Month: April 2019

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Harry Kargman, founder and CEO at Kargo. Google announced last month that it would switch to a first-price auction in Google Ad Manager by the end of 2019. The move brings Google into parity… Continue reading »

The post Google’s Move To First-Price Auctions Will Pressure Other DSPs To Compete appeared first on AdExchanger.

As influencer marketing becomes an increasingly vital component of marketers’ media plans, massive unresolved issues with campaign measurement and influencer selection continue to limit its potential effectiveness.

Of 83 client-side marketers polled by Digiday this April, 27% said the biggest obstacle to influencer marketing is measuring campaign performance while the same amount said they struggle to find the right influencers to work with. Related to effectives, one in five marketers identified their biggest challenge as understanding if an influencer is actually, well, influential.

The post Digiday Research: Marketers struggle with influencer marketing measurement appeared first on Digiday.

At the recent U7 summit in London, industry experts and world-renowned brands discussed the issues of complicated supply chains, self-policing and a lack of global guidelines on transparency.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom — many companies are working hard to clean up the ad landscape by bringing transparency and trust back to the industry. Initiatives like the U7, and trade bodies like the IAB and TAG, are transforming the dialogue.

So what would the advertising industry look like if it were launched from scratch tomorrow? If we could start afresh, which technologies, processes and standards would we put in place from the get-go to ensure the industry remained transparent and trustworthy — while being as efficient and effective as possible?

A global standard

Thinking along the lines of the IAB and TAG, we’d need an independent organization to create a global standard or a set of protocols that companies who participate in the exchange would need to adhere to.

At Unruly, we often speak about the idea of ID as a commodity rather than a USP. In our current ecosystem, only a few media giants own people-based identifiers, leaving smaller companies to struggle. In this new industry, ID would be available for all, giving the market a more level playing field and allowing companies to work across borders.

Working together

In order to succeed, it is necessary to put processes in place that encourage collaboration and unity. Rather than battling against each other, we should be looking at the overall picture and joining forces.

This is especially necessary for small independent companies — without teamwork, there’s no  chance of competing against the walled gardens.

Standardized measurements

With companies having different standards for metrics like viewability and CTRs, implementing consistent measurement is a must. We’d need to launch with a set of standards in place for measurement from an independent governing body, much like the IAB is working towards in our current industry.

In the new world, we wouldn’t focus so heavily on the numbers. Performance metrics only tell part of the story. With CTRs you’re chasing empty dollars, there are only so many people who are going to click and a click doesn’t always lead to a purchase.

Managed service vs. programmatic

In the future, it’s likely that all premium publishing will be plugged into programmatic supply in a way that renders all formats successful, but that presently isn’t the case. So if we were to launch again tomorrow with programmatic as it is today, we’d still need managed service until programmatic gets to the point where it can self-sufficiently operate.

 

Overseeing the data flow

Data is the buzzword of 2019 — and in this brand new advertising landscape,  an independent body would oversee the flow and exchange of big data sets.

There would be a lot more second party data marketplaces in the future, where two first parties share their data. For example, BA and Hertz are two companies that are non-competitive — one knows about fliers and one knows about car hirers — but by simply exchanging data, they can start to build a more complete picture of their shared consumer.

In this new industry, direct data alliances between brands, publishers and advertisers should be encouraged and the benefits conveyed to all. This would eliminate the worry of murky or fraudulent data, as it would be coming directly from the source, as opposed to a shady third party.

Thinking ahead

The industry we have today is great — but it’s nowhere near perfect. Imagining the possibilities afforded by a clean slate encouraged the evaluation of what needs to be changed.

Encouraging collaboration and the sharing of data, being more transparent with our practices, re-evaluating how we measure success and looking at how we can make ID fairer are great places to start. And if others in the industry also step back and imagine a fresh start, perhaps these changes can begin to take place.

The post A fresh start: Rethinking the advertising landscape appeared first on Digiday.

Jim Spanfeller has spent nearly two decades demanding that advertisers treat digital media with more respect. Now, Spanfeller has a very different kind of challenge: To rally and diversify the revenues at one of the most difficult, splenetic publishing properties in the history of digital media.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that private equity Great Hill Partners had acquired Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion from Univision, and installed Spanfeller as the CEO of G/O Media, a newly created entity housing the properties. According to Recode’s executive editor Peter Kafka, Great Hill acquired the properties for barely more than a third of the $135 million Univision paid for them in 2016.

In interviews, Spanfeller praised G/O’s titles for growing large, loyal audiences, and said he planned to boost their revenues by leaning more on commerce and expanding programmatic advertising, as well as expanding into consumer revenue through a subscriber-exclusive content strategy.

To make that happen, Spanfeller will rely on what observers say is a deep, comprehensive understanding of the digital advertising ecosystem — knowledge he’s acquired through a career that contains more hits than misses. He’s also built a reputation as a highly demanding leader that some expect could clash with the G/O sites’ distinctive culture. Spanfeller did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Industry observers said that Spanfeller, a veteran media executive who, years after a successful career in magazines, built a leading digital presence for Forbes and led a pair of digital-native sites, The Daily Meal and The Active Times, to acquisition, had all the qualities that would make him attractive to a private equity firm looking to turn around a media property.

“He’s original digirati,” said Wenda Millard, vice chairman of MediaLink, who’s known Spanfeller since he was at Playboy. “He’s a builder and a fixer.”

But Great Hill has also chosen an executive whose last venture, The Daily Meal and Active Times, didn’t live up to the hype that its founder whipped up around it. After vowing to build the biggest food site on the internet and raising more than $15 million from various investors, those sites were eventually sold at a price low enough that the acquirer, Tribune Publishing, did not feel it had to disclose its purchase to shareholders.

To observers like Millard, the stumble is not a strike against him. But to some former employees, those sites’ struggles – and the character traits those struggles brought out – make him a dangerous choice for a media company in need of a rally.

By the time Spanfeller launched his first self-owned digital property, The Daily Meal, in 2011, he had already been coronated as digital advertising royalty. He’d grown Forbes’s website, originally founded as a separate business, into one of the top business publications on the internet and received a lifetime achievement award from the IAB, which he briefly chaired.

While running Forbes.com, Spanfeller launched several programs that practically dared marketers to move their budgets his way. In 2003, Forbes.com started pitching advertisers on a digital ad guarantee, in which marketers who spent a minimum of $150,000 over a 60-day period were promised a statistically significant increase in several key brand metrics, including intent to purchase. If Forbes.com didn’t deliver, the advertisers got their money back.

Before Spanfeller stepped down as the site’s CEO in 2009, the minimum buy-in had swelled to $1 million over a 90-day period. The strategy’s success spawned outside imitators, not just at legacy publishers including Meredith, which unveiled a sales lift guarantee in 2011, but also at digital advertising networks such as Undertone.

It even gave rise to a competing in-house product: In 2008, Forbes.com’s sales teams rolled out The Wall Street Journal Challenge, which offered advertisers the chance to compare the performance of Forbes.com’s ads with those an advertiser had purchased in the print pages of the Wall Street Journal.

By today’s standards, digital display ads fetched enviable sums. According to a source that worked under Spanfeller at Forbes, even its standard display units could fetch CPMs between $25 and $40 in 2009.

Spanfeller carried that enthusiasm for guarantees – and expectations of premium-level CPMs – to The Daily Meal, which he launched two years after stepping down as CEO of Forbes.com. (After Forbes decided to absorb its digital counterpart, the job became “less interesting,” Spanfeller said at the time.)

The Daily Meal was meant to be a large-scale, all-encompassing site about food. Rather than an interest-specific site like Allrecipes, the Daily Meal was meant to have news, reviews, recipes, and everything in between. Like Forbes, it offered a brand lift guarantee — minimum price tag: $200,000 — and asked advertising CPMs that one former sales employee described as “outrageous” for a new digital site.

“They were very ambitious,” said one source that’s known Spanfeller since his days in magazines, which included Playboy as well as the Ziff Davis portfolio. “I think there was a little bit of naieveté – in all of us – about what it takes to build brand digitally.”

The Daily Meal and the Active Times struggled to build the scale Spanfeller sought. Despite hiring big-name editors and sales executives, including the co-founder of Saveur and the former publisher of Food & Wine, the sites had trouble building an audience on a scale that Spanfeller imagined. In Dec. 2016, the last month before their acquisition, The Daily Meal and Active Times, a sister site focused on active lifestyles, had amassed fewer than 8 million monthly unique visitors, according to Comscore. “The advertisers were always unhappy when the numbers came back,” one former employee said.

The sites eventually embraced quantity publishing emblematic of the overall digital publishing world. The Daily Meal’s news editors were expected to produce eight stories per day, according to multiple sources. Some former employees described a high-stress environment.

In G/O Media, Spanfeller assumes control of a company with some, but not all, of Spanfeller Media Group’s problems solved. The sites, collectively, have scale, reaching nearly half of all U.S. millennials, and some have built incredibly loyal audiences. But they also lost money last year and Univision was trying to rein the sites’ costs in by offering buyouts to unionized staffers.

Whether Spanfeller’s strategy for G/O succeeds or fails, much will be expected of his new charges. A caps lock-heavy memo that leaked to New York Magazine exhorts G/O employees to “BE GOAL ORIENTED.”

“He always makes his intentions known, and the expectations are clear,” said the source from Spanfeller’s Forbes days. “If you are operating at a high level, all day, every day…then when times get tough, you’ll be able to push through.”

The post ‘A builder and fixer’: New Gizmodo boss Jim Spanfeller is an old school digital media vet appeared first on Digiday.

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As DTC brands grow up, retail-as-a-service models are turning into a burgeoning industry. Naked Retail Group, whose core model is to open stores, then lease out space in those stores to brands, is taking it one step further.

The post Retail Briefing: Naked Retail Group is offering DTC brands physical store services appeared first on Digiday.

As the ad-supported streaming video market heats up, free video streaming services such as Pluto TV, Xumo and Tubi are bulking up on licensed movies, TV shows and digital video programming.

The key hits:

• Free video streaming services such as Pluto TV and Xumo are licensing more movies and TV shows in an effort to draw more users.
• Most often, these titles are available on a non-exclusive basis, which makes sense considering the fact that these are free products.
• Deal structures can vary: Most often, the video services send an ad revenue share back to programming partners.
• However, in some instances, Pluto TV and Xumo are willing to pay a fixed licensing fee or offer minimum guarantees — but those are typically reserved for studios rather than digital publishers.
• One interesting outlier is Tubi, which says it will spend more than $100 million to acquire content this year, eliciting skepticism among industry observers on how the service will be able to fund such a budget.

Earlier this week, Viacom-owned Pluto TV, which offers more than 100 channels of linear-programming streaming channels, announced a deal with BBC Studios to license more than 1,000 episodes of TV shows including classic “Doctor Who” episodes, “Antiques Roadshow” and “Robin Hood.” Rival free video streaming service Tubi has also been bulking up on its programming, recently adding existing fare such as past seasons of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette,” and movies such as “Donnie Darko” and “The Virgin Suicides.” Since last fall, Xumo has also made a bigger push into adding more movies into its programming lineup.

The post Video Briefing: Free video streaming services are bulking up with licensed programming appeared first on Digiday.

Amazon is now giving third-party sellers access to demographic information about customers, including age, income, gender and marital status.

It’s part of an effort from Amazon to give more information to sellers using its third-party seller platform, Seller Central. The company noted some of these moves in a news release Tuesday that highlighted newly launched Amazon Brand Analytics, including insight on popular search terms and comparable products; a promotional Fulfilled by Amazon monthly storage and removal fee waiver; personalized guidance on how to sell globally, and educational tools for sellers. Kiri Masters, CEO of Amazon agency Bobsled Marketing, said news of the move emerged on a LinkedIn post from a seller late last week; Amazon confirmed to Digiday that demographic analytics were made available to sellers in the U.S. last Thursday.

According to Amazon, Amazon Brand Analytics, including the customer demographics report, is available to “eligible brand owners” who are enrolled in Brand Registry. Currently, the feature is only available to sellers who own a brand or who serve as an agent, representative, or manufacturer of a brand.

For third-party sellers on Amazon, unlocking free customer demographics information addresses one of the biggest pain points of selling on Amazon’s marketplace: limited access to customer data. While brand analytics offer information about keyword searches, how popular keywords are, click and conversion share, information about who customers were was virtually nonexistent before, said Ryan Williams, director of finance for Rise Brewing. With limited customer data, it’s been challenging for many Amazon sellers to market to customers and would-be customers who peruse or buy items via Amazon.

The insights acquired from the demographics tool will have an impact on broader marketing strategies that go beyond Amazon, said Williams, who said he began accessing the feature on Tuesday.

“This really helps with your marketing strategy, not just on Amazon but outside of Amazon as well,” said Williams. “We’re constantly asked by investors who we should focus on, and beyond Google Analytics, those questions are not always easy to answer.”

For Brian Hemmert, chief marketing officer at Fat Snax, the added insights are a positive move from Amazon, but not enough to abandon growing Fat Snax’ own e-commerce site.

“It’s still crucial to have our own direct channels through our site,” he said.

Agencies working with Amazon, however, say the motivations behind the new analytics tool aren’t only to benefit smaller sellers. Amidst recent reports that Amazon wants to move some sellers away from the wholesale platform to Seller Central, agency executives say what’s at play is a strategy to promote Seller Central by giving third-party sellers access to data they would have to pay for if they used Vendor Central. Brands that sell through Vendor Central have to pay for demographic data as part of a subscription to Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA) Premium, which can reportedly cost as much as $30,o00 per year (ARA basic, which is free, offers reports on business metrics including sales and inventory levels). But according to the company, brand analytics are less relevant to the vendor model since Amazon is handling the listings.

“I don’t know if I would characterize it as a win — it’s an incentive for larger sellers to move to Seller Central,” said Fred Killingsworth, CEO of Amazon-specialized agency Hinge, who added that moving more sellers to Seller Central lets Amazon divert resources from seller relationships within Vendor Central. “Amazon is a tech platform; the vendor relationship requires a lot more humans to be involved in the process, given expectations Amazon is going to provide help.”

Meanwhile, additional analytics are a powerful tool to justify additional investments in Amazon’s advertising platform.

“With brand analytics, the new demographics that came out in the past few days are a case for more ad spend on Amazon,” said Masters.

The post Amazon rolls out customer demographic analytics for third-party sellers appeared first on Digiday.

Digital publishing is all about maximizing resources, reach and efficiency. In this presentation from Digiday’s Hot Topic: Subscriptions and Commerce, which took place in NYC this February, hear from Mike Finnerty, general manager at Ziff Davis, on how it uses its scale to make the most of its commerce operations. The key hits:

• When your business operations are dealing with a wide variety of publications, it is essential for them to understand the value proposition of each brand.
• From a user experience standpoint, what works on one website will work on another, regardless of the difference in content.
• Finding efficiencies requires an understanding of each brand’s unique audience. “Not all brands can do all things well. You have to be really focused on what your audience is there to do,” said Finnerty.
• “I think the big goal for us is to make sure we’re building a really strong platform that, as we go off and acquire the next brand or two, or three, they’re able to plug more efficiently into the system. So it’s making sure we have that scalable data infrastructure, a scalable technology platform, but also a great go-to-market approach for marketers.”

The post Video: Ziff Davis’ Mike Finnerty on using its size to drive its commerce business appeared first on Digiday.

After years running a loss from its video efforts, video now accounts for 10% of Austrian news publisher Die Presse’s digital ad revenues. The publisher has attributed the rise to running muted autoplay video and claims the user experience hasn’t suffered as a result.

Muted autoplay video has become the norm across the internet as a way for publishers to build up view counts and serve more impressions, particularly for news publishers where video has been harder to monetize. But there is an ongoing debate about whether or not the format is disruptive, forcing people to watch ads.

“The belief is that you can never do autoplay, or text and video content that is not exactly matching,” Alexis Johann, executive managing director at Styria Content Creation, part of Styria Media Group, which owns Die Presse. “We now know these beliefs are not true.”

For the past six years, Die Presse had lost money through its video strategy, said Johann. The 170-year-old news publisher faced the challenge of producing and publishing video content quickly to accompany breaking news stories. Anything that took longer than 60 minutes after a text story was published was too long, he added. Equally, training journalists new skills was a challenge. Only 10% of Die Presse journalists embraced creating video with enthusiasm; for the rest, it was a distraction, he said. Even with a centralized video team, it struggled to scale enough content to make meaningful revenue from pre-roll on open exchanges.

But last year, Die Presse turned this around. The publisher has increased annual pre-roll impressions from 300,000 to over 31 million since working with video platform Video Intelligence, which serves contextually relevant videos within articles. Since 2018, all Die Presse articles now have contextually relevant video, such as the below article about an Austrian mother who joined “Islamic State” four years ago and wants to return. The video is about the extension of border control in Austria caused by the threat of terrorism.

The revenue generated from pre-roll video is now 10% of Die Presse’s digital ad revenues. Johann said it makes a 50% margin on ads, while yields have improved as more advertisers are working with the publisher direct rather than trading on the exchange.

“Content sharing is key. We need content and need it fast, so licensing makes sense, but it’s how you integrate that to grow exponentially,” he said. As the video content is contextual, rather than an exact match of the story, it’s additive rather than repetitive. Audiences click into the article for the video to autoplay, so this shows some intent to view.

“‘Click to play’ is the holy grail; autostart overall is still a big part of internet inventory,” said Brian Rifkin, co-founder of video platform JW Player. “More publishers are creating points on site that are intent-to-watch scenarios where there is a call to action.”

While autoplay is generally frowned upon for disrupting the user experience, Die Presse claims that this hasn’t suffered. The publisher polled 500 of its readers on the integration of video on the site and found that over 60% would like to see more of this type of video and 50% said that the positioning of the videos in the news articles made the site more attractive.

“Advertisers said they cannot work with autoplay; editors say we ‘don’t believe users want autoplay,’” said Johann. “We didn’t think we could do either of these things.” As a result, the publisher, Styria One Digital, plans to replicate the solution on its other sites.

However, not everyone is on board with the growth of autoplay. “Even with muted autoplay, the animation can distract the user from the reading experience,” said Alessandro De Zanche, an independent digital media consultant.

The post How Austrian publisher Die Presse made its video business profitable appeared first on Digiday.