Month: October 2018

As more people use smart speakers, publishers are establishing their own voice. News organization Al Jazeera is exploring how to position its brand on voice, which it believes will be the gateway to an internet-of-things-driven world, said Michael Weaver, SVP of business development and growth at Al Jazeera Network. “Voice assistants are the first entry… Continue reading »

The post Al Jazeera Finds Its Voice On Smart Speakers appeared first on AdExchanger.

The TV ad buying ecosystem is getting even messier, according to GroupM’s second-annual “State of Video” report, released Thursday. Some of the report’s revelations are familiar: Linear TV ratings are still dropping and, as eMarketer predicted in September, Amazon is a “likely third force” in the struggle for ad spend between Facebook and Google. GroupM… Continue reading »

The post GroupM’s State of Video Lays Out New Battleground For Attention 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 Michael Connolly, co-founder and CEO at Sonobi. Advertisers that spend money during the Super Bowl pay an exorbitant amount of money for consumer attention, but there is no guarantee that this will lead to any… Continue reading »

The post Adjusting The Dial: How TV’s Future Tracks To The Evolution Of Digital Advertising appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. DTC TV Simulmedia released an ad marketplace called D2Cx.com designed specifically for startup online consumer brands to buy linear TV spots. The broadcast partners include Fuse, Hallmark, Discovery/Scripps and A&E Networks. Many direct-to-consumer brands got off to quick starts by outspending incumbents on search… Continue reading »

The post Simulmedia Helps DTC Startups Buy TV; Facebook Watch Edges Away From Short Form appeared first on AdExchanger.

As more advertisers try to bring agency capabilities in-house, eBay is recognizing the limits of that approach. After years of moving programmatic and creative work in-house, the online marketplace is thinking about reversing course.

Three years ago, eBay spent 90 percent of its ad spend on performance marketing, all done internally. That came at the expense of the brand, he said. Building the brand offline has been a big focus this year. To that end, eBay has started to do some offline advertising, and it thinks agencies can help with creative ideas and measuring the impact of that spending.

“You can drink too much of your own Kool-Aid,” said Gareth Jones, CMO for eBay in the U.K. “We’ve got some amazing agencies that we use, so we’re increasingly thinking about how we out-house some of the work we do.”

In TV, eBay is using insight from its agencies to create media plans based on ones that performed well in certain U.K. regions and run them in other parts of the U.K. Some tests have had 200,000 models running at any one time, said Jones. EBay plans to track those trends globally to inform media plans in its key countries.

It will take time for the benefits of offline ads to be felt, as eBay acknowledged this year when it told financial analysts that its latest campaign had yet to move the needle.

“The big challenge we’re grappling with is how to measure offline ads with the same sort of pseudo-precision as we do our performance,” said Jones. “It becomes very difficult to move budget to the offline space and still have the same types of conversations with stakeholders because you don’t know the efficiency, you haven’t got the margin ROIs and you haven’t got the efficacy of spend in terms of cause and effect.”

Jones said the company is looking at creating teams that balance the performance-driven side of the brand with its ambitions to create memorable ads.

EBay’s stance on agencies contrasts with that of many marketers that are questioning the value those businesses provide. A recent survey of 412 ANA members showed 78 percent of marketers in the U.S. have some form of an in-house agency, compared to 58 percent who said they did in 2013.

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The post Why eBay is doing more brand advertising in the UK appeared first on Digiday.

Now the dust has settled more firmly over the General Data Protection Regulation, certain ad-buying trends are becoming easier to spot. One that has attracted attention among certain vendors and publishers is a rise in ad rates, which some ad tech vendors have attributed to GDPR along with efforts like Ads.txt.

In some cases, vendors have said that the average CPMs for ad impressions that have consent strings attached — meaning they have information about whether or not a user has given permission for their data to be used for personalized ad targeting — have risen anything between 20 and 100 percent.

The post The upshot of GDPR: Programmatic ad rates are rising appeared first on Digiday.

Commerce has grown from a curiosity into a key stream of revenue, so BuzzFeed is helping brands sell more products, developing new ones that BuzzFeed helps sell with them and tying advertising into those deals.

Last month, BuzzFeed launched a 100-item line of Goodful products that it is selling exclusively at Macy’s. Over the past year, it developed products for Scott’s, Maybelline and Bloomscape, using BuzzFeed.com and its social reach to promote them. BuzzFeed’s markets team also has begun upselling affiliate commerce partners like Quip and Care/Of on display and branded content advertising.

While it’s not yet a mainstream request, BuzzFeed is starting to see requests for commerce elements in some of the RFPs it gets from agencies as advertisers start to take a unified view of performance, customer acquisition and brand advertising.

“We developed elements that would complement advertising, rather than conflict with it,” BuzzFeed chief revenue officer Lee Brown said. “We work with partners however they want to work.”

Affiliate marketing strategies — and budgets — have historically been handled by separate groups within brands. But as digital marketing and advertising gets more focused on business outcomes, those divisions are starting to come down. Observers expect this trend to accelerate, particularly for brands that already have affiliate operations.

“What brands are trying to do is at least look at it all in the same place,” said Robert Glazer, the founder of marketing agency Acceleration Partners. “The more they’re able to not make this 12 different discussions with 12 different teams, that definitely benefits everyone.”

To win these deals, BuzzFeed is trying to show that programmatic advertising complements branded content, or affiliate commerce campaigns, especially for direct-to-consumer brands that are trying to diversify away from advertising on social platforms.

Selling commerce as well as ads to advertisers is part of a broader effort at BuzzFeed to diversify its revenue. In the first nine months of 2018, the number of advertisers that have bought more than one kind of program from the publisher has increased 70 percent, a spokesperson said.

It owes that success partly to an internal reorganization. BuzzFeed has stakeholders from its different divisions, including branded content, studio, commerce and programmatic advertising all pitch account point people, who take ideas to the brands that they work with directly. The only sales team that operates independently in BuzzFeed is BuzzFeed Exchange, its programmatic exchange.

The publisher offers financial incentives to groups that work together on programs, though it wouldn’t give specifics.

The number of publishers trying to work commerce into bigger advertising deals remains small for now. Early adopters include PopSugar, Clique Brands, Vox Media and Bustle Digital Group. But as more brands see these techniques start to work, that could encourage more publishers to try and broaden out what they offer. “The sites that worked on affiliate commerce, historically, have been very transactional,” said Jonathan Kendall, vp of affiliate marketing at marketing agency Gen3.

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On Tuesday’s third-quarter earnings call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made clear his belief that stories — posts that he simply described as ones that disappear but are commonly known as being vertical and mobile — lie at the heart of the company’s future. And while investors have heard Zuckerberg describe Facebook as being mobile-first, people-first and video-first, this new pitch seemed to combine it all together and had listeners thinking of one word: Instagram.

“I walked away thinking they believe the future of online advertising is story-driven and heavily tied to commerce, and both of those seem further along on Instagram than on Facebook. Maybe the answer staring us all in the face is Facebook will be dwarfed over the next 10 years,” said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG.

Facebook’s stories are still new, Zuckerberg stressed on the call, but the evidence of the format’s strength is clear through the success of Instagram. More advertisers are buying ads in Instagram Stories and part of that stems from ease of use, media buyers said. Facebook’s Ads Manager lists ad formats across Facebook and Instagram, and buyers can simply check boxes of where they want their ads to appear. The system can change the creative to fit each format as well as track individual performance. Boxes for Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories were added earlier this year.

“If you’re creating a quick video ad, [Instagram Stories is] more or less a click of a button within ads manager. It’s not that it’s more expensive and you need to set aside [budget]. We have the freedom to optimize in real time and really find our consumers where they are versus forcing a budget,” said Joe Mingino, executive director of digital activation at Omnicom’s PHD.

When ads in Instagram Stories were introduced, brands divided their budget for Facebook ads into three buckets: Facebook News Feed, Instagram feed and Instagram Stories. Now, it’s one placement and can be adjusted at any time. During Tuesday’s call, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said Pandora has been using these so-called automatic placements. According to Sandberg, that buying method has resulted in a 10 percent lower cost per view than their standalone campaigns.

Facebook’s system is so simple and efficient that it has one buyer even less interested in Snapchat than he was before.

“I don’t advise Snap. For all of its faults, I like Facebook reporting too much to get away from it,” said Joe Leverone, a programmatic media buyer at excelerate Digital.

While marketers often critique Facebook and Google for their walled gardens, the strength of Facebook’s targeting due to its tightly held data has made Instagram Stories more appealing. A buyer at a global media agency said Instagram Stories is a format almost every brand should be using.

“It ties back to Instagram is growing faster than we can keep up. You can leverage all of the targeting across the board, and that’s fantastic given all the data they have with all their users,” he said.

Still, marketers were hesitant of the transition of Facebook being a stories-first company. Feed still is the vast majority of PHD clients’ budgets on Facebook’s platforms, Mingino said. He predicted that would not change any time soon due to differences in the formats.

“There are things that you can’t do in Stories just yet. It’s for quick three- to five-second snackable video: This is who we are, this is what we want to sell, watch this, buy this. But if you want to sell in five to 10 seconds, include GIFs, static images, carousel, dynamic product ads, there’s feed,” Mingino said.

As for Facebook Stories, the format has yet to show its worth. While some brands are finding success in part due to low CPMs in the auction, the media buyer at a global media agency said his team has tested it but was not impressed by the performance. There’s some audience there, he acknowledged, but it isn’t worth their budgets, yet.

“We’re not 100 percent sold on [Facebook Stories]. That’s not saying that the next month we might not click it for everything. It’s a ‘wait and see’ rather than jump on it,” the buyer said.

That hesitance to advertise on Facebook Stories comes even amid scale. Facebook Stories has 300 million daily active users, the company reported in September. Meanwhile, Snapchat has 188 million daily active users overall, as of August. Instagram Stories is leading with 400 million daily active users, Facebook reported in June.

One way Facebook could make Facebook Stories more appealing is providing more case studies from early tests, the buyer said. Sandberg shared one from Furbo, a company that provides dog cameras, during the earnings call. According to Sandberg, Furbo ran ads in Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories — targeted to people with dog-related interests and excluding people whom they’ve determined have already purchased the product — and had 20 percent more leads than its other digital campaigns.

Sandberg said her team has more case studies, but overall it seems that the company is taking things slowly rather than flooding Facebook Stories with ads.

“We’re following our normal playbook here of building out the best consumer products first and focusing on succeeding there before ramping up ads,” Zuckerberg said on the call.

Greenfield of BTIG said his impressions of Zuckerberg’s call was that there’s a lot of potential for ads across Facebook. As analysts are often concerned with ad load, Zuckerberg mentioned several places where ads are not even appearing yet, including WhatsApp’s version of Stories called Status and Instagram Explore.

“There are so many things they’re working on that are really early, and while not having the rapid growth [of earlier years, Facebook is] definitely not collapsing,” Greenfield said.

The post ‘The future of online advertising’: Instagram Stories has become a ‘box to check’ in all Facebook campaigns, buyers say appeared first on Digiday.

CVS is using its 9,800-location store network to play in Amazon’s court, and fend off increasing competition.

Its latest move: A Prime-style membership network hinged on in-store benefits. For a monthly fee of $5, or an annual fee of $48, subscribers can get free one-to-two-day delivery on most prescriptions and other purchases, access to pharmacists around the clock, member-only discounts and a $10 monthly credit on selected items each month. The retailer is testing the program at more than 350 locations in the Boston area right now. It gave no indications about the duration of the pilot or whether it will scale nationally.

It’s a data play and a defensive move against Amazon’s entry into healthcare, which was solidified by its acquisition of online pharmacy PillPack last June.

“It’s a preemptive strike to protect their consumer base from Amazon,” said Jeff Becker, senior analyst at Forrester. “[Amazon] is bringing their supply chain expertise to pharmacy distribution, and with CVS being a leader, it needs to respond to that, and it makes sense to start a prescription delivery solution of their own; rolling it up in a package that looks and smells like Amazon Prime makes sense from a marketing standpoint.”

A CVS Prime-competitor isn’t going to steal Amazon share, but it can help it win where Amazon is less advantaged: in stores. The retailer has been modernizing store locations to improve service efficiency, including moves to put in place Apple-style cashierless checkout. It’s also using stores as delivery hubs. In June, CVS rolled out prescription delivery from all locations along with same-day delivery for a one-time fee of $8.99 in selected urban centers.

With the membership program, new insights will let the retailer better understand the triggers for physical visits.

“They’ll understand what are real trip divers for physical purchases and the drivers for what can be delivered, and what the difference is in basket composition overall,” said Curt Munk, svp and head of strategy at agency FCB Chicago’s retail group.

Brand trust and a holistic view of the customer from a data perspective are also important advantages over Amazon.

By moving prescriptions to a digital-first, delivery-based format, CVS is simply responding to customer expectations arising from other areas of retail — the “Amazon effect,” where goods are delivered to homes on a regular basis, and services are accessed through mobile devices. But its more cohesive view of overall customer health profiles and the convenience of physical locations can set it apart. Customers can review their prescription records through its mobile app and chat with pharmacists around the clock. CarePass lets members engage in live conversations with pharmacists who have secure access to their prescription history with CVS. 

“It’s hard to imagine anything CVS does as not being a data play in some manner; what CVS still has that Amazon doesn’t is a comprehensive, quantified portrait of how Americans manage their health,” said Daniel Black, strategy consultant at Vivaldi. “CVS has an undeniable human advantage over Amazon by offering timely, informed advice, flu shots and other services from credentialed healthcare professionals.”

As CVS’ acquisition of health insurer Aetna moves forward, keeping a close eye on customer health will positively affect the company’s bottom line, said Becker.

“This makes them a payer, and they have a much more vested stake in solidifying their population health efforts, ensuring patients are taking their medications and addressing any barriers to medication access,” he said.

The post How CVS’s 9,800 stores will boost its Prime-style membership program appeared first on Digiday.

Daily Harvest, the online meal delivery service that sells frozen soups, smoothies and bowls on a weekly or monthly basis, is opening a Manhattan pop-up on Nov. 14 to pull in potential customers.

The Daily Harvest “Refuel Station,” designed in partnership with creative agency The Gathery to look like a 1970s Palm Springs gas station, gives visitors free samples of several Daily Harvest products, a walk-through of its ingredient sourcing process, an explainer on the benefits of frozen foods, and a chance to win products with faux scratch tickets. Located at 446 Broadway in SoHo, customers can also buy individual items, like a Blueberry & Hemp smoothie or a Mushroom & Miso soup, and take them to go. The focus is on brand awareness and direct sales, rather than driving Daily Harvest’s weekly or monthly subscriptions (individual items aren’t available to purchase on the company’s website).

“This is meant to drive direct sales. The one thing we know about our customers is that they need to taste it to understand why it’s different,” said Daily Harvest CEO and founder Rachel Drori. “So we want to meet customers offline, and interact with them there.”

Daily Harvest launched in 2015 and has so far raised $43 million in funding in three rounds, with high-profile investors including Gwyneth Paltrow, Bobby Flay and Serena Williams, as well as firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. So far, it’s been running an online-only, subscription-only model, so testing the waters of new retail channels is the natural next step. Digitally native brands have moved offline, in both temporary and permanent stores, chasing a new outlet for customer acquisition and awareness as digital marketing plateaus; subscription brands have shifted focus to e-commerce, like Birchbox, or pivoted to a more flexible membership model, like MeUndies.

And scaling meal delivery services has been tested online. Blue Apron, which sells meal kits by subscription, is partnering with Jet.com after losing customers. Sakara Life, a digital brand selling fresh, prepared meals, power bars and other supplements, has started selling products in wellness retailers to grow awareness.

“Subscriptions give you a nice, tight grip on your customer, but there’s a much higher barrier to entry,” said Chris Paradysz, the founder of the agency PMX.

Drori said Daily Harvest is targeting a different customer than other meal services on the market — unlike meal kits, Daily Harvest prep only takes a few minutes, and since the products are frozen, they don’t perish. She said that so far, the brand has built awareness and acquired customers through all the usual digital marketing engines, with Instagram advertisements and podcast spots being among the biggest drivers. By testing physical retail through a pop-up store, Drori said there’s “no agenda” other than to introduce more people to Daily Harvest’s brand and food selection, but that the company will be paying attention to see how it performs.

“We’re proud of our ability in general as a company to test things, see how customers respond, and then react quickly,” said Drori.

Data influences Daily Harvest’s regular production schedule: It owns its supply chain, and can make new products on an eight-week cycle. To gather feedback from the pop-up, all Daily Harvest employees will take turns being on the grounds, talking to customers at checkout and as they go through the experience. Visitors will also be given cards when they enter the pop-up so they can record what flavors they liked best (there are both smoothie and lunch and breakfast samples on hand to try), which will then be given to the staff.

“Getting to interact with customers is fundamental to the soul of our business,” said Drori.

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The post Daily Harvest is testing offline retail with its first pop-up store appeared first on Digiday.