Month: September 2018

Streaming sports programming service Eleven Sports will livestream at least one soccer game a week from either the top Spanish and Italian leagues to Facebook in the hope that those people who watch them will be tempted to become subscribers. Eleven Sports will use the viewing data to retarget ads for its own subscription service to those people who watched it, said one of the sources.

Soccer rights aren’t cheap, and for an upstart service that launched last month, Eleven sports can’t afford to hive them off to a small number of subscribers when those matches could be used to woo non-subscribers.

“Facebook knows broadcasters are wary of having to pay for reach, but there’s value to be gained if they distribute the content there to learn about their audiences,” said the source.

Eleven Sports declined to comment.

While any content publisher can retarget viewers with ads, Facebook is pushing the feature to sports media owners in the hope they will agree to host their content on the platform, said one executive familiar with those discussions on condition of anonymity. Rather than use money to secure content, Facebook is looking at value in kind deals, said the executive.

Rights-holders are currently open to those deals because Facebook is willing to share a large potential audience as well as sophisticated data with them that can be used to serve fans with more of the things they want, said Mike Flynn, CEO of sports marketing agency DataPowa.

It’s the main reason BT Sports has livestreamed both the Champions League and Europa League finals to soccer fans on YouTube for the last three years.

“It is rare for rights-owners to do contra-deals without cash unless they are compelled to by regulators,” said Flynn. “But the deals Facebook is striking show the value of data in the modern media and sports market.”

Facebook appears to be testing four separate ways to monetize sports content rather than risk alienating some media owners with a focus on one approach: sharing data with media owners for retargeting is one model; another model is when sports rights owners sell sponsorships against the incremental audience their content on Facebook attracts; the third model sees the social network sub-license content from a broadcaster like CBS to experiment with new ways of streaming sports to users; the fourth model stems from the social network reaching out to rights holders that don’t have distribution in certain markets and agrees to provide it in exchange for the content like when it took all 15 matches of the International Cricket Court’s Champion Trophy cricket tournament earlier this year to 42 markets where it wasn’t shown.

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ABC canceled Designated Survivor in May, but the Kiefer Sutherland drama has just lived up to its title, as it has been given a last-minute reprieve and will move to a new home: Netflix. The streaming service has ordered a third season of the series, which will go into production this fall and air next…

Few were likely surprised that President Donald Trump would tweet about Nike’s polarizing new ad featuring Colin Kaepernick. The only real surprise is that it took him a few days. But this morning, Trump fired off a tweet that takes digs at Nike and the NFL–though the two brands are, at best, uneasy allies in…

J.Crew Mercantile, the label from the specialty retailer that is sold at outlets, is now available on Amazon, according to an announcement. “We are focused on continually enhancing our assortment and innovating the shopping experience to enable fashion discovery and inspiration on Amazon,” Michelle Rothman, vp of Amazon Fashion, said in a statement. While Amazon…

Chartbeat, Amobee and Adobe were the top winners of this year’s Digiday Technology Awards, each collecting two awards.

Chartbeat won Best Audience Measurement Platform and Best Mobile (& Web) Analytics Platform for its audience analytics dashboard for publishers.

Amobee won Best Data Management Platform and Best Marketing Dashboard Software for its work with Honda Odyssey in the industry’s first sharable, scalable virtual reality campaign. This campaign had a 791 percent engagement rate from smartphone users visiting the microsite.

Adobe was named Best Testing and Personalization Platform for its advertising software’s robust product offering, and Best Email Marketing Platform for its work managing personalized, cross-channel campaigns for hostel-booking website Hostelworld, which resulted in a 500 percent increase in engagement and a 20 percent reduction in cost per booking.

Winners will be celebrated at the Digiday Awards gala, which will be held Nov. 14 at The Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers in NYC. Tickets to the gala are available for purchase here.

See the full list of winners below.

WINNERS IN DATA

Best Audience Measurement Platform
Chartbeat — Chartbeat for Publishing

Best Data Management Platform
Amobee

Best Marketing Analytics/Attribution Platform
Lucidity

Best Mobile (& Web) Analytics Platform
Chartbeat– Chartbeat for Publishing

Best Testing & Personalization Platform
Adobe — Adobe Advertising Cloud

WINNERS IN CONTENT AND EXPERIENCE

Best Marketing Dashboard Software
Amobee

Best CMS and Web Content Management Platform
Madras Global — JDX

Best Content Marketing Platform
Genero

Best Email Marketing Platform
Adobe — Adobe Campaign

Best Interactive Content Platform
Apester

Best Marketing Automation Platform
Koddi

Best Mobile App Platform
Cvent

Best Location-Based Platform
Ericsson Emodo — Emodo Supply

Best Video Marketing & Advertising Platform
Mirriad

Best Influencer Marketing Platform
Mavrck

Best Mobile Marketing Platform
Cognitiv — Cognitiv NeuralMind™

Best CRM Platform
Conversocial

Best Social Media Marketing Platform
SOCi

WINNERS IN COMMERCE AND SALES

Best Sales Automation Tools & Platform
Conversica — Conversica

Best Search and Social Advertising Platform
Crealytics Inc. — Crealytics Product Advertising Platform

Best Native/Content Advertising Platform
ADYOULIKE

Best Display & Programmatic Advertising Platform
Liftoff

Best Retail Technology
Syte

Best Display/Video Programmatic Platform
PubMatic — PubMatic OpenWrap

Best E-Commerce for Content Platform
Piano, Inc. — Piano

 

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The social shopping wars are just beginning, and Instagram might be about to take it up a notch. According to The Verge, Instagram is developing a new app that will let consumers shop for products from brands they already follow. They can also purchase the items in the app, potentially creating a relatively frictionless experience…

Disney is starting the new TV fall season by making some big changes to its ad sales leadership. Ed Erhardt, who headed up ESPN ad sales for 20 years, is retiring in January. And the company has promoted Rita Ferro to president of Disney advertising sales, where she’ll oversee all Disney media properties, including ABC,…

Nike has opened up all kinds of conversation and controversy (on both sides) after the brand launched a new “Just Do It” campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick. Yet questions remained as to what was next? Was this a one-off? Where would the campaign go from here? Today, the world has its answer as a new 2-minute…

The tech platforms were back in Washington on Tuesday to answer senators’ questions on how their systems should and could change in the wake of election interference.

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had invited the leaders of Facebook, Google and Twitter to speak on foreign influence operations on social media. In place of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who testified in April, was Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, alongside Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Google refused to send a C-suite executive and was represented by an empty seat (They sent a testimony anyway). The more than two-and-half-hour affair was a lot of talk — with Sen. Richard Burr poking fun of himself struggling to read on a small smartphone and Sen. Martin Heinrich mispronouncing Pokémon — a reminder of the cultural gulf that separates big tech and Washington — but here’s what we learned.

Questioning social media’s essence
Burr, chairman of the committee, kicked off the hearing by asking the witnesses to define social media.

Social media “enables you to share what you want to share when you want to share it without asking permission from everyone,” Sandberg said. She also emphasized the connections Facebook creates, specifically touting the rose of birthday fundraisers, the use of Safety Check and the growth of small businesses via the platform.

Dorsey defined social media as a “town square,” a term the company’s frequently used in the past to describe Twitter. He then added that “we” should be questioning the platform’s functions and what behaviors they encourage.

Twitter is considering labeling bots
Dorsey spoke repeatedly about the ways Twitter can restructure the platform. He mentioned that the follower count was emphasized on profile pages at launch and that was perhaps an error that they can now fix.

Sen. Mark Warner also asked if Twitter would consider labeling bots, which Dorsey said they are, in fact, exploring.

“I do believe, first and foremost, anyone using Twitter has the right to more context,” Dorsey said.

Deceptive ads in the hot seat
While Zuckerberg had to answer questions like how does Facebook makes money — “Senator, we sell ads” — Sandberg got a more nuanced question on microtargeting within those ads, with Heinrich asking what Facebook does with ads that promote voter suppression. He mentioned ads from the 2016 presidential election that showed the wrong date for an election, an inaccurate polling place or saying people can vote by text.

Sandberg was quick to decry voter suppression, though no solutions were proposed.

“We feel very strongly about this. There is a long history of trying to suppress civil rights and voting rights. Discriminatory advertising has no place on Facebook,” Sandberg said.

Looking to fact-checkers, journalists to promote the truth
Facebook and Twitter both keep false news on their platforms and instead rely on other ways to promote the truth. That’s frustrating to publishers, senators and users, but follows the platforms’ mutual desire to not be “arbiters of truth,” as they’ve both said in the past.

As Sandberg described during the hearing, Facebook relies on third-party fact-checkers to identify false news stories. Once they’re marked as false, Facebook’s algorithms suppress their reach. Anyone who shared or is about to share that story is shown the false label and also provided related articles that show other perspectives, or well, the truth. Sandberg first referred to those articles as “alternative facts” (Hello, Kellyanne Conway).

Dorsey, on the other hand, touted the power of journalists on the platform.

Journalists “often, with a high degree of velocity, call out misinformation,” said Dorsey, adding that Twitter could do more to provide more tools and resources to journalists.

A push for data portability
Several senators questioned users’ abilities to truly understand and own their data. Warner, for example, asked Sandberg if Facebook could put a value on the information they gather from users, individually.

Sandberg said the user own their data and emphasized that Facebook does not sell their data to advertisers. But while Dorsey said they don’t compete on identifying election interference, it’s clear that data is still their currency.

“As much as I’d love it, they won’t allow for data portability that easily. That will have to be a forced regulation. The data is the real money maker. They wouldn’t want to share that with competitors,” Bari Williams, a former employee of Facebook and StubHub, tweeted.

Still, in his closing remarks, Warner suggested more conversation around valuing and sharing data.

The post 5 things we learned from the Facebook and Twitter hearings appeared first on Digiday.

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