Month: February 2019

In what could be considered one of the least surprising agency announcements of recent years, Lucky Generals has confirmed that it will be opening an office in New York City next month. The London-based agency has progressively built up its roster of U.S.-centric clients, necessitating the stateside move. TBWA bought a majority stake in the…

Seven-in-ten U.S. teens say anxiety and depression are major problems among their peers. Yet anxiety and depression aren’t the only concerns for teens.

The post The concerns and challenges of being a U.S. teen: What the data show appeared first on Pew Research Center.

India proposed new rules for foreign e-commerce firms, the country’s latest move to rein in large American tech companies that dominate the country’s budding internet economy.

“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 Daniel Jaye, founder and head of product at aqfer. Ad fraud has long been on marketers’ radar, but there is another type of overlooked fraudulent activity that carries potential regulatory and… Continue reading »

The post Consent Fraud: A Simmering Problem That Could Scald The Ecosystem appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Apple Newsonomics Publishers are struggling to make money from Apple News because the platform doesn’t allow them to use third-party data or execute programmatic sales, Digiday concludes based on interviews with seven unnamed publishers. A source described an “abysmal” fill rate of less than… Continue reading »

The post Publishers Struggle To Monetize Apple News Audiences; The Road To A Federal Privacy Law appeared first on AdExchanger.

Advertisers are scrutinizing their data pools more than ever in programmatic advertising. In the latest installment of Confessions, in which we exchange anonymity for honesty, we spoke to an executive at a location data vendor who said most of what those companies sell is fraudulent.

Why is there a problem in the way location data is sourced and used in advertising?
Users need to give permission to share location within a given app for the latitude and longitude information to be passed in the bid stream. A very small number of publishers have enabled location sharing while using the app. Of those, a very small number of people will walk into a store with their app open. For the web, the number of people sharing latitude and longitude while walking into a store will be relatively non-existent. It’s unrealistic to scale this sort of data given how hard it is for location data vendors to source it.

How much of the location data in the market is fake?
I met with a programmatic leader at one of the agency networks recently who asked my firm to help him verify the location data in the bid stream because they believe up to 80 percent or more of the lat-long data available there is fake. No one has stopped to think about where that data has come from and why a publisher would choose to sell it all to a vendor who is going to build a business on top of their data. What’s actually happening is these ad tech vendors are trying to pad out the limited data they already own with other data sets from competitive vendors or other unknown sources. Most reputable publishers would rather use their data across their own business than sell it to ad tech vendors, as the revenue potential is greater against their own content.

Does the data even work?
Who goes into a shop with their phone in-hand looking at a publisher site? That’s not how people behave when they’re shopping. And yet there are location data vendors who are selling data sets of people who are more likely to go into a shop after seeing an ad. Additionally, there are players in market that are pumping exchanges with this fraudulent data to satisfy demand from advertisers who want to know that someone visited their store after seeing an ad.

Has the General Data Protection Regulation made it easier to spot the fraudsters?
Not exactly. But the companies previously buying that data have now got a real reason to question the model, rather than brush it under the carpet. Lots of companies thought they could build businesses on measuring store visits post ad exposure. GDPR’s arrival has meant some companies have shuttered that part of their business or their operations in Europe. The apps previously sharing or selling the data have stopped doing so, to safeguard their business, and thus the supply to the location data vendors has been cut off. As most of those developers do not have robust processes in place for managing a GDPR and privacy-compliant data flow to downstream partners.

What about fraud-detection services?
There are ad tech companies that promise ad buyers they will find fake data. Those vendors will usually eradicate that data at a cost-per-thousand, as a data fee. Similar to what happened with viewability and ad fraud. I’m sure there are companies looking to solve this problem, but you’ve got to wonder: Why would I want to pay more to validate the data that I already paid for? If this happened in the financial industry, then people would’ve been locked up for it — it’s like Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Companies that detect fraud would not need a reason to exist if the market didn’t pay for the fraud to take place. And once they do exist, of course, it’s about putting a bandage on the problem, rather than fixing it. After all, it’s easier to sell morphine rather than vitamins.

The post Confessions of a location data exec: ‘It’s a Ponzi scheme’ appeared first on Digiday.

Data visualizations and charts are playing an increasingly important role in Bloomberg’s journalism. The publisher has a 30-person data journalism team, known as its graphics team, across New York; Washington, D.C.; London; and Hong Kong. This number has grown from six in 2012 when it launched as a separate unit and started experimenting with long-running graphics like the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.

According to Bloomberg, monthly average traffic for the graphics team in 2018 increased 19.3 percent year-over-year, but it wouldn’t share specific numbers.

“We want to measure our success through impact, graphics we’ve worked on that have changed things,” said Martin Keohan, executive editor of graphics and visual data.

Last November, the team produced charts for a story on the rise in use cases of an old legal document, confessions of judgment, that compels small-business owners seeking a loan to sign a statement giving up their right to defend themselves if the lender takes them to court. In New York, there have been 25,000 court cases — and growing — involving this mechanism over the last three years. As a result of the story, the New York attorney general and two senators are investigating whether confessions of judgment should be abolished, said Keohan.

Two years ago, the team produced these graphics accompanying the roll-out of Amazon’s same-day delivery service and the areas — notably those with a higher minority population — that were excluded. As a result of the story, Amazon extended its same-day delivery service to all neighborhoods in Boston, New York and Chicago.

“We’re in a media environment where fake news is tossed around and people are disputing facts and what is true,” said Keohan. “Data journalism is a way to cut through that and establish credibility. It sits on sound data that has been vetted and tested; it helps Bloomberg stand out as a source of data-supported facts.”

Publishers like the Economist, use charts on social to drive people back to its site and subscribe. Most publishers use interactive charts and visualizations to enhance their content and tell complex stories quickly at a glance, but measuring that success beyond metrics like dwell time and pageviews is difficult.

In 2016, the Bloomberg graphics team integrated more fully with the newsroom, attending regular news meetings and working more collaboratively with the title’s other journalists to improve coordination and visibility. Depending on the news cycle, each month Bloomberg’s graphics team creates around 100 quicker charts and around 35 more in-depth standalone charts, like the Amazon piece and the confessions of judgment piece; these are often full web pages with interactions and a narrative.

Often the standalone graphics are more evergreen, for instance. This chart on how land in America is used — whether urban, pastoral, forest — was shared widely on social and is still getting traction. According to the publisher, this chart — which was an idea sparked by the graphics team — had the most unique visitors among graphics stories in 2018 and had the second-most unique visitors among all stories on Bloomberg.com in 2018. The majority of the requests for graphics come from the newsroom, although often the top-performing work comes from ideas inside the graphics team, the publisher said.

“We get involved at the beginning; we have a lot of experience and are full of questions, asking questions as a reader would,” said Alex Tribou, managing editor of graphics at Bloomberg.

For instance, timelines are often used as a way to represent events over time, but it’s a very backward-looking graphic by definition. In November, during ongoing protests and before the Trump administration put tougher oil sanctions on Venezuela, the graphics team probed to how to make sense of events leading up to such political and economic unrest. The team found that the price of oil was the common thread running through the past 20 years of Venezuelan history, impacting GDP, inflation, and poverty, using this as a barometer to track events.

To keep growing the team and its output, Bloomberg plans to train journalists in the newsroom to use data-analysis tools like Python and quicker tools so they can knock out charts within minutes, leaving more room for the graphics team to collaborate with the newsroom on deeper standalone pieces.

“We want to scale this work so more team can collaborate, break more news, have more impact,” said Keohan.

The post Inside Bloomberg’s 30-person international data journalism team appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook is showing a greater willingness to ax news programming that’s not working on Facebook Watch.

Last June, Facebook rolled out its first set of daily and weekly news shows from publishers such as ABC News, CNN, Business Insider and NowThis. Overall, Facebook has launched 21 news shows on Watch including CNN’s “Anderson Cooper Full Circle,” BuzzFeed’s “Profile” and Univision’s “Real America with Jorge Ramos.”

In recent months, Facebook has been telling news publishers that it will only renew about a third of the existing news shows that it has funded for Facebook Watch, according to publishing sources that have met with Facebook.

“We’re going to continue experimenting with news publishers in Watch and sharing what we learn,” said Shelley Venus, Facebook’s video lead for news partnerships, in a statement. “We’re partnering with these organizations to build sustainable video businesses, where Facebook can be one part of their overall strategy.”

Publishing sources stressed that Facebook is still paying for news shows on Watch — the company is just being more selective and careful about what it funds going forward. Instead of Facebook subsidizing news publishers en masse, it’s functioning more as a TV network, open to canceling shows that aren’t getting viewership.

“They are not abandoning news,” said a source at a news publisher with a show that recently met with Facebook. “It’s not like the [Facebook] Live deals.”

Facebook is also looking to spend less per show as it spreads its $90 million news budget for Facebook Watch across more programs, including international news shows, The Information reported in December. Facebook has been willing to spend anywhere from $1 million to more than $10 million a year for news programming on Watch, according to a Digiday report last May.

One publisher with a show that was renewed by Facebook said the platform reduced the show’s budget by roughly 30 percent; but in exchange, Facebook is allowing the publisher to sell some of the ad inventory available in the show. Previously, Facebook sold all of the ads that aired during the show and kept all of the money until it recouped its production costs. Now, Facebook and the publisher share in ad revenue. (Facebook typically takes a 45 percent share of ad revenue on its mid-roll video ad breaks product.)

In this way, Facebook is doing more “co-production” deals, where it doesn’t provide the full cost of production but gives the publisher greater control over how it chooses to make money from the show, said another source.

It’s unclear exactly which existing shows won’t be renewed by Facebook. The platform’s news deals for Watch run for a year. That said, if a show is not performing well, Facebook has shown a willingness to cancel it early. That’s what the company did with “Mic Dispatch,” which took away a major source of funding for the publisher and led to Mic selling to Bustle for less than $5 million.

In an interview with Variety earlier this month, Venus said Facebook will “double down on things that are doing well,” while cutting others. Facebook executives have also made it clear that eventually, the company wants most Watch content to be funded entirely by shared ad revenue.

“Facebook is trying to provide the best quality content to the audience,” said Keith Hernandez, founder of consulting firm Launch Angle. “If publishers want to act like production studios, they need to embrace shows not getting picked up for another season. It happens all the time.”

The post Facebook won’t renew two-thirds of existing Facebook Watch news shows appeared first on Digiday.

Target, which has invested in equipping its big box stores to become online fulfillment hubs, is looking to grow online revenue through a third-party marketplace on its website. The program, called Target+, will let the retailer compete with Amazon and other retailers’ e-commerce platforms, generate service revenue from third-party sales, and drive traffic back to stores through product return drop-off points.

Target is billing this move as an extension of its in-store and online inventory, supported by Target’s expertise as a product curator.

“Guests look to Target for great products,” wrote Target’s chief marketing officer and digital officer, Rick Gomez, in a blog post Monday. “With Target+, we aim to give them easy access to even more great products by partnering with best-in-class specialty and national brands.” Target customers who hold a loyalty card get 5 percent off and free shipping, an additional lever to lock in the customer.

Like Walmart and Macy’s before it, the marketplace lets Target grow its fee-based revenue from third-party sales. It’s a strategy that’s worked for Amazon, where third-party sales have proved to be a profitable channel. Target has an extensive store network to bolster its third-party marketplace presence and look after customer service needs should problems arise. Target’s e-commerce growth was up 25 percent last year, according to results in December.

Unlike Amazon, Target is taking a cautious approach to growing its marketplace through its invitation-only process. Taking control over which sellers get to participate helps Target control the customer experience more closely and avoid problems other marketplaces have encountered with counterfeit sellers.

“They have a real advantage by sourcing reputable sellers; with Amazon, they end up with so much crap being sold since no one has any sense of the quality with questionable brands,” said Kiri Masters, CEO of digital agency Bobsled Marketing. “By going out and cherry picking, they have a massive edge over Walmart and Amazon.”

It’s also a loyalty play. The platform encourages loyal customers to stay within Target’s ecosystem, while Target extends its reach to its customer base by vetting third-party products and owning the sale that takes place within its platform.

Adding third-party items also lets Target grow its inventory without having to take on the risk of holding the items in its stores or warehouses. The retailer reportedly will require third-party sellers to take on fulfillment costs, and the company did not comment on how revenue-sharing arrangements will work. Sellers can create their own Target storefront (which, for example, Mizuno has done), but Target handles the customer interaction if there are follow-up questions.

Control over the experience, however, has its disadvantages from the seller’s point of view. For example, brands that have sold on Walmart and Amazon have often complained about the lack of access to customer data to help them more effectively market to customers for retention purposes. Aaron Luo, CEO and co-founder of luxury bag and accessories brand Caraa, which sells through Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters and Athleta, said marketplaces “owning” the customer relationship is a disadvantage. Caraa is not part of Target’s marketplace and sold its products on Amazon for eight months last year.

“The more you can make that [review and discovery] data available to sellers, that’s extremely powerful,” said Luo, who added that information about how customers find a brand on a marketplace, and whether sellers can be assured that their products will place favorably among search results, are important considerations.

Beyond data, making sure the experience is consistent for customers, including shipping, is also critical, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse.

“Target is late to the game given that many other retailers already have marketplaces, so there are questions around what more Target is doing beyond allowing other people to list products on their website,” he said. “The challenge for Target is to integrate the shipping and buying experience.”

When Amazon sellers can build Fulfillment by Amazon fees into their product prices, it helps them maintain a consistent experience with predictable costs. By contrast, if sellers have to cover free two-day shipping costs, it could cause some margin pressure for smaller sellers. It’s a concern some Walmart sellers have expressed, and skews third-party selection to large brands with established reach.

“Customers have become accustomed to free two-day shipping,” said Cory Checketts, product marketing specialist at Seller Labs, a company that develops software tools for third-party sellers on Amazon. “You would have to be a big household brand or a brand the size of an anchor on Amazon to make that work.”

The post With Target+, Target gets an Amazon-like marketplace appeared first on Digiday.

TikTok, the short-form video app from Chinese tech company Bytedance, has been courting advertisers by focusing on its global reach and how much time its users spend on the app every day.

The company has been meeting with U.S. ad agencies in recent weeks to talk about its four ad products and discuss future offerings, such as biddable ads, as Adweek reported last week. Digiday received the pitch deck TikTok sent to U.S. agencies.

The post Pitch deck: TikTok says its 27m users open the app 8 times a day in the US appeared first on Digiday.