Month: July 2018

Broadcom struck a deal to buy software company CA Technologies for nearly $19 billion, a surprise move that takes the chip-making giant in a new direction.

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Shereta Williams, president at Videa.​ Local TV advertisers and broadcasters have heard it time and time again: “Digital’s got it all figured out.” And then, “Why can’t you be more like digital?” TV will… Continue reading »

The post Local TV Needs Open Standards For Automated Buying And Selling appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Snap’s OK Instagram may have run away with Snap’s stories format, but – consolation prize! – Snap is benefiting from all the exposure. According to Digiday, Snap story ads are now seen as a great value, selling at CPMs of just $1.88 versus as… Continue reading »

The post Snap’s Predicament Has A Bright Side; Europe’s War On Silicon Valley appeared first on AdExchanger.

According to eMarketer, 82.5% of digital display ads will be bought programmatically in 2018. That number will grow to 86% over the next year. Publishers do and will continue to rely on programmatic as the primary way to generate advertising revenue for their business.

However, Digiday research claims that US publishers see less increase in revenue than European publishers, reflecting the relative maturity of those markets. The more developed the market is, the fewer growth opportunities there are. As major markets are maturing, publishers will continue to struggle to increase their advertising revenues.

US and European publishers have already minimized unfilled impressions, using header bidding to expose their inventory to 5-10 programmatic demand sources.

However, the competition for publisher’s inventory is still low even in developed markets. SSPs inside the header rarely compete in an auction simultaneously—if a publisher has 5 bidders in the header, the probability that all of their SSPs compete simultaneously is 3%, according to the Top Header Bidding Partners Report.

Low competition in header bidding negatively affects the performance of Google AdExchange—the biggest contributor to publisher’s programmatic revenue. AdX adapts to unstable bidding behavior of SSPs in the header and buys publisher’s inventory for lower prices.

Another way to make Google AdExchange work harder for 100% of ad auctions is to set minimum prices for impressions. Price floors let buyers know they won’t be able to buy an impression cheaper at a certain price.

However, the main challenge for publishers is that they compete against machines. The buy-side technology participates in hundreds of millions of auctions an hour and adapts its bids to win more for less price. When publishers overprice their inventory, they decrease monetized impressions.

Publishers can achieve a balance between inventory prices and the fill rate with automated inventory pricing. Similar to the buy-side algorithms, the sell-side technology should analyze web site visitors and the demand for their attention. This technology would require big data analytics and a responsive algorithm to mimic the buy-side behavior.

Roxot Revenue Lift is an example of an automated inventory pricing product. By analyzing Google AdExchange auctions and visitors,it predicts what buyers are ready to pay for an impression to a particular user. Precise predictions boost inventory prices and publisher’s yield by up to 30%.

“Artificial intelligence and automation technologies look promising when applied to programmatic auctions. We noticed that our audiences directly influence the advertising revenue. And we’ve been looking for technologies to use visitors’ behavior to generate more revenue for a while,” says Anastasia Kapitanova, Head of Programmatic & Data at Independent Media, a mass media company that owns and operates Russia’s Cosmopolitan and Esquire brands.

Publishers own a massive amount of data. Automated inventory pricing uses this data to facilitate competition for each impression, making smart data application for audience-based inventory pricing a growth opportunity for publishers on the developed markets.

The post Why publishers struggle to increase programmatic revenues appeared first on Digiday.

Bustle Digital Group has more than tripled its Instagram following with help from a little-known practice of merging accounts.

So far this year, the women’s lifestyle publisher’s biggest Instagram account, Bustle, has more than tripled in size to 4.6 million followers, through spikes like one in June where its followers went from 3.3 million to 4.6 million. Elite Daily, which Bustle acquired in April 2017, has soared 69 percent, to 2.7 million Instagram followers.

Accounts can get big increases from a celebrity shoutout or runaway viral post, but those big leaps were powered in part by account merges, where one Instagram account folds in the followers of an account it grew or bought.

Publishers acquiring and merging Instagram accounts isn’t as common as buying followers to inflate a social media following, a practice often associated with influencers and which is frowned upon. But acquiring any part of one’s audience is seen as taboo in media, where a publisher’s chief selling point is its ability to attract an audience that’s sought after by advertisers.

Bustle wouldn’t give details about which accounts it merged, saying only that they were a mixture of acquired and homegrown accounts, and that the merges were part of a broader growth strategy that included editorial partnerships, social partnerships and marketing. It added that it does not buy followers for any of its accounts.

In the past year, the price of acquiring Instagram accounts has declined considerably. David Kosiba, the founder of Viral Accounts, a marketplace for Instagram accounts, said an Instagram account that mostly publishes humor or memes with a following in the high six figures can be acquired for $5,000 to $8,000, where two years ago the price could be many times that. “The market is so overflooded with willing sellers,” Kosiba said.

While page merges are a fairly common practice on Facebook, they are a less common tactic on Instagram, which has no information on its help pages or website about the practice. Instagram confirmed that it will conduct merges after ensuring that none of the pages involved have violated the platform’s terms of service.

The post Acquisitions help swell Bustle’s Instagram audience appeared first on Digiday.

Google has rankled publishers and ad tech firms with its General Data Protection Regulation compliance strategy. But a pledge the company has presented to ad tech firms is considered particularly burdensome.

In the lead-up to the GDPR’s enactment May 25, Google asked ad exchanges and supply-side platforms to guarantee that the publishers whose inventory they help sell have gotten consent across hundreds of vendors for any ads sold through Google’s automated ad-buying platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager, according to three ad tech executives with knowledge of the matter. The EU privacy law requires businesses to justify collecting people’s online data, by getting their consent or through other means.

In signing Google’s consent guarantee agreement, the exchanges and SSPs as well as their respective publishers would assume liability for any corresponding GDPR violations that Google’s DBM is charged with, the execs said. Under the GDPR, any company found violating the law can be fined up to 4 percent of its annual revenue.

Google is asking that the exchanges and SSPs guarantee that their publishers have received consent for each of the roughly 200 vendors on Google’s commonly used vendor list. The ad tech platforms can compromise by creating their own whitelist with a subset of those vendors that they provide to Google, according to the execs. In either case, Google will assume that any exchange or SSP requesting personalized ads from DBM has received consent for all of the vendors on the respective whitelist, the execs said.

The ad tech execs don’t want to assume liability for violations against Google and they don’t think they could honor it in practice. Further, they said Google’s agreement goes against the spirit of the GDPR, which says people have to have the option to withhold consent from individual vendors.

“It’s impossible to get 100 percent consent for every reader for the entire vendor list because most consent management platforms have to, by GDPR law, allow the reader the option to select potentially opting out of specific vendors, and so there’s no way to guarantee 100 percent of readers for 100 percent of the partners or vendors have given consent,” said one of the ad tech execs.

At least one ad tech firm, Sovrn, has declined to sign the agreement. “The changing landscape of GDPR has brought a lot of uncertainty for publishers. Due to the strict requirements around consent in the Google agreement, Sovrn has elected to wait until Google joins the IAB consent framework, which will make it easier for publishers to comply,” Sovrn CTO Jesse Demmel emailed.

“The GDPR is a big change for everyone. We’ve been working hard to make sure that Google complies with its obligations under the GDPR, and to help our partners in their compliance efforts too,” a Google spokesperson said.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May that AppNexus and Teads said they have struck deals with Google to guarantee consent. Reuters earlier this month reported that AppNexus and Rubicon Project have guaranteed to Google that they will only sell inventory to DBM for which publishers have received people’s consent. The articles didn’t say if the agreements were initiated by Google or if the companies and their publishers assumed liability for GDPR violations charged against DBM. Spokespeople for AppNexus and Rubicon Project declined to say if their respective companies signed Google’s agreement and assumed liability. A spokesperson for Teads did not return a request for comment by press time.

If an exchange or SSP declines to sign the agreement, it is limited to only selling non-personalized ads through DBM. Those generic ads generate less revenue for publishers than personalized ads that are targeted to specific audiences based on data collected about them. Some publishers that are heavily reliant on DBM have seen their revenues decline by 70-80 percent since GDPR took effect because they were limited to non-personalized ads, said another ad tech exec. That revenue drop has put pressure on exchanges and SSPs to sign Google’s consent agreement lest their publishers move their inventory to other platforms that can run DBM’s personalized ads on their sites, the second exec said.

Google’s consent guarantee agreement is considered by the ad tech execs to be a stopgap measure until the tech giant adopts the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe’s and IAB Tech Lab’s GDPR consent framework. Google has said that it plans to complete its integration of the industry framework by August, at which time publishers and ad tech platforms will be able to pass consent to Google on a per-visitor, per-vendor basis.

The post ‘It’s impossible’: Google has asked ad tech firms to guarantee broad GDPR consent, assume liability appeared first on Digiday.

In-house agencies are all the rage, but most marketers still struggle with taking their advertising and media entirely within their four walls — leading to more brands favoring a “hybrid” approach.

Marketers of all types have made it a mission to talk more directly to their customers, take media planning and strategy, if not the actual buying to their own teams and overall, do more themselves. That means agencies are now doing far less big-picture planning and more execution.

For example, Marriott chief marketing officer Karin Timpone recently launched a new unit, part of the marketing team, called “global marketing optimization” group, which handles everything from overall customer strategy, media and marketing, as well as performance and media buying. This is new, and the group is in charge of also a new media group that handles all global media buying.

The brand also works with Publicis, which created a dedicated team called Marriott One Media to service the account earlier this year. The agency group handles execution while strategy and planning is done internally.

There’s also more media buying done internally, especially at the local-individual-hotel-property level, mostly in search. The brand’s internal agency also is working directly with platforms, like Facebook, on how to buy media there that Timpone said “couldn’t have been done with an external agency partner.” Once the plan is set, the agency can come back and put Facebook in the overall plan — more executional, rather than strategic. “The strategies of what you need for our business, you can’t ever farm that out,” she said.

Timpone declined to say how many people work inside that group but said it was born out of an understanding that marketers needed to be much more in control of their customer journeys than they have been in the past.

In-house agencies, while touted by some like JP Morgan Chase CMO Kristin Lemkau as being more efficient, are also difficult to create: They have expensive startup costs and require a high level of internal buy-in. Plus, agencies still remain, according to CMOs, a place for expertise on new trends and new technologies, which are too difficult for an internal team to stay on top of.

At Northwestern Mutual, chief marketing officer Aditi Gokhale said she isn’t a big believer in outsourcing everything to agencies. “But frankly, from an efficiency perspective, it’s not super efficient to build out a big in-house agency either.”

What’s changed at NM, said Gokhale, is that she and her team now define media and media spend. “The agency doesn’t define it for me, which historically they have,” she said. “I take control of it, the agency executes.”

Ann Billock, partner at Ark Advisors, which advises CMOs about agency partnerships, said that most brands are now using a “hybrid” approach because creating teams in-house is expensive — and talent is often an issue. As Digiday has reported previously, everything from cultural fit issues, to brand marketing talent needing to adapt to a different way of working, to finding people outside the coastal cities can be an issue. 

Companies struggle especially to recruit media-buying experts for the client side, with 62 percent of marketers in a recent Digiday survey saying hiring talent is a challenge for bringing media buying in-house. One hurdle when recruiting media buyers for the client side is convincing them that there’s a path for career progression.

That’s what’s creating a movement where more brands are doing more in-house, but few are entirely eschewing agencies. Marc Speichert, chief digital officer at GSK, who said he doesn’t have plans to take everything in-house, said that what is happening is a clearer understanding of the marketer’s internal capabilities and how to increase them — and expect very different things from its agencies. “We have to make sure we push hard,” Speichert said. “As we elevated our own internal capabilities, we are asking much tougher questions of agencies. We have much higher expectations.”

“The most effective partnerships happen when the brand teams do, indeed, handle the strategy but recognize that the brand strategy still needs to be translated into a communications strategy by the agency,” said Billock.

The post Why brands favor a ‘hybrid’ in-house marketing approach appeared first on Digiday.

Walking through the city at midnight on June 10, Londoners would have seen a number of slogans projected on to the city’s landmarks: protest tags like “Evict the Government” on the Houses of Parliament, “No Trump” on Nelson’s Column and “ Brexit is a Crime” on Westminster Abbey.

The stunt, carried out by New York art activists The Illuminator, marked the summer issue of Dazed, called “Youth is Revoluting.” The culture and lifestyle quarterly is now making live campaigns a hallmark for every upcoming launch across its magazine brands AnOther, Another Man and Dazed. It will also host a festival in London this November for an app launch of its video channel Nowness. In September it’s opening Dazed Factory, an events space underneath the Dazed offices, where it will invite creators and artists to use as Dazed acts as the broadcast partner.

“The Factory will sit at the heart of all the magazines. There’s a thread running through how we operate in real life, print and in social, it’s all considered at the same time,” said Sophie McElligott, head of communications at Dazed Media. “But it was really when we saw the response from our audiences on social [to the Summer issue] that the team conceived the light-projection campaign.”

The Summer issue, published June 14, struck a chord with Dazed’s audience keen to hit back at the perceived political malaise placed on younger people. Instagram posts of the cover, featuring Vivienne Westwood with a group of different activists, fetched over 20,000 likes and nearly 150 comments, typically posts will get around half of this interaction. The media company then asked its audience the most important issues facing young people today, collecting over 2,000 responses on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook before choosing 12 to project on London’s landmarks. It will measure the impact through social reach.

“There are thousands of magazines in circulation in the U.K., the front cover alone doesn’t get traction anymore,” said Ray Murphy, senior editor at agency We Are Social. “To stay relevant Dazed is finding new ways to work into the conversation on social. Talking about the issues its community cares about is progressive, and it comes from an authentic place. Dazed has a history of being provocative.”

Tying live events to the print magazine gets the brand in front of new audiences. Dazed will run 40 events or parties for brands this year, double what it did last, as part of wider brand campaigns. The media company has a 30-person in-house creative agency, Dazed Studio, and a five-person events team as well as a network of contractors. Now, all co-branded project briefs for Dazed Studio have an element of experiential included.

Part of the campaign for sunglasses brand Persol includes live Instagram Q&As with actor Brandon Flynn, model Luka Sabbat and director and screenwriter Gia Coppola, as well as an exclusive dinner of 50 people. For Tinder, it’s launching an interactive video series on social and hosted a party during London Pride for 500 people. Hosting these types of events has been a natural evolution for the media company.

“We are a group of partiers,” said McElligott, “so many of us in the office have met during night time activities. It’s also part of our link to the LGBTQI community and the idea you can really express your identity at night.”

A six-month campaign with Huawei last year opened Dazed up to more technology clients like YouTube and Tinder, beyond its usual cohort of fashion brands like Gucci, Calvin Klein and Burberry. Dazed previously told Digiday around 75 percent of its branded content campaigns are done directly with the brand.

“It’s quick and efficient,” said McElliot, “it gives us a clear understanding of how brands across the board are making experiential a number one priority to connect with and attract new audiences.”

Dazed is growing incremental revenue through events, which is still a valid way of building its business, according to Bridey-Rae Lipscombe, chief strategic officer and co-founder of agency Cult LDN.

“There’s a question mark over the ROI on events — margins are not huge — but there’s so much value on the data you can get from them to inform where to take your business next. That’s been the response from every client about offline activation.”

Image: courtesy of Dazed Media.

The post Dazed is bringing print to life with live events appeared first on Digiday.

Much as programmatic advertising has created an impressive batch of three-letter acronyms over the years, the General Data Protection Regulation has recently spawned its own arcane jargon.

Here’s a refresher on the most common terms you can throw around to establish your GDPR street cred.

Layered consent user experience
When a website explains what it’s doing with user data, in a layered way. This option has been popular with publishers that have a large number of ad tech vendors they use to monetize programmatic ad revenue. Rather than overwhelm site visitors with a sea of disclaimers on various third-party vendors the publisher uses, site visitors are met with approximately three layers of information regarding vendor partners and use of data, each with increasing levels of detail. The top layer of detail is the initial message which invites users to click “yes” to all third-party ad tech vendors and purposes of data use. A separate “manage settings” tab takes the visitor to a middle layer, where they’re presented with specific purposes for the use of their data such as whether it’s used for site analytics or for personalized retargeting. From there, the user can agree or click through to a final third layer, where they are shown a list of individual vendors.

Open consent user experience
This is the full monty when it comes to GDPR consent. Consumers are exposed to the consent value proposition: the how, why and benefits regarding the collection of information for targeted advertising. In that context, they are asked to opt-in, on a line-by-line basis, each individual ad tech vendor that a publisher wants to share their information with. On the surface, this more up-front consent option appears more overwhelming and potentially off-putting for the user, so naturally, it’s rarer to see.

Data processing agreement
This isn’t new to GDPR, but the term is now far more prominently used because of it. It’s an agreement that publishers, agencies and marketers will have in place with each other regarding data protection, so it acts as the base line for GDPR compliance. Also, not to be confused with another DPA acronym that stands for data protection authority.

Data processing addendum
These have been the proverbial thorn in the sides of publishers for months. Addenda aren’t new but are legal jargon for contract updates. Data processing addenda have crept in more under GDPR as everyone has scrambled to update their existing contracts. They seem new terms because there was such a huge influx of them in the months preceding the deadline of the enforcement on 25 May, and sorting through them continues to clog up time.

Data controllers
Publishers and advertisers are both data controllers. Any business that owns first-party audience data is responsible for however that data is then handled not only by themselves but their partners: agencies and third-party tech vendors. Controllers determine the purposes and methods of processing personal data. They’re also on the hook for fines, even for breaches that are caused by partners.

Joint controllers 
When two businesses jointly determine the purposes and means of processing personal data and are totally transparent with each other over the terms. They’d therefore share liability. The term co-controller has also come up, but this isn’t an official term, according to experts. Rather, this is a term that surfaced as a result of Google’s GDPR policy change, in which it described itself as a co-controller, a move which would give it full control of the controller’s [publisher’s] audience data, in theory. Beware any company that starts professing that they’re a co-controller, as it’s not officially defined under GDPR.

Data processors and sub-processors
Data processors do not own the audience data but do things with it in order to fulfill marketing-related activities like ad serving and retargeting. Generally, processors must only act on the documented instructions of the controller. Processors can also be subject to fines, along with the controllers. When a processor outsources work to an external company, that secondary company is a sub-processor. The processor needs permission from the controller to do so.

Consent management platform
A CMP is what publishers use to capture and store information on what a user has given consent to use their data (and what they haven’t). That CMP then ensures that same information is passed to every other partner the publisher works with in the digital ad supply chain, to ensure no one is using data out of turn, and risking fines. Most ad tech vendors have tacked this capability onto existing services — this is not an opportunity for a new ad tech business model but is regarded by vendors as strictly hygiene.

Hard and soft opt in/out
There is still confusion around what constitutes opt-in, opt-out and legitimate interest. The term “hard opt-in” gets bandied around often. To avoid confusion opt-in and hard opt-in both refer to whether a website has not assumed what a site visitor’s expectations or choice is but will adjust its ad targeting according to whether the person ticks clicks “agree” or “yes.” If they do neither, they won’t be sent personalized ads.

Opt-out and soft opt-in are used interchangeably and mean the same thing: that a website has presumed an individual is happy for their data to be used unless they specify otherwise and opt-out of the experience.

Legitimate interest
The jury is out on just how many companies will be able to play the legitimate-interest card and skirt repercussions from regulators. A business that claims legitimate interest will have (in theory) undergone a lengthy test internally and checked that their interest in collecting the data outweighs the interest of the individual for not having the data collected. Under GDPR though, the site must make it easy to revoke any consent given, hence why unsubscribe links and buttons can be seen more clearly on email newsletters.

Personalized and non-personalized ads 
Personalized ads use personal data. In some cases, this includes sensitive information like race, religion and sexual orientation — the latter of which requires “explicit” consent rather than the more standard form of consent, under GDPR.

Non-personalized ads can be targeted but without using personal data of any kind. In some circles, they’re now described as using “ethical” as opposed to “conventional” data-targeting techniques, and the likes of Google have introduced them as an option. You could also class methods such as contextual targeting under this, which doesn’t target ads with personal data.

The post Layered consent? Legitimate interest? A guide to speaking fluent GDPR appeared first on Digiday.

Emails started flooding in on March 28. Brands and influencers were locked out of a tool they routinely relied on for years to access their audience data on Instagram. They messaged the platform’s team asking what was wrong.

The answer was unclear, at the time. The founder and one of the concerned clients told Digiday that thoughts came back to a March 17 exposé on Cambridge Analytica. But the malfunctioning of third-party software companies, which were not maliciously stealing user data, was unexpected.

“There was zero communication. Apps just stopped working,” said the founder of the marketing tech company, who requested anonymity due to privacy around trying to sell or pivot the startup in the wake of that day.

While drastic changes to platforms are nothing new — especially between Facebook and publishers — 2018 brought cataclysmic change that brought an end to some businesses or, at least, operational changes. Software companies that thrived off of analyzing data via Facebook’s API networks couldn’t operate with the restrictions Facebook made after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. 

“I don’t think data privacy and security is going to fall off the map because Cambridge Analytica is no longer in the headlines. I think the ways big brands are treating data is only going to become increasingly important. The currency today is data more than dollars,” said Lou Jordano, chief marketing officer at analytics company Crimson Hexagon.

On April 4, when Facebook announced it sped up the shutdown of Instagram’s API, some executives at marketing companies said they foresaw the impact to come when the Cambridge Analytica exposé had published. Other marketers were alarmed when Facebook formally emailed partners in April.

“When I heard the news, I immediately called in the whole executive team to talk how this will affect us. It was absolutely clear that Facebook and its subsidiary company Instagram will make drastic changes due to the political pressure. The only thing that surprised us how quickly it happened,” said Robert Levenhagen, CEO of influencer marketing platform InfluencerDB.

Not every move was surprising. Instagram announced in January that it would phase out the Instagram API platform and introduce the new Graph API. But several marketers told Digiday they were under the impression that it would simply require influencers to create a business account on Instagram, not completely eliminate the ability to get profile information for any Instagram account.

“It happened real fast and Instagram had really nothing to do with the [Cambridge Analytica] scandal so one thinks it was more of a power play and consolidation of power opportunity,” said the founder of the pivoting startup.

Some partners said they were frustrated by the lack of communication. A Facebook spokesperson told Digiday that the changes to the APIs were each a part of Facebook’s promise after the Cambridge Analytica scandal to prevent that issue from happening again and keep user data secure.

“It really was a perfect storm of data privacy in the public realm. [Zuckerberg] was testifying in the U.S., then UK, GDPR, all happening in the same moment in time,” Jordano said. “Those huge networks are under lots of pressure. They’re a multi-headed hydra.”

In line with the idea that Facebook is powerful, marketers said they have made sure to never rely on one API or one dataset. Crimson Hexagon provides insights from social listening, but it’s not solely reliant on Facebook posts or on private data. Influencer marketing company indaHash is known for its work with Instagram, but it has never relied on real-time calls for data via Instagram’s now-defunct API.

Beyond the Instagram API, Facebook instituted changes to access to data from the main social network. For example, Facebook would not allow just any app developer to access a user’s birthday or their current job.

“We haven’t lost a ton of key information,” said Alex Salvatore, cofounder and CTO of Beam, a social impact app. “We’ve just had to tighten up the way we’re requesting and be a little bit more careful. [Facebook wants] to guard against somebody making a calculator app and, oh, we know your political views.” 

The fallout from Cambridge Analytica may have crushed some startups, including Cambridge Analytica, but Facebook’s relationship with marketers is still strong. Several marketers told Digiday that they didn’t see any pause in ad dollars going to Facebook over the last three months. 

“We look at the whole Cambridge Analytica thing as being disappointing but a healthy reminder of private data staying private. If nothing else, this story has really shined a light at how people value their private data and how carefully it should be treated,” Jordano said.

The founder exploring a business pivot said, “Facebook and Instagram just built a 50-foot wall and moat around their business with the move. No idea what will happen and if more APIs get killed. but I think long term people stop building real businesses on Facebook and Instagram APIs.” 

The post ‘A power play’: Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica cleanup sweeps up marketing tech appeared first on Digiday.