Month: February 2019

A survey of 200 publishers by Digiday this month found that most (70 percent) personalize the content they deliver to visitors. Once frowned upon by editors and consumers alike, the practice is becoming mainstream or publishers are now more willing to talk about it.

However, readers might not always be aware they are served different content than the person sitting next to them. Eight-four percent of publishers that do personalize content said they conduct passive personalization rather than active personalization. Passive personalization utilizes information like readers’ location or browsing history to tailor to the content they see, whereas readers self-select the content they wish to see more or less of in active personalization.

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The opportunity to monetize connected cars has become too big to ignore at carmaker Bentley. The business is experimenting with developing different ecosystems for its connected cars.

The data generated by those vehicles is a potential goldmine. So much so that figuring out how to “ethically” monetize that data is the source of ongoing discussions at the company’s headquarters in Crewe, England, said its director of digital, internet of things and smart mobility, Hamid Qureshi. Streaming, 5G, geo-location and e-commerce in-car opportunities are all being considered by the business, which wants to be anything but a bit player.

“The idea of turning our cars into media platforms is something we talk about internally, but it’s very early days,” said Qureshi. “Once more data points emerge around the car and the ways of interpreting them all are easier, particularly in the context of autonomous driving, then the connected car could become a media entity.”

As a luxury player, Bentley won’t ever be considered a scale play by advertisers. It makes around 10,000 cars a year, whereas, for example, Facebook added 22 million new daily users during one quarter alone last year. And yet Bentley could be in a position of power. Connected cars create up to 25GB of data per hour, which equates to dozens of movies stored in HD every 60 minutes, according to McKinsey. That’s a mountain of first-party data that trumps the type of data any competitor might have in the media space when it comes to affluent, luxury consumers.

Owning all that data means being responsible for it. With data privacy concerns so visceral, the car brand is wary of what it collects and subsequently monetizes. For example, any ad business that might be built in the future could sell the statistical data inferred from the GPS and behavioral data collected from its vehicles, not personal data, said Qureshi.

Bentley has already seen how valuable those insights can be to marketers.

Brands including Apple and Visa, the latter of which has an exclusive deal for in-car payments, are among a stream of partnerships the automotive manufacturer has secured on the pitch that digital car technology is paving the way for new business models around retail, maintenance, fuel and infotainment. Some of those partnerships are woven into the Bentley Network App, which serves as a community for its drivers. Last October, the automotive brand inked a deal with telecoms business Viasat to let those drivers who had the app access high-speed Wi-Fi from their cars.

But working with marketers and subsequently monetizing data isn’t easy. The talent and technology needed to do so aren’t cheap regardless of how big the opportunity is. It’s a commitment Bentley is cautious of rushing into, said Qureshi. Not when mass-produced self-driving cars are more a dream than a reality for most car manufacturers now. “We can’t afford to be closed to potential opportunities around in-car advertising,” said Qureshi. For now, however, the business will use the work it’s doing internally on connected services like its Bentley Network of customers to understand how people might want to be served ads in their car.

“The success of any tech — even connected cars — isn’t just down to the technology. It’s about the content that exists on that platform,” said Qureshi. “As developments in autonomous driving continue we are looking ahead at what a future customer driving experience will be underpinned by relevant and targeted content. We see this content as improving driver safety, delivering an intelligent, exhilarating driving experience and enhancing the lifestyle of our customers via convenience and entertainment.”

The move chimes with shifts across the wider automotive sector. Both Nissan and Honda are also exploring similar routes to new business models around advertising and retail, respectively, as they look to remain relevant in the future.

“Seven years from now, the model of car ownership and what it means to be in a car will have changed, and these connected vehicles will effectively become buses,” said Gracie Page, innovation lead at VMLY&R. “If these vehicles are basically plastered on the inside with new screens, then that becomes interesting to advertisers. Those vehicles could be partly or wholly subsided by advertising. That raises a media question about who owns the pipeline to put images on those screens as well as raising the creative conundrum of how we come up with the best content for that experience.”

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Auden, Target’s new lingerie line, is the product of two industry forces: retailers competing on private-label brands, and a Victoria’s Secret-sized void in the market.

Auden, launching this spring, will offer nearly 200 bras in more than 40 styles, for under $22. The retailer will be phasing out its existing line for lingerie and sleepwear, Gilligan & O’Malley. Along with the launch of Auden, Target will add “Bra Fit Studios” to help customers find the right fit, and is using un-retouched photos of models of all body shapes to promote the line in stores. The retailer is also taking a page from digital upstarts like ThirdLove — which just announced that today that it raised a $55 million round of funding — in creating a Find Your Fit tool that will help customers find their bra size online by asking them a series of questions about how their current bra fits.

Auden is the latest in a long line of private-label brands Target has launched over the past couple of years — a spokeswoman told Digiday that Target’s launched more than 25 owned and exclusive brands since 2016 as part of its private-label push. To compete with Amazon and Walmart, which have their own growing private label businesses, Target is putting more effort in turning high-margin private-label products into fully developed in-house brands. It’s paying off: The retailer’s private-label brands that have crossed a crucial $1 billion in annual sales mark include brands in higher-end product categories like home furniture and women’s apparel.

Right now, the lingerie category is particularly ripe for private-label opportunity. While it’s typically an expensive product to manufacture, consumers are expressing more interest in styles that are cheaper to produce. Last year, data from Edited found that bralettes were rising in popularity more quickly than the traditional push-up bras, which contain more wires and are more expensive to manufacture. Nearly half of the styles in the Auden line will not contain wires.

Kayla Marci, a retail strategist with Edited, said in an email to Digiday that Target’s foray into lingerie is “timely due to the growing demand for this category and the backlash against brands neglecting to promote body-positivity.” The desire among consumers to spend at retailers promoting body-positivity is where Target may have an advantage thanks to its brick-and-mortar locations. It has more space to place private-label branding than an online retailer like Amazon.

But Auden’s price point will put Target squarely in competition with Amazon’s own private-label lingerie line Iris & Lilly, which launched within the last couple of years and sells a variety of bras that run up to about $23. Other retailers are grabbing a larger foothold in lingerie by acquiring e-commerce brands — Calvin Klein’s parent company acquired True&Co two years ago, while Walmart bought Bare Necessities last year. All are looking to take a bite out of Victoria’s Secret’s marketshare, which has struggled over the past year.

The stock price of L Brands, Victoria’s Secret’s parent company, has dropped nearly 43 percent in 2018, and sales for Victoria’s Secret in January dropped by 1 percent year-over-year. In a call with investors during the company’s third-quarter earnings for 2018, L Brands CFO Stuart Burgdoerfer said that two of its bra varieties that receive the most positive feedback from consumers are its T-shirt bras in the mid-$20 range, and its Illusion bra in the mid-$30s. In releasing a more affordably priced line, Target is likely betting that it can use some negative consumer sentiment against Victoria’s Secret’s advertising to chip away at its most popular lines.

“Ultimately, Victoria’s Secret model was just one type of a product for everyone,” Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, told Digiday. “Since then [lingerie] has definitely grown vertically into catering for different diversities of people.”

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U.S. officials came to the world’s largest telecom trade fair to press allies to exclude Huawei equipment from next-generation cellular networks, calling the Chinese company’s gear a security risk.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has until March 11 to answer federal regulators’ claims that tweets he issued last week violated an enforcement settlement he reached last year, a federal judge decided Tuesday.

Online marketplace eBay and activist investors Elliott Management and Starboard Value are nearing a settlement deal that would give the activists board seats and could open the door to the company breaking itself up.

At the Grand Hyatt New York on Feb. 6 and 7, Adweek hosted the first Brandweek: Challenger Brands summit. Some of the world’s most popular direct-to-consumer and established brands came together to explore 12 top-of-mind topics that examined challenging the brand standard. Check out the best shots from the day, as well as Adweek’s upcoming…

International governments are passing laws that allow authorities to pressure tech companies such as Apple and Facebook for access to digital secrets.