Month: September 2018

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Philip Inghelbrecht, co-founder and CEO at Tatari. The march of over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) has been unstoppable. The number of OTT and CTV viewers in the US will soon surpass 200 million, or… Continue reading »

The post Connected TV And Cable TV: Same But Different appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Face Plant Facebook seems intent on helping DC beat a path to its doorstep. First, academic researchers from Northeastern and Princeton universities say Facebook has used two-factor authentication data for ad targeting without properly notifying users. In some cases, Facebook allegedly grabbed phone numbers… Continue reading »

The post Facebook Face Plants Again On Data Security; DOJ Antitrust Chief Weighs In On Tech appeared first on AdExchanger.

TV networks and production studios are turning to text in search of younger audiences for their existing shows and inexpensive options to develop new content franchises.

NBCUniversal’s Syfy, AMC Networks, Warner Bros.’s DramaFever and Canvas Media Studios are among the media companies and studios producing series for Yarn, a chat-based fiction app that appeals to teens and twentysomethings. The companies see Yarn as a way to reach an important audience segment as well as to receive in return more in-depth analytics regarding their content’s performance than available on many other platforms. It also helps that Yarn — which makes money primarily through subscriptions — is paying the content.

“Being able to write somebody a check is a much better incentive than saying we’re going to give you promotion. From that standpoint, they can be seen as a real player,” said Bernard Gershon, president of GershonMedia.

Launched in February 2017 by mobile media company Mammoth Media, Yarn originated as an app for people to read fictional stories presented as text message conversations broken into episodes that typically take two minutes or less time to consume. Over time the app added photos and videos to these stories, which were being produced primarily by an internal team. Roughly 10 months after its launch, Yarn began receiving inquiries from different studios about producing stories for the app, said Mammoth Media CEO and founder Benoit Vatere. In January, Yarn began distributing stories that contained more highly produced videos, starting with thriller series “Hack’d,” which was created by the writers of the movie franchise “Saw.” While Yarn is featuring more high-end videos in its stories, it is not looking to entirely pivot to video. The app has seen that video-only stories do not perform as well as stories that mix text and video, said Vatere.

The idea of telling stories as text messages appealed to Syfy when the TV network was looking to promote the third season of its linear show “Wynonna Earp.” The network saw the format as a unique way to showcase characters and their relationships to one another and keep them top of mind heading into the next season. So Syfy ran a series of stories on Yarn in the week leading up to the show’s season premiere on July 20. More than 120,000 people have read Syfy’s Yarn stories for “Wynonna Earp” to generate 1.7 million views to date, according to Yarn. “We saw Yarn as a way to bridge the gap between seasons two and three,” said Max Tedaldi, director of digital at Syfy. A Syfy spokesperson declined to give details of the financial arrangement between Syfy and Yarn.

A place to test new franchises
Beyond being a promotional vehicle, Yarn has positioned itself as a place to test new content franchises for less than the cost of producing a TV pilot, said Barry Blumberg, a former Disney and Defy Media executive that joined Mammoth Media in March as the company’s chief content officer. Yarn compensates companies for the stories they distribute on the app, either through flat-fee licensing deals or revenue-sharing agreements, said Blumberg.

Companies also can make money by adapting their Yarn stories to other formats, such as shows they could sell to TV networks or streaming video platforms. The chance to make content that can make money on Yarn and adaptable for other platforms helped to fuel Canvas Media Studios’ interest in developing a forthcoming series for the app. “For us, it’s very interesting to look at something like this as season zero of what could be a series for other platforms,” said Canvas Media Studios CEO David Tochterman.

The opportunity to use Yarn to inexpensively establish a series that can be adapted for elsewhere could be important given the app’s volatile audience base. Yarn had 163,000 unique users in the U.S. in August 2018, down from 364,000 users a year earlier, according to comScore. In that 12-month span, Yarn’s monthly audience ranged from 671,000 to 75,000 users. While the measurement firm only counted users who are 18 years old and older, Yarn claims to be popular among 18- to 25-year-olds. “If you were an investor, [the monthly audience decline] is cause for concern. As a new platform for storytelling, I think it’s not that bad. If they’re seeing the same churn a year from now, that’s cause for concern,” said Gershon.

User numbers fluctuate
A Mammoth Media spokesperson wouldn’t provide active user numbers for Yarn, but said that 15 million people have downloaded the app since its launch and that its user base has grown by 50 percent since August 2017, with the average user spending eight to 10 minutes using the app per day.

Yarn’s fluctuating audience base could be a symptom of its business model. People can read stories on Yarn for free, but they can only check out one story at a time and typically have to wait 25 minutes after finishing one episode of a story to check out the next one. Sometimes people can opt to view an ad in lieu of the timeout. The free, ad-supported tier effectively serves as a way to get people to subscribe, at a cost ranging from $4.99 a week to $99.99 a year.

Despite the audience volatility, Yarn — and other fiction apps like Wattpad — can be a good way for studios to pilot projects because they get data that shows how their content has performed. On Yarn, people have to tap to advance through each line, photo or video in a story, enabling the company to track consumption patterns at a granular level. Yarn gives story producers PDFs containing line-by-line heat maps witih detailed information about which showing which parts of a story drew viewers’ interest and which didn’t, said Peter Szabo, chief revenue officer at Mammoth Media. That data could at least help to establish Yarn’s role in the TV show development flywheel and offset studios’ concerns about its fluctuating user base, assuming Yarn’s user base remains large enough to provide enough insight.

“That data and analytics is really, really rich and can be very informative in turning that fictionalized work into something that could be a TV product,” said a production studio executive, speaking anonymously.

The post TV networks, studios use chat fiction app Yarn to promote shows, develop new franchises appeared first on Digiday.

Subscription services might dominate the over-the-top video market today, but free, ad-supported platforms are beginning to find their way to viewers on internet-connected TVs. This growth is proving to be an opportunity for video programmers searching for distribution on the biggest screen in the house.

The Roku Channel, a free video streaming service from the connected-TV device maker with movies and TV shows and a handful of 24-hour linear channels from digital publishers, is now the fifth-most popular app on Roku in terms of reach, the company said. Roku declined to reveal an exact number of viewers for The Roku Channel, but Roku’s platform as a whole had 20.8 million registered users at the end of June.

Beyond Roku, other free video streaming services are also managing to build an audience on connected TV screens. Pluto TV now has roughly 10 million monthly active users; Xumo had 3.5 million monthly active users at the end of July, with viewership growing by 325 percent over the past year, the company said.

Then there is Amazon, which is reportedly working on a free, ad-supported streaming app that would offer licensed movies and TV shows and other programming for Fire TV users.

The growth of these services comes as people increasingly purchase and use connected TV devices including streaming dongles and boxes, gaming consoles and web-enabled smart TVs. According to a recent eMarketer estimate, there are 88.7 million connected TV households in the U.S., which translates to 71.6 percent of all households.

But what’s really driving the growth of free video streaming services, according to some, is not just that there are more people willing to watch streaming video on TV sets, but that people are beginning to hit their caps on how many streaming services they’re willing to pay for.

“Once you’ve signed up for Netflix and Amazon and Hulu, you’re more than $30 deep,” said Colin Petrie-Norris, CEO of Xumo. “Price-sensitive consumers are seeing [free video streaming services] as viable alternatives or complements to paid services — that’s probably the biggest factor.”

The growth of these services is also being abetted by the fact that some of the free video streaming services are integrating their services inside smart TVs built by manufacturers such as Samsung, Vizio and LG. Xumo, which claims an installed base of nearly 17 million TV sets in the U.S., is available inside Samsung, Sharp, Hisense and Vizio TV sets. With Hisense, Xumo has its own “input” on TV sets, Petrie-Norris said; on some Vizio TV sets, Xumo has its own button next to Netflix on the remote control. Xumo also white-labels its service for LG.

Pluto TV, meanwhile, has mostly been available as an app but is increasingly looking to integrate its channel guide-centric service inside TV sets. The company recently struck a deal with Vizio to program the TV maker’s WatchFree service, and a deal with Samsung to supply programming for the Samsung TV Plus app.

According to Petrie-Norris, these services are appealing to TV manufacturers because they receive recurring revenue in the form of an ad-revenue share. “You’re not making 50 percent margins when selling TVs,” he said. “So a revenue share, which brings with it long-term value as customers watch these services for years, is an attractive model for them — and there are no upfront costs for them either.”

Video makers with TV ambitions are latching onto these services as they grow audiences and revenue. The Roku Channel’s library includes classic movies and TV shows from major studios as well as a handful of linear channels from digital programmers including ABC News, Cheddar and Newsy. Pluto TV and Xumo’s programming partners include CBSN, People TV, Cheddar, Newsy, Tastemade and others.

For Newsy, distribution on The Roku Channel was appealing because Roku, where Newsy also operates its own streaming app, is its biggest platform in terms of pure streaming video consumption. With Roku offering the chance to program one of four 24-hour linear channels on The Roku Channel, the chance to grow additional distribution on this platform and potentially reach new viewers made sense.

“Roku is making a big push to make The Roku Channel a big part of their ecosystem,” said Blake Sabatinelli, CEO of Newsy. “Being one of only a handful of choices — and sitting next to ABC News — is always nice and something we took into consideration.”

The free video streaming services offer publishers to earn some extra coin. Pluto TV is driving incremental revenue for several of its channel programmers, according to a previous Digiday report. Xumo is driving ad revenue that’s comparable to the rates Amazon pays to publishers that upload videos — and get paid according to hours consumed — through Amazon’s Prime Video Direct program, according to Petrie-Norris.

Another appealing aspect of the free video streaming services is that the services are not seeking to commission original content, which means publishers can largely syndicate existing video series and clips and earn incremental dollars without devoting additional resources.

“We’re philosophically trying to put our content everywhere, but we need to be really careful in weighing the investment versus the return from all of these platforms,” said Pete Spande, CRO of Insider.

Insider will soon launch its own OTT offering with Insider TV, which will be available as an app on Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV. The publisher is also in conversations with Roku to distribute videos inside of The Roku Channel. The company is also considering Pluto TV and Xumo.

“The thing we are trying to do right now is be available across any platform where people may want to find us and identify with our brand,” Spande said. “That’s our primary focus.”

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The post The anti-Netflix: Free, ad-supported video streaming services are growing appeared first on Digiday.

Publisher and advertisers bemoan the proverbial ad tech tax that skims off one-fifth of ad spending, by a GroupM estimate. But transparency has given advertisers and publishers a clearer view into how the programmatic supply chain works, allowing them to hack away at hidden ad tech fees and more clearly assess ad tech’s value.

“The ad tech tax has gotten a bad rap. Our responsibility is to figure out where the ad tech tax, or incremental fee, is warranted,” says Liane Nadeau, vp and director of programmatic media at Digitas.

The post Flatter and fairer: Marketers and publishers hack away at ad tech fees appeared first on Digiday.

Be prepared to run across the random brand mascot. Advertising Week is back. But the exuberance and dare we say it — insanity — of Times Square is slated to be replaced by what seems to be a more calm venue of an Upper West Side movie theater. It’s pretty fitting, as the theme of the year will inevitable be the reckoning in digital media and marketing, from valuations to the #MeToo movement. Here’s what we believe are five themes that will dominate next week’s conversations.

The WPP reorganization
Mark Read is making his mark on WPP as Martin Sorrell’s successor. The first step was last week’s reorganization that merged Y&R with digital agency VML. VMLY&R (we don’t like it either) is only the first step of Read’s plan to simplify WPP. It’s a necessary move for holding companies, which are now being plagued with a lack of integration and increasing competition from other entities like consultancies and indies — and reckoning with a generation of marketers who are questioning why the promised efficiencies never panned out. For this week, expect more questions (and rumors) about what comes next.

Time’s Up?
It’s the post-#MeToo world. Of course, we expect there to be more women speaking on stage, and it’s not likely that there will be many all-male panels this year. But a consistent theme of Advertising Week is what comes next. Over six months since Time’s Up Advertising — a group that aims to address sexual harassment and gender issues in the industry — has been launched, it’s clear much still remains to be done. The rise of Diet Madison Avenue and other anonymous groups that call out these issues have brought these issues into sharp focus. Expect the week to be filled with panels that seek to figure out how the industry can better address these issues.

The DTC wave
There is a veritable glut of direct-to-consumer brands speaking this year — 25 as per Digiday’s count, and organizers of the conference say that’s about double from last year. (Digiday sister brand Glossy is holding its own DTC-focused event today) DTC brands have powered a retail revolution over the past year, and many in the industry are looking to them for what seems to be an updated way of doing things. Even as they grow, DTC brands are rethinking agency relationships, figuring out new ways to acquire customers and in some ways, freshening up the marketing playbook.

Brand purpose
Brand purpose is back in the spotlight thanks to Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ad, which is becoming a cultural phenomenon in its own right. While brands have been beating the drum around “purpose” for years, many have been thwarted because of tone deaf attempts. (Remember Pepsi and Kendall Jenner?). But the idea of brand purpose — when done right — will take centerstage again this year and we expect brands to be much more comfortable with taking political stances than they have before.

TV’s fight for its future
In some ways, TV is having its own DTC movement. The rise of advanced TV, streaming services and measurement is a hot topic across the Advertising Week schedule. And Disney and Viacom are both having mini events during the week on this. TV is experiencing a shift, and almost every player in the industry is affected by this. Expect this, along with the rise of Netflix and Amazon, to be a hot topic.

Overheard
“I never go to Advertising Week. The thing with these things is, it’s like picking and choosing what to listen to. There are things happening every week, every day, throughout the year. I don’t need to do that. But I understand why people do. They need to be seen. They need to be seen as learning and listening. I don’t need to be seen.” — Dany Lennon, veteran recruiter

What’s in & out
As thousands of media and marketing professionals descend on New York for four days of panels, networking and parties, Digiday has drawn upon decades of collective experience covering the event to create this list of what’s in and what’s out at this year’s event. 

Coming Up:
11.30 am: What brands must do to engage today’s conscious customer with L’Oréal, Coty and Coca-Cola. Playbuzz stage.

11.30 am. The CMO perspective on trust and brand safety, with MasterCard and Bank of America

1.00 p.m. New Cannabis: from Seed to Sale on the Culture stage

2.00 p.m. Brick and mortar is alive and well with Alibaba and Petco, Foursquare stage

3.45 p.m.: Google, Target and Xandr take the IMAX stage for a session on “Accountable advertising.”

5 p.m.: Join Glossy for a live recording of the Glossy Podcast with Glossier president Henry Davis on the Culture stage

6.30 p.m. The parade of ad mascots and the official opening gala at the Sony PlayStation Theater. Count Chocula is expected to be in attendance. 

The post Advertising Week Briefing: 5 themes that will dominate the week appeared first on Digiday.

The battle for consumer logins is on in Europe with Germany leading the charge.

In two weeks, an alliance of 20 media, e-commerce, agency ISP businesses in Germany will officially launch a unified consumer login product, created to give consumers total control of their data privacy and consent settings, which are now stricter under the General Data Protection Regulation. The concept is that any user that creates a login will be assigned a centralized privacy-settings center that they can manage, and that will work across all the sites and digital properties of the partners.

“This is the European market’s last chance to change this [imbalance],” said Sven Bornemann, former board member of Germany’s online marketers association AGOF, who has been appointed CEO. “With the dominance of Google and Facebook, user data is drifting away to the walled gardens and leaving the German market, meaning publishers and agencies are’t able to use that data anymore.”

Broadcasters Prosiebensat.1 and RTL group, along with an ISP called United Internet, formed the alliance in 2017. Since then they have accumulated more partners, including publishing houses Spiegel and Gruner+Jahr, regional publisher Ippen Digital, and national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. E-commerce companies Otto Group, C&A, Zalando, Conrad Elektronik, Douglas, Scout24 and parcel service DPD, along with media agencies GroupM Germany and Pilot Gruppe.

In March, the alliance established a not-for-profit European NetID Foundation, a neutral body that will oversee the unified ID system.

The forthcoming ePrivacy regulation, which is currently set up to drastically reduce the ability to use third-party cookies for ad tracking, remains a real concern in Germany. That, plus other developments such as Apple’s anti-tracking changes in its Safari browser, have added to the consensus that the third-party cookie is on the wane, according to Bornemann.

“Third-party cookies are losing their importance,” said Bornemann. “Long before the ePrivacy law will start, the browser industry will have killed the third-party cookie.” The consequences will be that the online user can’t be followed or identified by publishers or the digital market anymore, he added.

Although the alliance is currently made up of German businesses, the plan is to open it up across Europe, starting with the partners that already have offices outside Germany.

Via the settings, consumers will be able to choose what data they’re willing to share, and with whom, via a selection of tick boxes. Publishers that use consent management platforms will be able to pass those consent signals to partners in their digital advertising supply chain.

Prosiebensat.1, RTL and United Internet have upgraded their existing registered customers with the unified ID and login. That means that there are 35 million people who already have the NetID login, a decent base from which to start. That’s roughly 60 percent of the online population, which is around 60 million, according to Statista. After mid-October, all partners will increase their promotion of the need for the login in order to build that number further.

New attempts at publisher alliances continue to crop up all over Europe, as a way to compete with the dominance of Facebook and Google, despite their checkered history. However, the partners insist this one is different from the typical set-up and stands a better chance due to the fact a unified consumer login doesn’t lend any strategic advantage to any partner. That’s different to many other alliances where publishers agree to pool inventory but often hold back the best data and offers to sell individually, rather than via the alliance itself.

Naturally, media agencies and ad tech vendors don’t have direct customer data themselves and so won’t be part of the actual unified login implementation. Instead, they will pay an annual fee to participate on the committees to discuss future requirements and help shape and inform the future product roadmap for the implementation.

Germany has always had a unique relationship with data privacy. Despite that, consumer awareness of GDPR was at around zero until March, when the arrival of the law’s enforcement began to get mainstream consumer coverage, according to Bornemann. But GDPR is a positive development for marketers, according to Marcus Hartmann, chief data officer at Prosiebensat.1.

“Consumers are annoyed about getting ads in the wrong context,” said Hartmann.”There is far more value for a business or advertiser in knowing the person you’re addressing. If you can address your target customer in a more specific way, that’s of higher value for the marketer because you become a more valuable partner, but also for the consumer, because you take away all the noise and only provide relevant messaging.”

The post ‘Last chance’: German publishers unite on unified log-in to combat the duopoly appeared first on Digiday.

Digital media has its fair share of dubious statistics and myths that are bandied about. But often there’s little evidence to back them up. Let’s unpack a few.

“Audience reach”

The post Inside digital media’s greatest myths appeared first on Digiday.

Advertising Week is moving from decades spent in Times Square to a more compact, yet still befuddling venue uptown — the AMC Lincoln Square. But that’s not the only thing changing this year. As thousands of media and marketing professionals descend on New York for four days of panels, networking and parties, Digiday has drawn upon decades of collective experience covering the event to create this list of what’s in and what’s out at this year’s event. Did we miss anything? Let us know.

The post Digiday’s definitive guide to what’s in and out at Advertising Week 2018 appeared first on Digiday.

Good Housekeeping’s first pop-up shop, opening its doors at the Mall of America on Oct. 3 and running through the end of the year, has a twist: everything on sale will be bought through a mobile app.

That’s because none of the 40 products the Good Housekeeping store sells are actually in stock at the 2,800-square foot store. Instead, visitors who want to buy something can use their smartphone to scan a barcode-like image on that item, called a Smile Code, which loads that item inside Amazon’s mobile app. If a customer buys that product, Amazon fulfills the sale, and Good Housekeeping gets an affiliate commission. The infrastructure that supports that process is run by Amazon Local Associates, a program Amazon built to participate in the exploding pop-up shop ecosystem.

Good Housekeeping is more than happy to offload the complexity and risk of supply chain management.

“We do not want to become a retailer,” Good Housekeeping editor in chief Jane Francisco said. “We have an opportunity to meet our audience wherever they are.”

But for publishers interested in developing their experiential or commerce revenues, Local Associates presents an uncomfortable tradeoff: Get rid of one headache, but lose the direct relationships with customers one might be able to sell to later.

The affiliate commissions offered through the program limit the monetization prospects too: While they vary by product category, the highest commission rate Amazon Local offers is 10 percent.

A few others are leery of the lousy track record that QR codes, the technology Smile Codes are modeled off, have had.

“They are definitely pushing it,” said one source at a publisher that’s discussed the Local Associates program with Amazon. “I’m just not sure users are really keen on taking out their phones while they’re shopping.”

Local Associates grew out of Amazon Associates, the affiliate program that forms the spine of so many publishers’ affiliate commerce strategies: For some publishers, Amazon Associates delivers up to 80 percent of their affiliate commerce revenues.

The Local Associates program offers a digital marketing component too: Participants get a branded storefront on Amazon’s website, called an Amazon shop. Publishers ranging from Good Housekeeping to Open House TV, a TV program that airs on NBC’s New York City affiliate, WNBC, have participated.

But the storefronts are a secondary consideration for the program, which is designed to give Amazon a role in pop-up shops, a major growth area for brands, retailers and publishers. Over the past year, publishers such as Domino and PopSugar have found success selling products at branded pop-up shops, which are mostly funded through advertisers’ experiential budgets.

“It’s a key initiative at Amazon right now to monetize IRL [real life] experiences,” said Courtney Wartman, svp of influencer marketing and commerce at Clique Brands, which participated in Local Associates this summer.

Wartman said one of Clique’s properties, Byrdie, used Smile Codes at its Byrdie Beauty Lab in July, and liked what it saw: “Conversions were through the roof,” Wartman said, though she declined to provide any hard numbers.

Wartman identified a few factors, like the fact that Byrdie or the participating brands, could merchandise the Amazon shops as they saw fit, as additional reasons she liked the program. Good Housekeeping is taking advantage of that feature too: While it sells 40 items in store, its digital shop has over 160 items.

That experience might be closer to the exception than the rule. Since it launched Smile Codes in November 2017, Amazon has worked with publishers and brands to stick them just about everywhere: In the pages of magazines, on the sides of billboards and at events. The results, so far, have been uneven: “No one is scanning them,” said one source at company that’s used SmileCodes in a campaign.

Some industry analysts see growth ahead for QR codes as a technology. At the beginning of 2018, Juniper Research released a study suggesting that 5.3 billion QR codes would be redeemed by 2022, up from 1.3 billion 2017.

And while it remains a nascent technology in a rapidly shifting retail landscape, some observers see wisdom in partnering with a company that most people are familiar with. “Good Housekeeping promoting this [Smile Codes] only works in Good Housekeeping’s favor,” said Melissa Gonzalez, the founder of the retail popup agency Lion’esque Group. “A lot of people have the Amazon app. They trust Amazon.”

The post Amazon looks to muscle into publishers’ popup shops appeared first on Digiday.