Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Offer Yehudai, president at Fyber. 2018 has seen a spate of ad networks purchasing supply chain companies. For instance, Criteo acquired Managed, AppLovin bought MAX and Tapjoy joined forces with Tapdaq. At first glance, these acquisitions can be… Continue reading »
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“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 Matt Sweeney, CEO at Xaxis. Despite prevalent misconceptions, programmatic advertising requires deep human input to properly manage, guide and meld the wealth of technologies and strategies in service of a… Continue reading »
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brand Safe To Come Back? Three advertisers – Geico, Samsung and Disney – accounted for more than 15% of spend on YouTube this year, according to an analysis by MediaRadar of the top 25 channels on YouTube via Google Preferred. Geico led the group… Continue reading »
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In a quest for more ad dollars, Spotify has been improving its self-serve platform in an effort to grow its ad business, which still lags behind the money the company makes from subscription revenue. Ad buyers, meanwhile, remain mixed on Spotify’s ability to drive performance and conversions from audio ads, but remain intrigued by the platform, especially as another key audio ad channel — podcasts — grows on Spotify.
Spotify’s global head of partner solutions, Danielle Lee, said the company plans to add more demographic and interest-based targeting and other audience features to its self-serve Audio Studio in 2019. Lee said the company’s first-party segments on self-serve have been pretty limited to basics like age and gender, but now they’re looking to introduce categories like “fitness enthusiasts” and “mom” based on listening habits.
Spotify also is creating an audience upload feature that allows select advertisers to match their known customers with the platform’s audience. Lee declined to share specifics on what identifiers they will introduce.
The focus on growing its ad business comes as most of Spotify’s revenue is still tied to the ad-free, subscription product — even though the majority of its monthly active users do not pay for the service. In its 2018 third-quarter earnings report, Spotify said about 10.5 percent of revenue is from ads and 57.1 percent of monthly active users are ad-supported (and many use ad blockers). Those numbers haven’t fluctuated significantly from Spotify’s 2017 data.
“Our goal is to grow all of our channels. The beauty we see through audio, specifically, is the opportunity to reach consumers in screen-less moments, [which is] is just growing with the proliferation of connected cars, connected speakers, gaming consoles. We see an opportunity for brands being relevant in those moments, adding value in those experiences as opposed to interrupting them,” Lee said.
Advertisers have mixed feelings about audio ads and Spotify. One direct-response advertiser said he doesn’t like audio ads because of the interruptive nature, though he noted podcasts can be an exception. Men’s health startup Ro has invested in digital ads, TV and out-of-home but hasn’t focused on audio ads due to lack of efficiency.
“While I haven’t run ads on Spotify in a few years, it’s always been a struggle to find sustainable, efficient growth from internet radio. Part of that comes with the territory when running ads on the free version of a product that also has a paid version with a more premium audience,” said Rob Schutz, Ro cofounder and CRO.
But other brands have paid for Spotify’s audio ads, video ads and branded playlists. Spotify said “thousands” of advertisers have used its self-serve product Ad Studio since it launched in September 2017. Spotify revealed in its 2018 second-quarter earnings report that more than 20 percent of the total ad-supported revenue is from Ad Studio and its programmatic products. Ad Studio is available in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia, and has a $250 minimum spend. Spotify also adopted Nielsen Brand Effect last year to improve its third-party verification.
Entertainment companies go “hand in hand” with audio ads, said Jenny Lang, svp, managing partner of integrated investment at UM Worldwide. Her agency also sees interest from retailers and small direct-response companies. As a large agency, UM either works directly with Spotify or buys programmatically. The self-serve platform is geared toward small businesses that want to make a quick campaign without using a programmatic system or working with Spotify, Lang said.
“I think music is still a standard on the plan. Ad Studio we haven’t used a lot, but we see a lot of benefits. Some of our smaller brands don’t have audio ads, [so] we could see them quickly create it A.S.A.P.,” Lang said.
In Ad Studio, Spotify charges between $0.015 and $0.025 per ad served, as tested by Digiday. Buyers using Ad Studio are limited to only audio ads with display creative. If a campaign is higher than $25,000, Spotify encourages a buyer to work with the company’s sales team, a spokesperson said. The sales team also can offer other ad formats like video and branded playlists. CPMs bought directly range depending on the format.
Emily Harris, an independent marketer, has used Spotify Ad Studio over the last year for clients who put on live music and community events such as Artist Home & Timber! Outdoor Music Festival. In Ad Studio, buyers can target Spotify users by location, genre of music, artists age and device.
“It’s great that a music event can target listeners of performers, especially headliners. It definitely helps build blanket awareness for folks who might not see our posters, display ads or hear our traditional radio spots,” Harris said.
But the self-serve platform itself is quite limited. In the future, Harris said she’d like to see more targeting capabilities such as the ability to target fans of performers “lower on the bill” and to target fans of similar artists. Harris said she’d also like to target more general interests, as ad buyers can on Facebook. Pixel tracking, similar to Facebook, is another item on Harris’ wish list, so she can see a conversion metric. Like many buyers, she uses a discount code on audio ads so she can attempt to track conversions. Harris declined to share specific conversion numbers but said Spotify “does seem successful with implanting impressions, but last touch conversions — and even clicks — are quite low.”
On the direct sales side, Spotify is expanding beyond its traditional ad units by encouraging more advertisers to create branded experiences. Spotify announced in January that brands could now sponsor Discover Weekly, its playlist of new music that is personalized to each listener every week.
“One thing I will tease is the fact we’re working with advertisers to participate in moments of discovery on the platform, [which is] what we’re really known for. The fact we get [our audience] so well and can really anticipate what they like what they need. Discover Weekly is our most coveted,” Lee said.
Beyond music, podcasts have been a growing interest of Spotify, buyers said. UM’s Lang said she’s consistently hearing from clients that they want to work with podcasts, whether that’s customizing their own or partnering with an existing podcast.
“Spotify is working closely with brands to create these customize experiences in [podcasts.] Spotify has great creative services. We’re really excited to experiment and see how we can enter in this podcast space. It’s such a hot topic. Every single brand wants to get into podcasts,” Lang said.
The post Spotify plans to add interest-based targeting to its self-serve platform appeared first on Digiday.
Platforms are notorious for offering advertisers free tools that also, surprise, collect data for the platforms. Amazon is no different.
Last August, Amazon launched the beta test for the Amazon Attribution pixel in the U.S. and Canada. Advertisers place the pixel on ads outside of the Amazon walled garden such as eBay and YouTube so that they can see if those placements contribute to a sale back on the site.
This article is behind the Digiday+ paywall.
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It’s a tough time for BuzzFeed, which has undergone a significant round of layoffs in an effort to build a more sustainable business. And yet BuzzFeed’s business is growing. The coming challenge for the company is not only in reducing a large cost base — the recent cuts mostly impacted its various content operations — but also dealing with a new reality in which BuzzFeed is facing more competition from other large entertainment sites and platforms and the fact that it’s no longer in “growth mode” anymore.
BuzzFeed’s recent round of layoffs cut deep: with the company’s workforce of 1,450 employees shrinking by 15 percent. The cuts were made to help the publisher be more consistently profitable, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said in a memo.
But BuzzFeed’s layoffs had a minimal impact on the ad sales team, according to a company spokesperson. The company, which has flirted with profitability over the years, reportedly hit $300 million in revenue last year. Overall revenues grew by double digits, said the spokesperson, who declined to comment on specific revenue figures.
Revenue growth is being driven by BuzzFeed’s decision to move beyond its initial mantra of all-native advertising. In 2017, the company finally embraced programmatic and display ads. Last year, BuzzFeed sold a show to Netflix (which has since been canceled) and a documentary film to Hulu, among other long-form video projects in development with streaming platforms, TV networks and film studios. BuzzFeed has also found ways to merge its growing commerce operation with advertising, leading to $50 million in sales in 2018.
And the ad business continues to grow with more dollars and clients in 2018 than the year prior, said Lee Brown, chief revenue officer of BuzzFeed.
“When I started four years ago, the ad business was one product — we have diversified that tremendously to include not only lists but quizzes, rich media, video that’s distributed across platforms, programmatic,” said Brown. “We’re also building in our commerce team and affiliate team, which is allowing us to offer performance-based marketing that complements our native business and programmatic business.”
Brown declined to comment on what profits BuzzFeed saw through its $50 million in branded commerce sales — commerce is notoriously a low-margin business — but said the company expects to grow that revenue stream “significantly” in 2019. Brown also said that “80 percent of clients are “buying more than just native from us.”
But as BuzzFeed grows its ad product offerings, the company also becomes less specialized when compared to other large entertainment- and news-centric publishers such as Vice Media, Vox Media and Insider Inc — all of which also offer programmatic, social and long-form video and commerce.
Some ad buyers said that new BuzzFeed ad products — especially programmatic video and display — make them less incentivized to do branded content or custom integration deals with the publisher.
“There’s still a demand for [BuzzFeed’s] custom video from clients, but the volume remains in pre-roll,” said Paul Marcum, CEO of social ad agency Big Finish Digital. “They can do both. But as someone who was one of the earliest advertisers on the platform — and saw their ability to do great branded content and custom integrations — once they made their inventory available through programmatic, that’s how people started buying. BuzzFeed has become another similar destination to many other entertainment sites right now.”
“A few years ago, we were doing some custom integrations with their site, including content creation, but these days our activity is limited to [private marketplace] video deals,” said Kaitlyn Boulos, vp of marketing for MDC Partners-owned Varick.
Video CPMs in BuzzFeed’s private programmatic marketplace are in the “teens,” Boulos said. “They are fairly priced for what you’re getting — cheaper than The Wall Street Journal but more expensive than longer-tail sites.”
All of Varick’s work with BuzzFeed now goes through the publisher’s PMP, with roughly 60 percent of the buys going toward video inventory.
“Perhaps BuzzFeed was a bit late to the game getting into programmatic, which hindered the ability to buy for companies like us,” said Boulos. “We want everyone to be programmatic. I understand the need to make something feel super special and unattainable, but that’s not how audiences and marketers see most platforms — and you can still command decent pricing [in programmatic].”
Programmatic “is a material part of the business,” said Brown, who declined to break out how much programmatic is responsible for overall ad revenue. “We’re also not materially seeing marketers going from native to programmatic. But it has enabled us to go to advertisers that are not investing in native content.”
There is still demand for BuzzFeed’s branded content — particularly around media brands such as Tasty. Brittany Rollheiser, director of digital investment at Mindshare, said the agency works with Tasty for several of its CPG brands, which are using formats such as hands-and-pans videos and shoppable videos to feature their products.
“We have used Tasty as a way to connect with younger audiences who aren’t currently buying our products,” Rollheiser said. “They are putting skin in the game and including offline sales studies to showcase the effectiveness of branded content.”
BuzzFeed’s prices for native and sponsored ad content and integrations are competitive with top publishers in the market, according to media buyers. While prices will vary by different clients and deals, BuzzFeed’s minimum ask for branded content deals, which would include production services provided by the publisher, is around $125,000, per two media buyers. This is in line with other prominent news publishers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, which generally have minimums in the range of $100,000, according to one of the buyers.
BuzzFeed declined to comment about its ad pricing and branded and commerce deal structures.
Ad buyers in general said they don’t expect the layoffs to have any immediate impact on how much they spend on BuzzFeed.
“For those who might be concerned about the changes to [BuzzFeed’s] business, there might be an awkward phase,” said Marcum. “But at the same time, we have yet to see anything that would truly shift the narrative, say, like a drop in perceived quality of content, a reduction in brand safety on BuzzFeed or a drop in traffic. If the end-user does not see the impact of a reorg — at least outside of the New York media and marketing bubble — it’s not going to be seen by advertisers much, either.”
It’s clear that BuzzFeed has achieved a certain level of audience and revenue scale in the digital publishing market. BuzzFeed reached 64.2 million unique visitors in December 2018, a number which has remained relatively flat when compared to January 2018, according to Comscore.
But is there a clear differentiator for BuzzFeed that would help it beat a competitive publisher on a branded content deal? Buyers said it comes down to the pitch, the idea and the execution. And, with Comscore numbers remaining relatively flat, has the audience also peaked for BuzzFeed?
Rollheiser and Boulos said they expect to spend about the same amount of ad dollars on BuzzFeed this year when compared to 2018.
“They have more competition — we’re kind of watching what’s going on in the Reddit world, albeit their audience is more niche than BuzzFeed’s,” said Boulos. “BuzzFeed’s brand still holds cache and they still have decent reach — I would put them in the top 10 to 15 percentile — but there are other strong contenders for our brands, which will only further fragment media dollars.”
Brown, meanwhile, said he remains confident about BuzzFeed’s ability to grow the ad business — along with other revenue areas.
“You can buy reach anywhere, but the relationship with the customer and the engagement that we can offer, you can’t get elsewhere — it’s really hard to do what we’re doing,” Brown said. “We feel good about our renewal rate.”
When asked what BuzzFeed’s renewal rate is with advertisers, Brown laughed and said, “I’m not going to tell you the renewal rate.”
The post For BuzzFeed’s business, revenue growth but more competition and pressure to diversify appeared first on Digiday.
Facebook feed casualties have piled up, from Little Things to Mic to Cooking Panda. But for Attn, a 4-year-old social news publisher that once boasted a quarter billion video views a month on Facebook, the past year has been about adjusting on the fly and diversifying its business.
The company, with $37 million in venture backing, has started making more content for brands and relying less on its own distribution muscle. It’s focused on producing digital content for TV shows, hopes to get a show of its own onto TV in 2019, and expects to turn itself into a mainstay in the small world of political and advocacy advertising, where budgets continue to migrate away into digital channels from television. The social video bread and butter of short clips with text overlaid on them is still around, but Attn is less likely to trumpet a “Facebook-first” approach compared to 2017.
In the process, Attn is wading into marketing-services territory typically marked by lower profit margins and increasingly stiff competition. But it’s encouraged by its progress. The startup raised a $15 million series C round of funding at an undisclosed valuation last September and “more than doubled” its revenue in 2018, co-founder Matthew Segal said, adding that he sees a path to profitability “very soon.” He declined to provide hard revenue figures.
“From the day we started this business, we were never so naive to think that any social platform’s interest would perfectly align with ours,” Segal said.
Like most other Facebook publishers, Attn’s news-feed video views slid dramatically last year. Its main page went from a high of nearly 250 million views in April 2018 to less than 50 million views in December 2018, according to Crowdtangle data. Its high view counts in March and April should come with an asterisk; 24 percent of Attn’s Facebook impressions in those months were paid for, according to BrandTotal data. Views from other Attn-owned Facebook pages, such as Attn:Video and Attn:Life, did little to make up the difference.
Much like Insider (or Mic), Attn reduced the raw number of videos it publishes to platforms while making each of them longer. The number of videos Attn uploaded to social platforms in the past three months dropped 16 percent, to 766, compared to the three months it published from March to May in 2018, according to Tubular Labs data. John Cassillo, a media analyst at TVREV, pointed out that most of the content uploaded most recently ran between one and five minutes; during the spring, 75 percent of Attn’s content topped out at two minutes.
Attn is not abandoning Facebook. It has four shows on Facebook Watch, including “Your Food’s Roots,” a show about food starring Zoey Deschanel and “Undivided,” part of the inaugural batch of news programs Facebook paid publishers to make last year. It is also one of a small handful of publishers making content specifically for Facebook-owned Instagram TV, including a show hosted by former Vice President Joe Biden.
Attn also continues to crow about its prowess as a branded content producer. A Facebook video it produced for Adidas was the second-most-viewed piece of branded content on Facebook in 2018, according to Brandtale data. It recently produced a video for Beats by Dre headphones starring Dak Prescott that has piled up over 43,000 shares.
In January 2018, the company announced it was working with Paramount Television on a linear TV adaptation of its Facebook series “America Versus.” The series remains in development, Segal said, and there’s no air date yet set. The company claims it has several other shows in development. It contributed a few segments to a documentary that aired on the cable channel Freeform. To cozy up more closely to TV companies, it produces after-show content for television programs including “Grown-ish” and “Good Trouble.”
Attn has also busied itself making video for brands. According to a spokesperson, Attn played no role in distributing “around 40 percent” of the branded content it produced last year it had no hand in distributing. In 2017, it distributed 90 percent of the branded content it made, the spokesperson said.
Segal also hopes to make further inroads with political groups, nonprofits and other cause-driven organizations.
It has a long way to go among those advertisers. Andy Amsler, principal at Mothership Strategies, a digital ad agency focused on progressive causes and politics, said that, among the 120 campaigns it ran in 2018, Attn never came up as a possible source of investment.
Chris Talbot, a Democratic consultant and the founder of Talbot Digital, noted that nonprofits, political groups and candidates tend to be way behind on spending there.
“There’s a growing profile for high-profile ad possibilities,” Talbot said. “But it’s far, far behind consumer marketers’ investment.”
The post ‘We were never naive’: Formerly Facebook-first, Attn recalibrates appeared first on Digiday.
Magazine group Immediate Media has found a way to drive up the scale of its targetable audience inventory while reducing its reliance on third-party cookies to boost scale. It’s a formula that prompted a 135 percent digital ad revenue spike in the last three months of 2018, the publisher said.
The specialist-interests media owner, which has 1,3000 staff and publishes consumer brands including BBC GoodFood, TopGear and Radio Times, has grappled for years with the same issue many publishers face: scaling its first-party data audience segments to entice ad buyers.
Both the arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation and browsers like Apple’s Safari and Firefox now blocking third-party cookies have incentivized publishers to push harder to find ways to reduce reliance on third-party cookies. As such, rather than shovel additional reach onto its existing portfolio of 75 consumer brands by supplementing its first-party audience data with third-party data — Immediate Media has decided to wring more value out of its existing audience.
To do so, it scrapped its legacy data-management platform in favor of one that doesn’t rely on third-party cookies and that can identify fleeting visits from readers who come for a specific piece of content, like a recipe, then leave. The previous DMP took between 24 and 48 hours to identify those fleeting visitors — too long a gap to be able to serve targeted ads to them, according to Dominic Perkins, digital ad strategy director of Immediate Media.
The new DMP, supplied by Permutive, has unlocked a larger set of audience data as a result of being faster and not reliant on third-party cookies, added Perkins. Before the transition to this DMP last year, Immediate Media could only identify 20 percent of its audience. Now it can identify 80 percent, increasing the amount of targetable inventory that can be sold by a factor of seven, according to the publisher. Immediate Media had 11 million monthly unique users across its titles last November, according to ComScore.
The additional data insights give the publisher a stronger pitch when speaking with agencies looking for first-party audiences but at a scale they’ve not previously been able to offer, added Perkins. “The whole point of quality content is to generate really good behavioral insights,” he said. “We are the owners of the content and, therefore, that data. It is something we can build out more than any third-party data segment and be very transparent on what that data segment looks like.”
For instance, on BBC Good Food, data on what ingredients and recipes users are viewing can create new segments, like vegans. On other titles, such as its Radio Times, the DMP can create segments based on which types of TV channels and content people have searched for or clicked on — like whether they’re most interested in Netflix content over Sky’s. The media owner has gathered an additional 120 new data points per user and created a user ID for that visitor. That enables Immediate Media to then offer an unduplicated view of that user and their habits across all their sites.
Ad buyers can choose how they use the data — either as part of a direct-sold deal, or programmatic guaranteed deals — a type of deal for which there is increasing agency appetite, according to Perkins. The publisher is also willing to sell the data separately to its own inventory, enhance open marketplace buys, and as the backbone for second-party data partnerships.
The arrival of GDPR has triggered a renewed thirst among agencies for ad inventory they feel confident is compliant with the law. Agencies like GroupM want to establish even closer relationships with premium publishers with how they can deal directly so as to mitigate any potential risk of buying non-compliant inventory. A such, agencies are on the lookout for how they can access more first-party data.
“Our buying principles do prioritize first-party data ahead of third-party data,” said Ryan Storrar, svp and head of media activation for EMEA at Essence. “Deals where we are buying a specific audience defined by a publisher’s first-party data are those that we prioritize because we have a greater level of confidence in the quality of the data as publishers are accountable for the collection and segmentation.” With that in mind, Immediate Media’s ability to increase the scale of its first-party data selling, is “compelling,” he added.
GDPR isn’t the only reason publishers are pushing for ways to capitalize more on their first-party data. Apple’s anti-tracking ITP update, which blocks the use of third-party cookies for ad tracking on its Safari browser, has also played a part. The update is partly why an increasing amount of the web is becoming invisible to those still reliant on third-party tracking pixels, according to Joe Root, co-founder of Permutive.
“Cookies aren’t dead, they just can’t be read in the same way now,” said Root. “The trend where browsers have prioritized giving users more control of their privacy is a good thing, but it has created this hidden web of advertising, where between 40 and 50 percent of the web is now invisible. Permutive was built not with third-party cookies in mind but instead for a world that is browser dominated,” he added.
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