Month: January 2019

The past two years have seen a rush of consortiums, coalitions and ad tech products that all hope to standardize online IDs to improve match rates. But industry leaders, for-profit startup and nonprofit initiatives can have very different ideas on how to solve that problem. “The question is which one of these models will gain… Continue reading »

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Cheddar CEO Jon Steinberg will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 23-24. AT&T began rolling out Cheddar across its video platforms DirecTV, DirecTV Now and U-verse TV last month. Cheddar has also broadened its reach on other media over the last few months. AT&T announced the Cheddar deal just days after Axios reported that… Continue reading »

The post How AT&T Completes Cheddar’s ‘Journey’ Into Every OTT Skinny Bundle In The Country appeared first on AdExchanger.

“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 Orchid Richardson, vice president and managing director of the Data Center of Excellence at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).  Lexus recently released the first ad written by AI – and… Continue reading »

The post AI Is Eating Advertising – And 2019 Will Be Critical For Getting It Right appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. 5G Whiz This year we’ll see the first wave of commercial 5G cellular networks, which will revolutionize smartphones and the Internet. Although the biggest societal benefits of 5G will come in areas such as remote surgery a connected cars, 5G will also be a… Continue reading »

The post The Future, Brought To You By 5G; Yet Another OTT Streaming Service Brought To You By Comcast? appeared first on AdExchanger.

Reddit has been around for more than 13 years, but the platform’s marketing department is still relatively new. In an interview with Digiday, Reddit’s vp of marketing and business development, Roxy Young, explained how the company established its marketing organization in 2018 and plans to build on it in 2019 — starting at CES.

Did the ways in which Reddit markets itself change in 2018, such as by advertising in newer places like TV or podcasts?
I wouldn’t say that things have changed dramatically in 2018. Once we established our brand scorecard and got an understanding of where we were in terms of recognition, relevance and reputation, we were then able to dial in the various channels and partnerships that we wanted to leverage. We also have, for example, a partnership with WBUR, and we produce the podcast called “The Endless Thread,” where we’re able to surface stories from Reddit communities that help share different perspectives from all of these various communities.

How specifically did Reddit dial in the various marketing channels and partnerships? Which ones became more of a priority in 2018 than in 2017 and which went the other way?
I joined the company in mid-2017. The marketing team is relatively new and nascent. Over the last year and a half, we’ve been growing and formalizing the various aspects of marketing: marketing to consumers, marketing to advertisers, working with media partners. So I would say that throughout 2018 we’ve been putting some more structure and strategy around those teams based on those brand metrics that we’re trying to move.

What exactly have you done to put in more structure and strategy?
These are very simple things. Implementing roadmaps across the teams that are laddering back to our overall company goals and objectives, and ensuring that all of our strategies are aligning with the mission of the company, which is to create community and belonging for everyone at Reddit. It’s just taken a little while to grow and establish the teams and get a proper strategy and roadmap in place.

How much of Reddit’s marketing to date is done in-house?
Reddit does not have any agencies of record right now. Everything we do is in-house. Over the last year and a half, as we’ve been building the teams and putting more structure around these teams, their charters and their strategies, we’ve laid a great foundation. I think as you move into 2019, we’re excited to carry that forward and put Reddit out in the consumer world in a more proactive way.

What are Reddit’s marketing priorities for 2019, especially after laying that foundation in 2018?
Growing active communities. Community is really at the forefront of everything that we do at Reddit, and I think that in 2018 we really identified that people who are returning regularly to Reddit are doing so because of the specific communities. The vast majority of them who when we ask them why are you continuing to come back to Reddit, it’s finding that community that’s really special to them.

Do you expect to experiment with newer ways to market Reddit in 2019, like TV or a pop-up event?
In 2019, one of the things that we are thinking about if Reddit is often at the center of these cultural moments. So one of our key strategies for 2019 is to be more proactive in identifying how we can create unique and interesting moments on Reddit, whether that be 100 percent organic through our community or in partnership with a strong brand partner. We’ve seen these happen in the past. For example, a few years ago one of our April Fool’s programs gave people the ability to put a pixel down on a huge digital canvas, and we had this collaborative social experiment that created this super interesting art piece that was all community generated. It was a really special and unique moment that was a way of Reddit quote-unquote marketing itself, showing the power of community and people coming together.

2019 starts for many marketers with CES. Reddit will be at CES. Why is it important for Reddit to be at CES?
Reddit is really looking forward to CES as a way to kick off the year and connect in person with our partners. Additionally, as the team has grown, we’ll have new members of our team, specifically our agency development team, our measurement and insight team, that will be on the ground and engaging with partners.

The post Reddit plans to be a more proactive marketer in 2019 appeared first on Digiday.

Forbes has dangled various carrots in front of its contributors to get them to post more. Its latest? An artificial intelligence tool that writes a rough draft for them.

Over the summer, the business publisher, which just had its most profitable year in more than a decade, rolled out a new CMS, called Bertie, which recommends article topics for contributors based on their previous output. Now it’s going one step further, testing a tool that writes rough versions of articles that contributors can simply polish up, rather than having to write a full story from scratch. The tool is currently available to Forbes’ editorial staff and senior contributors in North America, and will be rolled out to all of its contributors in North America and Europe in the first quarter of 2019.

With Bertie, a contributor who writes regularly about the automobile industry might open up the tool to find the makings of an article about Tesla, complete with links to relevant, related articles published both on Forbes and elsewhere. The tool will surface images that might improve the story as well. Bertie is part of a broader focus on using artificial intelligence to make publishing more efficient for Forbes staff, and to make it as easy as possible for visitors to consume multimedia content on Forbes’ sites, said Forbes Media’s new chief digital officer, Salah Zalatimo. “Anything we can do to make it easier and smarter to publish,” said Zalatimo, who previously served as Forbes’ chief product officer. “That’s the loyalty we bring [our contributors].”

Though contributor networks have fallen out of fashion for some publishers recently, Forbes continues to embrace its own network. About a year ago, it modified its contributor program so all of its members, some 2,500 people, are paid a minimum of $250 per month, with payments rising based on the number of loyal readers they accumulate. Those contributors are supervised by members of the Forbes editorial staff, which totals nearly 150, Forbes CEO Mike Federle said.

The contributors produce a majority of the nearly 300 pieces of content Forbes publishes per day. As such, their needs represent a priority for Forbes’s product team, which regularly invites top contributors into the office for meetings about how to better serve them. The AI tool in particular was developed partly to meet contributor needs, Zalatimo said.

This tool is not designed to produce something that a contributor or reporter would feel comfortable publishing as is. Instead, Zalatimo said, they are more like thought-starters, designed to get contributors’ creative juices flowing. That’s partly a function of artificial intelligence’s limitations, and partly because reporters and contributors would rather make the pieces their own, adding insights and reporting that the AI might not be able to find.

Bertie adds Forbes to the list of publishers using artificial intelligence products to help drive editorial output. The Washington Post’s Heliograf tool, which generates short stories based on structured data about things like election results or Olympics events, has generated thousands of stories since it was introduced two years ago; Reuters’ Lynx Insights tool has been helping the business publisher crank out stories since March 2018, and the Associated Press is years into using AI to write stories on topics including company earnings and minor league sports.

These tools are all part of a broader trend of publishers trying to maintain high levels of editorial output while improving efficiency.

“Any sort of content creation-focused organization is pressured to make timely content and manage their costs,” said Ron Schmelzer, the principal analyst at Cognilytica, a market research firm focused on artificial intelligence. “This is smack-dab in the middle of that trend. We’re going to see more of these tools to help with some of this volume-based flow.”

Forbes, for its part, sees the benefits of its tool in other ways. The publisher declined to answer questions about whether the tool was enabling staffers and contributors to increase their output, but a spokesman said its site has doubled the number of loyal visitors — people who visit more than once per month — it attracts every month since rolling out the new CMS in July. Since that time, traffic has increased as well, hitting a 12-month high of 65 million monthly uniques in November 2018, according to Comscore.

The post Forbes built a robot to pre-write articles for its contributors appeared first on Digiday.

Buffy, a startup selling eco-friendly and environmentally sustainable down comforters, isn’t following the direct-to-consumer brand playbook.

The brand, which launched online in November of 2017, was built on familiar DTC tactics. It cuts out retail partners and runs ads on Instagram to raise awareness among millennial shoppers. It also positions itself as an environmentally sound choice for those customers — every comforter is made using recycled plastic bottles and sustainable eucalyptus fibers.

But the DTC model was mostly a launch strategy. Buffy hasn’t raised venture capital funding, which has allowed it optimize to profitability early in its life instead of chasing growth and scale to justify a valuation. It started selling third-party on Amazon in addition to its own site (something other digital brands have sworn against doing) and its CEO, Paul Shaked, has realistic ideas about how quickly the company can actually grow. Buffy opened its first pop-up store in New York in December and plans to launch its second product this year.

“There’s this trope of cutting out the middleman and therefore delivering more value and more affordable products to the customer, but it’s fluff for a lot of folks,” said Shaked. “Brands aren’t passing on savings in a big way when you consider how much they’re spending on growth. But for us we do it to try to make our products as affordable as possible. We don’t consider that our innovation, we consider that table stakes.”

Buffy is part of a growing cohort of digitally native brands that are prioritizing longevity over fast growth out of the gates. It’s a sign that the category’s maturing: In the past, brands saddled with millions in VC-funding could quash competition by outspending them on flashy marketing campaigns and brand awareness. With customer acquisition becoming prohibitively expensive, young brands like Hims and Rothy’s, in addition to Buffy, are turning their attention to loyalty plays and long-term growth plans.

“There’s an idea that you can ‘blitz scale’ in retail right now — scale something so quickly and make it so available with technology to power it. That’s a fallacy,” said Richie Siegel, the founder of retail advisory company Loose Threads. “The scaling of consumer companies is a much more linear path. It’s not exponential.”

That mindset led Buffy’s team to decide to sell on Amazon, a decision that Shaked said he’s still “wrapping his head around.” But, with the goal of making sustainable bedding more readily available and affordable, he said Amazon is fitting, with the goal to get more product into more people’s homes.

“What Amazon represents is a way to get the word out and get product into people’s hands. If you look at it just from a business standpoint, Amazon is the world’s marketplace and they do so much so well, and they represent a door into everyone’s home in a way,” said Shaked. “For us, I think recognizing those opportunities as non-threatening to our brand is important. It’s not something that gets in the way of people going to our site, so I don’t see it as a problem. It’s a way to leverage technology.”

Since Buffy’s site still makes up the majority of the company’s sales, Shaked sees Amazon as as much of a marketing play as Instagram. It drives awareness alongside sales. But, the company doesn’t have direct access to the customers that buy through Amazon. As a third-party seller, Buffy has more insight into the demographics of its Amazon customers, but those sellers are prohibited from interacting with their customers directly, a detriment for any DTC company built on an open flow of communication between brand and customer. According to Shaked, the lack of transparency for customer information on Amazon is a trade-off for volume.

Buffy’s first physical store, a temporary pop-up in Soho, is where Shaked sees customer interaction taking place. But while brands like Casper and Parachute eye big store network expansions to fuel offline growth, Shaked said every decision the brand makes prioritizes profit.

“It’s hard to say we’ll open a bunch of stores anytime soon. That’s a really big feat, and we’re trying not to grow too fast as well. That’s not what success looks like — we’re not just going to go out and raise $10 million tomorrow and open 20 stores and hope it works,” said Shaked. “If we ever do raise money it will be on the premise of retaining profitability. Especially when we’re selling a product that’s supposed to be universally affordable, we can only get there through volume. It makes no sense for us to be preaching that while hemorrhaging money.”

The post Why bedding brand Buffy isn’t playing by the direct-to-consumer rules appeared first on Digiday.

One criticism leveled at reader-funded journalism is that it can mean only the elite have access to quality information. But slow-news membership outlet Tortoise, which will go live Jan. 14 to its 2,530 strong-member base, has ambitions to be as inclusive as possible, offering low-priced tiers and inviting members to help shape its coverage through member events and conferences.

During its monthlong Kickstarter campaign, which ended in mid-November, 2,530 people collectively donated nearly £550,000 ($692,000) to the project, beating previous expectations of £75,000 ($94,450) from just 1,000 members.

According to publisher and co-founder Katie Vanneck-Smith, former president of Dow Jones, Tortoise already has backing from several minority investors. But the purpose of the campaign was to gather a group of founding members and a preinstalled community.

“We’re creating a different type of newsroom, for and with our members,” she said, adding that additional members will be able to join Tortoise in April. “Members will inform our thinking and our product and how we expand. They are core to our approach. In-person and personal is a real differentiator. We want to build the most diverse and inclusive membership base of a paid-for-journalism business today.”

According to Vanneck-Smith, 42 percent of its founders are under 30 years old, much younger than some news organizations that still rely on print subscribers. Tortoise is headquartered in London, and a quarter of its members live outside the U.K., mostly in the U.S. and Europe. Vanneck-Smith wants Tortoise editors to meet 40 percent of its membership by March, by hosting two breakfast events a month and regular news conferences, which she says will inform the editorial direction. Tortoise calls these sessions “ThinkIns.”

So far, Tortoise has run around 40 ThinkIns with attendee numbers ranging from 40 to 120, on topics including the U.S. midterm elections and the future of U.K. democracy. The idea is for editors to lead discussions at these events, the results of which which will help inform the five daily pieces of journalism Tortoise publishes. The publication says it will still tackle news around issues such as Brexit but in a more reflective way. Each Monday, it will also host a news conference looking back on the previous week’s news.

“We are still a newsroom,” said Vanneck-Smith. “The ThinkIns are the fuel of our journalism and the engine room, but they aren’t the full output. … ThinkIns are an organized system of listening; we’re uncovering stories that are not always told.”

Spaces for the ThinkIns Tortoise is holding in January are already taken, the company said. Topics for those events will include the state of racism and how older generations have reduced chances for millennials to thrive.

Tortoise, co-founded by James Harding, former editor of The Times and director of BBC News, has already attracted high-profile editors to join its ranks, which currently stand at 34 employees.

De Correspondent, another membership news outlet taking a more considered and audience-involved approach to creating content, offers periodical free access and invites specific people to join if they have a worthwhile experience. Nic Newman, editor of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, points out Tortoise editors have been working hard to avoid accusations of elitism, but noted that a paywall inevitably limits the size of a publisher’s audience and pushes toward a certain set of demographics.

To counter this, Tortoise says its membership is designed to be affordable. The full price in spring with be £250 ($314.82) a year, but it has offered discounted pricing and tiers for under-30s and groups. It will also introduce a student price tag at launch, and it expects partner companies will fund memberships at scale for certain groups. Non-members will be able to buy tickets to ThinkIns, which include a two-week membership.

Another way to broaden its member catchment is looking outside of urban areas. Every other week, it aims to host a ThinkIn outside its own newsroom, for instance covering knife crime in a school in North London, or visiting churches and mosques outside the capital.

“Everything we publish will be the Tortoise take, our journalism and opinion,” said Vanneck-Smith. “The difference is we want to listen differently and hear from varied voices to inform our point of view.”

The post Tortoise wants members to inform its ‘slow-news’ coverage via live events appeared first on Digiday.