Month: April 2019

After seven seasons at Saturday Night Live, where she’s best known for impersonations like Sarah Huckabee Sanders and making all-female music videos like “(Do It on My) Twin Bed,” Aidy Bryant still has plenty of surprises up her sleeve. Last month, she became one of the only SNL cast members ever to simultaneously star in…

“On TV and Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Maggie Zhang, senior vice president of video research and insights at Dentsu Aegis Network. As the timeless tale of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” goes, the young girl tastes three different bowls of porridge… Continue reading »

The post The Goldilocks Principle In TV Attribution: A Marketer’s Pursuit Of ‘Just Right’ appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Big Data Bucks Publicis Groupe will pay $4.4 billion to acquire Epsilon, the French holding company’s biggest-ever acquisition and the latest agency bid for first-party data. The transaction gives Publicis ownership over data on 250 million Epsilon customer profiles in the United States, as… Continue reading »

The post Publicis Buys Epsilon; Google Sued Again appeared first on AdExchanger.

Hot on the heels of anti-mobile app fraud tool app-ads.txt, the IAB Tech Lab has released yet another pithily named tool, comprising two parts: Sellers.json and OpenRTB Supply Chain Object.

Both come as a package and are designed to give ad buyers more confidence in the multiple vendors involved in the reselling of an impression throughout the digital ad supply chain — not just the first reseller. The goal: to help increase overall confidence that buyers are not being duped by shady players who aren’t authorized to resell a publisher’s inventory.

Still unsure what it is? Here’s a primer.

WTF is Sellers.json?
Think of ads.txt and app-ads.txt, which are both crack-downs on two types of ad fraud: the unauthorized reselling of inventory and domain spoofing. Sellers.json is the next step on from that, just using a json rather than a txt file. While ads.txt enables ad buyers to see what ad tech vendors publishers have authorized to sell their inventory, it only went so deep. Ad tech vendors buying and selling impressions on the open exchange typically work with a vast array of intermediary resellers, all of which work with other resellers. That complex web of players involved in the sale of every impression, makes it virtually impossible to keep track of who is reselling whose inventory, and whether they’re authorized to by the vendor that has the direct relationship with the publisher. Until now.

So how does it work exactly?
Sellers.json is a bit like the SSP’s version of the publisher’s ads.txt file. In the file, SSPs and exchanges will have to list all their authorized reseller partners along with their seller ID and any detail on the legal entity that owns that company.

Right. What about the OpenRTB Supply Chain Object?
This is like the record of what has happened to an impression. It lets buyers see what sellers and resellers have been involved in each bid request. It comprises a set of “nodes,” each representing a vendor that has participated in the selling of a bid request. It will also identify the vendor who was the final reseller in the chain. Buyers can match them to seller IDs given by publishers in ads.txt files and decide whether or not they’re bona fide partners. “The DSP and advertiser side, should see the information on who sold it to them, and all the people beneath that on the path back to the publisher,” said Matt McIyntre, head of programmatic, EMEA at Essence.

Who does this benefit?
In theory, everyone. No one should hurt from it except dodgy players who shouldn’t be operating in the first place. If it increases confidence for ad buyers and DSPs to buy ads on the open exchange knowing every single reseller involved in the process, then they may be more likely to increase spend. Trust has been eroded over time among various players in the supply chain. Certain advertisers have lost trust in their agencies, likewise agencies in their DSPs, and publishers in their SSPs. Both buy and sell sides of the chain have shed vendors over the last year. While ads.txt helped to reduce domain spoofing and unauthorized reselling of inventory, it can be gamed. Plus, it doesn’t provide end-to-end transparency. This, in theory does.

“This creates a lot more confidence around the reseller pipes,” said McIyntre. “It will be firmly on the DSPs using this extra information to do the checking,” If they should find there is a vendor in there that shouldn’t be, they can block it, he added.

Is it hard to implement?
Shouldn’t be. They’re compatible with the current version of the Open real-time bidding framework 2.5, rather than the next version 3.0. That means it is compatible with the current technology infrastructure, unlike ads.cert, which is the more secure version of ads.txt designed to work in the 3.0 version which hasn’t been rolled out or adopted yet.

Any downsides?
There is an option within the Sellers.json that enables a vendor to label an account confidential, meaning they don’t disclose who they are. They may not choose to do so, but if they do then it provides a transparency blockage. There could well be legitimate reasons to mask, like it could be part of a contract if a business is providing white-label services for instance. But it is a potential loop hole.

What’s the next step?
The tools have just been released by IAB Tech Lab OpenRTB Working Group for industry review. So they will be talked about for a while, and feedback will be offered within a 30-day window. They may be adjusted according to those, and then released.

The post WTF is Sellers.json? appeared first on Digiday.

Two years after Diageo told media owners it plans to get stricter on who it buys ads from, the stance has left the advertisers with fewer publishers to buy them from.

Diageo’s reduction of long-tail publisher partners was intended to keep its ads in safe, exclusive environments where it has more control, in what it calls its “trusted marketplace.”

The post Diageo’s cutting the number of publishers it works with to ensure quality appeared first on Digiday.

Earlier this year, a former Snap employee who now works at another tech company received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter for a sales job. The company was described as “one of the few successful content platforms powered by AI.” The company had products available in more than 150 markets and in 75 languages, and its top product had more than 300 million daily active users, the recruiter said.

“Very interesting,” the candidate replied, though ultimately turned down the opportunity.

The company was Bytedance, looking for a brand strategist role at TikTok.

Bytedance has been on an aggressive hiring spree in the U.S. since it brought TikTok, one of its apps, to the U.S. in August. The Chinese tech company had decided to merge Musical.ly, the app with a reported $1 billion price tag it acquired in November 2017, with TikTok. But for Bytedance to increase its presence in the U.S., it didn’t just want to promote an app; it hired a U.S.-based team with offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Chicago. These employees are joining a global organization of 40,000 people, The Information reported. In the U.S., over the last eight months, Bytedance has hired dozens of people from digital agencies and other social apps, most notably from Snap, as it tries to build out TikTok’s sales and partnerships team.

The former Snap employee said several of their former colleagues still at the company had been approached. Already, TikTok has hired at least 14 people from Snap, per LinkedIn. For example, Roxana Sarbaz spent more than three years in sales at partnerships before moving to TikTok in November as strategic content partnerships. Tucker King also worked at Snap for more than three years in production before moving to TikTok in January as creative development manager.

Buyers, who have spoken with Snap and TikTok, are seeing similarities in the companies’ pitches.

“They have the same talking points. [TikTok’s] pitch deck is incredibly similar, and they are hyping the lens, but TikTok is focusing on the value prop that it’s more interactive than just the face, which of course we know Snap is now doing too,” said a buyer.

Indeed, TikTok and Snapchat are both apps for short-form vertical video, and they both have young, highly engaged audiences. TikTok compares itself to Snapchat in its pitch deck to U.S. agencies, obtained by Digiday. One slide shows how TikTok overtook Snapchat as the most downloaded app in the U.S. in monthly downloads. TikTok also pulls App Annie statistics from October 2018 that show while the average session on Snapchat is 80 seconds, TikTok’s average session is 294 seconds. And their ad products are quite similar, with vertical video ads and augmented reality ads.

Hiring people from competitors isn’t anything new, especially in tech industry. Snap hired people from Facebook and Twitter to help build its ad business and other products. One of Snap’s notable hires was Sriram Krishnan, who worked on Facebook’s ad product. He now works at Twitter. Snap seemed to follow Facebook’s advertising playbook as it built its self-serve system. The Los Angeles tech scene, where TikTok and Snap are both based, is also quite small, though rapidly growing. Snap’s and TikTok’s offices in Los Angeles are about five miles from each other.

TikTok and Snap did not respond to requests for comment.

Of course, TikTok recruiters aren’t just looking at people with Snap experience. TikTok has hired at least three people from Twitter and at least three people from Google and YouTube. Mike Rodriguez joined TikTok in November to work in social and editorial after spending two years as a community specialist for YouTube in Los Angeles. He works alongside TikTok’s gm Vanessa Pappas, who helped build YouTube’s creator growth team in her nearly eight years there. As a TikTok spokesperson told Cheddar last year, Pappas is a good hire for her “experience and proven success in connecting global audiences through video.”

A Bytedance recruiter also had reached out to an employee at Twitch for a brand partnerships role earlier this year. The recruiter described the company as a “fast-growing global creation and interaction video platform, which has over 800 million daily active users,” the potential hire told Digiday.

To grow its brand and agency relationships, TikTok has hired experts from inside agencies. Two people recently joined TikTok from VaynerMedia. TikTok also has hired from Cycle and Fetch.

These employees are currently promoting TikTok’s current ad products and discussing future ones, media buyers told Digiday. According to TikTok’s pitch deck, TikTok currently offers four ad products: brand takeover, in-feed video, hashtag challenge and branded lenses. These products can only be brought directly through TikTok’s internal sales team, but the sales team has opened up to buyers about a future self-serve system.

TikTok’s recruiting efforts are far from over. TikTok has 26 open roles on LinkedIn as of April 12. These roles include a brand strategy in New York and in San Francisco as well as a head of marketing in Los Angeles.

The post TikTok is hiring from Snap as it grows US presence appeared first on Digiday.

According to several publishers, Apple News+ is off to a rough start.

Five participating publishers Digiday spoke to detailed a series of early headaches, including struggles with Apple News+ article formatting, confusion about user experience and design, worries about jeopardizing big digital ad campaigns, and a gripe that Apple is favoring large publishers at the expense of smaller ones.

Early hiccups are to be expected — Apple News+ is less than a month old — but multiple publishing sources said the product’s flaws do not bode well for its long-term future unless Apple adapts its approach. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

In pitches it made to publications, which included splashy treatments of designs it created with magazines such as the soccer title Eight By Eight, Apple reps made it seem as though Apple would be providing design resources and article templates that would make publishers’ content inside Apple News+ stand out, sources at three different publishers said.

“They basically said, ‘We will help you out by providing templates,’” said a source at one publication currently participating in Apple News+.

So far, that has proved only half true. A small team of Apple designers, led by former Wired editor Jason Tanz, fields pitches from participating publishers hoping for design help on specific articles or packages, sources said. All participating publishers were given an email address where they were encouraged to send pitches, and sources said that by and large, Apple’s representatives were responsive to their outreach.

But a smaller, select group of publishers were invited to join a private Slack channel where they could connect with Apple more directly, a move that exasperated several sources when they were informed of the channel’s existence. “They’re basically playing favorites,” that first source said. “It always seems to be good for the big guys, but not for the rest of us.”

Apple has also refrained from actually providing article or content templates to publishers. While it has worked directly with publishers that decided to build their own templates for Apple News+, it has largely outsourced that the problem of article templates to several vendors, each of which leaves something to be desired, participating publisher sources say.

Added work tops the list of several publishers’ complaints. Most of the publishers that want to convert pages from their print issues into a digital format rely on tools which scan PDFs, then converts their contents into individual articles and advertisements. The technology is buggy enough that each issue needs to effectively be copy- and design-edited all over again, to ensure that design, formatting and spacing have come out in one piece, according to multiple sources. And because they are standardized, these tools make it harder to distinguish one publisher’s content from another, sources said.

Smaller magazine publishers that don’t have the resources to design their own templates spare are stuck considering an unfavorable set of choices: Invest precious design and development manpower to create something beautiful without knowing if there is an audience to appreciate it; use an established template, which makes your content look exactly like that of dozens of other publishers; or wait things out with a PDF, and hope that having a different user experience doesn’t cost you readers.

There are also logistical puzzles to think through. For publishers that sell separate digital sponsorships around packages that appear in the print editions of their magazines, there is confusion – and indifference from Apple – about whether the Apple News+ launch could potentially cannibalize the digital audience for that package, one source said.

In addition, some publishing sources say, there is frustration with Apple News+’s uneven user experience, with some publications splurging on custom design, and others simply uploading PDFs of their print issues. “You think of Apple, and they’re so design-conscious,” a second source said. “This doesn’t feel like that at all.”

Navigation issues compound the problem. For example, the Apple News+ packages being created by digital natives such as Vox Media or theSkimm are not available as magazine issues inside the Apple News+ tab. They are only accessible through tabs displayed on those publications’ Apple News pages.

While that exception may be the source of some short-term confusion, some publishing sources speculated that Apple thinks individual stories, highlighted for Apple News users in their feeds, will do more to convert subscribers than whole magazine issues will.

“The future [of Apple News+] is less about magazines in general than it is about premium brands aggregating their paid content in one place,” said Paul Canetti, the founder of Maz, a digital content distributor that works with Apple News+.

The post ‘Basically playing favorites’: Apple News+ gets off to a rocky start for some publishers appeared first on Digiday.

Among discount retailers, Dollar General, with its 15,432 stores, is a force to be reckoned with.

It’s not an easy category to win. Discount chain Fred’s announced plans last week to close 159 underperforming and unprofitable stores as it embarks on a turnaround strategy; Dollar Tree-owned Family Dollar continues to be a drag on the parent company; and regional discount chain Shopko filed for bankruptcy in January and will close all of its stores by the summer.

Dollar General, meanwhile, reported $25.6 billion in revenue in 2018, a 9% increase year over year. The company succeeds because stores are often located in areas away from competition, and it’s made good in-store experiences a priority. It employs a careful merchandising strategy, a look and feel that’s inviting and easy to navigate, and it’s using technology to foster efficiency wherever possible. It’s also aggressively remodeling and renovating stores: For this fiscal year, Dollar General plans to build 975 new stores and carry out 1,000 store remodels.

“Their business model is nimble and focused on what customers want; that’s made them a very popular destination not just for low-income customers, but lots of other Americans,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail. “They are a savvy operator, and their growth has been quite phenomenal.”

Dollar General’s merchandising strategy is the result of a shift in approach after the company was acquired by private-equity firm KKR in 2007 for $6.9 billion. At the time, the company was struggling and saddled with $380 million in debt. It went public in 2009.

“Prior to KKR, Dollar General was, as we refer to it, ‘over-SKUed and under-assorted,’ meaning they had too many versions of the same product,” wrote Bernstein analyst Brandon Fletcher, in a recent report. The company then focused on eliminating redundant products and replacing them with higher-margin products and private-label items, he added.

Dollar General can attract customers beyond the low-income customer segments because its inventory includes value items from national brands that aren’t necessarily at the strict $1 price point, allowing it to also attract higher-income customers.

It also focuses on store designs that are easy to navigate for customers, a point of differentiation from competitors, and it’s rolling out in-store tech, including a scan-and-go payments app called DG GO! that’s been rolled out to 250 stores since its launch last year. CEO Todd Vasos told investors last month that the company plans to expand its reach, and the app currently has more than 140,000 downloads and 25,000 monthly active users. A feature of the app that encourages use is a cart calculator to help customers keep track of expenses.

“One key learning is that our customers are using the cart calculator frequently, even when they are not using a DG GO! kiosk to check out,” said Dollar General spokeswoman Crystal Ghassemi. “We believe they are using cart calculator to stay within their budgets and optimize their shopping dollars.”

Still, Dollar General faces competition. The large retailers are increasingly vying for market share in the discount category. According to Morningstar analyst Zain Akbari, if large brands like Walmart or Amazon can figure out how to quickly deliver products to discount shoppers in safe and cost-effective ways, there could be some competitive pressure on the horizon for discount players like Dollar General.

“If digital retailers such as Amazon, or omnichannel titans such as Walmart, achieve cost leverage that renders making relatively small orders of low-cost items available within a few hours (without expensive Prime or similar membership fees or shipping costs), they would be able to address the convenience that Dollar General stores offer,” wrote Akbari in a recent report.

For its part, Dollar General is looking to e-commerce models to inspire its evolving strategies. It’s dabbling in direct-to-consumer subscription models, including, for example, a subscription-based shaving product line called DG Shave Crew reminiscent of the Dollar Shave Club, and rolling out a buy-online-pickup-in-store option later this year.

“Having a user-friendly and helpful suite of digital tools is becoming increasingly important to our customers and, therefore, to Dollar General,” Ghassemi said.

The post A ‘savvy operator’: Why Dollar General dominates the discount retail category appeared first on Digiday.

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DTC brands are cozying up to each other. The latest to team up: menswear brand Untuckit and sustainable swimsuit brand Fair Harbor.

The post Retail Briefing: Untuckit is incubating a startup swimsuit brand appeared first on Digiday.