Month: April 2019

BuzzFeed is in the midst of a transformation from a fast-growing startup to a sustainable digital media company, with Chief Revenue Officer Lee Brown leading the charge. Over the past two years, BuzzFeed’s expanded into every revenue opportunity it can, including programmatic, affiliate and brand licensing. In programmatic, for example, BuzzFeed started with a basic… Continue reading »

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The average consumer is exposed to 10,000 messages daily, switching between screens more than 20 times per hour. In this always-on world, content consumption is truly multidimensional — spanning different time-zones, devices, platforms and more. Technological advancements are allowing people to engage with each other and brands in ways never before possible, creating a challenge for modern marketers.

So how do brands cut through the noise to create meaningful relationships when attention spans are limited and consumers are bombarded with content at all times, across all channels?

The answer: artificial intelligence. Here are the most important ways AI is helping fuel more impactful marketing initiatives right now and in the future.

Merge the art and science of content creation

Whether a brand is looking to decrease CPA, increase CTR, or increase digital sales, it is critical to dynamically optimize content based on performance. As Dana Kraft, digital & social advisor for Kraft, Kellogg’s and PepsiCo says: “How you use real-time data is how you can create a competitive advantage with paid marketing efforts.” AI is empowering brands to remove the subjectivity surrounding creative and replace it with an objective understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

At Social Native, we’re using AI, powered by IBM Watson, to predict which creators and content will achieve maximum results for each brand’s unique goals and initiatives. Our tech platform surfaces qualitative and quantitative feedback (including brand scores, content performance metrics and a proprietary Social Native content score) to create a continuous improvement loop, where data is used to inform future content development. In this way, we’re merging art and science to reduce uncertainty when making creative decisions and ultimately, increase performance. An example of this is in action is Panini NFL, who implemented a rapid creative iteration strategy powered by Social Native, and as a result, acquired high-quality users at 58 percent lower CPA.

Give your brand a voice

One-to-one marketing seems simple enough on a small scale. However, as more consumers become comfortable researching and buying products online, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for brands to keep up. To improve customer communication, many brands are leveraging AI to create personalized chatbots throughout the customer journey. These bots can help to understand complex requests, personalize responses and improve interactions over time.

Recent research shows that five percent of companies worldwide said they were using chatbots regularly as early as 2016, while 20 percent were piloting them today. Among these early adopters is Gap’s new menswear brand, Hill City. It has implemented chatbots on both Twitter direct message and Facebook Messenger. According to its head of marketing, Eric Toda, implementing chatbots has completely transformed the brand’s relationship with its consumers.

As Toda explained in a recent industry podcast, “so far, personalized means re-augmenting a website for your preferences. We’re working towards a specifically tailored Hill City experience 24/7 and 365 days a year, and we can do that with text and messenger in a really rich way.”

Taken together, the explosion of e-commerce and ever-evolving consumption behaviors are forcing brands to find new ways to merge communication, transaction and service. Although chatbots may seem daunting to implement, if your company doesn’t take the first steps to connect with consumers on a deeper level, then you run the risk of losing mindshare in the long-term — not to mention a decrease in sales and consumer trust.
 
Create personalized content experiences

The future of advertising will not continue to target people with a one-size-fits-all approach. Consumers have high standards for brands — including ads that are relevant, engaging and tailored to their lives.

In a comScore study, 86 percent of consumers claimed that relevant content increases their interest in a brand’s products and services. For an advertiser, aligning content with the target audience delivers an equally big benefit, increasing engagement by up to 60 percent.

As technology evolves, advertisers can get smarter and more granular with their advertising — to the point where no two people receive the same digital content experience. Critics might argue that this advertising breakthrough is impossible. How could a brand possibly create content for every target segment? How would this content be tagged and communicated to advertising distribution partners like Facebook or Google? Again, marketers should look to AI.

With advanced targeting, filtering and activation technologies, we can now automate and scale the creation of content. Instead of one photo shoot, it’s possible to activate hundreds of creators, with various backgrounds, interests and preferences, to create a library of unique content that’s personally relevant to niche and diverse audiences. When content creation is no longer a barrier, the possibilities for personalization are endless. Now, the yoga enthusiast gets an ad of someone doing yoga, and the dog lover gets an ad of someone with their dog. Personalizing the creative, in addition to the copy and targeting, is the final step needed to create truly impactful advertising experiences.

Modern consumers aren’t looking for products; they’re looking for content. They’re judging with their eyes first and they don’t want polish or perfection — they want real, meaningful connections. Consumers want to feel like the brands they’re buying from understand them. With the continued integration of tech and creative, we’re at an inflection point. There are endless possibilities when AI is involved.

The post The power of AI: Creating truly impactful advertising experiences appeared first on Digiday.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Engagement Above All YouTube’s leadership has knowingly let misinformation and toxic content run rampant on the platform to rake in higher engagement from viewers and sell more ads, a Bloomberg investigation revealed. Conversations with more than 20 former and current YouTube employees uncovered multiple… Continue reading »

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Images of models wearing H&M x Versace were common a few years ago inside H&M stores. These days, you’re likelier to see the same models, just wearing a dress made of recycled plastic. It’s just one of the ways H&M is hoping that an environmentally conscious rebranding can help it bounce back from the rough patch it has been in.

In January, the Swedish fast-fashion giant reported its sixth consecutive quarter of reduced profits. In February, the company announced plans to close 160 stores throughout 2019.

The post As fast fashion falls out of style, H&M looks to reinvent itself as a champion for the environment appeared first on Digiday.

Direct marketing has long been the backbone of Trusted Media Brands’ business. But after several years of modernizing its digital operations, the publisher behind Reader’s Digest and Taste of Home is now relying on a much smaller digital unit to oversee its newest consumer revenue products. Going forward, the publisher sees that small group playing an integral role in the growth of its legacy consumer products, too.

At the end of March, TMB launched Family Handyman Insider, a new digital subscription product offering a mix of instructional videos, digital floor plans, plus a print subscription to Family Handyman, for $179 per year.

Insider is the third subscription product that TMB has launched in the past 12 months, following a subscription coffee delivery business and a group of shorter courses for My DIY University, an on-demand library of video courses. Insider is also the first of several consumer products on the docket for this year, along with lines of cookware and bakeware.

But instead of entrusting Insider to TMB’s direct marketing team, a 49-person group spread out across two cities, Insider is being overseen by a four-person digital products group that reports to TMB’s chief digital officer. This digital group, which will add another seven staffers during TMB’s next fiscal year, will be in charge of growing Insider, as well as new revenue streams for content brands that TMB plans to launch later this year. Over time, TMB expects the digital group to also play a role in how TMB diversifies revenue at its legacy titles.

The decision to lead TMB’s revenue diversification efforts from the digital side of the house, rather than the direct-marketing side, hinged on the publisher’s desire to go after big audiences, CEO Bonnie Kintzer said.

“That top of the funnel is the most important factor in your ability to scale,” she said.

While TMB’s brands do sell products online, a lot of those revenues were powered by print subscriptions, as well as the sale of print products such as cookbooks, which were marketed mostly through legacy channels such as direct mail.

But to build an audience for its newest consumer products, the publisher decided to go a digital route. Over the past several years, under Kintzer and chief digital officer Vince Errico, TMB overhauled its sites and are reorganizing how they categorize their content, which would give editors and other stakeholders more information about the kinds of content its audience consumes. Monthly uniques are up 64 percent over the past two years, according to Comscore data, because of these efforts. The publisher is also using surveys to determine which products readers might pay for, such as the subscription coffee delivery product.

Unlike many of the digital publishers trying to diversify revenue lines, three-quarters of TMB’s revenue already comes from consumer revenue. That percentage was actually higher before Kintzer arrived in 2014, after TMB had gone through its second bankruptcy of the decade; the percentage decreased thanks to growth of TMB’s programmatic advertising business, which now represents 80 percent of the sites’ ad sales.

Building these products on the digital side of a media company, rather than the legacy direct marketing side makes sense if the goal is to develop and sustain relationships with one’s audience, said Sam Jordan, evp and head of the media practice at publishing consultancy Manifesto.

“It’s a different skill-set,” Jordan said. “The thing you’re trying to create is an ongoing relationship with a customer and moving away from ad-hoc selling of stuff. You have to prioritize the ongoing engagement with the customer.”

The post Trusted Media Brands has a 4-person team developing new consumer products appeared first on Digiday.

Streaming live TV services such as Hulu’s live TV, YouTube TV and DirecTV Now might be able to slow down cord cutting by offering cheaper, skinnier channel packages. But as these services try to keep costs down and turn a profit, many TV network owners will have to confront a new reality: the rates they charge distributors to carry some of those channels, which used to go up like clockwork every year, are probably coming down.

The key hits:

• “Virtual MVPDs” such as Hulu Live TV, YouTUbe TV and DirecTV Now have grown subscribers interested in cheaper, smaller bundles — but these services have operated at a loss.
• In the past year, these services have raised prices as they look to become profitable.
• But it’s important for these services to keep costs (and channel packages) low in an effort to differentiate from the bloat of traditional pay-TV.
• This will begin creating more pressure for cable network programmers to accept reduced rates in their carriage fees — especially if they want to get their channels on the “base” bundles.
• Viacom’s negotiations with AT&T are a great example: Viacom, which makes an estimated $1 billion in carriage fees from AT&T, reportedly accepted a lower rate in exchange to get some of its top channels on AT&T’s base tiers.
• Viacom is also getting more creative with its carriage fee negotiations, including agreeing to us advanced ad products deployed by distributors, co-productions and other elements to land these coveted deals.

The early success of services such as Hulu Live TV, YouTube TV, Sling TV and DirecTV Now — known in the industry as “virtual MVPDs” — has demonstrated that there is still a consumer interest in pay-TV. But instead of spending $100 or more per month for hundreds of channels, customers are happy to pay $30 to $50 per month for about 50 to 70 channels. In many cases, this has convinced younger pay-TV users, who might not watch as much pay-TV on a daily basis as their older counterparts, to opt for these cheaper services.

The post Video Briefing: AT&T-Viacom negotiations show the future of carriage deals appeared first on Digiday.

The rush of advertisers reviewing whether their media budgets are being spent wisely online was meant to stimulate the audit industry when in reality it has exposed its flaws. Advertisers are going beyond classic price auditing in their attempts to buy better ads.

It was during a recent attempt to take more media buying in-house that the senior marketer at a global advertiser realized they had to re-evaluate the role of media auditors.

Most of the ads bought by the team would be in online auctions where they would bid for ads in real time. There’s no rate card to benchmark against those sorts investments because it’s a fluid pricing system, and yet the audit firms that pitched to the team wanted to benchmark CPMs at a domain level, said the marketer. Those audits would have little value because the advertiser is constantly changing domains as well as the type of impressions it buys from them. Instead, the advertiser turned to a programmatic expert who knew how to fold metrics like quality, effective use of data, transparency and optimization into an audit.

Advertisers rely on big auditing firms to pore over their media investments and warn them of impending disasters. Recent scandals suggest they are not doing a great job. Viewability, fraud and brand safety remain big issues that are made even worse by audits that benchmark the cost of an ad at the expense of its quality.

“The sheer amount of variables that are involved in any digital impression is so large that a CPM benchmark by itself just is not valid and gives a completely wrong impression of the agency’s performance,” said Ruben Schreurs, managing partner at digital media consulting firm Digital Decisions.

There are two kinds of media audit: One is called “pool benchmarking” where the advertisers price and quality demands are benchmarked against the auditor’s pool of clients to understand the competitiveness of the media prices in relation to the media quality bought, and the second is called “value tracking,” which validates the actual media prices against the media agency price commitments coming from the agency pitch. Usually, price commitments are compared between agencies during the pitch, but without pool benchmarking, the advertiser won’t know whether those commitments are competitive versus the market average. Armed with this information, advertisers would then pick the agency that offered the biggest discount.

“I don’t think media auditors have set out to cause these problems, but they have struggled to solve them,” said Sam Tomlinson, a partner for media, insight and assurance at PwC. “The more sophisticated advertisers are recognizing that the old way of auditing media isn’t appropriate for programmatic and are asking for alternatives.

Deutsche Telekom has created a consortium of auditors that will split the advertiser’s media auditing and evaluation duties across Europe between themselves as part of a wider overhaul. Heineken has hired another firm, Digital Decisions, which will provide source data monitoring services instead of legacy cost benchmarking.

“The rigor in offline auditing does not currently exist in online, and that challenge will continue until the buying side settles down and matures,” said Andre Santos, director of marketing at Freesat, which has just concluded a media review.

Like the global advertiser, Freesat didn’t want its media pitch to come down to price comparisons. While Santos had compared the rates each agency could secure, he also took more time to gauge how the agency fit with its own strategic priorities when it came to areas such as reach versus quality, viewability and supply chain transparency. Following the review, Freesat moved its money from Havas to independent agencies Roast and Electric Glue.

“Certainly for our purposes, pool-based methodology is not the right choice, but largely that’s the result of the dynamics of the industry we are in and the size of the organization we are,” said Santos. “There could be instances though where — whilst not best in class — pool-based auditing is better than nothing, and, therefore, some organizations will derive value from it.”

Wary of the pressure on their outdated models, auditing firms aim to shake things up.

Ebiquity is trying to position itself as more of a strategic partner to advertisers, while Accenture wants to teach advertisers how to buy their own biddable media. Both pivots away from comparing prices are not without their problems.

Progressive advertisers have been less than enamored with some of the changes Ebiquity has made. As much as the company is focused on working with advertisers to define future media strategies, it’s hard to rationalize that pivot when the auditor has yet to show it has a grip on measuring anything but the cost of media, said one senior marketer on condition of anonymity.

“The challenge for companies like Ebiquity and Accenture is that they want to be seen as strategic partners but don’t have a firm grip on how the cost of online media relates to the outcome,” said the marketer. “Auditing as we know it is dead and will be replaced with effectiveness modeling.”

In response to those concerns, Ebiquity has revamped the way it audits online media to give advertisers a like-for-like view of both cost and quality on key aspects of their digital media performance that spans different markets.

Accenture has built a profitable business model reviewing other agencies’ performance and is now offering similar services to those same businesses. Despite the consulting firm’s claims otherwise, agencies aren’t convinced it can be both a rival and an auditor without any conflicts of interest. WPP has started to reject sharing data with Accenture to audit, according to four ad executives interviewed for this article.

“WPP at a global level have started to reject data requests from Accenture as a media auditor,” said a consultant on condition of anonymity because they had seen the confidential exchange between both groups. “WPP isn’t going to cooperate with audits executed by a competitor.”

Accenture declined to comment, and WPP did not respond by the time this article was published.

The post ‘Auditing as we know it is dead for online media’: Advertisers seek auditing alternatives appeared first on Digiday.

Walmart is bulking up its online strategy for groceries to stay competitive against Amazon.

Yesterday, the retailer announced that it is partnering with Google Assistant to allow customers to place grocery orders through voice commands. Customers will say “Hey Google, talk to Walmart,” to start adding items to their Walmart grocery cart. If the customer doesn’t specify exactly what type of product they want — e.g., “add milk to my cart,” Google Assistant will fulfill that request based upon what type of milk the customer buys regularly. Over time, Walmart said that it hopes to enable grocery fulfillment across more types of voice assistants.

It’s indicative of the next frontier Walmart will have to conquer in grocery, which is perfect e-commerce ordering and connecting those to physical stores. Walmart has already built out a significant grocery pickup operation using thousands of its brick-and-mortar stores, which it hopes will solidify customer loyalty when one of its biggest competitors, Amazon, makes a bigger push into grocery. Now, Walmart wants to take on Amazon on its own turf, by testing how it can use next-generation technologies like voice commands, visual search and autonomous delivery vehicles to more quickly fulfill customer orders.

More than 2,000 Walmart stores in the U.S. now have the ability to fulfill grocery orders that customers order online and want to pick up in store, up from zero five years ago. The company also plans to double the number of stores that offer grocery delivery, from 800 to 1,600 stores last year.

Today, about 11-13% of Walmart customers use its grocery pickup service, according to an analysis released this week from Cowen and Company. During the company’s most recent earnings call, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said that grocery comp sales were the best in nine years, on a two-year stack basis, coinciding with the investments in pickup. Walmart’s next biggest priority is looking at how it can use technology to make it easier for customers to place a recurring grocery order, CFO Brent Biggs said at the Evercore ISI retail summit last week.

“We’re going to get more and more involved in that customer’s life to where they don’t even have to think about shopping with Walmart,” Biggs said.

Walmart has made click-and-collect the cornerstone of its online grocery strategy, as it’s cheaper for the company to get Walmart customers to come to existing brick-and-mortar stores than for Walmart to deliver a grocery order to them, and makes them more likely to place other orders while they’re at the store. In order to do so, Walmart has had to hire more pickers to fulfill these orders in store. It also added more than 2,000 employees to its tech-division last year, many of whom were being hired to help figure out how to help Walmart fulfill online grocery orders more quickly, Walmart’s then-CTO Jeremy King said in an interview last summer.

“Compared to competitors, Walmart’s investments in this space have been more effective and wide-reaching,” Freedonia Group grocery analyst Cara Brosius said, citing the fact that Walmart’s stores can reach more of the U.S. compared to competitors like Kroger and Giant Eagle. The 2,100 Walmart stores that have grocery pickup can reach 70% of the U.S. population. The company is also conducting pilots with a handful of delivery partners in order to figure out what’s the most cost-effective way for it to complete last-mile deliveries. Last year, it announced grocery delivery tests with Udelv, Spark Delivery, as well as with Ford, to test delivering groceries via autonomous vehicles.

Now that Walmart is offering customers multiple ways to shop, order and receive their groceries, it’s building on its competitive strategy for the category. Its new test in voice ordering could help customers to quickly refill grocery orders.

Yet very few Americans buy products through voice assistants. A survey conducted by eMarketer in February found that just 5% of households surveyed use voice assistants for grocery shopping, an even smaller percentage than those who used voice assistants to buy other products. But Andrew Lipsman, an analyst for eMarketer, said that voice assistants can be a good channel for customers to make one-off requests — to place an order for olive oil when they’re cooking dinner and realize they’re out of it, for example.

Because Americans aren’t regularly shopping through voice assistants yet, Walmart also seems to be ready to look at how it can use other types of technology to help customers refill orders more quickly. At Sam’s Club, for example, Walmart’s testing using artificial intelligence to help customers auto-populate a shopping list, using their past purchase history. Walmart is also testing visual search to facilitate online shopping.

“Because adoption of voice-activated grocery shopping overall is still low, Walmart’s launch may not have as much immediate impact on its e-commerce grocery business as the bigger moves it is making in expanding coverage of its delivery and store-pickup services,” said John Owen, the associate director of food and retail at research firm Mintel. “However, it puts Walmart in a better position to shape what online grocery shopping looks like in the future, which could have an even bigger impact in the long run.”

The post How Walmart is building its online grocery business to stave off Amazon appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers have collectively woken up from their collective fever dreams about Facebook. Instead of hoping to grow more audience on the back of a third party algorithm or waiting for monetization to improve somewhere like Apple News or on Facebook Watch, publishers are all focusing on things that work now, and will help sustain their businesses in the future. On stage, in the hallways and on the slopes of Vail, Colorado, attendees at both Digiday Moguls and the Digiday Publishing Summit of 2019 talked about sustainability. Here’s what we learned:

The branded content space might be getting too crowded
Several years after publishers spun up brand studios to boost ad revenues, some real fault lines have emerged. Both on stage and in private, publishers complained that some of their peers, particularly venture-backed ones, are squeezing the market for branded content by producing content at a loss, all to grow their top-line revenues.

The post ‘Treat display like a legacy product’: Insights from the Digiday Publishing Summit appeared first on Digiday.

Marketers targeting younger audiences on social platforms have an abundance of places to spend their ad dollars. But according to the latest Digiday survey, they have a preference on which platform should get it first.

In a survey of 189 media buyers by Digiday this March, 37% said Instagram was the ideal platform to reach audiences aged 20 and below. After Instagram, 30% of respondents selected Snapchat while 17% would start their campaigns with YouTube. Emerging platforms such as TikTok and Twitch nabbed smaller shares of marketers responses with 6% and 5% respectively. Facebook is clearly not the place for teens, with just 1% naming it the best platform.

The post Digiday Research: Marketers say Instagram is the best way to reach teens appeared first on Digiday.