Month: August 2018

Facebook’s political ad archive and issue ads policy have frustrated media organizations and marketers over the past few months. But despite the grievances, Facebook’s system has apparently done what it’s intended to do: Flag foreign interference launching misinformation campaigns.

On Aug. 21, Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives held a call with reporters to explain its latest discovery and actions on “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Facebook said it recently removed 652 Facebook pages, groups and accounts, as well as Instagram accounts that originated in Iran and in Russia. During the call, the executives touted its new products for helping surface the bad actors.

“Our ads verification systems flagged some political ads these actors attempted to run. These efforts work in tandem with our progress to reduce the spread of misinformation and fake news. Put another way, our new products and the improved systems operate at scale, effectively shrinking the haystack, which allows our investigative teams to more effectively sift through and look for the specific needles,” said Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vp of product management.

Twitter also said on Aug. 21 that it suspended 284 accounts for “engaging in coordinated manipulation” and that many may have originated in Iran.

The bad actors aren’t actually buying up a ton of ad inventory. One group had 12 Facebook Pages, 55 Facebook accounts and nine Instagram accounts, but Facebook didn’t detect any ads. The continued presence of misinformation campaigns does, however, bring into question the authenticity of views and engagement on Facebook.

“We cannot be certain if real people are being reached or if true impressions are delivered. Account verification and creation steps must be made stricter in order to keep multiple accounts and pages from being opened from a single individual and unused or inactive accounts should be shut down after a period of time,” said Rigel Cable, associate director of data analytics at digital agency Fluid.

Facebook has gotten more transparent about manipulation and fraud and put more human resources into combating them. That effort includes creating the ad-transparency tool, hiring thousands of people to monitor ads and hosting more regular calls with reporters.

“As I have said before, security is not something that you ever fully solve. Our adversaries are sophisticated and well-funded, and we have to constantly keep improving to stay ahead. But the shift we’ve made from reactive to proactive detection is a big change,” Zuckerberg said in his prepared remarks on the call.

Meanwhile, agency executives are advocating for solutions to these coordinated attacks. Joshua Lowcock, UM’s global brand safety officer, said he’s been having conversations with senior officials in governments and government-backed security organization on the topic of brand safety on Facebook.

“We all agree hate speech and terrorism is wrong. What pressure can we bring to bear? We share that intelligence and use advertisers’ interest and the money we spend,” Lowcock said.

For Lowcock, pressure is not just about pulling advertising dollars but Facebook making other changes to ads such as targeting. On Aug. 21, Facebook removed more than 5,000 targeting options in Facebook’s Ad Manager, which the company announced separately from the news on the misinformation campaign. The majority of the options were for exclusion, where advertisers can select what groups to not target.

“A way we, as an industry, can align is on targeting. We ask, ‘Is any of the targeting something advertisers want? OK, let’s exclude this because it’s not going to hurt our business,’” Lowcock said.

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Google unveiled its open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages format in 2016 to improve the mobile web by making pages load faster (and match Facebook‘s own fast Instant Articles format). While Instant Articles has fallen out of use with publishers, AMP has contributed to Google overtaking Facebook as a traffic referral source. But despite AMP becoming a growing share of web traffic, some are calling its benefits into question.

A new study by Chartbeat being published today shows that only a third of publishers actually see clear evidence of a traffic increase from AMP. The study looked at 159 publishers that adopted AMP in 2017. Most were U.S. publishers and represented a mix of national, local, news and lifestyle.

If AMP was delivering a lot more traffic, that could make up for the revenue shortfall publishers often complain about. Publishers have long griped that the ad revenue they make on AMP pages has been slow to build because AMP limits the types of ad formats that are supported. In fact, AMP represents just a sliver of the revenue publishers make from their distributed content, according to a report from Digital Content Next. Other complaints have been that AMP limits publishers’ ability to promote other products, use elaborate editorial formats and get data back on reader behavior.

“AMP had a lot of hype and promise,” said Chris Breaux, director of data science at Chartbeat. “It’s really good for users in providing a consistent experience in terms of page-load time. The real question is, do you see more traffic than you would have if you didn’t do the implementation? The answer for two-thirds of publishers is, no.”

Chartbeat did the study in part with The Daily Beast, which wanted to test AMP’s efficacy. Brad Doll, lead data scientist at the Beast, said his pages clearly monetized worse — but a 23 percent increase in traffic would make up for the shortfall in revenue per page on AMP pages versus regular mobile web pages. The traffic story was less clear.

“What we found to our surprise was there was no clear evidence that AMP was boosting traffic,” Doll said. “It was surprising early on. We heard the buzz that was going around that AMP would make your traffic go up. But in retrospect, the buzz is what’s surprising.”

The Beast is evaluating whether to keep supporting AMP, given AMP’s benefits for page speed, Beast chief product officer Lauren Bertolini said.

Other AMP users have been vocal about what they see as its shortcomings. Tyler Love, CTO of Bustle, tweeted recently that Bustle disabled AMP on all of its sites, saying the user experience and revenue are better than the AMP equivalent. “My non amp pages are just as fast, and more functional too,” he wrote.

Disabled 100% across all of Bustle Digital Groups sites. https://t.co/eYYA7rmbuq

— Tyler Love (@tyleralove) August 10, 2018

Nathan Kontny, CTO of development firm Rockstar Coders, said after he enabled AMP on the company’s site, conversions dropped 70 percent, leading him to disable it. “Conversions are the lifeblood of our business,” he said.

An earlier Chartbeat study this year found that AMP was delivering a traffic and engagement boost. The new study found that there was a 22 percent increase in Google mobile traffic on average across publishers but that individual publisher effects varied widely. One-third saw clear evidence of an incremental traffic increase from AMP. Some individual publishers saw increases ranging from a 151 percent increase to a 58 percent decrease. For the remaining two-thirds of publishers, it was unclear if AMP was driving traffic increases independent of factors like seasonality and changes in the news cycle.

Across the publishers having success with AMP, there was no theme in characteristics like the types of content they publish and how long they’ve implemented AMP, Chartbeat found. Big news publishers had the same results as small lifestyle publishers, even though big publishers are more likely to have lots of resources to implement AMP and news was an early beneficiary of the format.

In the end, the benefit seems to come down to how well the publisher implements AMP, Breaux said.

“The message for publishers is, it takes a fair amount of work to support a new platform,” Breaux said. “There are also challenges on the ad side.”

Rudy Galfi, an AMP project manager at Google, said the project has led to big improvements in page speed but that when it comes to traffic and revenue, there’s a lot of variation by publisher. The Chartbeat study points to the need for publishers to maximize the way they implement AMP to take advantage of all the improvements in monetization that have been added over the past three years. “There’s always new best practices to take account of.”

Most publishers that have adopted AMP still use it. Thirty-one percent of Chartbeat’s clients used AMP at the end of 2017, up from 27 percent at the beginning as 3 percent dropped it but another 7 percent added it. Many feel they have little choice. There’s a widespread belief among publishers that, Google’s assurances notwithstanding, Google gives preference to AMP articles in search results even the publisher can match AMP’s speed on their own. Google has also trained readers to spot the lightning-bolt icon that indicates AMP articles. AMP Stories format, Google’s Snapchat and Instagram knockoff, however, has been slow to take off.

”A lot of publishers are nervous that if they don’t adopt it, either through overt priority or consumer preferences, they’ll be harmed,” said Andrew Montalenti, CTO of Parsley.

The analytics company’s data show that AMP provides an incremental traffic boost to publishers, based on AMP traffic not just from Google search but other Google products. But he also said it’s hard to quantify AMP’s impact because there are so many reasons traffic ebbs and flows. It’s hard to a/b test because most sites go all-in on AMP, and site comparisons are limited because all sites are different. “It’s hard to just directly say it’s better.”

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Stories are the new news feed for Smirnoff. More of the vodka advertiser’s social media budget is going to Instagram as a result of the vertical video format.

Smirnoff has made the format an always-on part of its media plan in the U.S. just eight months after its first test. The advertiser sees a clear delineation between stories — the Snapchat-style format that brands and publishers use to post vertical videos that disappear in 24 hours —  and the feed. Stories are about capturing a moment, whereas people are more careful about curating their feed.

Tests started with organic Stories on Smirnoff’s account, but now money is being spent on video ads to drive views and reach. Influencers are also on Smirnoff’s payroll for content on Instagram Stories. Six seconds appears to be a good length for online videos on Instagram Stories so far, said Jay Sethi, vp of Smirnoff, but the advertiser is experimenting with posts that last up to 15 seconds in its latest campaign, which features “Cheers” actor Ted Danson.

Relative to Facebook news-feed placements, Instagram Stories are actually cheaper in many cases due to less competition for ads, said two agency executives interviewed for this article. And while the reach of ads in Instagram’s Stories isn’t as large as ads in Facebook’s news feed, Smirnoff finds Instagram is where younger audiences are more likely to watch ads with the sound on, said Sethi.

“We’re at the point where Instagram Stories isn’t a test for us anymore,” said Sethi. “It’s growing at a rate that’s already made it an important part of our digital universe, and we’re going to keep trying different ways to engage users with the format.”

Smirnoff is testing whether Stories in Instagram can hit brand and performance targets as the volume of content using the format means the chances of people skipping them is likely to increase. Ad spend on Instagram grew 177 percent in the second quarter compared to the same period last year, per Merkle. The challenge of cutting through all those advertisers was recently highlighted by Simon Lejeune, the head of acquisition at flight-booking app Hopper.

In January, the cost per thousand impressions for an Instagram Stories ad was $4.62, said Lejeune, while the interaction rate was 1 percent. For the 30 days to Aug. 16, the CPM for Instagram Stories was $5.53, while the interaction rate was 0.47 percent. The story here is that when a new placement shows up, people interact with ads more because it’s new and there’s less of a choice. As feeds and stories fill up with ads, people become less reactive to them.

That could become a problem for Smirnoff later down the line if Instagram isn’t able to find enough highly engaged users. The advertiser is fine with the influx of advertisers on the platform for now, said Sethi, as the ROI it’s getting makes the cost of planning and buying the ads worthwhile.

“We see high engagement especially through the ‘ask me questions’ feature, and in responses to live events,” said Leah Forsyth, managing director at independent creative agency HarrimanSteel. “With this in mind, for our latest Nike campaign for retailer Intersport, we shifted the focus to stories. Although the campaign has just begun, we’re already seeing great results.”

Smirnoff sees the Stories format as a brand-building channel. Behind-the-scenes footage from photo shoots and influencer events that wouldn’t usually have made it into a news-feed ad make up a sizeable amount of Smirnoff’s ads on Stories along with GIFs.

“You’re not just getting the ad, which isn’t really what the consumer wants to see in this space; you’re getting something cool that’s happening in the creation of that ad,” said Sethi. “We’ve changed the makeup of our content production team to consist of people who are able to make great creative on the fly but also take the time to experiment with new channels and formats.”

Instagram has undoubtedly benefited from Diageo’s ban on advertising on the originator of the vertical video format’s Snapchat due to concerns over inadvertently targeting the app’s youngest users. Diageo has yet to restart its spending on the platform since a Snapchat campaign it ran last summer was banned in January.

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The Guardian has been on a mission to take total ownership of its digital ad supply chain ever since an internal investigation two years ago revealed it was being rinsed by ad tech vendor fees in the open marketplace.

Since then, the publisher has radically changed how it manages its digital advertising stack to make solving this digital ad-revenue leakage a priority. So far, so good. Over the last 18 months the publisher has gradually introduced a fee-transparency process that enables it to advise advertisers how to ensure that 95 percent of their media budget flows to the publisher after it leaves the demand-side platform.

The post ‘We took ownership’: How The Guardian rid itself of hidden ad tech fees appeared first on Digiday.

Crunchyroll has made a name for itself as the streaming home for anime lovers by offering a comprehensive library — more than 15,000 hours — of the top anime TV shows from across the world. Now, the Otter Media-owned streaming service plans to make anime shows of its own.

Ellation, the division within AT&T-owned Otter Media that oversees Crunchyroll, has formed Ellation Studios, a new unit dedicated to developing and producing original video series for Crunchyroll and its sister brand, Vrv. Led by Margaret Dean, head of studios for Ellation and a former gm of actor Seth Green’s production company Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, Ellation Studios consists of 75 staffers and two new production facilities in Los Angeles and Tokyo.

The first Crunchyroll original series, set to debut next year, is called “High Guardian Spice,” about a quartet of teenage friends enrolled at a school for sorcery. Dean did not provide a specific number for the amount of Crunchyroll original series Ellation has in development, stating that the company still has decisions to make on various projects. She said that her team is looking for anime projects across all types of genres — from rom-coms to hardcore action — with a focus on producing serialized shows intended for an adult audience.

“We really want to push the limits of anime as an art form and are having conversations with creators who have been working within the confines of western animation,” Dean said. “So many of them have these stories that they’re dying to tell but have never been able to figure out who would let them and support them. That’s what we want to do.”

Producing its own original series in-house is an important step forward for Crunchyroll, which so far has worked with various Japanese studios to co-finance or co-produce more than 50 series that run exclusively on Crunchyroll in the U.S. With “Crunchyroll Originals,” the shows will be entirely funded by Ellation with budgets in the same range as what anime shows typically cost, Dean said. These original series also won’t come at the expense of shows co-funded, co-produced or licensed by Crunchyroll, which the company will continue to do, Dean said.

Crunchyroll’s original series will also fit within the 22-minute per-episode structure common in TV and anime. That said, the programmer is open to projects that run at different lengths — when it makes sense.

“We have the flexibility,” Dean said. “That’s one of the most amazing things about being on a streaming service, which is that ability to be flexible and take some risks.”

Today, Crunchyroll reports more than 40 million registered users and 1 million paying subscribers for its streaming service, which is available as a standalone product as well as through the Vrv streaming bundle. By offering more original and exclusive programming, Crunchyroll has an opportunity to both grow and retain subscribers.

When asked whether or not Crunchyroll has seen evidence of how its previous co-produced exclusive programming affected subscriber additions and losses, Dean said the company hasn’t done enough research to understand the overall impact. However Crunchyroll has a research team internally that will look at how its upcoming original series impact its business across subscriptions, advertising and other forms of revenue.

“It’s definitely our hope that by doing the type of original content we plan on doing that we will be able to attract more subscribers,” Dean said. “It’s one of the reasons why we’re doing this.”

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Google AMP was supposed to help publishers deal with slow-loading mobile web pages and boost consumption of articles on phones when it rolled out almost three years ago. But publishers like The Daily Beast aren’t seeing that promised increase in traffic on AMP to justify the lagging monetization it experiences on AMP. The publisher ran… Continue reading »

The post Chartbeat: Only A Third Of Google AMP Publishers See Traffic Boost appeared first on AdExchanger.

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It wasn’t too long ago that analysts bemoaned the onset of the “retail apocalypse,” but retail earnings reports coming out in the past two weeks have them singing a different tune.

On Wednesday, Target’s earnings presented investors with hope for the future and probably granted them a sigh of relief — the retailer flew past Wall Street’s expectations and saw its biggest sales growth in 13 years. Target reported that comparable sales increased by 6.5 percent, buoyed by stronger foot traffic at physical stores, and e-commerce sales have grown by 41 percent since a year ago.

On the earnings call, Brian Cornell, chairman and executive officer of Target Corp., said the favorable results come from not only a booming economy, but the labors of Target’s $7 billion plan it impacted in early 2017, which included improving delivery and pickup options, adding more private label brands, remodeling stores and introducing smaller store formats.

The company is the latest discount retailer to paint a picture of high sales returns and an increase in foot traffic in their earnings reports, stemming from more shoppers heading to stores and initiatives to clean up the retail environment. Walmart, Nordstrom, Home Depot, Kohl’s and TJ Maxx all reported anywhere from 3 to 8 percent growth in sales at their physical stores as well as double-digit percentages of a sales boost in e-commerce sales, all beating Wall Street expectations.

Walmart reported it saw the strongest sales its seen in a decade at its physical stores and expects e-commerce sales to be up by 40 percent. Nordstrom saw a same-store sales growth of 4.1 percent and 4 percent growth at Nordstrom’s Rack. Kohl’s reported same-store growth of three percent and TJ Maxx reported a same-store sales growth of 6 percent.

“We are starting to see a resurgence of physical retail as the market is correcting itself and digital leaders make significant investments in physical retail,” said David Bray, CEO of ad agency Briz Media Group, which works with tech companies that service retailers.

Analysts point to a strong economy as a major reason behind the surge in foot traffic. According to the Commerce Department, gross domestic product rose 4.1 percent in the second quarter, with unemployment down to 4.1 percent.

“Customer confidence is at the highest level in years, shoppers are spending more because of the tax cuts and low unemployment and retailers are benefiting,” said Sucharita Kodali, retail analyst at Forrester.

Overall, there is growth across retail segments. According to research firm Lipper Alpha Insight, 157 companies in its retail and restaurant index have reported their second-quarter earnings and 73 percent have reported numbers above analyst expectations.

But aside from more shoppers opening their wallets, analysts believe retailers’ efforts to improve their stores and offerings are also driving much of the change.

“They deserve credit,” said Andrew Lipsman, principal analyst at eMarketer. “It took some retailers some time to make changes but now they’ve gotten religious in implementing change. They’ve been getting smarter about what the omnichannel consumer wants.” Lipsman points to Target’s acquisition of grocery delivery startup Shipt Inc. to expand its same-day delivery services and how it has added more options for consumers to pick up their purchases in-store.

Meanwhile, Walmart has invested in beefing up its grocery and apparel options as it competes with Amazon, Nordstrom has been testing new concepts with stores that don’t sell any merchandise, Kohl’s is adding more locations outside of left-for-dead malls and expanding its partnership with Amazon and TJ Maxx is focusing on experiential retail.

“Part of this resurgence is due in part to brick-and-mortar retailers taking advantage of customer data and putting it to work to help drive instore traffic,” said Bray.

Retailers like Target are also benefiting from closures of J.C. Penney, and Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us stores, picking up some of the leftover market share. And the always lucrative back-to-school season is cause for retailers to expect more growth on the horizon in the coming quarter. “Right now, there is a perfect storm for discount retailers such as TJ Maxx and Kohl’s,” said Bray.

And yet, while sales are currently on the upswing, skeptical analysts believe such a positive outlook won’t last long in such a fickle industry. “I won’t get too excited because retail is cyclical,” said Kodali. “It didn’t take much to get people spending more and it won’t take much to get people to cut back either.”

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As Vice develops more non-ad revenues models, the media company is hosting its first music festival in Copenhagen on Nov. 2-3.

Noisey Festival, a two-day indoor event, will host 4,000 people gathering to watch local and international acts picked by Noisey, Vice’s music vertical, which launched in 2011. So far, booked acts include Grammy-nominated Chicago rapper Vic Mensa, Danish indie pop group LISS and British road-rapper Nines. The festival will also have a Munchies food area featuring chefs curated by editors from Vice’s food vertical.

In the Nordics, Vice has a history of running smaller-scale music events. According to the company, Noisey previously held concerts every other week showcasing emerging acts as part of a year-long brand partnership with music subscription service Tidal.

“We slowly built up a track record and a good audience for Noisey in the Nordics through our concert lineups. That idea matured into a festival,” said Frederik Andersen, CEO, Vice Scandinavia. “We want to keep adding opportunities for us to be part of culture, adding connections to the audience in weird and wonderful ways.”

In Copenhagen, Noisey has an editorial team of four people, out of 15 edit staff who work across four of Vice’s verticals in the Nordics. In total, around 12 people across editorial, events and commercial departments have worked on producing the Noisey Festival.

Andersen said the festival will be the largest event Vice has held in the Nordics, so the media company has partnered with live music promoter Beatbox Entertainment to handle operations and artist booking, while Noisey will choose the artists, promote the event through its media channels and lead conversations with brands around sponsorship opportunities. According to Andersen, there’s interest from brands but no deal signed yet. Ticket sales will also add help monetize the event.

“Our digital ad revenue is growing, but we don’t see that as the future, the future is on branded partnerships and [Vice’s creative agency] Virtue,” said Andersen, adding that this is the fastest growing revenue stream, but was unwilling to share any more revenue details. “We never felt caged in by the need to survive on ad revenue alone, that feels like a broken model. Unless we build in natural alternatives to ad revenue models we can’t be an honest authentic media brand.”

Last year Munchies held a festival in Copenhagen for showcasing emerging Nordic chefs, which it took to New York for 18,000 attendees, with brand partners like Norwegian Seafood Council and Nordic Tourist Boards promoting regional the featured chefs in the run-up to the event. So far there are no plans to expand Noisey Festival to other markets, said Andersen.

Vice is well-placed to bridge the gap between brands wanting to play an active role in culture while shipping their products, said John Thomson, head of media at Dentsu Aegis Network agency, 360i Europe, but scale and differentiation are key in the saturated market of events.

“Events need to be designed for the people that create culture, not just the followers of trends, success relies upon engaging the 1 percent,” he said. “If only a few hundred attended, then it’s pointless. Vice need to ensure they create activations that have huge reach and that brands play an active role in the events and not just badge them up.”

In order to maximize margins on events, media companies like Time Out have developed systems over time, improving efficiencies, so it can run 800 global events last year.

“This is year one, we’ll take the learnings and we know it will take time,” said Andersen. “Doing offline activations are not the most profitable, but it’s the right thing to do for the brand. We’re aware it’s not high margin, but it’s a great opportunity for brands to have more meaningful integrations than just having a logo slapped on it.”

Image: Courtesy of Noisey, Denmark, via Facebook. 

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Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi swung to a profit in the second quarter as smartphone sales rose sharply, but the results were weighed down by a big bonus payment for its chief executive.