Month: October 2018

On Oct. 3, 2016, Facebook introduced Marketplace, a destination for people to find–and make offers for–items directly through Facebook’s mobile application. Today–Oct. 3, 2018–Marketplace turns two years old. Vice president of Marketplace Deborah Liu, who began overseeing the feature last September, said in a Newsroom post that more than one out of three people in…

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Abbey Thomas, chief marketing officer at Tremor Video DSP. The median number of years employees ages 25 to 34 stay with an employer is 2.8, according to the Bureau of… Continue reading »

The post Turning The Tables On Ad Tech Turnover appeared first on AdExchanger.

RockYou specializes in acquiring down-and-out digital properties and managing them through their decline. The San Francisco-based company adopted that business model because it nearly went out of business itself in 2009, when Facebook decided it was done with social gaming apps on its platform. At the time, RockYou was a top social gaming app developer… Continue reading »

The post How RockYou CEO Revitalizes Distressed Media Properties appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The RAMP Is Up IPG now officially owns Acxiom Marketing Solutions and LiveRamp is $2.3 billion richer. The deal closed on Monday – and guess how former Acxiom (now current LiveRamp) CEO Scott Howe found out. “Michael Roth [the CEO of IPG] came up… Continue reading »

The post Ramp Stands On Its Own As IPG Closes on Acxiom; Amazon Seeks To Grow Video Ad Supply appeared first on AdExchanger.

USAA believes augmented reality can help customers make decisions more quickly, and it’s testing that theory on car buying.

USAA customers who are part of a trial can log into a standalone car-buying app with their unique banking information, and then use their phones to scan cars they’re shopping in order to pull up information about the model, along with insurance and financing information.

The San Antonio-based financial services organization, which serves 12.4 million active and retired military members, then combines information about purchase intent (for example, car price and model information) with a customer’s transaction history to speed up the shopping process. The app uses a visual recognition tool from AR tech company Blippar to recognize any car made after 2000, and within minutes, it calls up car prices, insurance quotes, and information on similar vehicles for sale in the area. Because the app is connected to a customer’s transaction history, it’s able to accurately predict insurance prices that align with the customer’s credit profile. While USAA offers the insurance and loan quotes, car-pricing information is served up by car pricing and information platform Truecar.

“What we’re looking at with our strategy is a simpler way to engage our membership — the app is about car shopping and buying; in today’s world, if you want to start a car-buying experience, you have to go to someone’s website and start laying out a series of drop down menus,” said Patrick Kelly, avp of digital product development at USAA. “Through our computer vision technology we’ve eliminated the need for that.”

Kelly said USAA considers the app an AR tool because of two capabilities: the ability to use computer vision technology to recognize an object in front of the camera, and because it can quickly provide details about the recognized object on the screen. On top of that, it’s able to add loan and insurance prices based on a customer’s financial profile — a set of information that would typically require the customer to spend a lot of time consulting various websites.

The app, which will be tested on between 500 and 1,000 USAA members, will give USAA an idea of how customers will interact with the AR tool and whether additional features will be required to enhance ease of use, Kelly added. USAA is not alone among banks and financial services companies dabbling in AR to help customers better connect with products. In March, Capital One announced that it would be rolling out an AR-enabled tool within a few months (it has still yet to launch) and prior attempts have made by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and U.K. bank Halifax dating back as far as 2011 for the purposes of home buying.

Despite the lack of wide adoption from prior attempts in financial services to use AR, Kelly said advances in smartphone technology (for example, the iPhone ARKit tool) and a higher smartphone adoption rate mean the time is right to go full steam on the technology as a way to improve the effectiveness of customer interactions with financial institutions.

“I’m reluctant to say limitless [possibilities], but I do see many applications. For retail financial services, it’s one of the things that helps people make the best decision; what AR does for us is it gives an opportunity to be earlier in the process of performing a transaction — it’s an opportunity to not be heavy handed, but just give the information to you that will hopefully help you make a more informed decision,” he said.

Despite multiple potential uses for AR in financial services, it’s early days for the technology, and USAA is making a bet that user adoption will grow through advances in the technology. For now, AR as applied to financial services is more of a nice-to-have than a must-have, a tool to play with for early adopters. Brand marketers have also yet to be fully on board with the technology. According to a Forrester study carried out last year, only 5 percent of brand marketers were using AR. Many brands, including L’Oréal, have already experimented with AR but few if any of these initiatives have scaled, the study reported.

“L’Oréal’s app Make Up Genius seems like an outlier with dozens of millions of downloads, [and] the reality is that regular AR app usage is still limited according to several former L’Oréal executives Forrester interviewed,” wrote Forrester principal analyst Thomas Husson.

To go fully mainstream, the combination of an easy user interface, a compelling value proposition, and effective marketing is essential, argues Aite senior analyst Greg Donaldson.

For now, USAA’s AR test is confined to a group of volunteer customer product testers keen on exploring its capabilities. AR has potentially transformative potential in the auto insurance area, especially if customers can take pictures of their vehicles and claim processors can view the images overlaid over what they ideally should look like, Donaldson said. Beyond insurance, however, AR also has the potential to help staff members at banks and financial services companies more effectively communicate with customers through the use of AR-enabled tools as visualization aids, making abstract financial products seem real and tangible.

“It could change the game in terms of what’s possible for [bank staff members] to convey visually,” said Atul Hirpara, CEO of AVA Retail, a tech company which works with retailers and banks. “With the right tools, it could make products more palatable for the customer.”

The post To change the way customers shop for big-ticket items, USAA is betting on AR appeared first on Digiday.

The quality of the publishers included in Facebook’s new top-shelf video ad program can vary, depending on whether an ad buyer considers National Geographic’s programming to be on par with MaxNoSleeves, a comedian with 220,000 Facebook followers known for his “dude fashion reviews.”

Facebook has begun selling video ads through a program called In-Stream Reserve. Similar to YouTube’s Google Preferred program, In-Stream Reserve puts a velvet rope around Facebook’s most prized video inventory and sells it as a standalone package. However, what Facebook considers prized programming may not match with advertisers’ expectations, especially among TV ad buyers who are accustomed to buying individual programs on linear TV and may be unfamiliar with Facebook shows like “Fear Pong” and “Truth or Drink,” which along with MaxNoSleeves are also part of In-Stream Reserve.

When Facebook pitched the program as a test earlier this year, it asked advertisers to commit to spend $750,000 over three months. The price tag has since dropped to roughly $250,000 over three months, according to two agency execs with knowledge of the matter. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on pricing.

Among ad buyers’ frustrations with In-Stream Reserve are the wide range of publishers and influencers that Facebook has pooled together and the relative lack of control it’s giving advertisers. Unlike with regular pre-roll and mid-roll video ads on Facebook, advertisers cannot specify which publishers’ videos they do or don’t want their ads to appear against when buying through In-Stream Reserve. Also unlike with Facebook’s regular in-stream video ads, advertisers can only target their In-Stream Reserve campaigns by the audience’s age and gender, which will be verified by Nielsen.

These limits in control leave advertisers to decide whether they are comfortable with their ads running alongside the publishers and influencers that Facebook has selected.

Facebook provides advertisers with the full list of publishers and influencers whose videos are included in In-Stream Reserve and updates the list each month. The list is based on factors like follower count, level of intentional viewing and engagement they receive (such as people searching for their videos on Facebook) and their level of returning viewers, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

Based on inventory lists that Facebook shared with ad buyers earlier this year, the 100-plus publishers and creators included in In-Stream Reserve ranged from major TV networks and sports leagues to traditional and digital publishers to individual influencers and even a few zoos, according to copies of two separate lists reviewed by Digiday that contain the inventory for a given month.

For example, Business Insider, CNN, Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, Conde Nast, Fremantle Media, National Geographic and Tastemade appeared on both lists. One list included the Big Ten Network, Rolling Stone and Travel + Leisure. The latter list included Vice and Jukin Media. Both lists included lesser-known influencers and publishers such as MaxNoSleeves and Jay Shetty as well as Cut, an upstart media company that has multiple Watch shows in In-Stream Reserve, such as “Fear Pong” and “Truth or Drink.” Advertisers’ lack of familiarity with the latter programming and their audiences makes buying In-Stream Reserve something of a gamble, particularly in light of the lack of targeting available.

“No idea who’s buying this,” said one agency executive after reviewing the lists.

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The post Ad buyers question the quality of Facebook’s premium video ads appeared first on Digiday.

People will say all kinds of things to get what they want, whether it’s a kid hoping for a new toy or a company angling to do a deal. During the merger process, acquirer and acquiree make promises they won’t keep and claims they hope the other won’t try to corroborate. “If it’s not in the contract, it’s not real,” says one media executive who has gone through the M&A wringer. Here are the 10 things buyers and sellers all say — and what they really mean, according to four veterans of media M&A.

Media consolidation has ballooned, with older media companies racing to stay ahead and younger ones trying to stay afloat. In the first half of 2018, the amount of money going toward media mergers and acquisitions soared by 440 percent year over year to $323 billion, per Thomson Reuters. Consolidation begets more consolidation. That pressure to get deals done can push acquirer and acquiree to make promises they won’t keep and claims they hope the other won’t try to corroborate. “If it’s not in the contract, it’s not real,” says one media executive who has gone through the M&A wringer. Here are the 10 things buyers and sellers all say — and what they really mean, according to four veterans of media M&A.

The post The farce of the deal: what lies buyers and sellers tell during the M&A process and what they mean appeared first on Digiday.

On Monday night, the PlayStation Theater was packed with ridiculous characters with giant heads wearing outrageous costumes. There also were a bunch of brand mascots who won awards like Icon of the Year and International Icon Award and the Icon Retirement Award and the coveted Icon Icon Award. It was, as the kids say, lit.

Meanwhile, at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, the struggle continued on Tuesday as attendees tried to navigate long lines, weird rules that forced people to leave the building and get their bags checked again in order to re-enter, broken escalators and the creeping suspicion that maybe this venue wasn’t such a great idea. (It’s still better than Times Square).

Advertisers are waking up to OTT, but challenges remain
A common complaint in any honest conversation about the world of ad-supported, streaming video is that advertising has not caught up with consumer adoption.

Make no mistake: advertising is growing in over-the-top environments. Hulu topped $1 billion in ad revenue for the first time last year. And Roku, with the largest market share of OTT devices in the U.S., expects its ad revenue to surpass the money the company makes in selling streaming dongles and boxes.

But one issue is that for many marketers, “OTT” is not its own line-item in the marketing and advertising budgets. One top entertainment marketing exec told Digiday that Hulu, for instance, sits in a premium content category alongside ABC, HBO, Netflix and other major TV networks. This is separate from the budget this marketer devotes to digital publishers and video creators such as BuzzFeed and Group Nine Media. One is not necessarily better than the other, he said, but it shows how this marketer thinks about these different companies.

The marketer admitted that it expects to do more with streaming video companies going forward both from ad sales and content marketing perspectives.

But even with all of the consumption that is happening on connected TV screens, there are still only a handful of apps that enough people care about for marketers to care. Beyond Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, networks such as CBS, Showtime and HBO have been able to snag several millions of subscribers. As one prominent TV ad sales exec said, “OTT is TV. It’s just a different way of delivering the same shows and movies and sports that people have always watched.” This makes it difficult to separate out OTT in a marketer’s budget.

Hulu’s director of ad sales research, Asaf Davidov, said that Hulu is beginning to see more interest from direct-to-consumer advertisers such as Blue Apron, Peloton and Dollar Shave Club. The challenge here is that these marketers need greater amounts of real-time attribution in an environment where measurement remains an overall challenge.

“Connected TV is not ‘cookie-able’ like PCs and it doesn’t have a mobile ID like tablets,” Davidov said. “Being able to solve for that will be important.”

Solving for measurement shouldn’t come from the big measurement firms alone, Davidov argued. Instead of a “one-size-fits-all” approach to measurement in OTT environments, Davidov said it’s on every OTT publisher to work with Nielsen, comScore and other measurement firms in a way that makes sense for what their business model is. For instance, Hulu is both a branding medium like traditional TV but also provides real-time data for marketers that’s more akin to digital media.

“Ultimately, it starts with advertisers and agencies who understand the value of OTT and are now realizing that we need to be even more precise in how we measure this,” Davidov said.

— Sahil Patel

Overheard
“Even if a client wanted attribution, we couldn’t afford it.”

“Is this the right way out? It smells like urine.” — Attendee, taking the panel exit route to the street

“Data, data, data. Really? You’re using data to get a better understanding of who your customers are? That’s incredible.” — Research exec at agency

“There’s a lot of failing upwards.” — Marketing exec

Quality control
Digital was supposed to bring us ads that were measurable and precisely targeted, but the reality has been a lot more complicated. Data, privacy and quality ads were hot topics Tuesday, but the gripes were familiar. Brands are starting to pay more attention to where their ads appear, but many still move slowly and still want large reach at cheap CPMs, leading to bad or embarrassing ad experiences. “Probably a lot of cord cutters in the rooms. Sometimes I’m seeing the same house ad over and over — we can frequency cap, people, we can target!” said an exasperated Jed Dederick, vp of business development for The Trade Desk. There are rating systems and quality badges for ads — perhaps too many. It’s unclear who if anyone should regulate fraudulent sites and if a government overlord needs to step in to fix the problem. For all the complaining and finger-pointing, Facebook and Google weren’t being blamed for everything, though.

— Lucia Moses

GDPReality
It’s four months into Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation taking effect, and other privacy regulations being adopted in the U.S. and elsewhere, and the digital ad market has managed to keep operating. But the ad ecosystem is still processing the industry impact. Agencies are scrambling to show clients they’re ready while quality publishers whose relationship with audiences are wondering what happened to the advantage they were supposed to have in a consent-driven world.

After years of giving away their content for free, publishers haven’t done a good job of explaining why people are being shown targeted ads. “Publishers have backed themselves into a corner by not educating consumers on the value of their products,” said Glen Ames, chief product officer at Captify. “People don’t understand the value of advertising. It’s an industry problem that’s got to be solved. Content has always cost money.”

At the same time, there’s a sense that in the new era of privacy, dealing with customers’ data has never been more delicate than ever. “It’s a make or break moment — if we misuse that data, we are all screwed,” said Megan Clarken, president of Nielsen’s Watch.

— Lucia Moses

[Your problem here]
Personalization is held up as a panacea for all kinds of digital business problems. But to marketers focused on ecommerce, it still looks mostly like a minefield.

Go too far with personalization, and you risk being perceived as creepy by consumers. Act too hands-off, and you miss your chance to build loyalty. Marketers still lack the information they need to do personalization well. The most valuable information is data that most consumers don’t want to part with.

And no matter how much you personalize your product, be prepared to screw up a lot. “Most of the algorithms you’re going to test for personalization are going to be wrong,” said Sam Crosby, a product manager at eBay responsible for integrating programmatic advertising into its product.

— Max Willens

Coming Up
9:00 a.m.: “The Evolution of the Ad-Supported Business Model” with Spotify, Refinery29 and The Washington Post.
9:30 a.m.: “Trust and Transparency in Influencer Marketing” with ANA and Unilever
10:15 a.m.: Stan Chudnovsky, the head of Facebook Messenger, takes the stage to talk successful messaging strategies
1 p.m.: Digiday’s Kerry Flynn joins Fullscreen to talk about the modern gamer
2:30 p.m.: “Breaking Through the Permission Barrier” with Accenture Interactive’s CEO
4 p.m.: Digiday’s Kerry Flynn is at it again talking about how to use data to drive sales growth with Brooks Brothers and American Eagle
5 p.m.: Kerry Flynn is hosting an AI game show with Xaxis
5 p.m.: Digiday’s In & Out game show, with GE, Giphy and Equinox, where Digiday’s Shareen Pathak will discuss the most tired and wired concepts in advertising.

The post Advertising Week Briefing: ‘There’s a lot of failing upwards’ appeared first on Digiday.

Quip is the latest direct-to-consumer company to start selling its goods at Target, joining Harry’s razors, Casper mattresses and Native deodorant.

But the Brooklyn-based electric toothbrush company’s deal with Target is unique and an approach that could become popular with traditional retailers looking to appeal to younger consumers and digital companies seeking to scale, retail experts said.

Quip is selling starter kits for $25 at all 1,800 Target stores and Target.com, but if people want to buy refill brushes, they have to buy them from Quip’s site. The approach, said Simon Enever, Quip founder and CEO, is meant to help the company scale but still keep customers coming back to Quip’s own site.

As a subscription service, Quip profits as long as its customers reorder brush refills. Quip doesn’t share how many subscribers it has, but claims nearly 100 percent of people who purchase a Quip toothbrush will subscribe for refills (as with other electronic toothbrushes, Quip brush refills only fit its own toothbrushes). Last week, the company said it had sold one million brushes.

The sales approach is new to Target, a spokesperson said. In the case of other DTC brands, customers can buy all their products at Target, too.

This approach has advantages when it comes to data collection for Quip and Target, since both are interested in how consumers will react to the online-to-offline model. There’s a redeemable code on all starter kits for a free refill, which Quip can use to see which customers buy from Target and then subscribe from Quip’s website.

In the case of Target, it will be able to see how their own shoppers convert to the online shop of an outside company while providing a new type of product for younger customers.

Alice Fournier, vp of e-commerce and digital at Kantar Retail, said she expects more of these type of partnerships to develop as offline and online shopping continues to blur.

“Target obviously recognizes that their in-store retail and online audience is in line with the profile of Quip customers,” said Jim Fosina, CEO of consultancy Fosina Marketing Group.

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