Month: February 2019

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Phil Bohn, senior vice president of sales and revenue for Mediavine. Flooring is one of publishers’ most important yet least-discussed programmatic revenue strategies. Open auctions fill a large amount of ad inventory for almost… Continue reading »

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

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Direct Approach Tim Armstrong, former CEO of AOL and Oath, is on to the next business since leaving Verizon at the end of last year. Armstrong’s new venture, the dtx company, will invest in direct-to-consumer products. The first six investments are startups in… Continue reading »

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At the end of 2018, U.K. news publisher The Telegraph hit 3.5 million registered users, beating its 3 million target for the year in August. According to the publisher, it’s making good progress to meet this year’s goal and then onto reaching the 10 million milestone in a few years’ time.

The publisher hasn’t shared how many subscribers it has since it switched from a metered paywall to a variable paywall three years ago, where 20 percent of its content is gated. Since introducing the premium tier, where users register an email address to view one premium article a week, the daily subscriber acquisition number tripled compared to the previous model, according to the publisher, and conversion has been growing as it becomes more sophisticated in understanding readers’ reasons for registering.

“The one thing we have learned — and it’s no secret — but the pursuit of digital subscriptions is a business of marginal gains,” said Chris Taylor, The Telegraph’s chief technology officer. “You increase a few percents here and there, and if you manage it well, you can accumulate strong subscriber benefits.”

Last July, the publisher launched My Telegraph across its site and app, allowing registered users to save articles, follow specific journalists and customize the topics that show up in their feed. According to the publisher, 5 percent of its registered user base interacts with My Telegraph. By far the most popular use of My Telegraph is saving articles, then it’s following journalists, followed by customizing content topics.

“That was a big surprise,” said Taylor, adding that My Telegraph works as an acquisition and retention mechanism where anonymous readers can follow journalists or topics and are then prompted to register. Registered users invest time in developing their own feed and setting up alerts. “That creates strength in retention,” he said.

Taylor stresses that My Telegraph is offered as an accompaniment to The Telegraph’s core editorial proposition, and points to the popularity of saving articles as proof of the strength of its journalism in converting. The publisher said it has now increased the amount of content behind the paywall to roughly 35 percent, depending on the news cycle. Just over 12 months ago, it announced it would grow editorial heads by 39, last March it launched a new tech vertical with 15 new staffers globally.

Of course, managing acquisition while keeping churn stable is a balancing act. The subscriptions team at The Telegraph is growing under chief operating officer Aki Mandhar, and the publisher is wary of recruiting low-value subscribers, acquired through discount offers, for instance. While the publisher wouldn’t share retention figures — often a private metric for many — Taylor said retention levels have “proven solid” as acquisition has grown, although improving it remains a focus.

In part, keeping churn down is due to the work the publisher has done in mapping journeys from anonymous readers to registered users and subscribers while monitoring at what propensity they are at throughout each stage based on triggers.

Also last summer, the publisher switched how it experimented with what messages and content converted the highest. Previously, it ran A/B tests on product improvements. It has since introduced a self-learning paywall, which runs multiple executions, and machine learning determines which is best for the reader, thanks to rich first-party data on browsing habits as a registered user, making testing more practical and efficient.

But it still needs enough structure around experiments to understand the value. Currently, the publisher is focused on understanding the journey 30 days after people register, a known key time frame for people to convert. In the last few months, The Telegraph’s site has cut down display ads from other advertisers and replaced them with Telegraph products that are likely to nudge people to convert.

“Good quality advertising has its place in premium environments,” said Taylor, adding that as it’s a relatively small time frame of 30 days or 30 visits, this only represents a small percentage of overall pageviews. The publisher still has scale through its open and premium model: Unique monthly visitors have fluctuated seasonally just over 21 million, according to Comscore stats. Hard paywalls suffer more from falling traffic, potentially making the tussle between the advertising and subscription sides of the business more fraught.

The post ‘A business of marginal gains’: How The Telegraph pairs user registration and paid subscriptions appeared first on Digiday.

Incentive-based structures at agencies and brands have a lot to answer for.

For the latest installment of our Confessions series, in which we trade anonymity in exchange for candor, we spoke to a seasoned former agency executive about how nefarious tactics like cookie bombing remain a popular way to jack up campaign numbers.

Answers have been edited for clarity and flow.

What are the common tactics used to inflate performance campaign metrics?
Attribution scamming, also referred to as cookie bombing, is still rife. Attribution models are still very much based on last-touch or last-click, where the last ad the consumer saw before they converted is credited for the conversion, even if it isn’t what actually drove them to convert. They may not have even seen it, but people use cookie bombing to make it look like an ad has driven a load of conversions or reduced their cost-per-acquisition.

Give me an example.
If I’m a consumer and I see a rich-media ad for an item, and after I go on my mobile and am influenced by this beautiful mobile ad, then I go onto Facebook and see another ad for the same thing, and only then do I go and visit the e-commerce site. But before I buy, I am then retargeted with a display desktop ad. Then I buy on that site, but the mobile or social ads don’t get credit, only the banner does. That’s the cookie-bombing strategies coming in, making it look like that’s driven the conversions.

Cookie bombing isn’t a new technique though. Why is it frustrating you now?
It’s still frustrating because cookie bombing and attribution scamming is where the ad dollars are being pushed, simply because it looks better on paper. That also means that despite people spending so much more time-consuming media on mobile, the ad dollars aren’t flowing as fast to mobile.

Who is responsible for it?
It starts as a lack of deep education on the media landscape from the brand marketer’s side. You have a brand marketing manager, whose job it is to each week take a scorecard that shows their conversion numbers broken out by different channels, and put them a single Excel sheet to take to their CMO. A lot of brands I’ve worked with — their bonus structures are based on their scorecards. So the higher the conversion rates look on that scorecard, the better. So they then tell their agencies to get high numbers and the agencies want to look good to the client. The agencies should educate the client to say, “No, we need a mobile strategy” — but the agencies are also getting sucked in because they want to make the clients happy.

And the agencies likely have similar bonus structures.
Definitely. If they can send a scorecard to their client that says their cost-per-acquisition was more efficient week over week, then it looks great to the client. It’s just all about trying to beat those numbers.

So the brand marketers tell agencies to hit high figures by whatever means necessary?
In many cases, I do think the brand marketers know [what agencies are doing] and just turn a blind eye because it also looks good to their own bosses if the numbers look good.

Who loses out most from this?
Marketers are losing out because they’re spending all this money that is being pushed into non-viewable ads, not aesthetically pleasing ads or ads that don’t drive brand recall, even ads that aren’t being seen — they’re just shoved in there using cookie bombing to get that last-touch attribution. It’s a waste of marketers’ ad spend. It also hurts the publishers and vendors who are pushing to have better ads, and anyone trying to push for better creative and to make advertising more user-friendly. They lose out on ad spend because agencies don’t want to buy it if it doesn’t look as good for attribution. It’s very short-term thinking.

How prolific are we talking?
I’d say between 50 and 75 percent of [performance-driven] display advertising is influenced by it and has had ad dollars shifted toward attribution scamming. It’s happening the majority of the time for anything that is tied to conversion metrics across mobile and display. It’s like that time when millions of dollars of ad spend went to what was actually an accidental ad created by a Google employee, and the numbers proved that it performed better than other, really nice-looking banner ads. That’s very alarming when we are spending all our time and costly production on producing great creative. But that’s a great example of why cookie bombing works so well on paper — it’s just about cheating the tech.

The post ‘Brands turn a blind eye’: Confessions of a former agency exec on attribution scamming appeared first on Digiday.

Amazon has begun testing ads within the Amazon Business marketplace in an effort to get more B2B clients.

Three agency executives that have received access to the beta program told Digiday that the company is now letting companies advertise within its Amazon Business marketplace, where companies can buy and sell office supplies and other business products.

The post ‘It’s a land grab’: Amazon is now testing ads in Amazon Business appeared first on Digiday.

Nextdoor, the 7-year-old social network for neighborhoods, is after more advertising dollars. The quick pitch: Nextdoor is home to only users with verified addresses across 190,000 U.S. neighborhoods. That means advertisers can target real people by their specific location, merging the online and offline worlds.

Nextdoor tripled its revenue over the last year, said Lauren Nemeth, Nextdoor’s chief revenue officer. The company, which is backed by $285.2 million in venture capital funding from big investors such as Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark, declined to disclose the total revenue for 2018 as well as whether it’s profitable. In an earlier interview with Fortune, Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia had projected “tens of millions” in revenue for 2017.

The platform has “tens of millions” of users, the company said, without providing additional specifics.

“We tripled our ad business, not just because I’m a genius and have a team of geniuses. It’s more that we dramatically evolved the ad product to be frictionless. Before we were a walled garden and not taking third-party data, but now we do CRM ingestion and lookalike modeling,” Nemeth said.

Indeed, Nextdoor has been investing in maturing its ad platform. In December, it introduced a programmatic offering so advertisers wouldn’t necessarily have to work directly with Nextdoor’s sales team. Nextdoor now works with “hundreds of advertisers,” Nemeth said. Top industries include home security, retail, dining, financial services, tech, telecoms and automotive.

Nextdoor offers several ad formats, including native display, native video, rich media and email ads. The minimum spend is $25,000 and CPMs range from $8 to $30 depending on the ad format and the targeting, Nemeth said, and buyers confirmed.

HomeAdvisor, the IAC-owned online marketplace for homeowners, began advertising on Nextdoor in late 2017. Nextdoor had launched sponsored posts in April 2017 for its news feed and its newsletters. HomeAdvisor CMO Allison Lowrie said her company was interested due to its matching audience of owners. Nextdoor said 74 percent of its members are homeowners.

“The home service category is massive, but only a small portion of the hiring activity is happening online. Most people turn to friends or neighbors. Nextdoor creates a bridge between the traditional offline word of mouth and online behavior,” Lowrie said.

Schlage Locks, a door hardware manufacturer, began running ads on Nextdoor last summer and during the holiday season. Jason Owens, director of consumer marketing at Schlage Locks, said he has been a Nextdoor user for a couple years and was interested in how his company could use it to reach homeowners.

“We had that desire to reach verified homeowners in a less crowded advertising space, where we could get past the noise in other digital marketing,” Owens said.

Of course, Nextdoor isn’t the only platform offering advertisers the ability to reach neighborhoods and very specific local markets. Craigslist and Yelp offer local listings as well as Angie’s List (which is owned by IAC and combined with HomeAdvisor in 2017). Facebook and Google also allow local listings, and Facebook has been working to expand its local product.

Nemeth said that a desire for verified identities is one of the most common interests she hears from advertisers. Nextdoor verifies user identities by requesting proof of address such as a cell phone bill. This is one way Nextdoor is able to compete against other platforms. Facebook, for instance, may also tout real names and community, but the platform is still rampant with fake accounts as well as harassment.

Advertisers can target campaigns based on location and time of day. They also can target specific users through interests, household composition and local behaviors. For example, Nextdoor would know if a user has a dog. The platform also offers third-party targeting through Oracle and LiveRamp. Advertisers can also upload their own CRM data and can use Nextdoor’s lookalike modeling.

“We like how we can locally target, and it wasn’t just about specific engagement rates, but we also got to understand users who commented and asked questions [about our products]. There was more of an intimate dialogue,” Owens said.

Nextdoor’s 2019 road map is focusing on “eliminating buying friction” for agencies and brands, Nemeth said. The platform also plans to release more ad formats and improve ad targeting and personalization.

There’s also a part of Nextdoor that has yet to be monetized: local businesses. Nemeth said 2 million small businesses are part of the platform, but they don’t require them to pay if they want to post about their services on their neighborhood’s news feed. Mary Guy from Roseville, Minnesota runs one such small business. She offers lawn and garden care and has been using Nextdoor to promote her services.

“I appreciate Nextdoor’s tolerance of businesses such as mine being allowed to promote themselves, and my postings stay up there forever, and people see them and the recommendations all the time,” Guy said. “I would say every year I pick up [approximately] a dozen to two dozen inquiries.”

The post How Nextdoor is using verified location data to quietly build a big ads business appeared first on Digiday.

Target is on a path to consolidate its suite of mobile apps into one, combining mobile shopping, the loyalty program and payments in a single place after experimenting with a litany of separate apps.

Over the past decade, the retailer rolled out a number of consumer-facing apps: the Target app, launched seven years ago; pharmacy app Healthful; bridal and baby registry app Registry; discount offers app Cartwheel; and Target Connected, a companion app for its connected lights system launched in 2018.

As of now, three of these consumer-facing app platforms are active: Target, Target Connected and Registry — fusing as much of the shopping experience into the main app, while the two remaining companion apps cater to highly specific use cases outside of the core retail experience. Cartwheel was folded into the main Target app in 2017, while Healthful was shut down.

In centralizing its apps, Target is joining other retailers that have moved away from single-use platforms. And while Walmart has a number of internal employee workflow apps, its consumer-facing app strategy focuses on two apps: one for general shopping and another for its e-commerce grocery business. Target declined to comment on the record.

“There is a big push for ‘super apps,’” said James Lanyon, vp of strategy and innovation at T3, a digital agency that develops apps for retailers. “We think about WeChat as the most prolific version of that — it’s about how can we capture a person’s entire commercial existence into the app.”

While mobile apps are table stakes for large stores, they take resources to maintain, and have the potential to put off customers if the user experience is clunky. Some retailers may have resisted app consolidation due to capacity and internal organization-related challenges. Big-box stores are pulling various functions into their core mobile apps, including loyalty, payments, delivery and pickup. It’s a strategy to further lock in their most loyal customers. By contrast, a multi-app strategy subdivides the potential customer base.

Merging Cartwheel and Target may have been motivated by the desire to increase sales, said Gene Liebel, co-founder of digital agency Work & Co.

“By merging Target’s apps, they’re betting that they’re going to get more people to discover how good online shopping is and encourage people to join the loyalty program — loyalty leads to more frequency of shopping and higher basket sizes,” he said.

Per TechCrunch, at the time Target absorbed Cartwheel, the discount app was more popular than the main app, appearing in “Top 10” most popular shopping app lists (the main app was in the “Top 2o”) and was reportedly downloaded 40 million times.

The objective was to fuse loyalty, discounts and a digital catalog into a single platform to drive more sales volume.

Another motivation for merging shopping, discounts and the loyalty program in one place is to ensure seamless mobile payments, said Liebel. Target launched its barcode-based mobile payments tool Wallet in December 2017; it lives within the retailer’s primary app.

“It would be clumsy to support mobile payments in-store without integrating — the customer would often have to scan a barcode multiple times [in a separate platform],” Liebel said. The challenge with consolidation, however, is discoverability; a challenge many brands are trying to crack.

Jonathan Smalley, CEO of data analytics company Yaguara, which also has retail clients, agrees that converting prospects into customers is likely the primary driver for app consolidation. The challenge, he said, is trying to entice customers who may not already be loyal, exclusive Target customers, and who may choose to peruse goods in multi-brand platforms like Postmates.

“I’m curious how this is going to affect customers using other channels, especially if more millennials become customers,” he said. “Consolidating into a single app makes [the retailer] own that data, but you need to be careful not to silo yourself from losing those top-of-funnel users by integrating with other applications.”

The post Why Target is focusing its mobile strategy on a single app appeared first on Digiday.

Juul is growing its marketing leadership in an effort to transform its reputation. The company is recruiting for a CMO as well as some other marketing roles. 

A Juul Labs spokesperson said the CMO role will focus on education and advertising to show the company is not targeting teens.

The company is also looking to make other marketing hires as the company grows internationally and into new countries such as India. It’s looking for an international creative director in New York to handle advertising, a head of government affairs in India, an international marketing planning and programs manager, and several designers and engineers, among other roles.

Hiring a CMO is the latest move the vaping company is taking to turn around its negative perception after garnering an avalanche of negative press following an FDA inspection and Stanford studies on how the company marketed its products to teens. In October, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb called teen nicotine vaping an epidemic. The marketing chief will be charged with making Juul a more “trusted” brand.

Juul’s ongoing adult education campaign, a mix of print, radio and TV ads, features testimonials from only adult smokers who have switched to Juul from conventional cigarettes. In November, the company deleted its Facebook and Instagram accounts and stopped the sale of certain flavored Juul pods that appealed to teens at retail stores. The adult education campaign spots appear on Juul’s YouTube channel. 

The Juul spokesperson said the company has no plans on relaunching its Facebook and Instagram accounts, even for the adult-specific campaign. 

Juul faces an uphill battle. A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that while e-cigarettes might helping adults quit smoking, it also entices young people to start.

The Juul spokesperson would not discuss specifics on how the CMO will expand upon the current campaign or how much the company is spending on it. The company works with DDB for creative advertising.

Juul hasn’t had a CMO since the company spun off from vaping company Pax Labs in 2017, according to the company. The company is using recruiters to reach out to potential candidates, but because of the company’s reputation so far, the search is not going completely smoothly. One of the people a Juul recruiter reached out to was Katie Jacobs Stanton, CMO of Color, a service that gives people information about their genes and health conditions and past vp of global media at Twitter.

Stanton posted the recruiter’s message on Twitter, sharing a screenshot of what she wrote back to the Juul recruiter. She wrote: “I’m focused on helping people prevent and beat cancer. Why in the world would I try to build a business essentially driving up cancer rates and ultimately making more people sick?”

The Juul spokesperson declined to comment on the Twitter conversation.  

Dipanjan Chatterjee, vp and principal analyst serving CMOs at Forrester, believes a CMO at Juul is “much needed” given the company’s current state.

“The threat to an otherwise booming business comes squarely from the perception that the brand has created, and not from any market weakness,” said Chatterjee. “The right CMO could work to stem the negative backlash that the brand has unwittingly brought upon itself.”

Juul’s revenue exceeded $1 billion in 2018, up from $200 million in 2017, Marlboro maker Altria Group said in company earnings at the end of January, the first earnings Juul appeared in since Altria paid $12.8 billion in funding to acquire 35 percent of the company.

Juul had over 200 employees at the start of 2018 and currently has over 1,800, according to the company.

The post E-cigarette company Juul is looking for a marketing chief appeared first on Digiday.

As Amazon continues to spread its tentacles throughout the retail industry, hybrid selling is piquing more brands’ interest. Amazon vendors that sell through the company’s retail channel are increasingly testing a “hybrid” selling model — maintaining both a wholesale relationship with Amazon while also dabbling in the third-party marketplace.

In some ways, it’s being able to have your cake and eat it, too.

The post Retail Briefing: Hybrid selling on Amazon is gaining traction appeared first on Digiday.