‘USA Today’ Uses AR, VR To Connect Audiences With News

The company can track user engagement and session time across each new VR experience, allowing it to understand how people approach story telling within the technology.

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Work in the Age of Robots – Mark Mills

Work in the Age of Robots - Mark Mills
Mark Mills talked about Work in the Age of Robots. In his new book he suggests that despite artificial intelligence and automation, the job sector is likely to grow and productivity will increase. He was interviewed in Las Vegas.
Filmed July 13th, 2018.
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CMPs Bring Up CPMs: Mediavine Study Finds 52% Increase

Publishers who use a consent management platform (CMP) saw CPMs rise 9% and fill rates go up 5% post-GDPR, according to analysis of publishers using Mediavine, which manages ads for thousands of sites. Meanwhile, publishers who didn’t use a CMP for their European Union traffic saw CPMs dive precipitously. With no targeted ads, CPMs fellContinue reading »

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Trump Accuses Google of Suppressing Positive News About Him

President Trump accused Google of elevating critical stories about him, calling it a “very serious situation” that will be addressed. Google said “we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.”

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Trump Alleges Big Tech Bias; In-Housing Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Searching For A Problem The Trump administration is “taking a look at” Google’s alleged practice of diminishing conservative news in search results after the president went on a Twitter tirade after seeing anecdotal reports from conservative media, according to The Washington Post. It wouldContinue reading »

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How GumGum put Canon in context

In early 2017, Canon was looking to support “Canon See Impossible,” a brand positioning designed to promote its diverse array of digital imaging products. Appropriately enough, Canon’s first goal was to reach a wider audience with its new video content.

That’s when the company enlisted computer vision specialist GumGum through its media partner, GroupM’s MediaCom. “Canon wanted to drive engagement and utilize our high impact mobile units,” said Ben Plomion, CMO at GumGum.

Seeing the light
 
Canon created two sets of creative for the campaign. One set, dubbed “See Beyond Darkness,” was anchored by a short documentary video shot in the Solomon Islands. In it, scuba-diving researchers plunge into the ocean depths in the dead of night. First they explore a remote coral reef, before trailing behind a biofluorescent turtle — a newly discovered species that had never been seen on video.

Despite the use of minimal light, the videographers capture the turtle’s natural environment in vivid detail. That’s the point, of course: It’s shot with Canon cameras.

The other set of ads, cumulatively referred to as “See the Light,” followed a similar theme. The video at the center of this approach was titled “See Beyond Darkness.” Ranging from the ocean floor to the reaches of outer space, the video showcases Canon’s imaging technology — particularly its ability to help capture video in low-light conditions.

Both sets of creative were painstakingly produced. (Just take a look at the making-of video for “See Beyond Darkness.”) But such levels of care and investment are only worth it if those messages reach the right audiences.

Having the vision
Here’s where GumGum, the computer vision specialist, entered the picture.

What is computer vision exactly? Basically, it’s an umbrella term describing any technology that allows a computer to analyze and understand images and videos. A self-driving car that can see the road better than the human in the passenger seat? It’s using computer vision. That Google app that lets you match yourself to a 14th century Renaissance portrait? That too. The list of applications is growing by the day.

GumGum uses computer vision to power contextual targeting. By searching the web for images, videos and keywords, its technology can automatically place ads next to relevant content. So if a brand is selling cameras, GumGum might place ads next to visual content that’s related to cameras and photography, or even next to specific content related to the brand in question.

That’s exactly what it did for “See the Light” and “See Beyond Darkness.” Display ads, videos and video links, all laser-targeted at specific demographics, ran across premium sites like Men’s Journal and Fortune. More importantly, the ads were placed alongside contextually relevant content within those sites. “We surrounded images of cameras and camera lenses, of office buildings,” said Plomion. “We bundled that all together, using our first party data and the data Canon provided us with.”

GumGum also found prime real estate next to Canon products — perfect for customers who were already interested in the brand. “GumGum’s brand logo recognition technology let us deliver Canon messaging wherever a Canon product was featured in text, imagery or video,” explained Fernando Cadena, partner and communications planning director at MediaCom.

Plus, GumGum rolled out a new ad product for the campaign, which the company referred to as a mobile frame unit. Canon was one of the first brands to take advantage of it, allowing them to capture and own the content in an innovative way. “When the user loads the page, the outside of the unit animates for about 3 seconds and then collapses a banner on the bottom as the user scrolls,” Plomion explained.

A sweeping view
 
Seventy-five percent of the placements ran on mobile platforms, with the other 25 percent on desktop. “Consumers aged 25-44 had higher recall and were more favorable and likely to purchase than older consumers,” said Cadena. “Given that millennials consume a lot more mobile content, the results are logical.”

Throughout the campaign, GumGum guaranteed 100 percent viewability for all placements. “GumGum’s ability to deliver full visibility without [any] messaging or logo cut-off creates a better experience for the viewer and, ultimately, higher brand recognition and favorability,” Cadena said.

A look back
 
The metrics told a sunny story. Click-through for the campaign wound up at more than 2.5 percent — close to 22 times higher than the average industry benchmark of .12 percent. Meanwhile, the campaign’s engagement rate sat at nearly 7 percent, significantly better than the average benchmark of 2.8 percent. Finally, the campaign’s video completion rate wound up at more than 69 percent, higher than the standard industry benchmark of 61.5 percent.

Bottom line: People saw the ads, watched the videos and were altogether engaged — much more so than one might expect for a campaign of similar scope and budget.

“We wanted to deliver an engaging and meaningful experience using Canon technology and then make sure everyone viewed the video,” said Chris Sedlacek, sr. director/general manager of corporate communications at Canon. “Our shoot in the Solomon Islands certainly achieved the first objective.”

But it was GumGum, Sedlacek said, that helped Canon achieve the second objective. “They offered a platform for our messaging to reach a broad audience.”

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The Young Turks now has 27k paying subscribers accounting for half of its revenue

In August 2017, digital video news publisher The Young Turks Network raised $20 million from Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo to grow its subscription business. A year later, it has, though not without a hiccup.

TYT Network has “a little over 27,000 subscribers” who pay from $5 to $10 a month to watch the company’s shows sans ads and to access exclusive programming and other perks, according to TYT Network CEO Cenk Uygur. Last August, TYT Network said it had 30,000 paying subscribers, which Uygur says was wrong. “There was a technical error on our website that caused a misreporting of that number,” he said, adding that the company has not seen a decline in its subscriber base.

In fact, TYT Network has seen an increase in subscriber revenue, despite adding a lower-priced subscription option earlier this year. Historically subscription revenue accounted for around 30 percent of the company’s overall revenue, which includes money from advertising and merchandise sales, but the business has grown to account for “almost 50 percent” of the company’s overall revenue, he said, declining to provide actual figures or to say whether the company is profitable.

However, for a time, TYT Network’s subscription business wasn’t growing much at all, despite the company’s efforts. In April 2018, TYT Network debuted a mobile app in a bid to boost its subscription business. The app marked the first time the company had made all of its content available in one place: The paywalled content from its site as well as the free videos and podcasts it distributes on platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Spotify. While the app included content for non-subscribers, that was largely in hopes of convincing people using the app to sign up for paid memberships. But it appeared that people had a hard time seeing past the membership program’s $10-a-month price point.

TYT Network’s subscriber base remained relatively flat “for a long time” until June 2018, according to Uygur. That month, TYT Network introduced a lower $4.99-a-month tier and reserved some perks, like invites to company events and a swag bag, for the $10 tier. The company had tested the reduced price and saw that people were 2.4 times more likely to sign up for the $4.99 option than the $10 tier, said Uygur. The company informed its existing subscribers about the lower-priced option, and “out of 23,500 subscribers at the time, only 60 downgraded” to the $4.99 tier, he said. In the two months since adding the lower-priced tier in June, the company’s subscriber base has increased by 15 percent to more than 27,000 subscribers, a majority of whom pay for the $10 tier, said Uygur.

However, TYT Network needs to attract many more subscribers to reach Uygur’s ideal goal of subscriptions accounting for 80 percent of the company’s revenue. One option to achieving that end would be to invest in other types of programming to attract different audiences. The company tried that; it didn’t work. Best known for its political-news coverage, it had tried to expand into producing shows about pop culture. Recently, TYT Network shut down some of those shows and laid off an undisclosed number of employees as a result.

“I loved those shows, but we’ve got to focus on our core here,” he said, referring to programs that appeal the company’s politically minded, progressive audience.

To further focus on its core audience and convince those viewers to sign up for its subscription program, TYT Network updated its website last week to mimic its mobile app by featuring all of the company’s content. TYT Network will host a five-month membership drive starting on Labor Day.

“For the entirety of our existence, which is now unbelievably 16 years, we have pieced together a website with duct tape and WordPress,” said Uygur. “Now we’ve got a real website where people can come to see all of our shows, articles and podcasts.”

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Retail briefing: Retailers eye paid membership models

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.

Fighting back against Amazon also means taking a page from its book. With half of all U.S. households now subscribing to Prime, retailers looking to memberships to keep loyal customers loyal — and get some of that sweet recurring revenue.

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Video Briefing: Amazon is flooding the zone in the video market

Digiday’s weekly video briefing covers the modernization of video, TV and entertainment. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox.

On Facebook, YouTube and the other major social platforms, video makers mostly make money from advertising. On Amazon, they can choose up to four different sources of revenue — and all of them are growing. It’s a big reason why one top TV executive recently told me that “Amazon’s the beast that hasn’t really woken up yet.” But it will soon.

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