Month: July 2018

Shares in Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, which raised $4.7 billion in one of Hong Kong’s largest tech initial public offerings in recent years, fell on their debut as the broader market rose.

The WeChat smartphone app’s ubiquity in China is creating a new challenge for its creator Tencent Holdings: heightened scrutiny from Beijing.

“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 Wayne Blodwell, founder and CEO at The Programmatic Advisory. Now that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been activated, brands must quickly learn how to maximize what they do with… Continue reading »

The post Maximizing Return On Investment In A Post-GDPR World appeared first on AdExchanger.

Inserting fresh ads into podcasts is challenging and time-consuming. An online article loads fresh ads every time a page loads. But in the podcasting world, readers download content and ads together, which means the two must be stitched together beforehand. Because of this challenge, many older podcasts run with no ads or stale ones, even… Continue reading »

The post Washington Post Builds Tech That Dynamically Inserts Ads Into Podcasts appeared first on AdExchanger.

Many European publishers, like those in the U.S., attempted the “pivot to video.” Although enthusiasm for the strategy may be dimming, 92 percent of publishers in a recent Digiday survey said they’re still increasing the amount of videos they’re producing in 2018. A key motivating factor for publishers is the growing amount spent on video advertisements. According to a recent report on advertising in Europe for by the IAB Europe and IHS Markit, spending on video ads reached $6.17 billion in 2017, a 35 percent year over year increase from 2016. With that in mind, we asked 65 European publishers at the Digiday Video Summit Europe last month to rate which platforms are the best and worst to monetize and distribute video across.

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The post Digiday Research: European publishers’ top video platforms appeared first on Digiday.

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Edward Kim, founder and executive chairman at SimpleReach. Facebook recently announced the launch of IGTV, a hub for long-form, vertical videos that’s accessible from both a new app and the existing Instagram app. Facebook’s… Continue reading »

The post Will IGTV And Digital Long-Form Finally Bring Big TV Ad Budgets Online?   appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Zuck Abides Readers might be forgiven for thinking this has been a brutal year for Facebook, given the long string of scandals and investigations the company has faced. But in some important ways, Facebook is humming along as smoothly as ever, according to… Continue reading »

The post Facebook Defies Gravity; WPP Vs. Martin Sorrell appeared first on AdExchanger.

Europe’s far-reaching data privacy law was meant to be the end of ad retargeting, but the early signs suggest it’s still going strong.

Six weeks after the arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation, spending on retargeting is rising, according to several advertising executives. In the case of three of those executives, who all spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity, brands cut spend on prospecting campaigns but continued to retarget ads in the wake of the regulation being enforced.

Prospecting in programmatic is done on reach and scale and so mainly uses third-party data, which is far too risky for advertisers when it comes to knowing if it has been legally obtained. Retargeting, on the other hand, is an area of certainty for those brands that have shifted spend to safe GDPR-compliant businesses. When the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s consent framework launched in April, it was widely adopted by publishers and major players and, when properly informed, a majority of users have shown a willingness to opt in. The impact to retargeting has, therefore, not been as dramatic as some industry observers anticipated.

“Data targeting and first-party retargeting was certainly affected [by GDPR], with audiences dropping by up to 50 percent, and spend proportionally,” said Dom Blacklock, head of strategy at media buyer the7stars. “But this is going back to normal sizes as users consent to the new terms and conditions.”

At ad tech firm Adform retargeting levels are stable and haven’t seen huge drops over the last month, said Oliver Whitten, chief operating officer at Adform. “I think a lot of this is due to the preparation that many companies put in place ahead of the GDPR and adhering to industrywide protocols, he said.

Despite retargeting’s resilience to the GDPR effect, wholly attributing the death of prospecting to the data law would be incorrect. It’s still taking place, according to the executives interviewed for this article. What’s changed is how seasoned programmatic marketers realize it makes sense to retarget an audience they have spent time and money prospecting. This is why on the surface it appears that programmatic budgets may have shifted from prospecting to retargeting when really they work in tandem, said Whitten.

“What we are certainly seeing on the client side is the use of more lookalike models to extend first-party audiences,” he said.

Not all retargeting is likely to be compliant. Everyone in advertising is hedging their bets when it comes to the GDPR, and it remains to be seen how it will fully impact programmatic. For now, there’s a nervousness among advertisers over whether the policies of third-party audience targeting and data companies meet the requirements to keep their brand safe.

“What is the hardest part of the GDPR? There’s a lot out of our control,” said Dan Salzman, global head of media at Hewlett Packard. “We’ve locked down our data and customers. But we partner with all sorts of vendors that collect data themselves. At the end of day, if an ad shows up on web page by a third party, where does the responsibility lie? My fear is that people think it’s ultimately the advertiser. That’s my fear.”

Retargeting’s resilience is ultimately a side effect of a market that’s realizing there is still time to become more organized with many publishers yet to fully implement consent-management platforms. In the meantime, all parties are concerned about is losing revenue.

“Despite transparency, trust and brand-safety concerns, the benefits of programmatic in terms of scale and cost continue to see budgets moving to automated buying,” said Mark Bembridge, CEO at ad tech business Smartology. “Since the onset of the GDPR in Europe there has been an initial drop in programmatic activity which looks now to be leveling out as publishers, agencies and brands realize that there will not be any immediate impact on the market as everyone perhaps spuriously claims legitimate interest.”

The post Dire predictions aside, GDPR didn’t kill ad retargeting (it’s growing) appeared first on Digiday.

Several publishers are pushing back on demands by agency giant Publicis that are meant to get the agency in compliance with the Global Data Privacy Regulation. The concerns center around Publicis’ shifting liability for the new European privacy law to publishers.

The General Data Protection Regulation requires companies to justify collecting people’s data for the purpose of targeting them with ads and other business objectives. Confusion and controversy have followed as players in the ad supply chain dispute who’s responsible for what. In the Publicis case, publishers say the holding company is asking the publishers to collect users’ consent to be ad-targeted and to assume all liability for collecting that consent, per its new terms and conditions. The publishers’ concern is that agreeing to this demand would leave the publisher responsible if the agency retargets users who haven’t consented to be targeted.

“The ask before was, ‘Add us to your consent form.’ Now they just reworded it to say, ‘You’re responsible for getting consent, and we aren’t,” groused one publisher that’s been presented with the demands and who, like all publishing execs in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity since they were still in talks with the holding company.

Piling on to already hefty GDPR-related agency demands, three publishers said Publicis also sent them a 56-question “Vendor Personal Data” questionnaires asking for details on how the publisher uses Publicis Groupe data. Publishers were told to complete it by June 30 to avoid any potential “cessation of spend” by Publicis.

Some sent the questionnaire said they haven’t completed it, saying they’re dissatisfied with the lack of response they’ve had from Publicis about its GDPR requirements or they’re buried by other, similar compliance documents they’ve gotten from other companies.

Publicis wouldn’t disclose how many publishers or media companies have agreed to these terms and conditions, although it is telling that most publishers have agreed to them. Some publishers tell Digiday they’re still in talks with the holding company over them, though.

Publicis Media sent over the following statement: “With the goal of GDPR ensuring the right protections are in place for consumers, the advertising industry has been working together to address the requirements under GDPR. Publicis Groupe has implemented a robust data privacy governance structure and is working closely with publishers and other media providers to execute data processing agreements, or DPAs, to make sure Publicis is addressing those requirements, knowing that all members of the industry are focused on meeting the requirements under GDPR. To manage the process as simply as possible, Publicis developed a template DPA to cover several scenarios (client data being used, publisher data being used, etc.) and the template makes clear the provisions only apply if that scenario exists. To the extent publishers are processing data in a way not contemplated by our DPA, Publicis and the publishers have been engaging in thoughtful discussions and reaching consensus to ensure compliance so no campaigns are cancelled. Publicis values the partnership that publishers and others in the media ecosystem have provided as everyone in the industry navigates through GDPR. Importantly, as part of our process, we are taking a market-by-market approach to ensure we capture local sensitivities and we will continue to work with our media vendors to resolve questions and issues around GDPR.”

Under GDPR, publishers are classed as data controllers because they are regarded as the source of the first-party audience data, which other businesses will marry advertiser data to for the purpose of targeting ads. Advertisers are also classed as data controllers, given their own customer data is sourced from them and not third parties. Agencies and vendors are typically defined as data processors, because they work with data that’s sourced either from the publisher or the client. Agencies therefore process data on behalf of their clients, but publishers don’t believe they should share accountability for whatever is done with that data on the clients’ sites, when that is controlled by the agency. The challenge to this position is that some publishers believe in being asked to be a sub-processor, they could be liable for consent on campaign data that the agency collects and for any breaches through appended data.

“They’re trying to get publishers to be responsible for their client data, but as sub-processors without full transparency of their system, that feels like they’re just passing the liability on to us,” said another publishing executive.

The issue of liability comes into play with retargeting, something agencies have been getting more forceful about lately. Shortly before the GDPR enforcement began, Publicis also started requiring publishers it buys media from to agree to a promise that Publicis will not retarget that individual publisher’s audience. On its face, the requirement seemed designed to assuage publisher fears that the agency would not create a targeting segment using that publisher’s valuable audience data. Publishers reading this were concerned that this language would allow Publicis to still retarget its audience, but just in combination with other publishers’ audiences — whether or not the publisher has gotten the users’ consent to be targeted in that way. The GDPR has had a chilling effect on audience targeting because that tactic requires people to give explicit consent, but the Publicis language shows the practice isn’t being abandoned, either.

That communication complaint isn’t isolated to Publicis, said one publishing executive. In general, only 20-30 percent of the Data Protection Addendums this publisher is getting from agencies are acceptable to the publisher, the same exec said. Publishers cried foul earlier this year when another media-buying giant GroupM made demands that would let GroupM continue targeting ads to the publishers’ audience under the GDPR. Publishers worried the demands would potentially give GroupM control of their audience data.

“So we go back and say we’re O.K. to negotiate it — to agree a data processing system, and then we’re getting radio silence,” the exec said. “We have had over a dozen from all agency groups saying, ‘Sign this or we can’t do business with you.’ It feels like their default position. Maybe this will get worked through over the next six months, but the current position is still an aggressive and absolute war of attrition.”

Another publishing exec was more charitable, saying Publicis was at least discussing the publishers’ concerns. Two publishers also noted that GroupM has shown more flexibility lately, going from refusing to amend their GDPR-related demands to agreeing to negotiate terms relating to tag placement, rich profile creation and publisher liability.

As some publishers see it, complicating the whole GDPR compliance matter is that holding groups are still so siloed that their individual agencies are all sending their own DPAs without coordinating with each other. Intentional or not, the avalanche of similar demands coming at the last minute from different agencies at the same holding company has left some publishers confused and suspicious that Publicis is trying to use the GDPR to further its commercial advantage.

“With Publicis, there is no coordination within its agencies between countries — they’re not communicating at a group level. Publicis has been saying you have to sign this or we will pull money, but it’s coming from Publicis agencies rather than Publicis group. If that’s not their group position, then they need to clarify what it [their data position] is,” said a publishing executive.

“They [holding groups] don’t have a joined-up approach — everyone is working in silos at agencies,” added a different executive.

The post ‘They’re passing the liability onto us’: Publishers balk at Publicis Media’s new GDPR requirements appeared first on Digiday.

Marketers are taking their advertising in-house, and The New York Times is jumping on the trend.

The newspaper started moving its media buying in house more than a year ago, and accelerated the process with the hire of Janis Huang as managing director, marketing and media strategy in July 2017. Huang, whose resume includes DigitasLBi, Mindshare, Hall & Partners and Draftfcb, oversees the Times’ in-house 20-person media team, with a focus on growing digital subscriptions and increasing the Times’ awareness with new audiences. In that time, the Times has scaled back its use of agencies from more than 10. It’s almost doubled the amount of media it manages and now buys nearly 90 percent of its media itself.

Like other marketers taking their media in-house, The Times wanted to gain control over an increasingly cloudy process of digital media buying, which has been plagued by murky analytics; ads showing up next to offensive or unsuitable content; and fraud. As a journalism brand, it also needed to move at the pace of the quickened news cycle. The Times has also declared itself a consumer brand as subscription revenue has become its main growth driver, so it had to market itself accordingly.

Huang’s team has handled buying for Times campaigns “Truth Has a Voice,” “Year in Review” and “Truth Demands.” It was “Truth Has a Voice,” drawing attention to the Times’ groundbreaking #MeToo news coverage, that really validated the in-house approach. The ink was barely dry on the Times’s sexual harassment coverage when “Truth Has a Voice” broke on digital and TV, a testament to the value of having a media team, marketing, analytics and newsroom all having the same employer and corporate goals. (Droga5, which did “Voice,” still handles much of the Times’ creative.)

“You have some brands planning a year out, and we were able to respond in a matter of weeks,” Huang said.

Getting more visibility into the media buying process was another big benefit of moving in-house, she said. The Times has reduced its reliance on measurement vendors and now measures most of its media buys using its own analytics and insights staff.

“Media has struggled in the past; it’s been very black-box,” Huang said. “‘We have this proprietary algorithm that’s going to tell you your media is working.’ It’s something all planners and buyers don’t love.”

Now, her team can sit across the table from data scientists who are Times employees like themselves and can openly talk about their methodology.

“The first time that happened, it was so refreshing,” Huang said. “It’s really refreshing for our team to be able to have that frank and honest conversation.”

In a Digiday survey of 30 brand execs in December, all brands conducted at least some of their marketing in-house, compared to 12 percent that did none of their marketing in-house at the beginning of that year. Fifty-six percent said they planned to take more of their marketing in-house in 2018.

Other media companies handle their own media duties. Condé Nast does its media in-house with about 10 people in marketing. Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones has done all its own media buying for over a year and a half, including social, display and search, OOH and TV, for recent campaigns including “Good Things Come to Those Who Don’t Wait” and “The Face of Real News.” Bringing this work in-house brought efficiencies, the ability to work closely with the newsroom to turn around campaigns fast and better protection of the WSJ brand, particularly in buying programmatic display ads, said Jon Buckley, Dow Jones sales and media director, who oversees this work.

A company’s decision to take its media in-house poses a variation on the classic business question: Should you focus on your core expertise and outsource the rest, or do it yourself, said Dorian Benkoil, founder of publishing consulting firm Teeming Media. You can save money on agency commissions, have media staff focused solely on your company goals, and know the data you get back from a campaign isn’t being distorted by an intermediary. But it can be hard to find the right people and have adequate clout with media vendors in negotiating rates and placements, he said.

By taking doing one’s own marketing, you also can lose the objectivity an outside agency can bring, said Greg Paull, principal at R3 Worldwide, who has worked with a number of marketing clients on the issue of in-housing media work. “For every great company case study of building cost savings and speed to market through in-housing, there’s the cautionary tale of Pepsi and Kendall Jenner and lacking the external voice that an agency can provide,” Paull said.

Given that the Times still uses agencies, though less than it used to, Huang was careful to say that it still values the role of agencies. But, she said, the company’s capabilities are increasing all the time. “We’re very honest with ourselves with what our strengths and weaknesses are, but our expertise is growing very quickly.”

The post The New York Times mostly skips ad agencies with an in-house 20-person ad-buying team appeared first on Digiday.