Month: March 2019

Hearts & Science US CEO Erin Matts will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO conference on April 29-30, 2019 in San Francisco. It’s harder for media agencies to have the buying clout in the digital world that they have in traditional channels. Hearts & Science is building that influence through thousands of private marketplace deals… Continue reading »

The post How Hearts & Science’s PMP-Led Buying Approach Creates Digital Clout appeared first on AdExchanger.

Pluto TV is the anti-Netflix. It’s free and ad-supported. Users scroll through channels and watch whatever show is already playing, replicating the channel surfing that’s a hallmark of old-fashioned TV watching. Viacom spent $340 million in cash to acquire Pluto TV in January, validating the concept and its audience. The deal felt like “Cinderella getting… Continue reading »

The post Pluto TV’s Play For CTV Ad Dollars appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Network To Get Work A+E is taking a two-pronged approach with its new TV measurement products. A campaign reporting feature called P1 is meant to onboard smaller businesses and direct-to-consumer startups, which hunger for attribution data and want to test TV with relatively low… Continue reading »

The post A+E Seeks DTC Dollars; For Martin Sorrell, ‘Digital’ Buzzword Still Has Magic appeared first on AdExchanger.

Pinterest’s imminent IPO raises new questions about how big of a role the platform will play in the future of social commerce.

In its S-1, filed last Friday, Pinterest describes itself not as a social media company but as the “productivity tool for planning your dreams.” Pinterest gives retailers a direct line of sight into what type of items their customers have just bought or are on the hunt for: wedding decorations, baby shower gifts, Instant Pots, and so on. 

It positions itself as the ultimate discovery tool, but in order to get people to go from pinning to purchasing, Pinterest will need better commerce tools — and to convince more advertisers that it’s worthy of their time and budget.

Pinterest has struggled in the past to connect the dots of what people were pinning to what they could be buying. Initially helping people buy what they saw on Pinterest meant rolling out a buy button, and allowing advertisers to simply promote a Pin that their product was featured in higher up in a user’s feed. But to become a critical search, discovery and shopping tool for brands and retailers, Pinterest has evolved its monetization strategy far beyond the buy button, adding new ad units over the past couple of years and building new technologies like Pincodes and visual search tools.

And as Pinterest has taken baby steps towards encouraging commerce transactions, its most notable competitor Instagram is taking leaps, most recently with the launch of Instagram checkout. The more transactional data Instagram gathers, the more it risks upending Pinterest’s unique position in being the platform that knows the most about customer intent.

“There’s going to be a battle for the top of the [purchasing] funnel,” Apu Gupta, CEO of visual commerce platform of Curalate, said, referencing Instagram checkout and Google’s foray into shoppable ads. “I don’t think anybody’s got a lock on this yet.”

Beyond the buy button
One of the biggest value propositions in retailers for Pinterest lies in creating as seamless of an experience possible for users to find something they like on Pinterest and go buy it. And while Pinterest hasn’t yet perfected the format for doing so — neither have any of its competitors.

Pinterest first launched Buyable Pins in 2015, which allowed customers to buy products without ever leaving the site. But, the company phased out Buyable Pins in the fall for redesigned Product Pins. As part of the redesign, Pinterest enabled dynamic pricing information, as well as a notification when an item is out of stock — pieces of information that Pinterest’s head of shopping product, Tim Weingarten, said the company had found most important in creating a seamless shopping experience for customers.

“When I click on the product, I want to land on the product page of the retailer to buy it — I don’t want to go to the retailer’s home page, or a category page, or an out-of-stock product [page] and be disappointed and frustrated,” Weingarten said in October. In March, Pinterest also made announced that retailers could upload their product catalogs to Pinterest, allowing them to create Product Pins with up-to-date information more quickly.

Andrew Lipsman, an e-commerce analyst for eMarketer said that the evolution of Pinterest’s commerce feature is indicative of how the idea of social commerce has evolved — namely, that it’s no longer enough to slap a “buy” button on an Instagram or Pinterest image.

“One of the challenges I think is that shopping is not a very linear process for most people,” Lipsman said. “Being able to push useful information, like there’s a price drop or this is available nearby — those are all things that can move you closer to purchase.”

In launching Instagram Checkout, Instagram is essentially trying what Pinterest has already failed at — enabling a seamless in-app purchasing experience. But, Instagram has the advantage of having a much higher number of daily active users, and being a bigger advertising channel for many retailers. If Instagram Checkout starts to gain significant traction, it could doom Pinterest’s further ambition in commerce.

Ads show promise, but have less reach
In order to convince retailers that its platform is the future of social commerce, Pinterest is also going to have to convince them to spend more of their advertising dollars on there.

Pinterest has been criticized in the past for being slow to monetize. it didn’t launch advertisements until four years ago, and as a result, has had far fewer targeting options and ad formats than the platform it was most often compared to at the height of its hype cycle, Facebook, which has had an ads unit since 2007. It also has far fewer monthly active users — 250 million — compared to Facebook’s 2.3 billion MAUs. That’s given Pinterest two significant strikes it’s had to make up for as it has tried to convince retailers to advertise more on its platform.

“Typically the traffic a retailer gets from Pinterest might convert at twice the rate of other social platforms, but the amount of traffic a retailer gets from Pinterest is usually less than 1 percent of the retailer’s total traffic,” Jason Goldberg, chief commerce officer for Publicis said. “So they have earned the right to be part of the marketing mix, but are usually not the priority.”

So, in the lead up to its IPO, Pinterest has tried to court more advertisers with the launch of new ad formats, like video, as well as more ad targeting options. Brandon Doyle, the founder of digital agency Wallaroo Media, said that he estimates that the number of available ad formats on Pinterest have increased from four or five to around 20 over the past year. In particular, Pinterest’s made a bigger push into video ads over the past two years, having released a new bigger video ad format most recently in June.

There are a few headwinds working in Pinterest’s favor. For one, direct-to-consumer brands, which have historically relied on Facebook and Instagram advertising, are looking to advertise on other channels as the cost of Facebook and Instagram ads rise. In fact, this is a demographic that Pinterest said in its S-1 that it’s starting to build more self-serve advertising tools for.

Additionally, one of the biggest value propositions for Pinterest has yet to be unlocked — helping advertisers identify where exactly users are in the research phase of their shopping journey. Shannon Versaggi, vice president of targeted marketing for Lowe’s, said this is one challenge the home improvement retailer is trying to solve right now. She said that they’re testing predictive modeling to try and identify when a Pinterest user might be in the market for new products — a more obvious example being if they’ve bought a new sink, that means they’ll want to see other products on Pinterest to complete a bathroom renovation.

An even bigger challenge is reaching Pinterest users when they’re just starting to research products. Gupta gave the example of a user who might create a “dream house” board on Pinterest, but is still years away from buying a house. Pinterest acknowledged in its S-1 filing that “many existing advertiser tools that measure the effectiveness of advertising do not account for the role of advertising early in a user’s decision-making process.” But if Pinterest can prove to advertisers that it can help them target users early in their decision-making process, it could help them win a lot of business.

“We love Pinterest ads right now. No privacy issues, no scandals. Brands feel good about advertising there. And the auction isn’t as competitive so the costs are usually cheaper. For e-commerce brands particularly, especially their demographic is female-focused, it’s a no-brainer,” Doyle said.

Sean Barrett, senior vice president of advertising and marketing for grocery chain Albertsons, also praised Pinterest, saying that the “ad spend results that we’ve been getting in Pinterest are among some of the top we’re seeing in our digital media,” though he declined to say how much of their marketing budget is spent on Pinterest.

Pushing forward ad technology
Pinterest has also been a leader in experimenting with some of the edge cases of social commerce — most notably visual search. Pinterest introduced its first visual search tool, Lens, in 2017, that allowed users to point their phone at an object, and return images of objects that Pinterest thinks are similar to the one they’re searching for. Last year, Pinterest said that users conducted 600 million visual searches through Lens every month.

Visual search isn’t likely to become an everyday habit for shoppers, but it helps Pinterest gather data that it in turn can use to make better product recommendations.

Pinterest has also been experimenting for the past couple of years in using visual search tools to connect online and offline purchasing behavior. Barrett said that Albertson’s has been testing Pincodes, Pinterest’s two-year-old QR-code like-feature since last summer. When a customer points their phone at a Pincode, which are displayed in the meat and seafood aisles at some of Albertson’s grocery stores, they’ll be directed to recipe suggestions on Pinterest.

“We find that it’s a little bit more natural for the shopper [than a QR code],” Barrett said. “They’re already very comfortable with Pinterest as a place to find recipes and meal inspiration seeing that on our shelf tags and on our displays is a very immediate recognition for them.”

Further cementing its discovery ambitions, Pinterest announced last week that it hired Jeremy King, Walmart’s CTO, as its head of engineering.

“Throughout my career, I’ve been dedicated to growing teams and building products that help people connect positive online experiences to the offline,” King said in a statement at the time. “I’m excited to continue that work with Pinterest as they redefine what’s possible in discovery by bringing together technologies like computer vision with everyday searches for inspiration, to have a real impact on a quarter billion people’s lives.”

The post ‘A battle for the top of the funnel’: Pinterest’s long road to becoming a commerce platform appeared first on Digiday.

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The TV of tomorrow is coming faster than most people expected — and yet elements of it will stay the same. Networks and studios are still producing half-hour and hour-long shows — but sometimes designed for people who binge for hours at a time versus catching an episode week to week. Americans still watch a ton of linear TV — but might be paying a streaming service to do so instead of their local broadband provider. Thirty-second and minute-long commercials still dominate TV commercial breaks — but now these ads are becoming more personalized to the viewer.

TV is changing dramatically. Here are the key executives at the large media giants, wireless carriers, tech companies and everyone that is stuck in between as they duke it out for your time and money.

Kevin Mayer, Disney
Mayer is in charge of The Mouse House’s biggest priority: going direct to consumers with products such as Disney+ and ESPN+. It is going to cost Disney billions, but it is a bet worth making if the content giant wants to be better prepared for the future.

Kevin Reilly, WarnerMedia
Reilly, who led a turnaround at TNT and TBS in turning the networks from rerun repositories to Emmy-quality programmers, now has his biggest job yet: making the critical decisions on original and licensed content that will determine whether WarnerMedia can successfully take on Netflix and other streaming giants.

Jennifer Salke, Amazon
After some Emmy wins but not much cultural influence, Amazon rethought its studio business and spent $250 million for the rights to “The Lord of the Rings.” Salke now has the money and the IP to turn Amazon Studios into the big studio hitter Jeff Bezos wants it to be.

Jim Lanzone & Marc DeBevoise, CBS
CBS All-Access and Showtime have more than eight million subscribers combined and plan to get to 25 million by 2022. This is the dynamic duo overseeing the broadcaster’s massive digital operation, which has helped get the legacy giant a head start in going direct to consumer.

Cindy Holland & Channing Dungey, Netflix
Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos have already remade TV, but if we’re to look toward Netflix’s future, Holland and Dungey are critical. Both oversee Netflix’s original content deals, which include the globs of money the company has spent to poach big-name TV producers such as Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes.

Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal
As the patron saint of TV ad business, Yaccarino isn’t afraid of Google and Facebook. “Has a ‘view’ ever bought any of your products?” Yaccarino will ask advertisers, before collecting their upfront checks. Now, NBCU is coming for those digital giants by making its TV ad capabilities smarter.

Brian Lesser, Xandr
Can AT&T become a true threat to Google, Facebook and Amazon? It’s Lesser’s job to make it happen. Armed with data from 142 million wireless customers, tens of millions of pay-TV subscribers and access to some of the biggest entertainers in the business, he’s got a real chance.

Peter Naylor, Hulu
Hulu made $1.5 billion from advertising in 2018. No one else in OTT came close. And with Hulu’s plan to make half of its ad revenue come from “non-disruptive” ad formats (like those on pause screens), Naylor will help reshape how a significant number of people view ads on OTT.

Scott Rosenberg, Roku
If you plan to be in the OTT business, you can’t ignore Amazon, Hulu and Roku. Which means you can’t ignore Rosenberg, who heads up Roku’s work with media companies and advertisers.

Marc Whitten, Amazon
Amazon’s Fire TV boss. With 30 million monthly users, Fire TV is a key cog in Amazon’s ads business; critically important to anyone with a TV app; and has a chance to completely change how people find and watch their favorite movies and TV shows. (“Alexa, play ‘The Walking Dead.’”)

Kelly Merryman, YouTube TV
Merryman is the content dealmaker for YouTube TV. We don’t know how many subscribers YouTube TV has, but we do know it is a prized property inside YouTube. Merryman’s job is to make YouTube TV work, not just for cord-cutting consumers, but also as a profitable contributor to YouTube’s bottom line.

Meg Whitman, Quibi
The name makes people laugh. It’s probably not going to work. But it will be fascinating to see Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman try. Katzenberg is in charge of Quibi’s content. But Whitman’s in charge of the product, which will try to create a “mobile-first premium video” experience for users.

Carolyn McCall, ITV
As the boss of the UK’s biggest commercial free-to-air broadcaster, McCall doesn’t pull punches when it comes to facing TV’s new reality. Heightened competition from OTT has pushed the broadcaster onto the front foot. McCall is cognizant of the threat and plans to inject £40 million ($52 million) into media and marketing their on-demand platform ITV Hub, which has around 28 million users.

The post The TV revolutionaries: 15 people remaking the television industry appeared first on Digiday.

This week, several of us are in Vail, Colorado, for a pair of publishing events: Digiday Moguls and Digiday Publishing Summit. The opening of Moguls, which brings together 20 top publishing executives, was marked by plenty of chatter about Apple News+ — and exposed divisions between how publishers view this latest high-profile platform initiative.

The skeptics were summed up by one challenge put on the Digiday Challenge Board: “Apple News+ — why?” In explaining his thinking, the publishing exec who put up the challenge cited the familiar case against the initiative: It would create conflict with existing subscriptions programs and cede still more power to a giant tech company. But for those participating in Apple News+, the equation is somewhat different. They see this as a new audience that isn’t going to convert on their owned properties. As Max Willens reported, publishers like New York Media and Vox are using it to test and learn as they begin their moves into subscriptions.

The post The Rundown: Apple News+ splits publisher opinion appeared first on Digiday.

Unilever is laying down the law with publishers, creating a new set of guidelines they must adhere to before it buys ads from them.

The advertiser is rolling out what it calls the Trusted Publishers network of global, regional and local online publishers and platforms it will prioritize spend through its trading desk. Publishers in the network must adhere to criteria set by Unilever’s media team led by svp of global media Luis Di Como.

“What we’re doing is about giving Unilever an extra level of control to secure more accountability,” said Di Como.

He declined to detail what the full spectrum of those tiers but outlined the basics: The first tier will focus on guarantees the publishers can offer around viewability, brand safety and ad fraud. Unilever only buys display ads that are 100 percent in view for at least one second, for example; the second batch of guarantees focuses on information publishers are willing to share around metrics such as dwell time and pageviews; while the final criterion centers on campaign data that Unilever wants from publishers to better gauge the effectiveness of ads.

All three tiers amount to a whitelist of sorts built on Unilever’s ability to reward those publishers that can satisfy its demands with greater commitment.

Usually, it’s the way impressions are bought, whether that’s via a private marketplace or an open one, that dictates its premium. Unilever, however, believes that premium comes from getting exclusive access to data that can make a difference to campaigns. The criteria will evolve over time, which suggests this is a pressure play that will at the very least push publishers to commit to higher standards at the negotiation table.

“There are plenty of whitelists and other alternatives we could have considered, but based on our analysis of the marketplace, there’s a competitive advantage for us to have a deeper level of relationship with publishers,” said Di Como.

The way ads are bought will differ across the publisher network. Some ads could be bought with an insertion order that spells out how much Unilever is willing to pay for the inventory and how long the ads will run in a private marketplace, while other deals could be based around guaranteed inventory, that unlike private marketplaces, won’t require human intervention to run, for example.

“We want to make sure that Trusted Publishers are going to be the recipient of our investments regardless of the mechanism of buying,” said Di Como.

Despite Unilever’s investments being funneled into a select group of partners, Di Como insisted the advertiser will still buy some ads in the open marketplace as long as its criteria are met. There are a number of ways to do this, loosely grouped under the umbrella “Supply Path Optimization” that involves working with ad tech vendors to understand how factors like the header bidding wrapper, auction latency and DSP match rates impact auction dynamics.

“This isn’t about Unilever pulling money from one place and spending it another,” said Di Como. “We’re saying Trusted Publishers are the priority, and we’ll be increasing our investment in a network based on deeper relationships.”

Working with fewer sellers will help to iron some kinks in Unilever’s supply chain, but it’s no silver bullet to problems such as fraud.”

“More malicious types of fraud can affect premium titles as well as the long tail,” said John McGarvey, head of supply chain optimization at Infectious Media. “Unilever must use this network of publishers in combination with sound fraud detection processes, not in place of them.”

Agencies have previously been at the helm of attempts to curate publishers. And while Unilever will work with its own media agencies to assess publishers, it will take the lead. Having already strong-armed agencies and ad tech vendors buying its media to be clear about margins and fees, the advertiser is now coming after the supply side. It’s reflective of a wider realization among larger advertisers that they need to invest more time curating the sellers they buy from.

Some advertisers like Heineken see no other option but to revert to the safety of private marketplaces in the short term while they figure out how to closely monitor what media they buy instead of setting up deals and then forgetting to track them, which is what tends to happen.

Other advertisers are considering publisher-controlled marketplaces like Ozone that are willing to give advertisers greater access to data as well as alternatives like the Association of National Advertisers Trust Consortium, which consists of companies like Reset Digital, MediaLink and ID Comms helping advertisers swot up on issues like transparency, measurement, auditing, digital fraud and brand safety.

Having a brand with the financial clout of Unilever commit to reputable publishers could provide some much-needed stability at a challenging time. It’s also emblematic of how publishers have struggled to create their own alliances.

“The publishers should have been the one to have lead an initiative like this because there’s a vacuum in the market where advertisers want alternatives to the duopoly,” said Alessandro De Zanche, founder of consulting firm ADZ Strategies.

The post ‘More accountability’: Unilever creates its own network for trusted publishers appeared first on Digiday.

On an earnings call last August, Disney CEO Bob Iger said Disney+, their upcoming subscription video-streaming service, is “the biggest priority of the company during calendar 2019.” If asked, Iger would extend that timeline well into the future as Disney tries to ward off the existential threat of Netflix by building its own streaming platform.

And Disney is not alone. Under siege from tech giants, the rest of Hollywood is also going direct to consumer. WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal and Discovery have all announced plans and created dedicated units to build streaming video businesses. CBS and Showtime have already jumped head first, grabbing eight million subscribers for CBS All-Access and Showtime’s streaming channel before its competitors get into the pool. Smaller players such as A+E Networks and AMC Networks, meanwhile, are targeting fans of niche verticals such as horror and history.

The post In streaming video, direct-to-consumer is a lie appeared first on Digiday.

Amazon is on track to grow the reach of its payment wallet to more than a million more retailers, and with bigger reach comes more opportunities to work with retailers online and offline.

It’s working with payments company WorldPay, a company that enables payment methods for 1.1 million merchants across the U.S., adding options like Visa, Mastercard and American Express. It’s an arrangement that puts Amazon Pay in the checkouts of a larger group of retailers.

That’s good for Amazon Pay’s potential, which has been tempered by retailers’ reticence to use a payment platform powered by the company. But it also underpins a more involved strategy that Patrick Gauthier, vp of Amazon Pay, would only describe as a “connected experiences” strategy, one that would connect customer journeys between multiple channels, including mobile, voice and in-store.

“If you think about it in terms of progression with those larger merchants, to help them innovate, leveraging the various capabilities of Amazon, including Alexa, to connect with Amazon’s 300 million-plus audience, we needed to first get the payment operation out of the way,” said Patrick Gauthier, vp of Amazon Pay. Adding Amazon Pay was previously a burden for brands that needed to set up separate workflows for settlement, reconciliation and chargebacks; with WorldPay, Amazon Pay can be turned on as easily as any other payment method.

By working with WorldPay, one of the the largest intermediaries between banks and merchants, Amazon gets readymade reach to a much bigger market. Amazon is currently available at tens of thousands of merchants in 18 countries and an unspecified number of physical store and restaurant checkouts in the U.S., according to the company. It’s experienced strong growth among smaller retailers, but the WorldPay integration gives the company stronger capabilities to use payments as a basis to build other tech-enabled experiences, both online and in-store.

Amazon would not comment on how many large merchants have begun enabling Amazon Pay through its partnership with WorldPay. But its tests among smaller brands offer some clues of how it may want to use payments to underpin customer transactions that take place on a variety of different channels; for example, with Moda Operandi, Amazon customers preorder and pay for items within an app and collect items in stores while bypassing checkout. The future evolution of this type of interaction could involve voice tech, but Gauthier didn’t offer specifics on how it will be used. Amazon Pay is already enabled at physical checkouts through barcodes and QR codes accessible through the Amazon app.

“We see so much opportunity for for innovation across the full customer journey with Alexa — [voice] today is where mobile was in 2009 and 2010,” said Gauthier. “Voice [with Amazon Pay] is not limited to just buying things with voice.”

Gauthier acknowledged that voice-based commerce, including voice-initiated payment transactions via Alexa are still at an experimental stage. Amazon’s more immediate goal may be to build a broader constituency for Amazon Pay across the U.S. retail ecosystem before further plans evolve. An earlier job posting, reported by Digiday in December, points to the objective to scale the payments tool more broadly alongside competitors like PayPal: “Amazon Pay has now emerged as the alternative to PayPal and our business is growing at a fast pace, and we are poised to continue redefining consumer identity and payments,” the posting, which has now been taken down, said.

“What it does is in one sense is it increases their distribution; in the past, Amazon had to go individually to website owners, and it it gives them greater reach,” said Paygility Advisors partner David True. “A merchant can turn on Visa, American Express, Mastercard and Amazon Pay.”

The payment method has experienced an uptick among small merchants (Amazon said it’s seen a 59 percent growth in active merchants and 103 percent  growth in overall revenue from Amazon Pay between 2017 and 2018). Online sellers who have yet to enable it on their owned and operated e-commerce sites told Digiday they’re taking a wait-and-see approach. Russell Saks, CEO of Campus Protein, which previously enabled Amazon Pay on its site and then removed it after a six-month trial, said he’s not closing the door if its ability to drive purchases is proven. Meanwhile, 1-800 Flowers, which has added PayPal, Chase Pay, Visa, Mastercard and American Express payment methods to its e-commerce site, is watching developments with interest.

“It’s too early to say — I’m curious to see how that landscape evolves,” said chief marketing officer Amit Shah. “We want to be led by our customers.”

As with any collaboration with Amazon, questions loom around data advantages it can derive from the onboarding of a large group of new merchants. Amazon said payments isn’t a means to horde customer data: It only collects the final payment amount, or total order value (including date and time), which is necessary to process the transaction, a company spokesperson said. In addition, when Amazon processes merchant payments, Amazon Pay’s site API does not collect product details or line item values, so merchants’ data is secure, according to Amazon.

Despite these safeguards, any information Amazon can acquire about purchase or behavior patterns is a concern for brands, said Griffin Carborg, senior specialist at Gartner L2’s Amazon Intelligence team.

“Even if Amazon only gets high-level transaction data, enabling Amazon Pay remains a double-edged sword for merchants,” he said. “Amazon Pay now enables the retail giant to bring retail data that lived outside of the Amazon ecosystem into the Amazon ecosystem.”

The post How Amazon Pay’s WorldPay partnership will grow its retailer footprint appeared first on Digiday.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the few more traditional subscription businesses to participate in Apple’s paid magazine bundle. But, aside from using the platform as an acquisition tool, certain ad units on Apple News were performing better than on the Journal’s own site, according to Josh Stinchcomb, global chief revenue officer, media sales for Dow Jones.

Stinchcomb joined the publisher last August to turbocharge its ad revenue. Since then, The Wall Street Journal has been growing its teams and capabilities across three areas: content marketing, events and new ad formats. In the last six months, the Journal has won back branded content clients and increased the contract renewal rate, partly thanks to incorporating data from its other properties, like information service Factiva and sister company Storyful, as well as launch a new contextual targeting tool, which has become its most-highly sought-after format with advertisers.

“Our digital reach is bigger than in print, so in many ways, digital advertising is the most important revenue stream looking to the future. It’s growing, and it’s where we have scale,” said Stinchcomb. “We’re hyper-focused on creating valuable ad products. As an indication of how important, we now have a sizable ad tech team to create ad products that didn’t exist eight months ago.”

Stinchcomb discusses why Apple News Plus makes sense for the WSJ and working more closely branded content partners. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

What was the appeal of Apple News Plus, and how big is the concern of diluting the brand?
The opportunity brings us to a broader and qualified audience, those are good filters for someone who is selling advertising against it, so it’s an expansion of inventory and ad capability. We’ve always had different products for tranches of members. It increases the size of the funnel of people coming into the brand where we can upsell them to other areas of membership or C-suite council.

Were you getting meaningful revenue from Apple News?
We found things that were working well. One of the most effective formats in Apple News for us has been the native units and pushing our branded content. We found they performed as well or better than the native units on our site. It’s proving to be particularly good for pushing branded content at a time when we’re investing in our branded content entity.

Explain the changes to your branded content studio and the impact they have had.
As an industry, we’re at risk of undermining the value of branded content. Calling it “The Trust” means no blurred lines and no blind spots. More important than the rebrand is expanding the team and building capabilities in technology, event programming and audience development. It’s early days, but revenue from this up-coming quarter is going to be significantly better from branded content than quarters preceding. We’re seeing a major upswing in business. We’ve just brokered five custom deals, some with partners we haven’t worked with in a couple of years. It’s more interesting and more effective to work on a longer time frame with ad partners. The change I’m perpetuating is fewer, bigger, longer partnerships.

What’s a typical campaign look like now?
We work with [financial service provider] Tech Mahindra on an annual basis. We’re surveying global CEOs about what keeps them up at night, which will be our road map to what stories [the client] has to tell to address these issues there’s an appetite for. The length of partnership allows us the time to do that. They are also a sponsor of our CEO council meeting where they could present this research. There are smart ways to connect the insight we have: from the access to our audience to content creation to live moments to make a difference for clients.

How are you driving business outcomes?
With [aviation company] VistaJet we were able to tie back new plane lease customers, those are worth millions of dollars to them. We worked with a real-estate company where we sold multimillion dollar houses through our activation. We’re getting closer to being able to prove the business outcome. Branded content will be increasingly relied on to do a lot more than just general vague brand awareness. It’s going to have to work harder as people rely on advertising less. The insights part is strong. The content part, which everyone seems to focus on: That’s the commodity. We are focused on that chain — from insight to creation to distribution to performance — at either end. That’s where you’re going to differentiate.

Besides data from your membership base, how do your services enhance your ad products?
Last year, we launched a new ad format called DJID which takes Factiva and applies artificial intelligence to understand the nuances of what a story is about. As a contextual targeting tool, an advertiser can put their message next to stories on really specific topics like how AI impacts healthcare or how transportation is being transformed by this technology. It’s our highest CPM and highest in demand; we’re struggling to keep up with the number of segments advertisers want us to build. There are dozens of segments but ultimately will be hundreds. There are other contextual targeting tools, but they are crude by comparison, often keyword-based and retroactive.

 

The post ‘Apple News+ brings us to a broader audience’: Dow Jones CRO Josh Stinchcomb appeared first on Digiday.