Month: July 2018

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Rohan Lala, director of media activation at IPONWEB. It is no secret that many of today’s digital publishers have serious concerns about the state of ad tech. They have yielded a huge amount of… Continue reading »

The post Is It Too Late For Publishers To Take Back Control? appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. PE Playbook Vista Equity Partners, which owns a majority stake in Integral Ad Science and Mediaocean and took Marketo private, uses a 110-point formula to revamp software companies, The Wall Street Journal explains. Vista cuts people costs by focusing on recent grads who score… Continue reading »

The post How Vista Operates; TV Player Philo Raises $40M appeared first on AdExchanger.

Facebook has been taking fire from all sides lately, but few have been more outspoken and consistent of late than Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times.

As publishers have increasingly found their voice in criticizing Facebook out loud, few have been more vocal than Thompson, who carries a lot of weight as the leader of a storied journalistic institution. In June, Thompson gave a speech in which he described Facebook’s policy of labeling news as political ads as “a threat to democracy.” A few days later, he sparred with Facebook’s head of global news, Campbell Brown, during a panel discussion over the same issue, accusing Facebook of playing into the hands of enemies of high-quality journalism. (She shot back that the Times didn’t want to be transparent itself.) Then, speaking before marketers in Cannes, he returned to the same issue, calling Facebook “very difficult.”

The Times and other publishers have pulled spending from Facebook to avoid their articles being labeled as political. A Times spokesperson said, “We support Facebook’s efforts around transparency but have disagreed with how they’re approaching it. We’re now actively engaged with them to get to a solution that recognizes and distinguishes independent journalism like that of The New York Times.”

Facebook enacted the policy after coming under fire for its role in Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. It requires news articles about political issues to be included in its political ads archive when the publisher pays to promote them in the news feed. Publishers worry the policy will conflate journalism with traditional political advertising.

Other news execs, most notably News Corp’s Robert Thomson, have previously criticized Facebook for not providing more monetization for publishers and its lack of accountability through its black-box algorithm. Thomson’s views, however, are more easily dismissed as having a political motivation as his boss, Rupert Murdoch, has long pushed back against the power of Facebook and Google.

While those issues were about dollars and cents, the issue-ads policy has been a big pain point because it gets to the very essence of independent journalism. It also comes at a time when news organizations face a dearth of public trust and a president who’s especially hostile to the press. Seven organizations representing journalists and media executives from outlets around the world signed a letter protesting Facebook’s policy.

The relationship wasn’t always this sour. A few years ago, the Times was one of the handful of publishers picked to debut Facebook’s then-big initiative, Instant Articles, and to get funds to make live video for the platform. Thompson then spoke enthusiastically about the Instant Articles opportunity. Since then, the Times has ditched Instant Articles, sat out Facebook’s subscriptions test and wasn’t one of the first couple batches of publishers picked to create news shows for Watch, Facebook’s video section.

Thompson’s outspokenness on the political ad labeling issue has won him appreciation from some quarters and skepticism from others.

“Mark is a leader in the industry. He’s giving voice to news publishers that are frustrated with Facebook right now,” said David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, representing some 2,000 newspaper companies, including The New York Times and News Corp.

“The sentiment speaks for a large part of the news industry, and the news publishers most at risk are probably local or in other countries where this could be used against them,” said Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, which represents digital news organizations.

To others, it’s about time. Said News Corp’s Thompson, whose outlets aren’t always on the same page politically as the Times: “Rupert and I are pleased that other media execs are finally starting to find their voice, given the profound importance of the issues for media and society.”

Another saw the Times as opportunistic and questioned whether his criticism would have any impact without a critical mass of others speaking out, too. “Mark is a business guy,” said a news exec at a major outlet. “He sees they’re weak and scared, and thinks by attacking them, [the Times] can get something out of them.”

The Times’ attack on Facebook, like other media companies that have publicly slammed it, is also enabled by the fact that the Times doesn’t rely on Facebook as much as others that literally built their businesses on Facebook or benefit from it and other tech giants’ largesse in the form of grants and training. The Times has a strong relationship with its readers, such that subscriptions contribute two-thirds of its revenue and growing. Other publishers, while they’ve been forced to diversify their audience sources, still depend on Facebook for traffic and want to be part of new programs like Watch news programs and are afraid to speak publicly against the platform for fear of retribution.

Brown was out of the country and Facebook declined to comment, but the company has lately stressed that it still considers Instant Articles pretty good for a lot of publishers. (It’s true that for many smaller publishers, Instant Articles is still a good deal.) Facebook has said it’s still working on improvements to its subscription tools. On the issue-ads policy, Facebook tweaked it following publisher criticism but hasn’t exempted news from the policy.

The post How The New York Times’ Mark Thompson became the latest thorn in Facebook’s side appeared first on Digiday.

Instagram continues to squash Snapchat in size with now twice as many people using its copycat Stories feature every day. But it’s not all bad for the messaging app. Some media buyers have noticed that while ad rates on Instagram Stories have soared along with its popularity, Snapchat ad prices have dropped.

“Essentially, the best thing is super, super, super cheap CPMs: $1.88 on Snapchat vs. $14 to $17 on Facebook and $19 on Instagram,” said David Herrmann, director of advertising at Social Outlier. “It’s not perfect yet, but getting a 1.2 percent [conversion rate] on a CPM of $1.88 is pretty great.”

Jon Morgenstern, vp, paid media at VaynerMedia, said his agency has seen Instagram pricing soar over the past few months with a surge of spending on its Stories format.

“Instagram Stories’ CPM went from being something more comparable to Snap to more Instagram core feed. That’s good news for Snap. Snap now has the more efficient pricing narrative,” Morgenstern said.

Not long ago, creatives despised Snap’s vertical-only format. Buyers groaned over the lack of targeting. While brands craved its Gen Z demographic, Snapchat’s audience was prone to skipping ads. Yet these days, Snapchat has been providing a solid return on investment.

“It’s funny because right now the CPMs are so cheap that even if something quote-un-quote ‘doesn’t work,’ it was so cheap to get it up,” said Antonia Rubell, digital marketing associate manager at ThirdLove, an underwear brand.

Brooks LeComte, customer insights manager at personal safety app Noonlight, said cost-per-install rates are cheap, adding that campaigns focused on cost per impression have still been high.

Beyond the cheap prices, Snap is appealing to advertisers with new measurement tools. Snap recently expanded access to Pixel, added Pixel-supported targeting for conversions, conversion-lift studies for web and in-app sales and return on advertising spend reporting to self-serve, the company announced last month.

Snapchat’s “two biggest areas of improvement are targeting and measurement. Before, it was a blunt placement, there were limited parameters, and you just reached a lot of people with the same message a lot of times,” said Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer at 4C Insights.

For targeting, Snapchat has gotten some edge over Facebook over the past few months, media buyers said. In the wake of General Data Protection Regulation and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook removed the native support for third-party data firms like DataLogic and Acxiom via its Partner Categories program. Meanwhile, Snapchat has kept its support.

“More friction has been added to the Facebook process. It’s certainly not hurt Snapchat,” Morgenstern said. 

For measurement, Rubell said ThirdLove paused its spending on Snapchat until the company released Snap Pixel, a conversion-tracking tool. ThirdLove became a beta partner of Snap Pixel, and Rubell said since then, Snapchat’s cost per acquisition has been about 50 percent lower than Facebook and Instagram.

Snapchat also has made its ad platform more intuitive, media buyers said. Indeed, Snapchat reported last quarter that 95 percent of Snap Ads (excluding Story Ads) are served programmatically. Snapchat is testing a reach and frequency tool to help with media buys.

“It’s actually impressive where [Snap’s ad] product is right now: AR lens studio, measurement, viewability, a brand-safety focus very early on,” said an account director at a top global agency. “The ad product is fairly easy to use. Anyone disagreeing is asinine.”

But lower ad rates aren’t everything if advertisers can’t scale on Snapchat as they can on other platforms due to its far smaller user base. Terry Whalen, CEO of Sum Digital, said his spends about $2,000 on Snapchat versus $30,000 to $50,000 on Facebook and Instagram.

“It’s not apples to apples when you’re looking to default CPAs,” Whalen said. Snapchat could be “kind of like how it was with Pinterest two or three years ago. We got pretty heavy into Pinterest, and then fast forward, we spend $0 there because it never continued to improve the interface.”

The price for Snapchat’s original vertical video ads may have come down, but the platform is still pushing for marketers to create more expensive AR ads. According to Standard Media Index, 67 percent of Snapchat’s advertising revenue in May 2018 came from Snap Ads and 15 percent from lenses.

Goldman of 4C Insights said on July 6 he hoped Facebook would copy more Snapchat features, specifically when it came to AR ads, because that would increase their inventory across platforms and make it more efficient to use the ad format. In fact, Facebook recently did just that. On July 10, Facebook announced AR ads in News Feed. The feature is available to U.S. users at launch and is focused on shopping.

“It feels like the early days of Snap Ads where people don’t have this creative sitting around. They’re going to have to invest and build it. It’s cool, it’s new, it’s immersive, but it has to be worth their while,” Goldman said. “It’s not what Evan Spiegel wants, but I would love someone else to copy that.”

The post ‘Super, super cheap’: Media buyers find easy wins on Snapchat thanks to price drop appeared first on Digiday.

Like many publishers, The Telegraph is working to prove its native ad campaigns work.

From crunching data from thousands of branded content campaigns and their pre- and post-analyses from the last five years, The Telegraph found that hitting certain content benchmarks will drive either awareness, consideration or propensity to buy. Based on post-campaign analysis the publisher found that an uptick in one of these metrics ultimately leads to driving sales. For instance, the publisher could set the benchmark that a dozen articles on travel content should increase the propensity to purchase for an airline brand by a certain percentage. If post-campaign research shows the content hasn’t lived up to those expectations, then the client gets the media value as a percentage back. Rather than charging extra, this is included in the service price.

Since introducing the benchmarks last July, The Telegraph has run 80 campaigns for clients that have met these targets. By bringing in effectiveness guarantees, campaign budgets and campaign length have grown, according to the publisher.

“The big shift we have made has been bringing the sales guarantees into the pitch process in order to inform the campaign, rather than just at the end,” said Emma Elford, content sales and strategy director at The Telegraph. “The challenge for everyone should be interrogating the brief. This allows us to challenge the client brief.”

For a cybersecurity brand, the initial client brief was to drive consideration for a narrow business-focussed audience. Through a pre-campaign survey, The Telegraph’s data insights team found people who owned the product didn’t recognize the company. The publisher suggested a longer, consumer-facing campaign, fetching a higher budget, alongside a more targeted campaign to drive consideration among business audiences.

For the majority of the campaigns The Telegraph has run in the past year it has worked with the brand and the agency, rather than going to the client direct, according to Elford. Although negotiating the finer detail can take four months, particularly for bigger budget campaigns.

The number of campaigns The Telegraph runs and the percentage of repeat clients has largely stayed the same since before introducing the guarantees, partly because the publisher has always offered some form of post-campaign analysis through partnering with third-party measurement firms.

“When campaigns have the product at heart it demonstrates why [a publisher] would be happy to give guarantees,” said Laura Wade, vp of content and innovation and Essence. “The sentiment from The Telegraph is good, but if the benchmark is your hygiene factor how do we know when it’s outstanding work? We need to avoid the commoditization of branded content so it doesn’t become just a premium display buy.”

Publisher branded content revenue is growing by 40 percent year-on-year, according to branded content platform Polar’s research, while the number of entrants to the market and the competition between them is increasing. In the U.K., companies including Vice, Hearst and Bloomberg tout how they prove their branded content works, but publisher headaches now include navigating between multiple measurement vendors and managing resource while having to justify their value. Agencies facing shrinking margins are keeping publishers at arm’s length and reducing the number of publishers they work with per campaign from three to one in order to stay efficient, according to Polar’s global research with publishers.

“The challenge is weaning people off the crack of media metrics,” said Elford, “so many are still wedded to unique views or two-second views. There’s still an appetite; they’ve been addicted during the last five years.”

The post How The Telegraph ties native ads to brand metrics appeared first on Digiday.

Agencies across the U.K. have something to cheer about in a 2018 riddled with challenges: the England team is in a World Cup semi-final. Agencies, never ones to miss an opportunity to party, are marking the milestone with their own celebrations ahead of the match against Croatia.

Here’s our round-up of some of the World Cup-themed celebrations taking place at agencies this week.

Journey Further
It’s not just the World Cup semi-finals where the English are taking on the Croats this week. Digital marketers over in Croatia are facing tough competition too. Media agency Journey Further is running a series of irreverent paid search marketing ads that state “It’s coming home. PPC is a bit like football you need to outmaneuver the competition.” The ads appear when anyone in Croatia searches for ‘PPC agency’. A certain smash hit from 1996 makes for apt landing page content.

iProspect
Regardless of the outcome of the match, iProspect will host an office-wide charity football tournament on Friday between 14 teams, including one from Facebook. Each team has a designated World Cup country with corresponding kit. The tournament will also raise money on behalf of iProspect executive Shaun Hill, who is taking part in a 960 mile cycle for charity.

Tin Man
Tin Man, which does the PR for Barclaycard, is taking the team down to Hyde Park where the financial firm is sponsoring live entertainment including a screening of the match.

Grey
For every England game so far this Word Cup, Grey has turned its reception into a venue to watch the game on its big screens. You’ll need to be BFFs with someone at Grey to get on the guest list though, as staff at the agency are only allowed to invite two friends each. Once in, there’s pizza and drinks for everyone.

December19
The independent media agency has declared the Monday after the World Cup final a holiday for all staff should England win or lose the final. December19’s office will close two hours before kick off so that staff have enough time to get settled at home or in the pub.

Every agency in London with a rooftop terrace
Agencies never pass up an opportunity to show off their rooftop terraces in the summer. And the World Cup has been the perfect excuse. JWT, Oliver Group, Karmarama and Fjord are all hosting parties on their own terraces, where guests will be able to watch the match outside, while constantly looking out for rain.

The post How UK agencies will celebrate England’s World Cup semifinal appeared first on Digiday.

Instagram began testing a feature that would remove some of the mystery behind its verification process. The Facebook-owned photo- and video-sharing network confirmed that it is testing an in-application form that enables “all accounts that are notable and authentic” the opportunity to gain the coveted blue checkmark on their profiles. The form is currently available…

The post Business management tools: A how-to guide for media companies appeared first on Digiday.

The European Union’s antitrust watchdog is expected to find Alphabet’s Google illegally abused the dominance of its Android operating system for mobile phones, issuing a multibillion-euro fine and ordering changes to the company’s Android-related business practices.

Instagram Tuesday introduced a new way for users to spur interactivity with their Stories. The new questions sticker enables users to type questions and add them to their Stories via stickers that can be placed anywhere on photos or videos. Friends who choose to answer those questions can tap the stickers and reply as many…