Month: March 2019

Jayne Pimentel, senior director of growth marketing at DraftKings, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO conference taking place April 29-30, 2019 in San Francisco. Jayne Pimentel is hard on her technology partners, but that only makes the relationship better and more stable in the end. “I don’t want to say it’s a love/hate relationship,”… Continue reading »

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“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Mark Zagorski, CEO at Telaria. The question of whether Netflix will introduce an ad-supported business should not be will-they-or-won’t-they, but rather when and how. Those bullish on Netflix’s strategy of flooding screens with an… Continue reading »

The post Why Wouldn’t Netflix Launch An Ad-Supported Business? appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Lightening The Load Hulu is limiting commercial pods to 90 seconds, cutting the overall inventory available by almost half. Previously, ad pods on the OTT network ran between 180 and 240 seconds and varied significantly by show. But that, admits Hulu head of ad… Continue reading »

The post Hulu Pares Back Its Ad Load; Amazon Plans Ad-Supported News App For Fire TV appeared first on AdExchanger.

Buying ads across Facebook and Instagram hasn’t been the same for smaller advertisers since a glitch crippled nearly all of the tech company’s services two weeks ago.

The technical problem was caused by a server configuration change that shut down the Facebook, its Messenger and WhatsApp apps as well as Instagram and Oculus. Not only were billions of users prevented from accessing those services, but some advertisers were also unable to make money from them.

The price of ads across Facebook and Instagram surged immediately following the outage, according to the six ad buyers interviewed for this article, while the ads manager tool used to buy and optimize campaigns slowed down. Two weeks later, smaller ad spenders are still struggling.

“We understand the frustration the March 13th Ads Manager outage may have caused,” said a Facebook spokesperson. “Our team is working hard to investigate the impact on advertisers, including reviewing any refundable cases.”

At worst, the cost-per-thousand of impressions bought by agency Social Outlier sat between $41 (£31.38) and $46 (£35) after the outage; the cost was previously $7 (£5) and $11 (£8). The cost-per-acquisition on ads was four to six times more compared to the price before the glitch, said the agency. For the affected advertisers, which tend to spend no more than $50,000 (£38,272) a month across the social networks, no strategies used by Social Outlier have been able to wrangle the wayward auctions.

Nothing has really stuck, said David Herrmann, co-founder and director of advertising at the agency. It’s hard to gauge how much the situation is costing advertisers prior to the 28-day attribution closing said Herrmann, who did say revenue lost for clients has been as low as $1,000 (£765) to $4,000 (£3,061) and as high as $20,000 (£15,309) depending on size.

It’s a similar predicament for Wonghaus Media, an incubator for brands that also buys ads for them. The business has lost around $60,000 (£45,000) in potential revenue since the day of the outage, said the incubator’s CEO Jason Wong. On average, Wonghaus Media makes between $8,000 (£6,123) and $10,000 (£7,654) a day in revenue across all the media it buys including from Facebook.

Unlike Social Outlier, Wonghaus Media felt the effects of the outage on reach, not CPAs. It’s left the business with the conundrum of having to pay three to four times for CPMs that reach fewer people than they were prior to the outage, said Wong. For now, some client budgets are moving over to other channels in the mix like influencers, native ads, Snapchat and Twitter until the auctions settle.

“We’re not a big advertiser on Facebook, so we don’t have a rep who can help us with queries, and the most we’ve got from the company is an automated response so far,” said Wong. “The key takeaway from the situation is, as great as Facebook is as a platform, it can’t be the end-all for advertisers. You have to look elsewhere.”

The volatility of the auction has left Shopify software technology company Liverecover wary of running ads on Facebook now. “The cost of ads has been extremely inconsistent and got 30-50% more expensive since mid to early first quarter,” said Dennis Hegsted, co-founder of Liverecover.

Part of the problem is rooted in the amount of money spent in the auctions. Ad buyers Social Outlier, for example, have observed that the smaller the ad spend and the more an advertiser is dependent on Facebook to be its primary traffic generator, then the more susceptible they are to the vagaries of the auction. The algorithm effectively works better the more data and subsequent spend it has to work with.

“I would say anything less than $50,000 (£38,272) you’re still playing catch-up, but in all honesty, that’s more of a speculation,” said Hermann. “I’d wager the more you place as Facebook being your sole channel you are still feeling the effects.”

The observation was backed by the ebb and flow of the auctions VaynerMedia has contested over the last two weeks. In the two days after the outage, the media agency’s clients spent between 15-30% less than they did before it happened as a result of either the CPM or conversion rates rising depending on the advertiser.

But after two days, the auctions started to return to normal for VaynerMedia’s ad buyers who work for larger advertisers. “We’ve seen spend return to normal in terms of pacing for our clients, while performance seems to be back where expected it to be pre-outage,” said Morgenstern. “When the auctions were volatile, it was more our direct spend that got affected, rather the brand spend.”

Despite the amount of money the auction has cost in terms of lost revenue, ad buyers aren’t recommending advertisers pull media spend from the platform outright. Instead, they are paying closer eye on the fluctuations in price and performance to ensure they’re still pacing well against metrics. Switching off a channel that has the potential to grow a business at scale that generates noticeable returns isn’t an option most ad buyers can justify, despite the issue.

The post Post-Facebook outage, ad buyers are grappling with out-of-control costs appeared first on Digiday.

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In the past two weeks, Lerer Hippeau has seen two companies in its portfolio reach unicorn status: Glossier and Casper, two consumer brands selling cosmetics and skin care and mattresses, respectively, are now worth $1 billion.

The post Retail Briefing: Lerer Hippeau’s Graham Brown on what’s next for DTC unicorns appeared first on Digiday.

Branded content is a vital stream of revenue for most ad-supported publishers. But increased competition and myopic media agency metrics have begun squeezing margins in ways that some publishers say make the economics unworkable.

On stage at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colo., Dotdash CEO Neil Vogel said venture-backed publishers, who are looking to grow revenue regardless of whether they can do so profitably, have been undercutting the branded content market. Popsugar CRO Geoff Schiller said Popsugar’s branded content studio, the Bakery, now has to compete against proposals from heavily venture-funded publishers offering to create more video than a publisher can create profitably.

The difference in price between publishers’ proposals can be so significant that some publishers are willing to lose established clients rather than set a precedent that puts further pressure on their margins. “If we have to, we let them walk away,” said Michael Finnegan, the president of Atlantic Media.

The global spend on branded content is expected to hit $13.4 billion in 2020, nearly double the $7 billion it was predicted to hit in 2018, according to branded content distribution platform Polar. It has shown a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent, also per Polar.

Publishers have used that growth not only to manage declining ad revenue but to build up sophisticated brand studio businesses, with some expanding into consulting, experiential businesses or influencer marketing operations. Last year, nearly a third of respondents to a Digiday survey said branded content was their most important source of revenue — and the one with the greatest potential for growth.

But several developments have begun to squeeze publishers’ margins. For example, the number of advertisers buying these kinds of ads has leveled off; it has hovered steadily between 2,500 and 3,000 since the beginning of 2018, according to Mediaradar data.

Paid Facebook distribution, a key element in the growth of branded content, has been growing steadily more expensive.

Some publishers try to guard against increased paid-media costs by selling branded episodes of shows that have gotten traction with an audience. “If we can predict that we’re going to get half a million to one million views an episode, that helps,” one source said.

Agencies provide another source of pressure. Most publishers are still at the mercy of agencies, who think about the value of branded content by looking at metrics which, publishers say, make it difficult for publishers that make high-quality content. For instance, one publisher in attendance said that agencies view everything through the prism of “effective costs per view” — a strategy that some publishers say is putting extra pressure on publishers that spend real money on high-quality content.

“There has to be education if we’re going to continue to see growth in that space,” that source said. “These are high quality productions, and they say, ‘Our [effective cost per view] has to be four cents.’”

To navigate around those issues, publishers are returning to the idea of selling editorial sponsorships. That strategy fell out of favor many years ago, Finnegan said, though the Atlantic has been returning to it with an eye toward making that sponsorship more multi-dimensional. Rather than simply noting at the top of a piece that a large editorial series is sponsored by a specific brand, publishers are now finding more ways to incorporate advertisers, including giving them physical space at events or contribute a video to a series created specially for a large editorial program, Finnegan said.

Others have begun taking steps toward using branded content as a vehicle for performance advertising. Both New York Magazine and Turner’s social media agency, Launchpad, have begun using branded content to drive sales for advertisers.

The solution many publishers are looking to involves working directly with the brands themselves. Annie Granatstein, the head of the Washington Post’s WP Brand Studio, said that the solution to the problem is to find the person at a brand that “understands content.” Though not every brand has a person like that, Granatstein said, they are becoming increasingly common.

The post ‘If we have to, we let them walk away’: Branded content margin pressure squeezes publishers appeared first on Digiday.

For mid-tier publishers chasing subscription revenues, a sobering year lies ahead.

As subscription fatigue sets in and consumers think more carefully about what content they’re actually prepared to pay for, publishers occupying the middle ground between large, established brands and small but passionate audiences are about to find out how big (or small) their subscription businesses can really be.

The post Why a large-scale bundle could be the only hope for the subscription efforts of mid-tier publishers appeared first on Digiday.

Talking to an executive at a major U.S. production company, I begin to feel like a therapist. The patient has very complicated feelings about a relationship. On the one hand, he loves Netflix. Netflix is great to work with, offers a ton of creative freedom — and is happy to pay a premium for shows that it really wants.

But this executive also knows that sometimes he is leaving more money on the table by taking his show to Netflix, which prefers to buy shows outright (hence the premium). By doing this, he has to forego money on the back-end from reruns and global distribution.

The post ‘The middle is going to struggle’: In TV and entertainment’s race to the top, some get left behind appeared first on Digiday.

Envious of Amazon’s swelling ad business, which accounted for $3.4 billion in fourth-quarter revenue in 2018, leading retailers have been eager to develop digital ad offerings of their own. Those offerings continue to trail significantly in the eyes of most media buyers, however.

In a survey of 71 media buyers by Digiday this March, a relatively small number said they currently advertise on platforms outside of Amazon. Whereas 90 percent of marketers spent money with Amazon, only 23 percent did so on Walmart. Roughly the same number of media buyers utilized eBay and Target, 17 percent and 16 percent respectively. Meanwhile, just 8 percent of media buyers advertised on Kroger.

The post Digiday Research: Retail media plays catch-up to Amazon appeared first on Digiday.

The leaky nature of the real-time bidding advertising ecosystem continues to cause problems in a post-General Data Protection Regulation era.

Publishers that rely heavily on programmatic advertising bought via the open exchange as a revenue stream have always been vulnerable to sketchy ad tech vendors that drop tags on pages without the publisher’s knowledge. But when those same so-called vendors don’t have GDPR policies, they create bigger problems.

“We have yet to find one website whose CMP [consent management platform] vendor list covers all vendors that are dropping or reading cookies,” said Chloe Grutchfield, co-founder of ad tech consultancy RedBud. “And that includes publishers that opt to display the full IAB list of vendors in their CMP.”

RedBud has scanned 30 of the top U.K. publisher sites and flagged several dubious redirects occurring on a dozen sites, triggered by vendors that have no clear GDPR policy. That puts both publishers and legitimate vendors they work with at risk of penalties. Two companies flagged by RedBud have vague office addresses listed outside the European Union in countries like Israel and Russia.

Some redirects are vendors triggered by other, bona fide vendors for the purpose of cookie syncing. Some may be a little questionable and piggyback on a redirect to redirect to other smaller vendors, added Grutchfield. But in general, redirecting for cookie syncing purposes is a legitimate digital advertising method. The issue comes when the smaller players outside of Europe, that are not GDPR compliant, are triggered on U.K. browsers. There are several like this that are managing to slip through, she added.

RedBud flagged several specific companies as suspicious redirects, which are appearing on publisher sites in the U.K. One such company called “Upravel” states on its website that it has offices in Moscow in Russia and Raanana in Israel. There is only an Israeli address and one generic email listed as contact details on its site. Digiday contacted Upravel via the contact details on its site but received no reply before this article’s publication.

RedBud isn’t the first company to flag Upravel as needing further scrutiny. The Media Trust, which continuously scans publisher pages for unauthorized tags, has previously flagged Upravel as potentially an illegitimate business. A year ago, Upravel was flagged as serving tags and loading a tracking pixel onto a site, been although it doesn’t position itself as an ad server. The fact its name was nearly identical to Uprival, a legitimate business with a good reputation among publishers also roused suspicion, according to Chris Olson, CEO of The Media Trust.

“Publishers need to scan their ecosystem for any unauthorized supply chain code,” said Olson. “The rogue code could enable unauthorized data gathering or a data breach that would put a publisher at odds with GDPR.”

Despite being flagged as suspicious a year ago, the company continues to appear on sites today. Another name flagged by RedBud as suspicious and appearing on major U.K. publisher sites is “Slowplay,” which shares a domain name with “cootlogix.” A visit to its site shows no GDPR policy and three vague office addresses in Malta, London and Denver in the U.S. Digiday contacted Slowplay via the contact details on their site but received no reply.

Many media executives believe that the seemingly infinite number of vendors in the digital ad market create the perfect camouflage for fraudsters and bad practice. However, GDPR needs to be used as a tool by all legitimate players in the ecosystem to enforce cleaner practice. “It is the natural outcome of strategies and practices which are ignoring the fact that RTB is not GDPR compliant and so bundling consent,” said Alessandro de Zanche, independent media consultant and former News UK executive. “This is leaving gray areas and dodgy practices active, something which in a pre-GDPR era were ‘just’ unacceptable but today are also illegal.”

Continuously monitoring which vendors a publisher’s vendors are redirecting to is a constantly moving beast. Typically, exchanges and SSPs rotate who they redirect to. They won’t call all their partners per session because it would put too much pressure on a website. If they have more than 100 partners they sync cookies with they will use redirect rotations. That makes it tricky for publishers to see the full extent of who is dropping cookies on their sites.

That said, onus shouldn’t be just on the publishers to monitor. Ad tech vendors also share the responsibility of auditing who they are redirecting to and whether those companies have GDPR policies.

“Third-party vendors doing business with the digital publishers do have a responsibility to know where their source code is running,” said Olsen. “Though, there is a willpower issue in the digital ad ecosystem. If you shut off one company from running on your site, they will find others [vendors to piggyback on] to get them there.”

The post Unauthorized redirects are putting publishers at GDPR risk appeared first on Digiday.