Month: August 2018

The BBC has discovered just how fascinated humans are with their own mortality through BBC Ideas, its 6-month-old, short-form video unit.

This four-minute video, “Dying is not as bad as you think,” featuring palliative care doctor Kathryn Mannix on why we should rethink how we feel about death has been one of BBC Ideas’ most popular videos, with 160,000 views. Other popular ones are this video about the railway that carried bodies of dead Victorians out of London and this one about the arguments for euthanasia, with 16,000 and 13,000 views, respectively.

Since January, BBC Ideas has published 276 videos that have been commissioned from independent production companies, taken from other units from the BBC or created by the Ideas own five-person team. Most run two to four minutes long and become part of themed autoplay playlists like “reflections on dying,” “challenging taboos” and “extraordinary pioneers.”

Other popular playlists deal with self-improvement and nostalgia, such as one about an electronic music pioneer at the BBC that’s been shared over 13,000 times and viewed over 1.7 million times on social media, according to the BBC.

BBC Ideas executive editor Bethan Jinkinson said on average people are watching one to two videos per session, which is poised to increase as the content library grows. Last week was the unit’s most successful to date for video views, with one of the most popular videos, a six-minute video about seven ways to change your last name after getting married, having a completion rate of 70 percent, she said.

“The indication is that it’s working,” said Jinkinson. “The video views on the whole playlists get a boost when we have a standout hit.”

The BBC’s charter requires it to innovate with new formats and connect with younger audiences, and BBC Ideas launched in January after the BBC did research showing that people between 22 and 44 are looking for short-form content that is thought-provoking and factual. The videos are also well suited to YouTube, which according to the Enders Analysis forecast from May represents 22 percent of video viewing for 16- to 34-year-olds.

“YouTube has created a market, and it would be remiss for the BBC not to be in it,” said independent media analyst Alex DeGroote.

While the BBC can’t monetize video in the U.K., it can run ads on video that’s broadcast overseas. Currently, roughly 80 percent of its audience is in the U.K., with 20 percent in the rest of the world, and there are no substantial plans to monetize it outside of the U.K., said Jinkinson. Short-form video’s growth is also capped by publishers’ ability to make money off YouTube, which dominates the market. And the view threshold to reach meaningful monetization is increasing. That said, short-form video can be produced cheaply by cutting down long videos.

“There’s money to be made, but obviously [YouTube] pales significantly in comparison to the money that can be made in selling to TV platforms,” said Aron James, media consultant and former commissioner at Viceland International and Discovery. “It’s a low priority for broadcaster and producers because Google holds on to a lot of the profit.”

Image via BBC Ideas

The post How the BBC is getting people to watch short-form video appeared first on Digiday.

Twitch will soon be flooded with ads, even in the places viewers have paid to keep them out. In the latest in our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for candor, an influencer on the Amazon-owned platform explained why its decision to end ad-free viewing for paying members next month is just the start of a wider push to make it more advertiser-friendly.

We’ve asked Twitch for comment and will update the article once they’ve responded.

Excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Can more ads in front of more viewers be good for Twitch?
Twitch is going to be more advertiser-focused in future. Its decision to show ads to people who have paid to avoid them shows that. It’s an interesting move for me as an influencer, but I wouldn’t say it was a good one. It might bring more revenue to the platform and subsequently the influencers, but I don’t think those subscribers should have to watch ads. More money will benefit the platform, but look what happened to YouTube when it became more focused on advertisers. Twitch is, as it stands, a more community-driven and engaging experience compared to YouTube.

Is Twitch the right place for ads?
The only successful brand campaigns that can be done on Twitch are the ones involving paid promotional partnerships like a product placement where there’s a gaming chair in the background of a stream, for example. That works because it fits seamlessly into the stream and isn’t interruptive like a promotional plug every 30 minutes or expensive like an overlay.

Are you seeing more interest in you as an influencer with the growing popularity of Twitch?
I think advertisers are more curious than confident in Twitch. Livestreams are unpredictable and anything a brand can’t approve or control makes them nervous. The popularity of games like Fortnite has made brands more interested in ads and influencers on the site because they see the influence and follower counts of the most popular players of that game, and they are curious. I don’t, however, think that curiosity has turned into confidence for many brands. Twitch feels too much like the Wild West. The only advertisers that are doing well are the early adopters like Red Bull as they’re able to take risks and jump on trends without always caring about approvals and their branding.

Is Twitch doing much to help put you in touch with advertisers?
My deals haven’t come through Twitch; they’ve come through the email address I have on my Twitch profile. Earlier this year, a gaming-chair company reached out to me directly over email because they wanted to be my sponsor, which meant that I had a cool chair to play my games from. The deals aren’t being driven by the Twitchers or the their managers most of the time. Twitch doesn’t really do much right now except take a cut from the deals they broker with the most popular streamers.

Brand safety on Twitch is clearly an issue for advertisers, but what about fraud?
Many of the most successful Twitch influencers have big subscriber numbers, so it’s difficult to have a fake following. Let’s say you bought a botnet that shows fake viewers at any given time. It would look like a weird number against the number of subscribers you have. No one in their right mind would pay money to Twitch to have fake followers. Half of a £5 Twitch subscription goes to the streamer, while the other half goes to Twitch. If you were to try and pretend to have 100 viewers at a time, for example, then it would cost you £250 a month — that’s not affordable. It also wouldn’t benefit anyone much except to be shown higher up in search results to then get real views. That’s not worth the risk given how light on their fingers Twitch has been when it comes to banning people they suspect of any fraud.

The post ‘Advertisers are more curious than confident’: Confessions of a Twitch influencer appeared first on Digiday.

If Shawn Porat realizes his dream, every fortune cookie will have an ad inside of it.

The startup founder of Open Fortune — he goes by “chief fortune officer” — has spent the last eight years building a business — much of which involved logistics within the supply chain of cookie factories and Chinese restaurants — to place ads on those tiny paper slips. On Aug. 19, Porat had one of his first big breaks when BuzzFeed’s Ben Kaufman tweeted to his nearly 12,000 followers about one of those ads, featuring Capital One:

Ad blockers ain’t got nothing on the nyc take out market. pic.twitter.com/Q6WUnu5qTX

— Ben Kaufman (@benkaufman) August 19, 2018

Capital One has bought promotions in 10 million fortune cookies to be distributed across about 5,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S. Porat’s company, OpenFortune, has sold out its inventory through the first half of 2019, he said. Porat declined to share names due to non-disclosure agreements but said upcoming campaigns include CPG, dating, auto manufacturers, wireless, financial services, tech and travel companies.

To some media buyers, fortune cookie ads may be creative and underutilized or expensive and potentially untrackable. Porat and his counterpart Matt Williams, chief cookie officer of OpenFortune, said those brands don’t have to get onboard. As for ROI, they’re hoping to prove its value through promotions written on the fortunes and social media posts. Beyond Kaufman’s viral tweet, there are more than 1.2 million posts on Instagram with the hashtag #fortunecookie.

“The emotions we value are prosperity, compassion, growth and luck. We always work to maintain the integrity [of the cookie]. We keep the lucky numbers, keep the fortune and work with brands to drive emotion. We won’t pitch a brand that we feel like is a stretch,” Williams said.

The idea for selling ads in fortune cookies came to Porat in 2010, unsurprisingly, when he was dining at a Chinese restaurant, specifically China Kettle in Brooklyn. Brands weren’t interested in ads in Chinese restaurants at the time, but they were curious about branded fortune cookies. Porat worked with TJ Maxx, Salesforce and Bloomingdales on promotional cookies, he said. In 2014, he worked with the Missouri Lottery for a version of his original concept.

OpenFortune, previously Fortune Cookie Advertising, has since embraced that original idea of ads in cookies and distributed through Chinese restaurants. They work with about 50 percent of the 44,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., which took a lot of phone calls.

“It should have been a reality TV show, calling restaurants and they’re like, ‘Hi, what’s your order?’ and me saying, ‘Hi, I’m giving you free cookies,’” Porat said.

As for making the ads and the cookies, OpenFortune works with printers in Florida, North California and California. They use soy-based ink, so the cookies stay edible. They print in multi-colors rather than the typical black font on white paper. The wrappers and cookies are made in Chicago and New York.

Now, with years of experience and the logistics understood, it costs about 10 cents to produce every cookie. That cost decreases based on volume and other variables.

Part of the ROI and tracking mimics subway ads and other out-of-home advertising for some brands. Williams said they can use the lucky numbers as something to enter on a brand’s website to potentially win something. They hope to “gamify” the experience, taking cues from McDonald’s Monopoly game.

“This is our dream: You’re never going to get a cookie without an ad,” Porat said.

The post Nowhere is safe: Fortune cookies now have ads, starting with Capital One appeared first on Digiday.

At Digiday’s Retail Forum in New York City on Thursday, more than 100 marketers gathered to hear from retailers like Rent the Runway, Away, Eloquii and Rothy’s that spoke on topics like competing with Amazon, controlling data and determining their return on investment when acquiring new customers.

During a town hall session, which operated under the Chatham House Rule, marketers debated their most pressing concerns. Here are the major takeaways:

Acquisition challenges
“With some retailers, it’s really difficult to get feedback on how your product is performing in-store. That’s why we have people in stores. We get permission from our retailers to go into certain stores, and we intercept people in the aisles. We pre-recruit employees to talk to them, go into their homes and talk through their whole routines. We’re looking at everything — even at their eyes from the moment they enter the store. We go deep with these people.”

Doing more work in-house
“I’m super excited to build out an in-house team, but we have to make sure whoever we hire is supported because they have a lot to execute.”

“It’s hard to find exactly who we need. I interviewed five people in one week.”

“The things we do in-house, we get very excited because they can be done on an ongoing basis.”

“How people in-house work cross-functionally is really challenging.”

On getting the message right with consumers
“We’ve had to do damage control. There have been instances when the messages have been true to the company, but we missed on tone and the reaction was heated. We reached out in a very human way to say we understand where you’re coming from and then the next time around we changed our tone.”

On working with Amazon (or not)
“We have not been on Amazon because you can’t control your story, especially with a 100-year-old brand. That allowed us to revamp our e-commerce strategy. We knew that unless we invested in a new website, it wouldn’t warrant any spend to drive traffic there.”

“A lot of people outside the U.S. are not using Amazon. It’s a different market. If you’re headquartered in the U.S. but have offices in the U.K. or Asia, how do you scale that? They don’t have that global capability that you might expect from such a large company.”

“There are mixed feelings at the top whether we use it as a customer brand awareness platform. One thing is photography. To put a product on Amazon, we have to reshoot it specifically for them.”

“We’re not getting a lot of information from them on how we should launch on that platform, which makes it confusing.”

The post ‘You can’t control your story on Amazon’: Retailers sound off on their biggest challenges appeared first on Digiday.

The arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation in May has been a rollercoaster for many companies. The law has triggered several immediate changes. Here’s a look at some of them, in five charts:

Third-party cookies plummet on news sites in Europe
The average use of third-party cookies per page across Europe has dropped 22 percent, according to a report from Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The report examined third-party cookie use between April and July — before and after the May 25 GDPR enforcement date — across seven countries: the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland and Poland. U.K. news publishers had the highest proportion of third-party cookies per page prior to GDPR, and so have seen the biggest drop, of 45 percent, while Germany showed the smallest change with just a 6 percent drop, according to the report.

GDPR requirements for consent mean some news organizations may be deferring some tracking cookies until after a user clicks to accept to the site’s terms for using their data — a factor the report’s authors attributed to the drop in average third-party cookies per page. Sites also may have undergone a GDPR-inspired clean-up, ridding their sites of out-of-date features and code, which could also have contributed to the drop-offs.

Marketers don’t trust their supply-chain partners
It’s no secret that the weeks leading up to the GDPR enforcement deadline in May became one massive game of pass the liability. Only 20 percent of 255 brand marketers recently surveyed by marketing tech vendors Demand Metric and Demand Base are confident that their mar-tech vendors won’t expose them to legal risks if they’re not GDPR compliant.

A resurgence for contextual targeting
Just under 80 percent of 500 decision-making brand marketers across Europe and the U.S. believe GDPR will make targeting audiences using third-party data more difficult, according to research from ad tech firm Sizmek. But contextual targeting can help fill the gap, for now at least. In fact, 87 percent of marketers said they plan to increase contextual targeting in the next 12 months, while maintaining personalized advertising where possible, according to the same report.

Smaller ad tech companies lose ground to duopoly
Unsurprisingly, it’s the smaller players that were always more likely to be affected by GDPR. Although partly dreamed up in order to slow the pace of growth of the dominant U.S. platforms, particularly Facebook and Google, many industry experts believe GDPR has inadvertently handed them more power. The prevalence of third-party social media services on news sites has fallen: Facebook’s presence across news pages examined by RISJ has dropped from 75 to 70 percent between April and July. Smaller ad tech companies were also used less for tracking by publishers.

Many U.S. sites wait it out
U.S. news sites have had a different experience with GDPR then European sites. Two months after the law’s enforcement, more than 1,000 news publishers chose to block European visitors from their sites. According to research from ad tech firm Catchpoint, the U.S. version of USA Today’s site had an average web-page load time of 9.9 seconds following GDPR’s implementation. The version in the U.K. loaded in 0.42 seconds, 0.75 seconds in France and 0.51 in Germany. Those faster load times are attributed to the removal of most external third-party features such as ad servers, Google services and analytics, and social media plug-ins. Ad rates have increased 10 percent in the U.S. since May 25 and dropped in Europe, according to research from analytics firm Ezoic.

The post The impact of GDPR, in 5 charts appeared first on Digiday.

European publishers certainly don’t see over-the-top platforms as their key video focus, but they are increasing the amount of OTT content they produce according to a recent Digiday survey. That increase in OTT production comes even as publishers state they’re struggling to monetize the content they create for OTT platforms.

Three-in-ten publishing executives surveyed at the Digiday Video Summit Europe in Amsterdam this June said their companies are significantly increasing the level of OTT content produced. Overall 79 percent of publishers are increasing their OTT output and none reported a decrease in production.

The post Digiday Research: Monetization lags for European OTT video appeared first on Digiday.

Phillip Picardi, the 27-year-old Teen Vogue superstar who quickly rose through the ranks to become chief content officer, is leaving Cond? Nast. Picardi first publicly revealed his plans to The Wall Street Journal in which he announced that he’d be editor-in-chief of Out, a magazine that covers LGBTQ fashion, entertainment, travel and lifestyle. He will…

Antonio Lucio, global chief marketing and communications officer at tech giant HP Inc., is leaving for the same role at Facebook, the company confirmed today. Lucio will report to Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox and start on September 4. “[Antonio] has an extraordinary reputation in the industry as a leader, a marketer, an operator,…

On Tuesday, Joann customers received an email–not to share new offerings on the craft and fabric store’s website or to alert them to an end-of-summer sale. It was a call to action regarding President Trump’s pending tariffs on goods imported from China–which has been dubbed the “Made in America” tax. In the email, Jill Soltau,…

The characters from Disney’s 1967 adaptation of The Jungle Book have, for generations, served as icons of the wildlife found beyond the reach of civilization. But that reach has gotten longer with each passing year, and now an advocacy group is using the movie’s characters to show how habitats are rapidly diminishing. In “Concrete Jungle,”…