Month: March 2019

All brands in Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy can now run standard and video ads on Pinterest. These four countries followed France, which became the first non-English-speaking country for Pinterest’s ad program last November. In addition to the countries above, Pinterest ads are available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and…

Google, a sleeping giant in the podcast space, is starting to open its eyes and stretch. Since launching its native podcast app for Android last June, Google has worked to improve podcast discovery, offered more titles and connected podcasts to its voice assistant and vast search business, said Zack Reneau-Wedeen, product manager at Google. “Google… Continue reading »

The post How Google Plans To Grab Its Share Of Global Podcast Listeners appeared first on AdExchanger.

Cars.com knows that most people shopping for a car come to its site, which creates some of the best in-market auto data available. The only downside? The higher the quality of data, the smaller the audience for marketers to target. Cars.com counts about 7 million people in-market for cars at a given time. In contrast,… Continue reading »

The post Cars.com Helps Auto Manufacturers Fuel Up On Quality Data appeared first on AdExchanger.

“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 Brian Nguyen, group connections strategy director at R/GA Austin. A few years ago, it would’ve been unthinkable to build out a communications strategy without planning tools, such as Nielsen Ad… Continue reading »

The post The Case For Smarter Social Data Tools appeared first on AdExchanger.

By Sharb Farjami

Social media has revolutionized the way people experience the world. It has connected news organizations and publishers to eyewitnesses in volatile regions of the world. It has armed brands with a direct line to their target audience and served as a critical communication tool for corporations. But social media is a double-edged sword — one which some people maliciously wield — making the power to reach and connect people subject to manipulation and mischief.

For nearly ten years, Storyful has watched the social media landscape become more complex, sophisticated and treacherous for brands. We’ve mapped the disparate ways information travels from fringe sites to mainstream media to shape brand perception and influence public discourse in record speeds. Our work with newsrooms to verify and understand social content in breaking news situations affords us a unique understanding of an ecosystem that is increasingly polluted with mis- and disinformation.

Recently, we analyzed digital and social media posts across mainstream and fringe networks, including Reddit, Snapchat, 4chan and Gab, filtering through billions of posts to understand some of the most insidious types of social media tactics used to target brands: memes, doxxing, review attacks and doctored content. In the new environment of social media, marketers need to be aware of how this information spreads so they can protect their brands and their own reputations.

Memes
Meme campaigns are one of the most prevalent tactics for disseminating brand propaganda online in the public space. Often coordinated on fringe networks, these images spread at an alarming rate due to the nature of visual content. This makes them difficult for brands to curb once they’re in circulation.

During the Nike-Colin Kaepernick controversy, hundreds of memes were launched in the same visual layout as the ad, mocking the quarterback and the brand. On fringe platforms like 4chan, alt-right posters revived issues of cheap foreign labor and sexual harassment lawsuits against executives to smear Nike. Seven hours after Nike announced the campaign on September 3, mentions of “Nike” and “labor” increased 3,110 percent, with the hashtag #BoycottNike peaking on Twitter. Popular memes emerged from the fringes, including a meme with the Nike logo paired with “Just Blew It,” driving the conversation on Twitter.

While the brand experienced an uptick in sales and stock price, the outpouring of nefarious memes certainly distorted brand sentiment for some.

Doxxing
Doxxing is the practice of researching and publishing someone’s personal information to fringe and mainstream sites with the goal of embarrassing or inviting unwanted harassment. The practice involves posting anything from photographs and telephone numbers to credit card numbers and political contribution histories — and can leave a brand’s key decision-makers vulnerable to anything from hate mail to death threats.

Journalists in particular have long been doxxed, but in recent years, the practice is spreading to prominent company executives. Take for example when Procter & Gamble’s Gillette released its “We Believe” ad. In response, key decision makers at the company and the creative staff behind the ad became the targets of smear campaigns on Reddit and a doxxing campaign on fringe sites. The doxxing even extended to the social media profiles of Gillette’s North America Brand Director and parent company P&G’s Chief Brand Officer.

Review attacks
Review attacks target consumer perceptions of a product or place on review sites such as Yelp, Glassdoor and TripAdvisor. People booking a hotel or restaurant look at reviews before taking action, and bogus reviews can seriously skew a potential customer’s opinion. While a bad review can break a business, every one-star increase to a review score can lead to a five to nine percent increase in revenue.

Last year, when YouTube personality Vitaly “VitalyzdTv” Zdorovetskiy got kicked out of the Boca Raton Resort and Club on New Year’s Eve, he called on his nine million YouTube followers to leave negative reviews. This caused the hotel’s rating to plummet on Yelp and Google Reviews, going from five stars to one-and-a-half stars in less than 24 hours.

Doctored content
Doctored content is a rising threat to brands and society at large. Tampering with and distorting images and videos is easier and more accessible than ever before. In a matter of minutes, an individual or brand can be implicated in controversy.

In the wake of an incident in April 2018 in which two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia store, Starbucks announced plans to shut down 8,000 stores in the US for four hours to train employees on racial sensitivity. Less than a week later, fake coupons with the header “We’re Sorry” in Starbucks’ brand colors and style began circulating on mainstream social media, promising free drinks for people of color. The campaign commanded mainstream attention, forcing Starbucks to speak out and clarify that the coupon was a hoax.

Conclusion
These examples are only a taste of the tactics used to influence brand perception online. That’s why social understanding is more important than ever for safeguarding brand reputation. By understanding the nuance in the conversations around your brand and industry, companies can get ahead of digital threats and tackle them head on.

The post Memes, doxxing and doctored content: Understanding the tactics of disinformation for brands appeared first on Digiday.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Oath Ad Server, Peace Out Verizon Media will shutter the Oath ad server in 2020, Adweek reports. The Oath DSP and SSP products aren’t affected, and Verizon will be shifting investments to higher-growth revenue streams, such as connected TV, streaming audio and adoption of… Continue reading »

The post Verizon Media Shuts Down Its Ad Server; Legacy Brands Stave Off the DTCs appeared first on AdExchanger.

This special Shoptalk edition of the Retail Briefing is unlocked by Braze. You can get the Retail Briefing delivered to your inbox every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe here.

In-house innovation labs in retail are beginning to look like failed experiments instead of arbiters of forward-thinking industry change from the inside out.

At Shoptalk, where retailers on stage get the chance to show off their latest tech and achievements to interested listeners, little lip service has been paid to the innovation lab. Once held up as a signifier that a retailer was Taking Tech Seriously, the concept now carries with it the impression that innovation is something that can be sequestered into a siloed corner of the business. It’s become more evident that retail experiments contained in a controlled environment are destined to fail before they even get out the door.

“I don’t believe in innovation hubs,” said a vp at one brand whose company is in a quiet period. “The way our digital innovation team works, it’s not in a lab off to the side where we’re testing things in an abstract way. If innovation is core to your company, it lives at the center and influences everything you’re doing, facing the customer.”

In January, the retail innovation lab got a pretty public bashing when Neiman Marcus’s head of innovation Scott Emmons left the company, and left a searing review of the retailer’s siloed approach to innovation. Within Neiman Marcus’s iLab, Emmons wrote in a Business of Fashion op-ed, “processes are broken, execution is too slow, politics stalls decision-making and resources are too scarce.”

During Shoptalk, it’s not that retail executives downplayed their passion about innovation. Gap CEO Art Peck ended his keynote session, which laid out a new four-part strategy for the brands remaining post-Old Navy, with the line “we have to change, or fail.” But what that change entails has shifted, and the gimmicky, one-off tech tests that filled innovation labs doesn’t speak to real strategic overhaul. Instead, utilitarian changes like improving internal processes to bring down silos between digital and physical retail teams, expanding distribution channels and optimizing inventory for in-store and online purchases were touted by companies from Crate & Barrel to Ulta, and from Dollar Shave Club to Wayfair.

“To put it dramatically, what we’re seeing is the death of the innovation lab,” said Bullish managing partner Mike Duda. “Retailers can now acquire innovation in the form of new brands.”

That’s not to say retailers have stopped innovating in house. It’s just the positioning and parlance around this innovation has changed. Wayfair Next is what Wayfair calls its in-house tech arm, where new products like 3D modeling and visual search tools are perfected. The company employs 2,300 engineers and data sciences working on technology programs in house. It’s characterized as cross-functional, with the Wayfair Next team working with other internal teams, like marketing and e-commerce, to figure out how to blast out new technology to other facets of the company.

“If innovation is one piece of your business operating on its own, it’s never going to have any impact on the customer. What’s the point?” said Robin Copland, group vp of retail practice at Huge.

Amazon’s most valuable data
Wireless earbuds, bluetooth headphones, iPhone X cases — these are all hot commodities. As of Tuesday, these are the top search terms on Amazon. For ARA Premium subscribers — vendors who pay money to access better Amazon data — it’s the most valuable data they can get their hands on. For vendors, it helps them decide what terms to spend against and where customer interest is shifting in response to trends. For instance, when Kate Spade passed away, terms like “Kate Spade bags,” “Kate Spade dresses” and more bubbled up to the top for a few days. Making sure Amazon spend is efficient and understand customer buying trends is critical for sellers, according to an agency consultant who coaches brands on Amazon business.

But the terms themselves can also work in reverse. Companies like Mohawk Group, a brand accelerator, are mining Amazon search term data to find out what products would sell well, then manufacturing those items and launching them on Amazon. Understanding customer behavior is a way to imitate Amazon’s success for outsiders.

“The way to understand Amazon is to understand what customers are searching for. It’s the only data worth paying for. It’s currency,” said the consultant.

Shoptalk speaker superlatives
Most likely to break his own embargo: Michael Dubin, who announced that Dollar Shave Club was launching deodorant approximately 16 hours before the embargo on the news lifted, irritating media editors not on site at the show.

Most likely to give a history lesson to hint at why legacy matters: Gap CEO Art Peck, who appeared for a keynote presentation on Monday, four days after Gap announced Old Navy was leaving the Gap, Inc. nest. Peck spent roughly five of his 20 precious minutes recounting the history of modern retail in the U.S., starting with a legislative bill signed by FDR and ending with Gap’s iconic 90s commercials and the rise of suburban value shopping. Point taken.

Most likely to talk for 20 minutes without saying anything at all: Amazon chief evangelist for Alexa and Echo, Dave Isbitski. “Evangelist” titles are not yet outlawed, it seems.

Most likely to dodge a question: Facebook’s vp of advertising Mark Rubkin.

Most likely to make a statement by stating the obvious: Nordstrom president Erik Nordstrom received praise throughout the conference for the groundbreaking admission that Nordstrom stores drive online sales in their surrounding markets.

Most likely to make you hold your breath: Macy’s brought out Story founder Rachel Shechtman to discuss how Story’s experiential retail model would change Macy’s store experiences. Nothing’s come to fruition yet, nearly a year after the acquisition, which was anticlimactic.

 

Overheard at Shoptalk
“Warby Parker did not invent $99 glasses. They made them cool, and Facebook was free. Facebook was fucking free.”

“Amazon destroys brands. It’s a brand destroyer. Vendor managers are 27-year-olds who don’t know anything about the brand categories they’re working in. They don’t care to help business.”

“If retailers still look at brands like they’re playing landlord, they’ll be gone in five years. That’s over.”

“As a brand, we got so much stuff from the conference for free, including a booth on the trade floor. I don’t know if I was supposed to say that.”

 

The post Retail Briefing: The death of the retail innovation lab appeared first on Digiday.

For most online publishers ad revenue isn’t getting any easier to come by, as platforms swallow up a growing portion of advertiser budgets and layers of middlemen continue to chip away at media dollars before they reach publishers’ sites. As a result, the need to wring the greatest yield possible from their programmatic operations is only becoming more pronounced.

One way publishers are doing so is by actively shrinking the numbers of ad-tech vendors they work with.

The post Digiday Research: 44 percent of publishers plan to work with fewer ad-tech vendors appeared first on Digiday.

ISBA’s annual conference may have been held inside a nightclub in London’s East End, but the atmosphere was anything but party-like. From duplicated reach and ad fraud, to the questionable ways both the walled gardens and agencies profit from media budgets, it was clear that clients want more say over where their ads run but those at the event are still grappling with how to get it.

Transparency isn’t as relevant to larger advertisers as it was a year ago. The catch-all term for everything that’s wrong with advertising has given way to concerns about brand safety and contextual targeting that have shifted the focus back to effectiveness, according to advertisers, agencies, ad tech vendors and media owners at the event, held March 5. “It’s no longer acceptable to say the digital marketplace is an evolving one that’s moving too fast to be fixed. It’s well-established, and it’s time to address these issues,” said Unilever’s outgoing CMO, Keith Weed.

The advertiser is exploring new solutions to the same old problems of brand safety, ad fraud and personalization as it comes to terms with how each one damages the image of brands and wastes ad budgets. Duplicated reach is among the more pressing issues for the advertiser as is the work it’s doing with influencers, some of who are being paid on engagement rather than reach, in order to limit the exposure of Unilever’s brands to fraud.

“Reach is important but so is brand affinity and being relevant to your target audience,” said Sarah Mansfield, vp of global media at Unilever. “As an industry, it’s important for us to move beyond just reach as the main factor for the transaction because it’s perpetuating the issues we see with fake followers.”

In many ways, this means moving away from the long tail of content as outlined by what Weed called the “seven sins” of advertising. These are: improve quality of advertising; the challenge around influencer marketing; concerns over data; brands funding bad activity such as terrorist content; fake news; personalization; and bombardment. The long tail of content is no longer as relevant to larger advertisers like Unilever as it once was.

Weed made some big calls when he outlined a five-point plan to solve for these issues, which revolve around the following: reduce bombardment; curb retargeting; prioritize data privacy matters; show advertising can drive positive change; and ensure the U.K.’s ad regulator is best in class. It’s an argument for a revaluation of media planning — or the commercial objective — with those global advertisers at the event now more worried about where ads will run rather than where they’re not. The realities of making this happen, however, are tricky, as WPP, which buys media for Unilever brands worldwide, can attest.

The holding group’s CEO, Mark Read, said he “wasn’t sure” whether WPP could support an organizationwide frequency cap to throttle ad loads on all campaigns for its clients but said the network could introduce the safeguards as and when a client requested. “We work with Unilever on standards around trust, security and viewability, and I think ad load could be part of that,” said Read.

Despite those hurdles, progress is being made — albeit slowly. A year ago, at the same conference advertisers spoke about wanting to buy 100 percent viewable impressions. Since then, many have accepted that it’s not always feasible and instead are taking a more pragmatic stance. Some advertisers are using guaranteed views to buy ads, said Nigel Gilbert, chief market strategist for Appnexus EMEA. Rather than working on a viewability metrics that a marketer has deemed fine, they are instead buying guaranteed views and don’t pay for the ads that aren’t viewed, said Gilbert.

Even the walled gardens have made more concessions. Google and Facebook may have agreed to back a cross-platform measurement plan, but the data they are sharing is limited, for instance. Moves like this are an example of how when those companies are asked to do things by industry initiatives they’re slow and never go against their own commercial interest, so continue to mop up new ad spend, said one attendee at the event, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity. Indeed, there was an underlying view throughout the conference that adjustments made by technology companies haven’t been done with the long-term health of the ecosystem in mind.

“I know the online platforms have made substantial efforts to improve, but are they getting better fast enough or are they doing just enough to stop us moaning?” said Tess Alps, chair of TV marketing body in the U.K. Thinkbox. “Advertisers should be much more ruthless in who they support and who they don’t.”

It’s hard for marketers to turn their backs on technologies and media owners they don’t fully trust when the reach and clicks they deliver make them so much money. Chasing clicks and excessive retargeting are a reprieve for many marketers at a time when share buybacks are massively outstripping the investment in marketing. It’s hard for marketing to be effective in a world where investment opportunities are drying up.

“We’re at the end of a first wave where everything that could go wrong across the whole ad ecosystem, from measurement and fraud all the way through to the consumer, has,” said Gilbert.”We’re now at the start of a second cycle. It’s a chance for the industry to hit the reset button at a market level and make things work better, driving the things that are not only important to the agencies, for example, but also the customer.”

The post ‘The industry has to hit the reset button’: Advertisers’ annual gathering sees new solutions to old problems appeared first on Digiday.

The climate is tough for publishers. Digital ad revenues continue to be swallowed up by big tech giants, while publishers still need to rely somewhat on platforms for reach. Yet publishers have an air of realism despite the challenging conditions and looking to non-ad revenue streams like subscriptions and commerce to protect their businesses.

In Milan, Italy, 150 publishers gathered at Digiday’s Publishing Summit Europe this week to discuss their growing reader revenue strategies, difficulties with attracting and keeping talent and the changing programmatic landscape. Focus groups and town hall sessions were conducted under Chatham House Rule. Highlights below.

How to convince readers to pay
“As premium publishers, we’ve made a huge mistake in allowing consumers to believe they can consume content for free. I can have the biggest brand but still be competing with all the content for free online. Two years ago, we gave away content on Facebook Instant Articles; it increased traffic but revenue was significantly cannibalized.”

“As a subscriber what can we give you that is special? Sometimes that’s early access. It’s about keeping premium, premium.”

“It doesn’t matter how cheap it is, €1 or £1; if you’re not using it there’s no value. Subscriptions sound more transactional; memberships are more inclusive.”

“Reconciling members versus subscriptions, some of our sites have really hardcore tech readers, that can lead to a level of toxicity. We need to balance subscribers and members and building a community people want to engage in.”

“There are hard paywalls and soft paywalls, but there are culturally different approaches and reading habits across Europe.”

“Spotify for news can’t be done. There’s too much free-to-air news; it’s too fragmented. Effectively we have moved away from nano payments with newspapers.”

“There’s still a premium niche. There are people interested in not just eating the sausage but how the sausage is made. There’s a niche in the behind-the-scenes.”

“It’s tough moving revenue generation from advertising to subscriptions.”

“For us, of course, the challenge is conversion. What kind of content is working? A lot of it is free; it’s hard to find what readers need and where to get that content from.”

“Our coverage is B2B and B2C. B2C relies on reach, and we have to watch out we don’t lose reach in subscriptions.”

Getting tech talent to stick
“We aren’t the Googles of the world. We’re publishers. Keeping talented tech people is a challenge. I hear the story all the time: How can we be innovative in publisher technology? But you can’t keep people just with money alone.”

“For us, it helped giving more senior people more control and management over the product, so it’s not just the editorial team who have the final say. Younger people will fly away easily.”

“We create great media; we can still be cutting-edge and focus on those great aspects of our creativity; that’s what we should be seeing them on.”

Programmatic revenue struggles to fill the void
“Planning cycles at agencies are not translating into a $50,000 IO. There’s a sequence of events on the agency side that doesn’t translate to the pipes being connected and you suddenly being higher up the hierarchy if you were in a private market place. Programmatic direct is the closest thing to direct, but anything beyond that, even by the agencies’ own admission, is that they are not joined up enough because there are too many people involved in the process that it doesn’t translate to the same meaningful revenues.”

“In the old days, people would phone you up saying, ‘I’ve bought some digital stuff from you; here’s another massive IO because we like you.’ Those days don’t exist anymore, and management believe they should. You still want to continue to grow digital, but the scale of how we do that is proving more difficult than it used to be.”

“You need a balance of open, PMP, PG and direct to have competition; it’s direct buys that are pushing yields up, not just the competition between demand sources.”

“The challenge a lot of us have is you’ve got salespeople selling print and those same guys selling digital, and they’ll always go down the path of least resistance, so you have to try and upscale them to go and sell a PMP. At the end of that month, somebody’s only bought 500,000 impressions with you because they’ve bought with loads of other people as well.”

“We aren’t very good at joining up the direct part of the business and the programmatic part. We think of them as two separate revenue sources, but we’re all selling the same thing. I don’t think we have the right skills in house to take that message to the market.”

The post ‘We’ve made a huge mistake’: European publishers sound off on subscriptions and tech talent shortages appeared first on Digiday.