Month: April 2019

“On TV and Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Chris Maccaro, CEO at Beachfront. People who have spent their careers buying linear TV advertising are confronting a much different world. From direct-to-consumer streaming to cross-platform metrics, media buyers have new opportunities to garner… Continue reading »

The post Programmatic Cable Can Unlock VOD Inventory, But We’re Not There Yet appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Search Wars 2 Amazon is eating into Google’s search market share. WPP, the world’s biggest ad buyer, spent $300 million on Amazon search ads last year, 75% of which came directly from clients’ Google search budgets, The Wall Street Journal reports. Omnicom said 20%… Continue reading »

The post Amazon Eats Into Google’s Search Share; IBM Sells Marketing And Commerce Software appeared first on AdExchanger.

In a Jan. 24 video, YouTuber Matthew Patrick, better known as MatPat, makes a blunt point about the rough-and-tumble world of YouTube creators: “The bigger you get, the more willing people are looking to cheat you, exploit you, use you and throw you away.” The impetus: The meltdown of Defy Media, a multichannel network, meant Patrick and other YouTubers were out what he estimates to be $1.7 million in fees they are due from running ad campaigns on behalf of Defy clients.

Defy is just one of the MCNs that has collapsed as the industry struggled to adapt and survive in the changing world of digital video. Machinima, which had been owned by AT&T, closed in February. Disney acquired Maker in 2014 and has, over the years, reduced the property. Big Frame got bought in 2014 by AwesomenessTV, which itself faced layoffs in August 2018 under parent Viacom.

The post The deconstruction of the MCN: As YouTube matures, middlemen lose ground appeared first on Digiday.

Just like publishers and agencies, digital platforms need to strike a balance between sameness and differentiation.

Over the past year, Reddit has been augmenting its advertising platform with familiar features – cost-per-click bidding, video advertising, app installation ads – hoping to capture marketer dollars once earmarked for Google and Facebook. That was the focus of the pitch Reddit made to executives at CES at the start of the year, and industry observers expect the pitch will resonate; eMarketer predicts that Reddit will generate $119 million in ad revenue in 2019, and more than $260 million by 2021.

But being an alternative to Google and Facebook only gets a platform so far. Though Reddit has global ambitions — “We believe everyone should be on Reddit,” said Reddit COO Jen Wong — Reddit also hopes to position itself as a platform with something that no competitor can copy.

Digiday spoke with Wong about the plan to develop Reddit’s ad business, the problems with brand safety and the platform’s relationship with publishers. The conversation has been edited and condensed. 

Platforms are under pressure because of brand safety concerns. How do you think about brand safety, especially with UGC content?
Safety with UGC is an internet question, it’s not specific to Reddit. Every platform has to handle it their own way. We have policy and tools that’s like the baseline for Reddit Inc. that applies to everything that happens on the platform. Our special sauce is definitely that moderation. We feel really good about that mechanism.

So you like how much you’ve invested in being able to deliver that safety?
We’re always evolving and we’re always investing more, both in terms of helping our moderators evolve and how they think about it and helping them, and then on the brand safety side, we have all these mechanisms for brands: white-listing, black-listing, being able to target. There’s so many mechanisms of brand safety. the one that clients want that we’re working on is third-party verification. That’s a priority for me this year.

To be clear, in terms of safety and platforms, nobody has the measurement. Nobody has the measurement that advertisers want today. The one thing I can say is that we are absolutely committed to having that happen, and we need partnership from the vendors to do that, but it’s important to us because it’s important to our clients.

Why does nobody have the measurement that advertisers want today?
It takes two to tango. You have to be willing, as a platform, to make the investment, and you need the third-party partner to make the investment. And I don’t think those two have met, in all cases.

Reddit’s been busy augmenting its ad offering. Is your goal to make something that’s unique or something that’s familiar for marketers?
Ultimately, we want to make something that’s very differentiated. We’re very clear on where that opportunity is, but where we are is mid-flight. For the past year, we’ve focused on parity and getting those basic aspects of the marketplace down.

But I think the things that make Reddit unique are three things. First is, everyone knows you shape conversations on Reddit before it goes elsewhere. That’s an opportunity for marketers to jump into a conversation that’s going to thread over the next two years. Two is, we know community better than anybody else. There’s nowhere else you can go to answer the question of, ‘Community’s important, but what can I do?’

How do you monetize that community?
I think it’s still advertising. But I think it’s a set of insights people can’t see today, and we’re starting to provide, and I think we’re best positioned to do that. We have that ecosystem. But ultimately, the biggest signal that we have that nobody else has is we have an un-duplicated interest graph.

That interest graph is based on community, right? My friend’s husband’s renovating, and he’s on Reddit dealing with drywall. He’s definitely on Facebook sharing pictures of his kids, but he’s not talking about drywall. That interest graph is really important because it tells you what communities matter to that person, and ultimately comes down to great targeting and the format with which you engage.

As you continue to develop Reddit’s monetization strategy, will it be optimized as more of a bottom funnel or top of funnel place?
I think we’re always going to be up and down the funnel. Shaping conversation early is ultimately upper funnel, thinking about community and their influence. Communities have influence over the upper funnel as well as immediate decision-making. Obviously, qualified audience leads to performance.

Let’s talk about platforms’ relationships with publishers. Can they ever be friends?
I don’t believe the relationship has to be acrimonious. I actually believe it can be very constructive. For certain platforms it is constructive. I certainly hear that some are going well. I think we have a good relationship with publishers, because we’re very transparent about what we can do and what our ability is to help. We’re clear in setting expectations, and that’s important I think in setting a healthy relationship.

Would you say the relationship with publishers have evolved?
For a while, we were having conversations that I felt were pretty transactional: ‘Hey, can we get a lot of traffic?’

That’s not really our starting point. I think things are changing. I think people want depth of conversation. Those conversations have all moved off publishers’ sites. It requires a bit of a mental shift from publishers about what is possible, because we’re different. I think we have a healthy relationship, I feel really good about it.

 

The post ‘Safety with UGC is an internet question’: Reddit COO Jen Wong appeared first on Digiday.

While testifying in front of Congress in Sept. 2018, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he wanted to “increase the health of public conversation” and be more proactive about removing hateful content rather than relying on user reports. Marketers say they are seeing that commitment firsthand — even if the platform still routinely struggles with brand-safety issues.

“There isn’t a single person at Twitter who doesn’t talk about how health is a priority. So the top-down message from Jack [Dorsey] has resonated. They recognize they need to make Twitter a place for civil discourse without abuse or letting it be a tool or weapon for bad actors,” said Joshua Lowcock, global brand safety officer at UM.

UM’s Lowcock said he was particularly impressed by Twitter’s decision to “get off the MAU/DAU treadmill” by making moves that would affect their numbers. For example, Twitter has repeatedly committing to eliminate fake and bot accounts from the platform overall and inactive accounts from users’ follower numbers. Twitter recently changed reporting metrics to “monetizable” daily active users instead of monthly active users.

“While it might adversely impact user numbers that Wall Street obsesses about, it’s the right step to take if you want to be a responsible platform,” Lowcock said.

Twitter, like its peers, has been investing in content moderation through hiring human moderators and building more technical solutions. Twitter doesn’t tout how many human moderators its hired, unlike Facebook and YouTube. A Twitter spokesperson declined to share the size of the team. Publicly, like in Dorsey’s testimonies in DC, the company discusses organizational improvements and its technological investments. For example, in June 2018, Twitter acquired an anti-abuse startup Smyte that identifies unwanted online behavior including fake accounts and hate speech. Technology that can quickly identify harm is especially useful during a global crisis such as the recent shooting in New Zealand.

Joe Barone, GroupM’s managing partner for brand safety in the Americas, said he worked with Twitter in the wake of the New Zealand shooting.

“I can’t tell you if [Twitter’s] AI and machine learning is as good as YouTube, but they deploy a lot of the same types of capabilities to snuff out the content. More generally, they have a real human-curation approach when it comes to products like pre-roll,” Barone said.

Twitter lets brands work with a curated list of more than 200 publishers to buy pre-roll ads or other sponsorships, as Twitter shows in its pitch deck. That’s ideal for brands who are more risk-averse and may be less willing to tweet their own content and therefore risk being adjacent to hateful content in the feed or have bad actors reply to the ad.

For brands that are more risk-averse, Twitter allows brands to blacklist accounts that have made harmful or negative comments about the brand in the past, so they will not be in the targeting group for an ad, Barone said.

Twitter also is testing a feature that would allow for comment moderation on organic posts as part of its push to improve conversation in the app. This feature, which Digiday saw in an app demo in October at Twitter’s NYC office, was spotted by Jane Manchun Wong in February, prompting a response from Twitter senior product manager Michelle Yasmeen Ha.

7/8 We think the transparency of the hidden replies would allow the community to notice and call out situations where people use the feature to hide content they disagree with. We think this can balance the product experience between the original Tweeter and the audience.

— Michelle Yasmeen Haq (@thechelleshock) February 28, 2019

That moderation feature has yet to be widely released. Haq tweeted that it may be tested publicly in the coming months. A marketer, who works in-house at a technology brand, said they would welcome the ability to moderate comments, as they can on Facebook and Instagram.

In fact, this marketer has been resistant to invest ad dollars in Twitter. While they have repeatedly expressed concerns about Twitter’s health and safety to sales reps at the company, in conversations and via email, for the most part, the marketer hasn’t been impressed by the feedback.

“They sent me some BS propaganda on ‘How Twitter is actually a really positive place’ and it boils down to: OK, great, donut dad had a busy store for a few days. Hate and white supremacy means people die and crazy folks send bombs and plan to kill journalists,” this marketer said.

Unlike with Facebook and YouTube, marketers haven’t been as reactionary about pulling their ad dollars during high-profile incidents on Twitter. One marketer told Adweek they paused their ad spend in response to their sponsored tweets appearing on Twitter profiles that promote the illegal sale of narcotics.

A recent Digiday study of 71 media buyers found Twitter to rank 8th out of 13 platforms when rating it on brand safety.

Marketers at agencies say they try their best to use Twitter without engaging with any hateful content. Abby Eckel, social media strategy at DEG, said her clients don’t shy away from Twitter, but they make sure that their tone on the platform is aligned with the brand and the users they respond to are legitimate.

“We do our due diligence and make sure that we’re not giving the trolls the attention that they think they deserve and we’re not engaging in misinformed conversation. We pay attention to people who are engaging with us, what they engaged in previously,” Eckel said.

But while brands and agencies can try to manage their own behavior on Twitter, marketers say they would appreciate more effort from Twitter to rid the platform of distasteful content such as white supremacy.

“Twitter, like all platforms, struggles with making proactive decisions around content moderation outside of what is being reported by users and the community. Everyone looks to someone else to lead, then they are fast followers,” UM’s Lowcock said.

That’s not just a Twitter problem. All platforms are forced to decide whether to make an editorial decision to ban particular content or to accept the responsibility for promoting it.

“We need to stop treating platforms as neutral vehicles when they are engineered to amplify the content posted on them and keep users engaged in the content,” Lowcock said.

Barone, who recently met with Twitter’s vp of client solutions Jean-Philippe Maheu, said he believes the company recognizes that larger responsibility.

Brands “don’t want the egregious content to be there at all. It’s more about how the platforms can excise the negative content, as much as we want separation from [negative content and] the brands, it’s more about the social responsibility,” Barone said.

The post Marketers see progress in Twitter’s efforts to stamp out hate appeared first on Digiday.

With pink hair, dark lipstick and a nose piercing, Snap’s chief business officer Jeremi Gorman embraces an alternative reality: “I’ve never felt more badass in my life,” she says. Gorman, in fact, is not so punk rock in appearance; the badassery was on her phone thanks to her favorite Snapchat filter.

Augmented reality aside, Snap does need a badass to help the company move forward after a turbulent year of executive turnover, stagnant user growth and relentless competition from Facebook. Gorman, 41, brings not only energy to Snapchat but also 20 years of experience in marketing and sales, including the expertise of Amazon, the new member of the ad industry’s triopoly.

The post Former Amazon sales exec Jeremi Gorman is bringing new energy to Snapchat appeared first on Digiday.

While plenty of startup brands are being built on the backs of venture capital funding, an increasing number are looking to buck the stereotype of bloated DTC brand in favor of a scrappier path.

One of the most interesting side effects of this is new ways of funding. Clearbanc is one of them. The company, which late last week launched a new product, called “20-minute term sheet,” is now looking to back 2,000 businesses with $1 billion in capital by the end of the year. How Clearbanc pick those companies: It looks at ad spending, marketing and revenue data, and based on that, invests between $10,000 and $10 million in e-commerce companies. Then, it sends the money, and keeps investing. The only catch: Keep the return on ad spend and other unit economics in the green. Clearbanc takes some percentage of a company’s revenue every month.

The post Retail briefing: Investment-as-a-service piques DTC interest appeared first on Digiday.

Snap signaled to ad buyers at its inaugural Partner Summit last week that it is becoming a more open and more coherent platform. That is a welcome shift because of advertisers’ difficulties in understanding the app and their concerns regarding Snapchat’s audience growth, say agency execs.

The day before Snap’s Partner Summit on April 4, a Snap exec said that the company’s hope is that the event would provide a more cohesive vision of what the company is. And it appears to have worked. After hearing that Snap is introducing an in-app gaming platform and new augmented reality features to Snapchat, agency execs came away from the event feeling like they had a better grasp of how the app differentiates from other social platforms. “Snapchat is really about fun more so than any other platform or competitor. They’ve figured it out,” said Noah King, svp and group director at Socialyse.

“They’re starting to put together the story of who they are more so than before. It’s about the camera and creativity. That has been a narrative that wasn’t for me as solidified before. When we’re talking to clients about platforms, we need that soundbite,” said Meghan Myszkowski, vp and head of social activation for North America at Essence.

That soundbite may help Snap reorient the conversation among advertisers who struggle to understand Snapchat’s product and see past its audience growth challenges. Being able to reframe advertisers’ perceptions is important given Google’s and Facebook’s continued dominance of digital advertising and advertisers’ burgeoning interest in other social platforms like TikTok, Reddit and Pinterest. Additionally, if Snap is able to not only grow its business with existing advertisers but also attract new ones, that would give the company the type of broad advertiser base that has helped Facebook’s and YouTube’s advertising businesses to weather the storms surrounding their products.

Snap’s advertising business has been somewhat mired in advertisers’ struggles to understand the app, given that middle-aged marketing executives are not exactly Snapchat’s audience. “Every brand I work with goes, ‘What is Snapchat?’ They don’t get it because they’re not on it. That’s the biggest hurdle for more brands to get on it,” said one agency exec who asked to remain anonymous.

That lack of understanding has led advertisers to focus on what they do understand about Snapchat, which lately has been that it has struggled to grow its audience. The size of the app’s daily audience has not grown quarter over quarter since the first quarter of 2018. After sequentially shrinking in the second and third quarters last year, Snapchat’s daily audience quarter-over-quarter growth was flat in the fourth quarter, which some agency execs have taken as a sign of stabilization. “Advertisers were worried users are still leaving,” said Myszkowski.

The key now is whether Snap can attract new users. Currently, Snapchat primarily pops up when an advertiser is interested in reaching Snapchat’s core user base of millennials and members of Generation Z. To get broader consideration by advertisers, Snapchat needs to be able to offer advertisers more users, and it is trying to do so.

In addition to the in-app gaming platform and new AR features, Snap is rolling out new ways to expose people outside of Snapchat to its content and ads: an option for people to cross-post their Snapchat Stories to third-party apps and an ad network to run its Snap Ads in third-party apps.

Allowing people to cross-post their Snapchat Stories to apps like Tinder and Houseparty could be a way for Snapchat to bring new or former users into the fold. “It is an opportunity to advertise the platform and have people say, ‘That’s cool content. I want to come back to Snap, or I want to open an account for the first time,” said James Chanter, senior partner at GroupM’s m/SIX.

Similarly, Snap Audience Network could extend Snap’s addressable audience beyond the 186 million people that use Snapchat daily to include less frequent users who may be found in other apps. “Snap does appear on our media plans where relevant and where we want to reach a specific audience. But what Audience Network does is it has a potential to blow that out,” said Chanter.

However, that potential depends on Snap’s answers to two major questions that agency execs have about Snap Audience Network: Will Snap be able to serve ads in third-party apps to non-Snapchat users, and will Snap offer tools for advertisers to control where their ads may appear across the ad network? Snap has yet to answer either question as it is still in the process of signing up apps for the ad network before pitching it to advertisers.

“When I’m talking to clients, across the board they’re concerned about the audience footprint. [Snap Audience Network] allows them to reach more people. But it comes down to where the ads will be running and what brand safety measures are in place,” said Myszkowski.

Whether or not Snap is able to use its cross-posting option and mobile ad network to offer more people for advertisers to reach, it’s also important for Snap to increase usage among existing users, according to King. To that end, the introductions of an in-app gaming platform and new features for its augmented reality Lenses could lead people to spend more time within the app by giving them more reasons to open the app.

“As they start to court more users and as users increase overall adoption, the more marketers who aren’t using the app are going to think they have to be on Snapchat,” said King.

The post Buyers say Snap’s latest announcements may allay audience growth concerns appeared first on Digiday.

Unilever is using artificial intelligence to influence more of its marketing, from processing insights to finding influencers.

The advertiser has 26 data centers across the globe where scientists are using AI to synthesize insights from a range of sources including social listening, CRM and traditional marketing research. Like other advertisers, Unilever hopes the investments fuel a move away from mass reach channels toward more personalized communications that are also cheaper to produce and localize at scale.

Unilever has been using AI and machine learning to sort through structured data within a database for years, but it hasn’t been able to do the same for unstructured data until recently. Unstructured data is qualitative, which makes gleaning insights from content such as text, audio, social media and mobile activity harder. Rather than develop the algorithms needed to do that internally or even partner with one of the larger tech companies, Unilever is working with startups from the U.K., China, the U.S., Israel, Finland and Singapore.

Unilever’s AI ventures analyze information from multiple sources in the content people post and how they react to them. Only information already available in the public domain is used as part of a wider stance that has seen Unilever deploy its pan-European General Data Protection Regulation strategy to markets that have more relaxed data-privacy regulations.

Through AI-powered influencer marketing platform Popular Chips, Unilever has been able to expedite the search process for influencers. The tech helps to detect those influencers with fake followers as well as pairing Unilever up with the right ones based on demographics such as country, age and gender. Unilever found the startup via its accelerator program the Unilever Foundry. 

Having that sort of technology has unearthed insights Unilever’s marketers would have otherwise missed. The most extreme example of this is a range cereal-flavored ice-creams under the Ben & Jerry’s brand. It was inspired after Unilever found that there were around 50 songs that featured lyrics on “ice-cream and breakfast.” The insights came at the same time as the advertiser commissioned research into the ice-cream category, which found businesses like Dunkin Donuts were already serving ice-cream for breakfast. One of the AI algorithms Unilever worked with then sifted through those different data sets and revealed an opportunity for creating sweet treats in the morning.

Two years after the Ben & Jerry’s range launched a range of cereal flavors including Fruit Loot and Frozen Flakes in 2017 and other rivals are now doing the same, said Unilever’s head of insights Stan Sthanunathan, who is the main cheerleader for AI within the business.

“AI is helping us to run metaphor analyses as we’re able to look at all these different signals from unstructured data and start to see how the brain processes information,” said Sthanunathan. “We can start to consider those metaphor analyses when we’re working on brand architecture across the company as well how to look at how we can manage our brands better.”

Beyond market insights, AI is also being used to help recruit executives including marketers. The company partnered with AI firm Pymetrics to build an online hub that uses the technology to assess a candidate’s aptitude, logic, reasoning and appetite for risk against the benchmarks for whatever role they have applied for. The second phase of the process revolves around a video interview from the candidate, whose speech and body language are assessed by the AI. It has cut around 70,000 hours from interviewing and analyzing the candidates, per Unilever.

Despite the growing presence of AIs across Unilever’s marketing, it won’t have a direct impact on the agencies it employs. Critics of AI in media have argued that the speed and accuracy advertisers get when they weave the tech into their marketing is offset by the lack of emotional depth and creativity that comes from human experience. It’s a similar stance to Volkswagen, which has previously used AI to plan its media campaigns.

“If agencies allow themselves to be replaced by AI, then it will,” said Sthanunathan. “If you’re able to use AI to create something new from data that has the curiosity and passion that an algorithm can’t replicate, then there will always be a role for agencies.”

The post How artificial intelligence is influencing Unilever’s marketing appeared first on Digiday.

Eric Ryan still believes that the best way to build a CPG brand that can scale is by working with mass retailers.

On Monday, Ryan, the co-founder of eco-friendly cleaning products brand Method and vitamin brand Olly is announcing the launch of his third company, Welly. Welly will sell bandages, ointments, and other first aid products. Like Olly, Welly will first launch exclusively in Target, and then the plan is to later sell in other channels.

Ryan co-founded Method in 2000 — before the start of the direct-to-consumer boom, and at a time when companies with a sustainability focus were still trying to prove that they were appealing to the mass market. Method was first acquired by Ecover in 2012, and then both companies were sold to SC Johnson in 2017. Olly, founded in 2015, is now profitable and generated more than $100 million in sales last year.

With Welly, Ryan said that he’s trying to rebrand the first aid category as “one that’s more representative of our active lives,” instead of products that have a “hospital, clinical,” design.

So far, Ryan’s companies have mostly resisted the pull of direct-to-consumer selling. Olly only does about 10 percent of its sales online, Welly will only be available at Target (for the time being) and Method doesn’t sell directly online. It’s been intentional how he’s positioned himself as a brand founder: Ryan’s repeat successes have allowed him to build a closer relationship with mass retailers than other aspiring entrepreneurs. Welly’s CEO and other co-founder, for instance, will be Doug Stukenborg, formerly the vice president and merchandise manager of healthcare at Target.

Ryan spoke with Digiday about how what he thinks about the DTC boom, and the benefits of launching with a mass retailer. Answers have been slightly edited for clarity and length.

What has changed the most about the CPG landscape since you launched Method?
What has not changed is that you need to build great brands, great products and strong retail partnerships. We’ve gone through the wave of digitally native brands — everyone’s recognizing that it’s very hard to build a profitable brand online, and there are few categories that really lend itself to doing that. They either need to be a platform, or they need to be vertically integrated, so they can get the margin to offset customer acquisition costs. So now, we’ve evolved into the world of omnichannel — and that’s how the consumer thinks about [shopping] anyways. We’re also seeing brands leverage DTC as a place to establish credibility for a brand and then go sell it in-store. It’s certainly being fueled by a tremendous amount of VC and private equity money.

Did you feel any pressure at all to go direct-to-consumer, or make online a greater part of your sales?
We did think about that in the beginning [with Olly]. In year one, we wanted to get proof of concept at Target. In the end, we decided not to invest heavily in DTC. We’d rather run our water through someone else’s pipes than occur the high customer acquisition costs. We could focus on building our wholesale business, and break even and not have to raise further capital — which we have not — or we would have had to go out and raise a lot of capital to fund a DTC business. 

I don’t believe that down the road, you can’t start building out your DTC business in a bigger way. We’re watching very closely the ability to purchase on Instagram. That could be the game changer, where you no longer have to build a storefront, but you really focus on selling items.

What’s one thing you think DTC companies underestimate or get wrong before working with a major retailer?
A lot of them are tech-backed, and they have founders or teams that don’t have CPG experience. There’s a real skillset and art to being able to work with a mass retailer and to meet their supply chain needs. Especially if you’re with a major national retailer, it is not easy to produce quality product, at high volumes, and be able to delivery flawlessly. 

Tech is a little naive when they go into these spaces, and how they’ve pushed up the valuation, and pushed up the expectations [beyond] what’s past a natural, healthy, growth rate. Honest is a great example — I have yet to see a really big capital raise against a CPG company have a successful exit. It will happen, but right now, we are struggling to get there, and [these companies] start to scale well before they are ready to. They don’t have teams that know how to scale and understand how to work well with mass retailers.

The post Method and Olly co-founder Eric Ryan: ‘It’s very hard to build a profitable brand online’ appeared first on Digiday.