Month: April 2019

People primarily visit AccuWeather’s site or use its apps to check the weather. But the company is increasingly succeeding in getting them to stick around to watch videos, whether that be user-generated videos surveying storm damage or editorial videos breaking down the science of weather.

Last year AccuWeather made its videos appear more prominently on its desktop site, such as by placing trending videos immediately underneath its local weather forecasts. That contributed to the company’s video view count increasing by 300 percent year over year in 2018 to finish the year with 650 million video views.

In February 2019, AccuWeather’s digital properties received 4.3 million unique video viewers, a 149% increase from February 2018 when it received 1.7 million unique video viewers, according to figures provided by Comscore. By comparison, The Weather Channel’s digital properties received 2.9 million unique video viewers in February 2018 but did not receive enough unique video viewers in February 2019 to meet Comscore’s minimum reporting threshold. A spokesperson for The Weather Channel did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

The company plans to update its mobile site and apps this year to more prominently feature videos on those properties, as it did last year on its desktop site.

“We are in the process of a significant relaunch of our web properties. That’s coming in early Q3, so I think you’ll start seeing even more video on mobile,” said Kurt Fulepp, global chief product officer at AccuWeather. Additionally AccuWeather will be making “big changes” to its mobile apps by the end of this year, he said, and video will be part of those changes.

AccuWeather’s increased video view count was likely helped by the fact that its videos are often very short. If a video is longer than two minutes, it’s considered long-form, said Trish Mikita, vp of content at AccuWeather. Given the short duration of its videos and the fact that another video automatically starts after one finishes, AccuWeather typically see people sit through four videos per session, said Fulepp. He added that people watch a video to completion 80 percent of the time once it has started playing. That people are watching multiple videos at a time and to completion ought to help AccuWeather’s pitch to advertisers since it runs ads before the first video that someone watches and inserts ads between videos.

AccuWeather’s primary focus remains providing people with weather information. But video plays into the company’s efforts to ensure that people continue to visit its properties to check the weather. When AccuWeather is able to get someone to view its content after checking the weather, it has found those people become more loyal users, according to Mikita. “Content consumers generally consume more pages per session,” she said. Those additional page views translate into more opportunities for AccuWeather to serve people ads.

The mobile redesign may be particularly important to the future of AccuWeather’s video viewership given the disproportionate role that desktop has played in the past. In 2018 AccuWeather’s desktop traffic in the U.S. accounted for most of its video views, according to Fulepp. However desktop represents a minority of the publisher’s traffic. In February 2019, AccuWeather’s mobile site and apps received 41.8 million monthly visitors and 17.1 million daily visitors compared to its desktop site that received 7.6 million monthly visitors and 1.1 million daily visitors, according to Comscore figures published to AccuWeather’s site.

AccuWeather has also made editorial changes in a bid to grow its video viewership. In February the company announced that it had combined its digital media content group and its AccuWeather Network team that produces content for its linear TV network into a single media content group. Merging the digital and TV content teams has enabled AccuWeather to be more efficient with the content that it produces for the two channels. There are restrictions that prevent AccuWeather from syndicating all of its TV content across its digital properties, so having the combined content team makes it easier for AccuWeather to identify opportunities to produce content for both TV and digital and to repackage TV content for digital, Mikita said.

The post AccuWeather hits 650m video views on its site and apps appeared first on Digiday.

As the ad industry re-evaluates its approach to personal privacy, advertisers are searching for ways to collect data on people without compromising their privacy. One of those alternatives has been called differential privacy, a statistical technique which allows companies to share aggregate data about user habits while protecting individual privacy.

Here’s an explainer on how differential privacy works.

WTF is differential privacy?
It’s a process used to aggregate data that was pioneered by Microsoft and is now used by Apple, Google and other big tech companies. In a nutshell, a differential privacy algorithm injects random data into a data set to protect individual privacy.

Before data is sent to a server to be anonymized, the differential privacy algorithm adds random data into an original data set. The inclusion of the random data means the advertiser gets a data set that has been masked ever so slightly and, therefore, isn’t quite exact.

How so?
The advertiser effectively gets approximations of the answers they need without compromising anyone’s privacy. An advertiser viewing differential privacy data might know that 150 out of 200 people saw a Facebook ad and clicked through to its site, but not which 150 people, for example. It gives the users of that data plausible deniability because it’s virtually impossible to identify specific individuals with full certainty.

That doesn’t sound very accurate.
There is a definite trade-off here between privacy and accuracy as advertisers won’t get the full picture of how people respond to a campaign. However, it’s a sacrifice some advertisers seem willing to accept. Without the random data injected into the main data set, it’s easy to figure out who the person who engaged with the ad is, which would mean having to kill the database if the proper General Data Protection Regulation consent has not been attained.

Who is driving this? 
There is a Truth in Measurement cross-industry collective of advertisers, publishers and tech platforms considering how the statistical technique could be used to underpin cross-platform measurement. Trace Rutland, director of media innovation for Tyson Foods, who is part of the collective, said this pragmatism comes down to there being a more apparent ethics test at play that revolves around the question: “Would our customers expect and be comfortable with us using their data this way?” The answer to which pushed the cross-industry collective to consider whether differential privacy could be used as a way to validate data being shared in a proposed data clean room.

How can that help with cross-platform measurement?
With all the talk of whether data clean rooms can support cross-party measurement, one sticking point has been who actually benefits from it. Media sellers are wary of sharing their data in the same place as their rivals, while advertisers don’t feel like they have ownership of those environments, which subsequently makes them suspicious of what’s been added.

Differential privacy could ease some of those suspicions as all backers of the clean room would feel like they have some control of a data anonymization process that is usually controlled by the media seller. An advertiser would get a data set that is an accurate reflection of how well a campaign performed, while the media seller wouldn’t have to part with valuable targeting data.

The issue came up at an event hosted by Truth in Measurement group last month. “The consensus was that advertisers would receive a differential privacy-based log file of campaign data as an output of data clean rooms being adopted,” said Victor Wong, CEO of Thunder Experience Cloud, which has spearheaded the Truth in Measurement initiative.

Can any advertiser do this?
Any advertiser could theoretically develop their own algorithm for differential privacy, but it’s not advisable given how complex it would be to develop and then manage. Indeed, advertisers like Tyson Foods would rather work with others to co-fund a version of the technique they can apply to larger data sets.

“If something like differential privacy is going to take off, then it needs to be a combined effort on the buy side. Advertisers can’t do this alone,” said Rutland, who wants the industry to rally around a united version of the algorithm rather than support various versions of it. “Whenever advertisers have tried to go it alone when it comes to cross-platform measurement, it’s not been something they’ve been able to scale to a point where it’s had an impact on the way the walled gardens go to market.”

Any other downsides?
Differential privacy isn’t great on small data sets. The smaller the data set, the more prone it is to inaccuracies once the random data is added to it. Furthermore, it’s harder to make differential privacy work at scale compared to reporting the real, anonymized data of users.

The post WTF is differential privacy? appeared first on Digiday.

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