Month: February 2019

Advertisers’ attempts to break down data’s walled gardens have found a second wind. The emergence of so-called data clean rooms, safe spaces where insights gleaned from the walled gardens are commingled with first-party data from advertisers for measurement and attribution, is gathering pace as media trading becomes more addressable.

As much as these safe spaces are in demand, they are fraught with adoption issues. Here’s what you need to know:

What is a data clean room?
Data clean rooms are places where walled gardens like Google, Facebook and Amazon share aggregated rather than customer-level data with advertisers, while still exerting strict controls. First-party data from the advertiser is then poured into the same space to see how it matches up with the aggregated data from the platforms. From there, advertisers can see how the different data sets match up, using any inconsistencies between the two to determine whether they’re over-serving ads to the same audiences. In the case of the data clean room Unilever is building, the advertiser should theoretically be able to see the duplicated reach it gets across Google, Facebook and Twitter, all of which have agreed to back it. None of that aggregated data leaves the clean room.

“As you start adding more channels as an advertiser, it gets harder to assign effectiveness and attribution,” said Victor Wong, CEO of Thunder Experience Cloud. “In addition, it’s harder for advertisers to understand what their media spend is doing when it comes to knowing whether it’s hit the desired audience.”

Are data clean rooms new?
These types of data arrangements aren’t new. Facebook has offered them to its largest advertisers for some time, for example. But those deals are expensive and, more important, weren’t scaleable. Having a data clean room that works just as well in mature markets as it does in emerging ones is increasingly important for the likes of Unilever and Procter & Gamble, which are becoming more dependent on the marketing in those regions to kickstart stuttering businesses.

Why is there so much demand for data clean rooms?
The surge in popularity is the culmination of three things: the ad industry’s deference to the European Union’s strict data privacy law: the fear of invoking a scandal akin to the Cambridge Analytica data faux pas: and the realization that advertisers don’t know what they’re buying.

In some ways, data clean rooms are a manifestation of the pragmatic approach taken by many advertisers looking to rationalize each of these issues. The approach works for platforms because a data clean room means they don’t have to part with valuable targeting segments that could give one platform an edge over another. Furthermore, these safe spaces could also emerge as an opportunity for the platforms to grab a share of spend from rivals.

“In my opinion, any platforms that are not pushing for cross-platform data sharing and transparency are just not confident that their own products deliver as much value as they say,” said Neil Astin, head of operations at performance marketing agency Journey Further. “Platforms that are very confident in their advertising products and the quality traffic it generates should be pushing hard for this new standard in data sharing.”

Why haven’t data clean rooms been more widely adopted?
Data clean rooms aren’t cheap. Google, Facebook and Amazon have offered alternatives for some time, but the logistical and political hurdles of working with those platforms can put a strain on all parties. It’s not within any of the walled gardens’ best interests to cede too much data to advertisers given how much value they derive from controlling their own data, particularly targeting data. When it comes to walled gardens, there is no single source of data truth like there is for TV or radio.

“Up to now, that has been win-win for advertisers, but the new agenda is to understand if there is overlap and thereby overinvestment in these super platforms, creating the demand for a single point of data truth inside a secure data platform,” said Chris Bennett, managing director for video advertising and insights platform Pixability’s business in EMEA.

Essentially, platforms and advertisers are bringing together data that’s in different formats, and a lot of preparation work is needed to standardize this. Standards need to be developed so that advertisers have a way to match the user-level first-party data they put in the data clean room with the aggregated data from the walled gardens. Those two data sets are fundamentally different. Ownership of clean room data needs to be established as does an independent verification party.

Any other downsides?
As much as the success of data clean rooms are predicated on data shared by platforms, advertisers also need to pony up. And yet advertisers either don’t or don’t always want to share detailed transactional data, due to the privacy risk. That can make measurement rough at best. Those difficulties meant that Unilever resorted to a pane-based solution as the source of the first-party data it puts into its own data clean room. Doing so gives it an estimate of the true frequency and reach of its ads, but the panel isn’t active in the market for products and thus won’t be great for attribution purposes.

Running a data clean room can be a manual process, and people end up emailing whole data sets or creating shared folders — exposing a privacy risk. That is also “cumbersome and fraught for the user,” said Nick Halstead, CEO at InfoSum.

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A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

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“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Scott Bender, global head of publisher strategy and business development at Prohaska Consulting. We have all read the stats that private marketplace (PMP) transactions continue to outpace overall programmatic spending. Sixty-one percent of publishers in an eMarketer… Continue reading »

The post Without A Real Programmatic Direct Plan, Publishers Face PMP Pain appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Shopping News Meredith generated $400 million in retail sales last year due to commerce integrations across a dozen of its sites, working with 400 retailers to post 40 million products. To expand its shoppable integrations, Meredith acquired Linfield Media, the six-person affiliate marketing… Continue reading »

The post Meredith Ramps Up Affiliate Revenue; GDPR Probe Dropped appeared first on AdExchanger.

Brand safety has been on every marketers’ lips for the past couple years, as concerns about ads showing up in undesirable places moved from adult content, to fake news, on to terrorism-related videos on YouTube, and now pedophilia and child abuse. But there are signs the industry narrative is evolving from simple outrage to a more nuanced and sensible view.

Despite their incentives to skewer major platforms such as Facebook and Google whenever they are given a chance, marketers and agencies are now publicly being more pragmatic about the challenge. There is no such thing as brand safety on the Internet, and advertisers are just going to have to be OK with that.

The post The Rundown: Brand safety outrage is wearing thin appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook is consistently under scrutiny for nefarious ad targeting on its platform. But while abuse on Facebook and the company’s reactive steps to prevent it may make the most headlines, other digital platforms including Foursquare and Twitter have also been taking steps to clean up their audience segmentation and targeting capabilities to prevent misuse.

For example, Foursquare launched audience segmentation in its self-serve platform on Jan. 22. Prior that release, the location platform only worked directly with select advertisers on creating custom campaigns. Ahead of the launch, Foursquare had each of the segments reviewed by its ethics committee, a cross-functional group of engineers, product, sales and legal.

“In the nature of the self-service model, you’re handing [all the targeting] over to someone else so it was important for us, for a number reasons, to be very thoughtful of what segments to work. We want to make sure we’re honoring the trust we feel like we’ve earned from the users, to create those segments in the first place,” said Foursquare’s svp of product, Josh Cohen.

Foursquare’s team eliminated several possible categories such as visitors of gun stores or strip clubs or even McDonald’s. Rather, Foursquare decided to launch categories that were broader like road trippers, nightlife and fast food. Snapchat has similar targeting called “lifestyle categories.” Snapchat currently has 117 of these categories. Foursquare released 450 segments at launch.

Foursquare also decided to eliminate categories based on scale, making sure the segments are large enough so that users cannot be personally identifiable. People’s specific homes are not categories, for example.

Twitter, meanwhile, restricted the ability to target small audiences, buyers said.

“Before, on Twitter, you could do 200 to 300 people. You could be way more targeted, but now it shows up to 1 million. [Twitter] took away the niche factor. Now you’re at the mercy of Twitter’s algorithm,” said Nick Venezia, managing director at Social Outlier.

In its attempts to prevent misuse, Facebook, has also been eliminating niche groups for their audience segmentation. Last August, the company said it was removing more than 5,000 targeting options as part of its efforts to prevent abuse on its ad platform.

“Facebook has made it harder to see smaller audience sizes where the old limit was around 1,000 on some days. The list size column will now say unavailable,” said Duane Brown, founder and head of strategy at Vancouver-based agency Take Some Risk.

But while these platforms are trying to clean up, it’s still possible to game the system.

Facebook’s platform still allows for nefarious ad targeting. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times reported that it was still possible for advertisers to target Facebook users who were interested in Nazis.

Advertisers on Twitter, meanwhile, can generate their own tailored audience based on their customer lists of email addresses and phone numbers. One buyer said that if they were granted that ability, they could work around Twitter’s restrictions of not targeting someone’s followers by simply using Twitter’s API to export a user’s follower list and then upload that as a custom audience. It’s easy to see how bad actors could take advantage of this, and it would violate Twitter’s rules.

Meanwhile, Google claims it has been extremely restrictive to prevent nefarious activity. Its rules, which ban targeting to sensitive interest categories such as identity, beliefs and personal hardship have been in place for at least a decade, a Google spokesperson said.

Though, a buyer said it’s still fairly easy to get specific on Google.

“Google is still the wild west. There are segments available at low CPMs for almost anything. For all I know, whatever is in these segments could be BS, but it makes clients feel better thinking they can target a woman who has a size 7 shoe with a low credit score and is in the market for an insurance plan for her house that she hasn’t bought yet,” the buyer said.

Brown said his clients have never been interested in nefarious targeting, but saw how it’s challenging for the platforms to prevent it.

“The challenge is you are asking people to change something but in one part of the code. Are you changing the base code is my question? It’s like focusing on your queen in chess and ignoring the rest of the chessboard, which is your base code. Just trying to band-aid a solution is not going to work,” Brown said.

The post In the wake of scandals, platforms are policing audience segmentation appeared first on Digiday.

These are difficult times for agencies. They are dealing with a raft of business model challenges and new competition from consultancies — and their own clients taking more of their marketing functions in-house. On top of that, agency staffers say they’re increasingly overworked and underpaid, and many are looking for roles at clients, consultancies and technology firms instead.

Agency executives gathered in Nashville on Feb. 20 – 22 to discuss these issues and more. Here’s what attendees learned:

The post In-house may have a silver lining for agencies: Insights from the Digiday Media Buying Summit appeared first on Digiday.

The European soccer league that’s home to Real Madrid and Barcelona is making a bigger media play in the U.S. — just a few years ahead of new rights deals that could see the league draw greater interest and revenue from TV and digital distributors.

LaLiga North America, a media joint venture formed last year between Spain’s top soccer league and sports marketing firm Relevent, is building out a media business that includes daily video programming for social platforms, long-form productions to license to streaming platforms and TV networks, live fan events, support for local soccer communities across the U.S. and, eventually, even a regular-season La Liga game held in the U.S.

All told, the joint venture plans to invest around $10 million in its first three years, with the intention of building a media business that includes revenue from ads and sponsorships, content sales, match ticket sales and media rights.

“We want to help grow La Liga in the U.S.,” said Boris Gartner, CEO of LaLiga North America. “It’s the biggest market for La Liga outside of Spain already, and there is room for growth, especially leading into the World Cup in 2026.”

The joint venture’s long-term goal is to increase the media rights value of La Liga in North America. Domestic broadcast rights are currently held by BeIn Sports and are up in two years. With soccer becoming more popular in the U.S., as well as the fact that La Liga is home to two of the most famous clubs in the world, the league is expected to draw a ton of suitors.

It’s unclear what the rights market will be for La Liga in two years. NBC Sports reportedly paid $1 billion in 2015 for a six-year deal with the Premier League. La Liga isn’t as popular as the Premier League in the U.S., but Real Madrid, Barcelona and Lionel Messi are. The idea is that a dedicated media operation focused on growing interest in the league ahead of those rights negotiations can only help.

“Do you close your eyes and pray that rights fees keep going up, or do you actually work to create more value for your product?” said Gartner.

Relevent is funding the joint venture, with both companies sharing equally in profits. The venture is expected to be profitable over the long term, the company said.

Initially, LaLiga North America’s content team, which is led by former Univision executive Adrian Segovia and has production units in the U.S. and Mexico, will focus on Spanish-speaking and bilingual Hispanics. Gartner said this will pave the way for the team to expand into content for English-only Hispanics and the general soccer audience in the U.S.

A strategy deck for the LaLiga North America shows that the company has plans for six daily and weekly shows this year, spanning 200 episodes. This includes “LaLiga según Luis Garcia,” in which the host breaks down the biggest stories and highlights from that week’s matches. Other shows include “The Fans’ League,” which will highlight fans and transplants of various La Liga clubs across the U.S. Through La Liga, the joint venture has access to match highlights, Gartner said.

Beyond the daily and weekly shows, LaLiga North America is also in conversations with three production companies to co-develop long-form projects for streaming platforms and TV networks, Gartner said. LaLiga North America will be helped by the fact that Netflix and Amazon have both shown great interest in soccer documentaries.

“There’s definitely a lot of value in the IP and the rights that LaLiga has,” Gartner said. “We’ll facilitate the access and relationships [with the league, teams and players] and have production partners who do that for a living execute on it.”

Live events for fans will also be a big focus area for LaLiga America. For instance, the company is hosting two fan events in Houston and Los Angeles ahead of this weekend’s El Clasico between Real Madrid and Barcelona — for which it’s expected to draw more than 5,000 fans.

LaLiga North America will also get back to work on its plans to host a regular-season game in the U.S., Gartner said. There was an attempt to do this for the current season, but pushback from players and some clubs (who criticized the decision for having to travel far and taking away critical home games) scuttled those efforts. Gartner said LaLiga North America will try again in hopes of figuring out a match that is approved by the players, clubs and soccer governing bodies.

The post Spain’s top soccer league La Liga is building a U.S. media business appeared first on Digiday.

Venture capital firms might have soured on digital media companies over the past few years, but many sports media companies continue to draw backing.

In the past four months, three very different kinds of sports-focused publishers have announced substantial funding rounds. Last week, The Chernin Group-owned Action Network, which focuses on the growing world of sports betting, announced a $17.5 million Series B round. On Feb. 21, the distributed video startup Overtime raised $23 million as it looks to build a bigger content business. And late last year, The Athletic raised nearly $40 million in a Series B round led by Founders Fund, with contributions from Comcast Ventures and other investors.

Those bets are a far cry from the nine-figure sums that startups such as BuzzFeed and Vice gathered from investors just a few years ago. But investors feel that sports, with its engaged, loyal fan bases, might offer the right foundation for media businesses that are diversified with various revenue sources beyond display ads.

“Investors want to put capital behind ventures that are super-serving fan segments,” The Athletic co-founder Adam Hansmann said.

Even though many of these newer, sports-focused titles are just a few years old, they are well on their way to forging direct relationships with their readers and building diversified revenue streams. Though Overtime has already built a seven-figure brand advertising business, the company plans to build numerous other revenue streams, including a commerce business as well as a live events operation. The Action Network, which already has a subscription business, expects that a substantial portion of its advertising revenues will come through affiliate commissions it earns from sports books as sports betting becomes legal in more of the United States. The subscription-focused Athletic has no advertising at all.

“We’re hedged against some of the difficulties [of the advertising market],” Overtime founder Zack Weiner said. “It’s important for us to be diversified.”

These sports publishers are also a lot less reliant on a single platform such as Facebook, which powered a lot of the audience growth that fueled the last VC funding craze for media companies.

“There are more than enough of them [platforms] whereby one party’s changing its strategy will not disrupt the entire ecosystem,” said Michael Spirito, the managing director and cofounder of Sapphire Sport, a VC firm that’s invested in Overtime.

Many of these new sports media companies have had success attracting investment from legacy players. Just as NBCUniversal sought to align itself with a fast-growing upstart like BuzzFeed to avoid future disruption, MSG Networks was among the investors that participated in Overtime’s latest round.

In the Action Network’s case, it’s had success luring investors who see an opportunity to learn about a new line of revenue — from gambling — that complements an existing business. Included among the Action Network’s latest funding round were David Blitzer, a businessman who owns a stake in both the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Devils, and Fertitta Capital, which is owned by the former CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

But these companies are still media companies, and so they face plenty of competition. The Athletic has already seen legacy newspapers roll out similar subscription products covering their local sports teams. And earlier this month, Yahoo announced it expected to partner with upwards of a dozen professional sports franchises on paid membership products. The Action Network, meanwhile, will have to face off against entrenched sports betting titles as well as newer entrants such as Bleacher Report, which announced a betting-focused vertical in partnership with the casino Caesars earlier this month.

The track record of sports-focused media startups have been mixed. Bleacher Report, the sports startup, was acquired by Turner Sports for $175 million in 2012 and is considered a rare success story; The Players Tribune, which has raised nearly $60 million since it was founded by Derek Jeter and his longtime agency, Excel Sports Management, in 2014, laid off around 10 percent of its workforce in early 2019 and is undergoing a business shift.

But sports publishers also feel like they have harnessed their audience’s passion enough that they have permission to act and think very differently than a traditional publisher might. Over the past six months, the company that owns U.K. publisher GiveMeSport acquired Oryx, a digital gaming and data company, and renamed itself the Bragg Gaming Group. This month, Bragg launched GiveMeBet, a sportsbook it hopes to build up using the audience it’s amassed through GiveMeSport, according to Bragg Gaming Group CEO Dominic Mansour.

“Why should we say no to taking William Hill’s $5 million a year ad budget, and why should we not build our own [sports book] on the side?” Mansour said.

The post Why VCs still see growth opportunities in sports digital media plays appeared first on Digiday.

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Amazon’s in the news this week for coming under fire for, and cracking down on, fakes.

The post Retail Briefing: Amazon ups its fights against fakes with Project Zero appeared first on Digiday.