Month: March 2019

“Strong enough for a man but made for a woman.” It’s one of the most iconic lines in advertising, and it’s from the creative mind of industry legend Carol H. Williams. During Women’s History Month, Adweek is looking back at some of the most storied women in the industry. Check back next Wednesday for the…

Now, relevance diagnostics will measure relevance across three dimensions, including quality ranking, engagement rate ranking and conversion rate ranking.

Retailers and banks are sinking more money than any other industry into artificial intelligence capabilities, according to a new study from the International Data Corporation. The retail category as a whole will spend $5.9 billion this year on tools like automated customer service agents and product recommendation generators, while the banking sector is set to…

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Dillon Roulet, founder and managing partner at Duplici. The effects of a matured ecosystem are clear: Open marketplace media buys are much more secure and transparent than they were in the early days. We’re… Continue reading »

The post No, Private Marketplaces Aren’t Going Anywhere appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Addressing Television TV networks are banding together to create a standard that will enable addressable advertising on smart TVs. NBC Universal, Disney, Discovery, Turner, AMC Networks, Xandr, FreeWheel and Hearst TV are part of Project OAR (Open Addressable Ready), and Vizio’s Inscape will power… Continue reading »

The post A New Addressable TV Consortium; Senate Takes Up Privacy appeared first on AdExchanger.

With ad costs going up on Facebook, publishers have been rethinking their branded content distribution strategies and, in some cases, looking for alternative sources of distribution.

The key hits:

• Costs for paid video distribution on Facebook has more than doubled year over year, stemming from Facebook’s decision to prioritize user posts as well as more buyers in Facebook’s marketplace.
• This has been tough for publishers as Facebook has largely been “the only game in town” when it came to buying reach in a quick and efficient manner.
• Rising costs naturally mean lower margins for publishers, which have pivoted to other options including: sponsorships on existing editorial; owned marketing channels such as websites and email; and other platforms such as Instagram.
• Show sponsorships can be attractive to advertisers as these programs come with promised organic reach.
• But not every publisher has massive scale on editorial programming across platforms, which is hurting their branded video efforts.
• Other platforms, especially Instagram, are short-term opportunities before they, too, push prices up.

Costs for paid video distribution on Facebook have more than doubled year over year, according to executives at three different publishers with sizable reach on the platform. For one publisher, which does more than a billion video views per month across platforms, the cost-per-click for Facebook video ads was 50 cents in February, more than doubling from 23 cents a year ago, according to an executive at the company.

The post Video Briefing: Rising costs on Facebook force publishers to rethink branded video distribution appeared first on Digiday.

Niche OTT service for sports DAZN is looking to find its niche in advertising with the launch of an ad business that wants to pull as much money from TV as possible.

The broadcaster has been quietly testing different variations of advertising in key markets Italy, Germany and Japan since November. In Italy, for example, where DAZN is the only place that soccer fans can watch 114 matches of the country’s top league, ads for Volkswagen are shown during those matches. In Germany, ad breaks rotate between four brands during streams, whereas in Japan branded content by games developer Konami is used instead.

The soft approach has left DAZN reliant on a “fairly clunky” process, said Stefano D’Anna, managing director of sales and brand partnerships at DAZN Media, who said all test ads are placed by his team. None of those placements are bought in an automated fashion nor are they addressable, with measurement revolving around audience numbers that are signed off by DAZN. Getting those numbers squared off by an independent verification is not possible either.

From summer, however, the pitch will become more robust. “We’ll scale our ad delivery plans from August and September onwards,” said D’Anna.

In the intervening months, he expects to have an ad server in place following talks with vendors that will eventually allow DAZN to manage and target ads that have been sold directly to advertisers. As it stands, there are no immediate plans to sell DAZN’s ads programmatically, with D’Anna reluctant to cede too much revenue to ad tech intermediaries from the outset.

“We’re not going to become an entirely digital property and have ad exchanges plugging into our technology,” said D’Anna. “I would always want our pitch to err toward us having the relationship with brands. We have a premium environment where we can evolve those relationships on a bespoke basis.”

Going direct to advertisers is not a scalable proposition in a broadcast market that in many ways is going the other way, further toward programmatic.

“Eventually we’ll have to look at other ways of driving revenue from ads, which may mean a combination of direct and programmatic revenues,” he added. D’Anna’s apprehension stems from the fact that broadcast VoD has been prime real estate for years and continues to grow as more money flows back into TV thanks to addressable formats.

“I don’t disagree that more sponsorship budget is moving into digital — and that’s something we’ll look at — but we have a slightly different approach because of the audience we have,” said D’Anna. “We want to move as much out of TV over to our business as we can.”

DAZN is an OTT player built on second-tier sports that are followed by smaller groups of fans. It’s an intriguing proposition for advertisers at a time when discussions in sports marketing are more concerned with how to activate a smaller number of people, who are really engaged with the property, are going to talk about and share the asset. The OTT service rarely shares subscriber data, though D’Anna said it was on track to hit internal forecasts, and in some markets is surpassing them.

“Sports audiences are traditionally older, and yet DAZN is getting a slightly younger, mainly male contingent, who are quite difficult to reach via traditional TV,” said Richard Broughton, research director at Ampere Analysis. “That’s a valuable audience of fans who can be more profitable than your average sports viewer.”

DAZN’s focus on ad budgets is emblematic of how hard it is to build an OTT business with staying power. Subscriptions will continue to drive the bulk of the business, but the margins to be gained from something as profitable as sports advertising could be a fillip in the long run.

Like other media upstarts, DAZN will be looking to break even over a three-to-10-year trajectory, while simultaneously having to spend big on rights and marketing. So far this year, it has already had to fork out for Moto GP rights in Germany, soccer influencers and tennis rights in Brazil, sponsorship deals with superstar soccer star Neymar da Silva Santos as well as lock in a deal with boxer Gennady Golovkin. Anything that adds 5 to 10 percent to the company’s bottom line like ad budgets could alleviate some of those costs, said Broughton.

Advertising could also help offset growing competition for subscribers. It costs a lot for OTT services to acquire new subscribers now than it did a year ago, as Netflix has found. Between 2013 and 2015 the cost of adding subscribers in the U.S. was $60 for Netflix, per Ampere Analysis. Now, Netflix spends between $100 and $140 on every net new subscriber it acquires.

DAZN’s commercial charge will come under the banner of DAZN Media, the replacement sales house for Perform Media that will oversee strategies for sites including Goal.com and Sporting News. As part of the overhaul, DAZN+ has also been created to sell online ad inventory across its sites.

The post ‘We want to take as much money out of TV as possible’: DAZN details bid for ad budgets appeared first on Digiday.