Month: January 2019

The Television Critics Association’s winter press tour is starting a few weeks later than usual this year–in order to distance itself from other January TV events like CES and the Golden Globes–but the semiannual event finally kicks off today at the Langham Huntington in Pasadena, Calif. More than 200 television journalists and critics are gathering…

To the victors went the spoils, as the two National Football League teams that will face off in Super Bowl LIII Sunday, the Los Angeles Rams and New England Patriots, dominated Facebook, Twitter and Instagram from Jan. 12 through 27. Social marketing firm Unmetric found that the Patriots tallied the most likes and comments across…

The public no longer gives Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the other tech giants the benefit of the doubt. And that’s going to hamper their growth.

The ad tech industry might soon be facing a more punitive FTC. While the consumer privacy and protections agency traditionally came down on blatantly fraudulent advertising, like rebilling scams, or improperly targeting children, the influx of data-driven technology has required the FTC to reevaluate its agenda. With consumer privacy protections becoming a more pressing issue,… Continue reading »

The post The FTC Rethinks Its Role In The New Data Economy 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 Rivi Bloch, interim CEO at Taptica. Get a marketer from a big brand in a room with a mobile app developer and, odds are, you will see the two have… Continue reading »

The post Blurred Lines As Performance And Brand Marketing Coalesce appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Amazon Vs. Williams-Sonoma A lawsuit filed by Williams-Sonoma against Amazon in December demonstrates the ecommerce platform’s ability to replicate and overwhelm rival product lines. Williams-Sonoma is relatively strong online, with ecommerce accounting for the majority of sales, and its furniture business West Elm is… Continue reading »

The post How Amazon Undercuts Williams-Sonoma; Apple Explores Gaming Subscriptions appeared first on AdExchanger.

Sinclair Broadcasting Group is already one of the most prominent providers of local programming on traditional TV. Now, the company wants to extend into streaming video.

Earlier this month, Sinclair launched Stirr, a free, ad-supported video streaming service that provides local news and entertainment programming from Sinclair as well as 20 linear streaming channels from digital network partners such as Cheddar, Stadium and Jukin Media. Sinclair said it plans to grow Stirr’s channel guide to more than 50 linear networks by the end of 2019, providing everything from local news and live sports to on-demand movies and lifestyle programming.

Stirr’s key pitch, though, is local programming. The centerpiece of the streaming service is the Stirr City channel, which Sinclair said will offer a custom, 24-hour programming lineup based on where the viewer lives. This programming, which will include daily morning and evening news shows, regional sports broadcasts and city-focused lifestyle shows, will come from the local Sinclair TV station in that city or the Sinclair station that’s closest to the market a user is in.

Adam Ware, gm of Stirr, described Stirr City as a national channel that gets paired with the local Sinclair affiliate in a particular market. Stirr City will have a national feed, which will switch to local news, sports and other regional programming that the affiliate has the rights to. Sinclair’s network includes 191 TV stations in 89 markets across the U.S. This includes three of the top-10 OTT markets in terms of video consumption (Washington, D.C., Seattle and Portland), according to a Nielsen research study from late 2017.

In markets where Sinclair does not have a station affiliate, the broadcaster is aiming to sign programming and distribution deals with local newspapers, Ware said. “You don’t necessarily have to have a station partner, just a news partner,” he said.

“Sinclair has one of the most important local footprints of any media company,” said Jon Steinberg, CEO of Cheddar. “People love local news and tune in for it, or seek it out. So companioning our national and business news with that is great distribution.”

Local programming, in general, is scarce in streaming video: In December 2018, CBS News launched a New York-specific offshoot of its streaming network CBSN, with plans for more extensions later in 2019. Meanwhile, some local stations such as NBC affiliate KSL-TV in Salt Lake City are making some programming available to watch on their apps.

“Every so often, there are a bunch of local stations that have their own apps, and they usually offer clips for online viewing, but that’s about it,” said Alan Wolk, co-founder of TVRev. “Plus, a lot [of local broadcasters] are not technologically sophisticated, and OTT, in general, is a big expense. With Sinclair, it’s easier for them to get on board.”

Stirr is also looking to build relationships with studios, publishers and other video programmers that can license movies, TV shows and other non-local content. For instance, when Sinclair’s affiliate is off the air during prime time, that’s a void that Stirr City can fill with licensed movies and TV shows.

“We know that for every single one of the stations we have, we have to put something on in prime time — we have to cover that programming block,” Ware said. “If you’re a content owner or distributor, this is a chance to get on prime time.”

With its 20 current channel partners, Stirr offers an even 50-50 revenue share on ads generated by Stirr. Some of these channel partners are also providing programming for Stirr-branded channels such as Stirr City, Stirr Movies and Stirr Life. Sinclair is also signing deals with studios and distributors for movies and TV shows independent of the content owner having its own channel on Stirr. In all instances, Sinclair is not paying a license fee and is instead sharing ad revenue with all content partners.

Free, ad-supported video streaming is on the rise. Independent services such as Pluto TV, which recently sold to Viacom, Xumo and Tubi TV are capturing millions of monthly viewers on connected TV screens. Amazon and Roku have also launched their own free streaming channels. The question is whether these services can have audiences as big as Netflix, Hulu and other top subscription-based streaming services — or whether they would even need to.

“[Free video streaming services] are not going to get the scale of Netflix,” said Wolk. “But a lot of people are also going to reach the point of no return with subscriptions: ‘I’m paying too much already, so what’s for free?’ For that reason, they have a good shot at succeeding.”

The post Sinclair is building a streaming video bundle by focusing on local appeared first on Digiday.

Like most young professionals, Chris Strub joined LinkedIn in 2011 as a way to network with others. But over the years, it wasn’t much of a focus for the journalist-turned-social-media-strategist who gravitated to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Periscope and YouTube.

That’s changed now: LinkedIn is now one of his top priorities as a social network to share videos.

Ever since LinkedIn released video to all users in August 2017 — and then to all company pages in July 2018 — a variety of creators and publishers have slowly been investing more of their time on the platform. LinkedIn’s principal product manager on the video team, Peter Roybal, told Digiday “millions” of people, companies and publishers have created videos on LinkedIn and said it’s the “fastest growing type of content on the platform.” Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk has been preaching the gospel of LinkedIn video, saying the “organic reach is fucking gold right now.”

LinkedIn’s Roybal denied boosting video in the algorithm, but LinkedIn users say they’re seeing more and more videos on the platform. Tom Goodwin, head of innovation at Zenith Media and a LinkedIn superstar with more than 686,000 followers, said his mobile app the other day was “just video pretty much: people quite awkwardly recording themselves saying something to the camera.”

Goodwin has made some videos for LinkedIn, such as a pitch to attend his talk at CES. Strub has created educational videos about other marketing platforms. Cathy Hackl, futurist at immersive experience lab You Are Here and ranked as LinkedIn’s No. 4 top voice in technology, has posted video reviews of new gadgets like foldable screens. And publishers like Forbes and The Economist have shared leadership tips and explainer videos, respectively.

“It’s cliche to say that ‘marketers ruin everything,’ but LinkedIn video still seems like a sweet spot, where most of the content shared provides valuable insights and information. The business-based nature of the platform and the ability for your content to reach executives who’d generally be unreachable on a platform like Facebook is huge,” Strub said.

Among media companies, Forbes started sharing LinkedIn videos at the end of 2017 as part of the platform’s beta. It has been publishing videos there consistently since then.

“As our audience began engaging beyond the job search [on LinkedIn], we took that opportunity to highlight our leadership and entrepreneurial content to decision-makers with a direct, visually focused approach. We saw this partnership with LinkedIn as an organic path toward amplifying Forbes content in a new, meaningful way,” said Shauna Gleason, director of social media at Forbes.

The Economist was part of LinkedIn’s video test in 2017 and now claims to be one of the best-performing video publishers on the platform, said Bo Franklin, an assistant community editor.

Publishers started seeing value in LinkedIn’s audience in 2017 in part as an alternative to Facebook’s news feed — though the platform hasn’t been worthwhile for all. Parsely data reveals LinkedIn referral dropped by 13 percent over the last year. While referrals have dropped from an absolute standpoint, they have consistently come in at just under 0.05 percent of total referral traffic, Parsely told Digiday. Desktop traffic was the hardest hit with referrals down by 42 percent, though mobile traffic made up 75 percent of total referrals in 2018, according to Parsely.

Monetization for videos is still lacking on LinkedIn. The platform doesn’t offer pre-roll or mid-roll ads. A LinkedIn spokesperson said the company is looking into it but doesn’t currently have plans to launch those ads. Publishers said they are not deterred — at least not yet. The Economist’s Franklin said his team relies on a sponsorship model to fund the majority of their video content.

Publishers and creators see value in audience insights they get from LinkedIn. Hackl said she recently shared a video about Whirlpool’s AR oven and was able to see that “a lot of folks from Whirlpool” not only viewed the video but also shared it.

“When you see that professionals from Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook are watching your videos, you realize there’s a perfect audience for my content,” Hackl said.

Publishing to LinkedIn is quite unlike the other platforms. Suzie “String” Nguyen, one of the beta users of LinkedIn videos in early 2017, who now has 30,000 followers, described LinkedIn video as a “mishmash of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.”

Unlike YouTube, LinkedIn is not about search traffic. In fact, it’s rather hard to search for videos on the platform. Instead, similar to Facebook, traffic is driven by the feed where the algorithm relies on a user’s connections commenting and liking on posts.

“LinkedIn’s all about engagement like Facebook algorithm, people commenting and liking posts to get a network effect. Awkward videos do well. Don’t do dark or shaky videos, but you need uniqueness in your personality,” Nguyen said.

LinkedIn users are hoping for more features from LinkedIn in 2019. Hackl said she wants an integration with Adobe Rush so she can more easily edit and then share her videos. Strub, who has actively streamed on Meerkat (RIP), Periscope and Facebook, said he hopes LinkedIn adds live video.

“As LinkedIn aims at increasing time on site, livestreaming feels like the natural next step,” Strub said.

The post LinkedIn video use is rising among creators, but there’s no monetization product yet appeared first on Digiday.

Connected TV advertising is not stealing ad dollars away from linear TV so much as redirecting how those traditional TV dollars are being spent. While TV advertisers are moving more of their money to advertise against the content that people stream over the internet to their big-screen TVs, that money is usually connected to the money they continue to spend on linear TV, according to agency executives.

Connected TV is “a complement. It’s definitely not a substitute [for linear TV],” said Garrett Winkler, director and connected TV lead at Modi Media, GroupM’s advanced TV unit. “You look at the Nielsen numbers, and the time spent on linear TV is more than connected TV. But that’s changing a little bit.

That TV advertisers’ connected TV dollars are often tied to their linear TV dollars is, in some ways, a reflection of the challenges that TV advertisers face in adapting to the new channel. For example, TV advertisers are used to buying ads based on the content they will appear against, but connected TV advertising is broadly sold on an audience basis, like digital advertising, without advertisers knowing what content will carry their ads. That lack of transparency and control, as well as more favorable pricing, has spurred TV advertisers to deal directly with publishers for connected TV campaigns, which has further reinforced the connection between connected TV and linear TV.

TV networks have seized on connected TV as an opportunity to ease TV advertisers into the new channel while tethering those investments to linear TV by selling their OTT inventory as an extension of traditional TV deals. During the annual upfront negotiations, TV networks are increasingly pitching so-called “fluidity” deals. In these deals, the networks’ linear and OTT inventory is bundled together so that an ad may run wherever the audience is. That type of tie-up is expected to be even more prevalent in this year’s upfront negotiations. “One of the things I expect to see heat up this year is how connected TV rounds out the ways that people are delivering their TV budgets,” said an agency exec who asked to not be named.

TV advertisers typically see connected TV as a way to add incremental reach to their linear TV campaigns, according to agency execs. For example, streaming TV services, be it Hulu’s, YouTube’s, Sling TV or DirecTV Now, syndicate the same ads running on traditional pay-TV services but show them to people who have cut the cord without any additional effort or investment by the advertiser. Similarly TV networks’ OTT apps often require people to log in with their cable or satellite accounts to stream a show, turning that inventory into a safety net to catch people who have not cut the cord but are untethering themselves to an extent.

However TV advertisers are also using connected TV to augment their TV campaigns in a different way. Instead of simply ensuring that they reach people tuning into traditional TV through non-traditional means, TV advertisers are taking advantage of connected TV’s technological edge to find the people they can’t reach through the streaming TV safety nets and to follow up with those they did reach on linear TV.

Roku and Samsung already take advantage of smart TVs’ built-in automated content recognition technology to track what people watch on linear TV networks in order to target them with ads when those people are streaming videos on their connected TV platforms. That enables advertisers to round out their addressable TV campaigns by targeting households that are not exposed to the ad on linear TV, said Mike Piner, svp of video and data-driven investments at MullenLowe’s Mediahub. The ACR technology and corresponding targeting options also enable advertisers to retarget people who had seen their linear TV ads with follow-up ads that could take advantage of the belief among advertisers that connected TV viewers are more receptive to ads because they are actively choosing what they want to watch and therefore more willing to sit through an ad, said the unnamed exec.

TV advertisers may not be investing connected TV for its own sake so much as to shore up their linear TV campaigns. However connected TV’s supporting role does not mean it is stuck taking a backseat to traditional TV. Instead, by enabling advertisers to ease into it, its complementary status could clear the path for more traditional TV money to move into the connected TV market and potentially make its way to other types of sellers.

The post Why TV ad buyers don’t yet see connected TV threatening linear TV budgets appeared first on Digiday.