appeared first on Digiday.

The Digiday Video Briefing is a weekly newsletter from Digiday senior reporter Sahil Patel that will take you behind the scenes of an industry in upheaval. To get this in your inbox, sign up here.

The Television Critics Association’s summer press tour is an opportunity for TV networks and streaming platforms to showcase their programming for the coming year and answer questions from TV critics and media reporters on their strategy. With Facebook continuing to fund shows for Facebook Watch, the company hosted its first TCA panel last week — and it didn’t go well.

The post Video Briefing: Facebook falls flat against TV critics and reporters appeared first on Digiday.

The Digiday retail briefing is a weekly newsletter from Digiday that will take you behind the scenes of an industry in upheaval. To get this in your inbox, sign up here.

In the age of Amazon, service can be the differentiator.

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