Month: April 2019

Chinese developers publish a license aimed at disrupting “996,” a 12-hour, six-day work schedule common among startups around the world.

It’s been quite a year for Sandra Oh, thanks to her hit series Killing Eve, about an MI5 operative (Eve Polastri, played by Oh) tracking an assassin (Villanelle, played by Jodie Comer) around Europe. Oh was nominated for an Emmy and won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards for the role, which also led…

Missoula County, Montana, commissioners are expected to approve a resolution that would require bitcoin mines to offset their energy use with renewables.

The Big Story is a podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. We ride hard and fast this week on “The Big Story,” with three tales of industry upheaval. First, we consider the prospect of a Google Chrome… Continue reading »

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 Large, established companies such as P&G, Verizon and Kellogg’s are building direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands to compete with the challengers encroaching on their territory. In addition to investing in or acquiring other DTC brands, there are strategic advantages to a company building its own. P&G for instance thinks of buying, building and acquiring brands as a… 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 Jane Clarke, managing director and CEO at the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM). This upfront, the focus is on outcomes. As presentations continue, the role of outcome-based measurement – whether for attribution or… Continue reading »

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As programmatic buyers move away from a singular focus on chasing cookies toward a broader playbook of monitoring fraud, viewability and engagement, there has been a shift in how performance is evaluated. It’s leading marketers to question whether the current viewability standards adequately measure true audience attention.

The current Media Ratings Council (MRC) standard for an online ad to be considered viewed is half of that ad being seen for one second. Apply that to any other medium, a TV ad for example, and the flaws in this standard of measurement become immediately clear. If a consumer sees one second of a TV commercial (nevermind only half the screen), would they even be able to recognize the brand or product?

In our survey of 300 industry professionals from publishers, agencies and brands there’s a clear appetite for change, as Jo Lyall, managing director of media agency Mindshare UK – part of GroupM, says: “Basic viewability, knowing that your ad has been seen, is a hygiene factor, and we shouldn’t even have to keep questioning that.”

However, there are a few battles to be won along the way.

Inertia makes it difficult for buyers and sellers to move beyond standard viewability

To expose a key part of the battle preventing both sides of the industry from better assessing attention, it’s important to zero in on the barriers. Buyers seem to lack opportunities to explore new ways to measure success and quality. The result is that where buyers point to a lack of resources, publishers say there is not enough demand for change.

Eighty-eight percent of publishers said a lack of industry demand for alternative metrics is the biggest barrier to moving beyond standard viewability. Just two buy-side respondents agreed. Instead, 79 percent of buyers pointed to limited resources to test and validate new metrics as the biggest barrier; just five percent of publishers agreed.

“Some companies are thinking very far ahead, but they are not in sync with people like myself at publishing houses or media buying agencies that literally operate year-to-year. I think that’s why there isn’t a heavy tactical demand for it,” says Kai Hsing, SVP of marketing and operations at Bustle.

The need for scale is driving a preference for CPM-based models

Our respondents have already begun to test attention-based metrics beyond the MRC standard, but increasingly these are CPM-based buys, suggesting the need to drive scale in an increasingly programmatic world.

Maybe this isn’t an issue after all. Conversations around attention metrics tend to imply a seismic change to buying models. But consider this: a buyer could be provided with data that an impression is likely to be in-view for 10 seconds; they could then have the choice of paying a higher CPM – the same model they’re used to – for that impression based on its quality. In the end, factoring in attention-based metrics but continuing to buy on CPM could be an attractive path.

In fact, 69 percent of buyers have tested time-based currencies in the past but only 10 percent said they intend to do so in the next 12 months. Meanwhile, 81 percent say they plan to try optimizing on time-in-view but buying on a CPM.

Marketers haven’t come to terms with the cost of quality

Eighty-nine percent of buyers said that marketers have not yet accepted the true cost of quality; only 11 percent said that most marketers are ultimately willing to pay more. One buyer in the survey pointed to limited resources preventing progress on evaluating new measures of quality as a key barrier. However, publishers are complimentary of buyers’ view towards their premium inventory; 89 percent said they are willing to pay more for quality impressions, and just 10 percent said that marketers have not yet accepted their true cost.

“You cannot get quantity and quality for the same price,” says Alistair Smith, head of advertising yield management at The Financial Times. “What people need to decide is if they want 100 ads to be seen for one second or 50 ads to be seen for 15 seconds. You’re far more likely to have an impact with smaller amounts of impressions for long periods of time than you will do with just snippets of messages that come through.”

A detailed summary of the research and further insight is available here.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Last Resort Publishers have mixed reviews of Apple News+, the $9.99 monthly subscription bundle Apple unveiled last week. They have been burned in the past when they hopped aboard news platforms developed by tech giants. (Ahem, Facebook.) But, for some, Apple’s promise to distribute… Continue reading »

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As CMO of the National Hockey League, Heidi Browning’s job is to see where marketing’s proverbial puck is going and to skate to it. But doing that demands a level of insight and agility that can be more easily attained when a marketer handles its ad budge itself. At least, that’s what Browning is betting on.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Browning brought the NHL’s digital media buying in-house in an effort to better use its content — including a pair of original episodic shows — to find segments of casual observers, convert them into documented fans and use the corresponding data to find more of them. While the NHL has taken digital media buying in-house, it will continue to work with outside agencies and productions studios on creative, said a league spokesperson who declined to comment on the size of the NHL’s advertising budget. The league joins the ranks of brands like Electrolux and Nationwide that have taken their advertising in-house to assume greater control and flexibility. According to Digiday research, a majority of marketers surveyed cited increased control or quicker turnaround times as the greatest benefit for going in-house.

The NHL is especially interested in appealing to younger fans, specifically millennials and members of Generation Z. That audience segment explains why the league spends a lot of its ad dollars on social platforms, according to Browning, who declined to say exactly what percentage. And that social spending would help to explain the decision by the NHL to take its media buying in house.

Social platforms generally offer sophisticated self-serve ad-buying tools that can be used with minimal spend. Such a low barrier to entry enables marketers to test campaigns against particular audience segments before deciding whether to invest more money to reach more people. That flexibility has fueled the rise of many direct-to-consumer marketers, and the NHL saw an opportunity to take advantage of that agility to establish more direct relationships of its own with fans. “Having direct control over media investment and the analytics behind it creates better opportunities to have real-time optimization,” said Browning.

Overseeing the NHL’s media buying is Alyssa Musto, who prior to joining the league in July 2018 as senior manager of customer acquisition, had managed customer acquisition marketing for Meredith’s Entertainment Weekly and People. “She had that direct response focus,” said Browning.

Musto’s experience in performance marketing appealed to Browning because the league is concentrating on not only using advertising to get people to tune into games but also to sign up for programs, like its Inside the Crease email newsletter or Bracket Challenge contest, in order to grow its fan database.

The NHL has been building out what Browning described as its “fan engagement platform,” a system through which the league will be able to use the data that it is able to collect from people who sign up for its newsletters and contests. “We’re in the process of cleaning and unifying all the data and applying lifetime value models and understanding fan affinity,” Browning said.

Understanding its fans is particularly important for the NHL at the moment because the league’s content is having a bit of a moment. TV and digital viewership of NHL games have grown compared to last year. As of March 7, the average TV viewership for NBC’s broadcasts of NHL games had increased by 10% year over year to 1.42 million viewers, according to Sports Media Watch. Digital viewership has similarly grown to average 431,000 viewers as of March 20, a 4% increase compared to last season, per the same publication. and The NHL may have been around since 1917, but “it’s a new game. There are more goals being scored. The game is faster than it’s ever been. There’s an opportunity for us, especially with the casual fan,” said Browning.

To seize that opportunity, the NHL has been trying to raise the profile of not only the game but its players. To coincide with the start of the latest regular season, in October the league premiered two original series featuring its players off the ice. Since bringing buying in-house, the NHL’s media buys have centered on promoting those shows, according to an NHL spokesperson.

“Skates Off” delves into what players do when they are off the ice, and “What’s in the Box?,” which aired its season finale in February, has players blindly reach into a box to guess what is inside. The league posts episodes of the series to its various social accounts, including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram’s long-form video service IGTV. Across those social platforms as of April 2, “Skates Off” has garnered 13.3 million views and 46 million impressions, and “What’s in the Box?” has nabbed 18 million views and 52 million impressions, according to the spokesperson.

Promoting its players is important for the NHL to break some of the tribalism that surrounds the sport and can curb people’s interest to only tune in when particular teams are playing. “We’re really trying to focus on the faces and personalities. There are so many young, amazing stars that are changing the game,” said Browning.

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