Month: September 2018

Oath is attempting to deliver on its promise of becoming an alternative to the duopoly. But a question remains as to how compelling its proposition will be to buyers without the full complement of Verizon data at its disposal. On Monday, the Verizon-owned company unveiled the long-awaited fruits of a year’s worth of hard labor:… Continue reading »

The post Oath Integrates Its Ad Tech Assets – But What About The Verizon Data? appeared first on AdExchanger.

“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view. Today’s column is written by Paolo Provinciali, head of global ecommerce at Anheuser-Busch InBev. Brand marketers are good storytellers but often bad at driving consumer action. This wasn’t as troubling when content consumption was more linear with fewer stimuli; brand awareness… Continue reading »

The post Hack Attention To Drive Action: What Brand Marketers Can Borrow From Performance Marketers appeared first on AdExchanger.

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Lance Neuhauser, CEO at 4C Insights. From Comcast and NBC to AT&T and Time Warner, the unification of premium content with rich consumer data is driving our current phase of media consolidation. These companies are… Continue reading »

The post Removing Risk From Content Investment: A Network’s Survival Guide appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A Retarget On Your Back Criteo shares fell on Friday after it was revealed the retargeting company had been removed from the Facebook marketing partner program, Bloomberg reported. The situation is not dire, since Criteo’s share of revenue from Facebook has dropped from 9%… Continue reading »

The post Criteo Loses Facebook Preferred Status; A Peek At Google’s Podcast Plans appeared first on AdExchanger.

Content marketing adoption is being driven by its ability to deliver cost-efficient consumer engagement, according to a recent Digiday survey.

Fifty-nine percent of marketers polled at the Digiday Content Marketing Summit said they believe content marketing provides high engagement, while 41 percent say it’s a low cost alternative to other marketing tactics.

The post Digiday Research: Content marketing’s appeal rooted in engagement and cost efficiencies appeared first on Digiday.

A recent Pew Research study reported 26 percent of people surveyed deleted the Facebook app from their phones. Yet advertisers’ cravings to experiment within more places within Facebook’s ecosystem hasn’t waned. The latest battleground: Facebook Stories.

Ads in Facebook Stories, posts that are displayed at the top of the app and disappear after 24 hours, are still in beta but should be rolled out globally by the end of the year, the company said in an email sent to Facebook Marketing Partners on Sept. 6. The email, which was posted on Twitter by digital media consultant Matt Navarra, also invited more advertisers into the beta with a sales pitch.

“Your customers have already been able to reach their audience with Instagram Stories ads, and now they have another opportunity to reach even more people in this full-screen, vertical environment with Facebook Stories ads,” the email read.

Advertisers in the beta can run ads in Facebook Stories as long as they’re also running in Instagram Stories or in Facebook’s News Feed, meaning an advertiser can’t run an ad just in Facebook Stories. That restriction lets advertisers and Facebook compare the results across Facebook’s ad properties.

Media agencies are giving good feedback on Facebook Stories ads; the format being new has helped keep prices down and engagement high. Brandon Doyle, the founder of digital agency Wallaroo Media, said his team started testing ads in Facebook Stories about a month ago. Some ads they’ve placed, within their ad spend of $20,000, have outperformed all of their other buys.

“CPM and conversion rates have been the best of any placements over the course of the last month, probably due to the fact that the competition is lower there,” he said.

Simon Lejeune, head of user acquisition at flight-booking service Hopper, said he’s paying $2.3 per thousand impressions compared with around $5 for Instagram Stories during the same time period, for similar targeting and creatives.

He’s also seen good conversation rates; people who download the app directly from an ad in Facebook Stories go on to search, watch and book about as many flights as users coming from Instagram Stories. Ads in both Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories also have been performing better than ads in Facebook’s news feed and in Instagram’s feed. Hopper has been prioritizing designing ads for the Stories format, then adapting them to the other formats, Lejeune said.

Facebook itself has been making advertising in Stories easier by letting advertisers click a button to convert ads to the Stories format. Jose Sánchez, head of creative studio at Smartly.io, said they’ve been helping advertisers in Facebook’s beta for Stories modify their assets for vertical video. He said the format has driven incremental results, but stressed that the format alone isn’t enough to drive performance. “The creative is key here as you’re taking over the full screen on users’ mobile devices,” he said.

Facebook Stories’ newness is part of the appeal, but its audience is still far smaller than other similar platforms. About 150 million people use Facebook Stories every day, the company revealed in May, while the daily audience for Instagram Stories is more than double that. Meanwhile, Snapchat has 188 million daily active users overall, not just its Stories feature.

Facebook Stories also shortfalls that could limit its growth. The founder of OnlyInBOS, which shares news about Boston across social media and prefers anonymity, said he has used Facebook Stories to share posts organically but has been disappointed by the functionality, especially the lack of features compared to Instagram Stories.

“Facebook Stories is promising, but it’s very limited. You can’t link, can’t tag, and it significantly decreases the resolution of images you upload. No idea why,” he said.

Views also leave something to be desired. His Facebook Page has 14,000 followers and the largest audience for a post was just 200 users, he said. But he said Facebook Stories are still worth testing, especially given that it’s simple to share there.

“I think that’s all right for a functionality people are still not checking out yet, so that’s why I’ve been pushing content on it for now to monitor those numbers,” the OnlyInBOS founder said.

The post ‘Competition is lower there’: Still-new Facebook Stories attracts advertisers with low CPMs appeared first on Digiday.

It’s that time of year again, when the digital marketing industry descends on the Dmexco conference in Cologne, Germany, to talk all things ad tech. Trouble is, ad tech is riddled with jargon, and for those who don’t spend all day in the weeds of a supply- or demand-side platform, it can get overwhelming.

Here’s a primer for some key terms to throw around while you’re quaffing beer.

Ad caching
Unlike bid caching — the two terms can be conflated — this is an industry-accepted method endorsed by the Internet Advertising Bureau. With ad caching, the auction is conducted ahead of the ad being served, as a way to reduce ad-serving latency.

Ads.cert
An upgrade to ads.txt that more securely validates the information that passes between buyer and seller at each stage of the digital ad supply chain. That ensures that it is not vulnerable to being modified or gamed. Ads.cert is like a digital signature that lets buyers verify a specific site’s inventory and stops fraudsters from tampering with the inventory.

Ads.txt
The tool that the Interactive Advertising Bureau introduced to help publishers and the supply chain crack down on ad fraud — both the reselling of unauthorized inventory and domain spoofing. Ads.txt verifies that a business is authorized to sell a publisher’s inventory.

Bid caching
This has been the ad tech term “du jour” over the past month due to a backlash over the use of it by Index Exchange. Bid caching is when a lost bid from one auction is used to fill a subsequent auction without the knowledge of the buyer. It has created some serious controversy given that it’s a method that means the buyer isn’t necessarily getting what they paid for — potentially having their ad appear on less premium article pages or sites.

Bid shading
This is a relatively new technique that has been introduced by vendors because of the shift from second- to first-price auctions. Developed as a middle ground between first- and second-price auctions, it’s a sweetener for buyers who weren’t happy about suddenly having to pay far higher prices than they were accustomed to in first-price actions. The SSP will calculate an average price in between first and second price, based on bid-history information, such as what bid rates typically win on a certain website.

CDP
A customer data platform initially looks very similar to a demand-side platform — both are systems that store people’s data. But there are differences in what data sets they collect and how they process that data. CDPs mainly analyze first-party data based on real consumer identities, while DMPs examine consolidated third-party data based on cookies. A simple way to distinguish them: CDPs can be used to nurture the relationship with existing consumers, while DMPs are mainly used to acquire lookalike audiences.

Consent string
This one is important when it comes to the General Data Protection Regulation. A consent string is what identifies whether an ad tech vendor has user consent or not. Also referred to as a “daisy bit” or “daisy string,” it is a series of numbers added to an ad bid request. It’s now vital for understanding when and when not to send personalized ads to a visitor of a publisher’s site.

First-price auction
A more recent type of online auction where the highest bidder determines how much an impression gets sold for. It was introduced because publishers complained that second-price auctions weren’t transparent enough. Publishers like these more than buyers as they get higher yields.

Header bidding
A popular technique in which the online auction takes place in the publisher’s header or browser. This made a big splash in 2015 when it was introduced because it gave buyers access to publisher inventory simultaneously, rather than in the former, staggered waterfall structure set up by Google. That drove up bid density, and publishers made higher ad revenues. But it has its down sides, including putting major strain on vendor infrastructures.

Privacy by design
Another term that’s cropped up thanks to GDPR. Under the law, all media and marketing businesses must ensure that their processes and any new products are GDPR compliant at the design concept stage — essentially, jargon for having data-privacy baked into any product or service.

Second-price auction
The more traditional type of online auction, where the second-highest bidder determines the sale price of an impression. In a second-price auction, if two buyers bid $7 and $10, respectively, the buyer who bid $15 will win but will only pay $7.01. It’s losing ground now to first-price auctions because many believed second-price auctions to lack transparency. Some supply-side platforms would mislabel the type of auction they ran or raise the price floors without media buyers’ knowledge.

Server-side bidding
Introduced to offset some of the challenges that header bidding has, such as page latency due to the number of ad calls being made from the header, along with vendor infrastructure costs — the auctions take place on the ad server, rather than within the browser.

SPO
Supply-path optimization gives media buyers the ability to bid on and win inventory at the most reasonable price. By increasing the probability that a given bid will win its auction, SPO helps buyers avoid impressions they’re unlikely to win, and supply-side platforms that depend on reselling and duplicative inventory.

Take rates
This is a vendor term, but it essentially means margins — and is often associated with hidden fees.

The post Bid caching, bid shading, consent strings: A guide to understanding Dmexco appeared first on Digiday.

Gannett’s USA Today Network is becoming the latest publisher to shift to an agency model to grow its share of marketing dollars, but with a local twist.

The publisher of USA Today and 100-plus local brands including the Detroit Free Press, (Nashville) Tennessean and Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., has acquired three firms over the past two years, ReachLocal, SweetIQ and Wordstream, that provide agency-like services to local businesses. On Sept. 10, USA Today Network is rolling out a new marketing brand, LocalIQ, to emphasize the breadth of all those services. They include helping local businesses find new customers on search and social media, create websites and manage their online reputation. A new service, called LocalIQ Grader, gives advertisers comparative data with competitors and recommends marketing approaches for them to take.

“Our partnerships to date have been an advertising one,” said Kevin Gentzel, chief revenue officer for Gannett and the USA Today Network. “We have made three acquisitions that can change the perception of who we are. It helps us evolve from being the newspaper selling selling advertising and being a marketing partner selling solutions to local businesses across the country.”

The evolving pitch comes as Gannett and other local newspaper publishers struggle to replace declining newspaper advertising with digital and reader revenue. In the second quarter of 2018, Gannett’s digital advertising grew 8.5 percent year over year to $108 million, but it wasn’t enough to offset a 19 percent decline in print ad revenue. (Total digital revenue represents just over a third of all company revenue.) ReachLocal, which provides search and social optimization services, was a bright spot, however, growing revenue 17 percent to $100 million.

While advertising in local traditional media is declining, digital is on the upswing. BIA/Kelsey predicted that local ad revenue across the U.S. would increase 5.2 percent in 2018, to $151.2 billion, with significant growth in social and mobile advertising.

Google and Facebook dominate digital advertising, and while local businesses are also putting more of their media dollars towards those big platforms, local media operators like Gannett will have to convince the local businesses to use their agency-like services to help them spend that money instead of doing it themselves. Scaling marketing services at the local level is another challenge for the agency model. But with its recent acquisitions and scale through its presence in 100-plus markets, Gannett sees local being the growth driver for the company.

“We think local businesses will not only catch up but be the lead in driving the shift to digital,” Gentzel said. ‘We believe local businesses who are facing fierce competition like we are as media companies from Google, Facebook and Amazon deserve the type of data-informed best practices, technology and solutions that national businesses received from agencies and consultants.”

The move into agency-like services also lets the company expand beyond the markets where it already operates local media. It already has ReachLocal offices in some markets, but is looking to expand that to new cities, where it will brand its services as “part of the USA Today Network.”

The post Gannett is putting a local spin on the publisher-as-agency model appeared first on Digiday.

Condé Nast’s Glamour UK went almost entirely digital last October, and since then, it’s boosted its loyal readership and branded content business by focusing on beauty sampling.

The publisher said loyal readers — those who visit the site more than four times a month — are up by 33 percent in the past six months year over year.

The post How Glamour UK is using product sampling to drive branded content revenue appeared first on Digiday.

Digital publishers and video programmers are keen on franchise building. Instead of just producing a show, media companies including Bleacher Report, Complex Media and Rooster Teeth want to build properties with original content across different formats and multiple forms of revenue.

At the center of many of these digital franchises is the talent.

Take Bleacher Report, which recently premiered an NFL-centric video show hosted by former pro QB Chris Simms and Adam Lefkoe and is looking at more talent-driven shows to help build franchises tied to major league sports. It’s building a whole business around Omar Raja, the 23-year-old founder of the popular Instagram account House of Highlights.

“From an audience engagement standpoint, people connect with people,” said Joe Yanarella, svp of content for Bleacher Report. “In the social era, having people who can be advocates and the faces of franchises and brands helps break down walls and makes the connection more personal.”

Talent has been the key to successful franchises that Complex Networks and Rooster Teeth have built. With properties such as Complex’s “Hot Ones” and “Sneaker Shopping” and Rooster Teeth’s “Achievement Hunter,” these companies have not only captured a huge audience online but expanded these franchises into other areas including merchandising and live events.

The role of talent can vary
There is no one definition of talent as the role depends on the publisher and the franchise.

At Bleacher Report, Simms and Lefkoe are on-air personalities, while brothers Craig and Adam Malamut are the showrunners and head writers of “Game of Zones” and other animated series, and Raja is both a personality and content chief for House of Highlights.

At Complex Networks, the focus is on homegrown talent. “Hot Ones” host Sean Evans was a freelance reporter for Complex’s magazine before joining the company full-time and co-creating the interview series. “Sneaker Shopping” host Joe La Puma started as an intern at Complex and now also serves as its director of content strategy. In both instances, Complex and the hosts worked together to build the shows into what they are today, said Complex Networks CEO Rich Antoniello.

At Rooster Teeth, its talent — some of whom are also founders of the company — are involved in everything from starring in original movies and shows to hosting podcasts and live events.

For instance, Rooster Teeth’s video gaming brand, “Achievement Hunter,” which centers on a cast of personalities that include Rooster Teeth co-founder Geoff Ramsey. The full cast is about a dozen personalities who host and participate in gaming sessions and other videos produced for “Achievement Hunter” on a daily basis. These cast members also often star in productions made for Rooster Teeth’s subscription service and other platforms, including “Hardcore Tabletop,” which centers on Monopoly competitions.

“We are just mirroring the old studio model of the 1990s when production houses would sign up talent to multi-picture deals,” Ramsey said. “The investment was in the talent and then the studio would find projects that made the most sense for them.”

But talent alone is not going to turn a show into a successful franchise, said Antoniello. A ton of other factors go into the success of any show.

“There’s no magic formula or model,” Antoniello said. “We’ve had shows that have started on one platform and were wrong for that platform and moved someplace else. We’ve had shows that were brilliant, but the talent wasn’t the right fit. And sometimes we’ve had a show where the talent and the platform were right, but the show itself was too wide or too narrow to work.”

Revenue comes from content licensing, merchandising and events
Talent can help build media franchises, which can spawn other revenue streams.

With “Hot Ones,” Complex makes money from advertising, content licensing and commerce. Complex Networks gets paid a licensing fee from cable network Fuse, Snapchat, which airs a vertical video version of the show on Snapchat Discover, and international streaming service Iflix, for which Complex will create localized versions of “Hot Ones” and other shows in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Complex even sells its own hot sauce that’s featured in the show. It’s on track to make about $5 million in gross sales from sauce in 2018, Antoniello said. (Other merchandise, including T-shirts and other apparel referencing Evans’ nickname as “The Spice Lord” have also come online recently.)

“Just to be really frank, we didn’t go into this thinking let’s develop a hot-sauce business — and not all [franchises] are apt to go in this sort of direction because every franchise is different,” Antoniello said. “But we know we have an amazing, loyal audience to the ‘Hot Ones’ brand, so it made sense for us to go figure out how we could give them more of what the brand represents.”

Over the past decade, Rooster Teeth’s “Achievement Hunter” has built up a passionate fan base that’s willing to watch new shows and buy merchandise and attend live events.

Ramsey has his own clothing collection — “I’m in my 40s now, as much as I love my Rooster Teeth family, I don’t want to wear video game t-shirts in my 40s,” he said — which has sold more than 26,000 T-shirts since 2016. Achieve, a “high-concept lifestyle brand,” has sold more than 5,000 hoodies and T-shirts this year. A Ramsey-centric pop-up shop that opened in Los Angeles in June had 1,000 shoppers and sold out of its inventory in two hours, the company said. Another pop-up shop open during Rooster Teeth’s mega RTX convention drew 10,000 shoppers.

Overall, merchandising accounts for 20 percent of Rooster Teeth’s total revenues — and a key part of that has been the relationship the company and its personalities have built up over the years.

But even with a passionate fan base, it’s still important to deliver on their expectations, Ramsey said.

“We have a leg-up at the onset because of this wonderful community that’s super receptive to trying new things,” Ramsey said. “But it better be good. They’re not going to watch something that’s not good.”

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The post ‘People connect with people’: How Complex, Bleacher Report and others use talent to build franchises appeared first on Digiday.