Month: May 2019

“Third-party audiences are going to be a nightmare,” said Pedro Mona, managing director, platforms and engineering at iProspect. “The volumes will decrease significantly. The ability to track their own audiences outside Amazon will go down. Not necessarily on a device level as they will still have their app installed in a number of devices, and there might be a way they can still track users there. But [on web] they will see a reduction, like everyone else. Google is the only winner.”

Amazon doesn’t split out how much of its ads business is conducted on and off its own sites, but it’s reasonable to presume the majority is on site. However, it will no doubt limit off-site plans, according to agency executives.

“It does limit their opportunity to go full-scale programmatic,” said a media agency executive who spoke anonymously because of its relationship with Google.

“If say, 100,000 people have demonstrated an interest in Doc Martens when searching on Amazon, and they then want to find them programatically off Amazon, then you will have a problem,” added Mona.

Over the last two years, Amazon’s ads growth exploded . However, that meteoric growth spurt seems to have been short-lived. In the company’s first-quarter earnings report, Amazon said its ads business growth had slowed to 36%, totalling approximately $2.7 billion. Whereas, in the three previous quarters of 2018 ad revenue was up year-over-year 95%, 123% and 129% respectively.

Much of Amazon’s ads growth has come about as a direct result of advertisers shifting budgets from Google. Amazon is forecast to claim 8.8% of U.S. digital ad spending in 2019, up from 6.8 percent in 2018, while Google is expected to lose 1 point of market share dropping to 37.2%, according to an eMarketer report.

Should a lot of Google users choose to block third-party cookies, several agency executives have predicted that Amazon will start to push more aggressively into the mobile app ecosystem, where third-party cookies aren’t used. Others have stressed that if Amazon’s programmatic ads business is affected badly as a result of Google’s privacy changes, that Amazon will merely find other ways to offset such as working closer with media owners.

“They can build integrated data management solutions for publishers,” said an ad tech executive who spoke anonymously.

Naturally, a lot will hinge on how Google markets the ability to block to users. If it’s a clear reject-all third-party cookies for ad tracking purposes, or accept all, then Amazon could be lumped in with all other ad tech vendors. But if the user choice is buried in multiple layers within the settings — a bit like Google’s GDPR consent options — it’s unlikely to have as big an impact. “Once we start to see the beta version in Chrome people will get an idea of how we can adapt,” said a media agency executive.

Ultimately, while there may be some short-term pain should a large volume of users decide to block third-party cookies, most industry executives spy long-term opportunities.

“There will be massive opportunities for anyone that can extract value from users and find different ways of living in a cookie-less world,” added Mona.

The post ‘Google is the only winner’: Google’s anti-tracking moves could slow Amazon’s ad growth appeared first on Digiday.

In February, The New York Times started testing tightening its paywall so readers couldn’t access paywalled content by switching their device to incognito mode. A New York Times spokesperson said it’s too early to glean the impacts of these tests.

The Washington Post has blocked users from accessing paywalled content using incognito mode, as has The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and The Dallas Morning News. In 2016, The Wall Street Journal experimented with Google to prevent people from accessing paywalled content. Google’s ending of first-click free now means that subscription publishers can still appear in Google search results without offering access.

However, automated tools and browser extensions that block JavaScript that triggers paywalls are emerging, albeit just for the Firefox browser so far, which accounts for just 5% of global browser market share. Installing it requires a little heavy lifting, downloading several extensions via a visit to GitHub.

“You have to be a real hard-core geek to enable any paywall blocker,” said Michael Silberman, svp strategy at paywall tech provider Piano. “For now, it’s a very narrow behavior.”

However, as with ad blocking technologies, more technologies will likely emerge that make bypassing cookie-based metered paywalls more mainstream. In January, the Reuters Digital News Report predicted a growing adoption of “subscription blockers” for metered paywalls. Forcing users to log in for any content is one workaround, but this will reduce fly-by users and the resulting advertising revenue.

“As paywalls are becoming more frequent, we will absolutely see more paywall blockers,” said Robin Govik, chief digital officer at Swedish media group MittMedia. “It’s a truth, at least in military science, that every measure will meet a countermeasure.”

That said, although it’s difficult to measure how many people circumvent meter paywalls, it’s unlikely that paywall blockers will reach the epidemic that ad blockers did. That’s partly because the motivations are different: Frustrations with too many ads and privacy concerns roused an active and vocal community to fight back.

“Fundamentally, I think this is a very different proposition to ad blockers,” said Cecilia Campbell, a consultant for the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. “With advertising, your revenue comes equally from loyal visitors and fly-bys; all clicks are equal. With healthy user relationships in parallel with developing relevant personalized content, users are less likely to block paywalls.”

As such, focusing on this small cohort of people who might always avoid paywalls shouldn’t be as much of a priority for publishers as tactics like driving retention.

“Free riders aren’t that valuable; it’s a low likelihood they will ever pay, so why bother,” said Silberman. “Publishers are trying to find the right balance between restricting access and making it harder for current and prospective subscribers who are considering it. They don’t want to add too much friction and are wary of tactics that get in the way of that.”

Not all publishers are perturbed by the growing possibility of freeloaders. Publishers like News UK’s The Times of London and Sweden’s MittMedia have harder paywalls embedded on their platforms, where readers need to enter details to access any content. These are harder to implement and harder to circumvent, and so less vulnerable to these skirting tactics.

In this case, the issue of user experience and the process of authentication is of more concern than paywall blockers, according to Chris Duncan, managing director at The Times of London.

“I suspect the greater challenge that may face the industry as more people move to subscriptions is how we keep making it easy for subscribers to access the content they have paid for without continually having to provide authentication details.”

The post Incognito no more: Publishers close loopholes as paywall blockers emerge appeared first on Digiday.

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear set an ad sales target of $1 billion in 2018, Bloomberg reported last year. That goal was more than double its current ad sales, per Bloomberg. Twitch declined to comment on its revenue numbers. Jacobs said the company has been investing in international expansion for its sales team, including hiring sales leaders in Paris and in Singapore.

Digiday spoke with Jacobs about Twitch’s ad pitch, its investment in brand safety and its current challenges. The conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.

How would you define the current state of advertising on Twitch?
For me, it all starts with the audience. Millennial and Gen Z find their entertainment on Twitch. We have an incredible audience advantage. When I look at our audience advantage and the fact that we’re live broadcasting video, it unlocks a huge mainstream consumer ad category opportunity, and that’s what the team has really been focused on executing over the last 18 months.

What brands are investing in Twitch?
We’ve had a tremendous amount of success over several years, in particular, working with game publishers and related categories to grow our business and that continues to be a real strength for us. The fastest growing are mainstream consumer categories like apparel, consumer electronics, retail, QSR, CPG, automotive. What our team is focusing on now is how do we lead with video and use video to help us build bigger more sustainable partnerships broadly.

What ad products on Twitch are your clients most interested in?
The largest percentage of our business with marketers is in video advertising, the unskippable 30-second videos. [Those ads reach an audience] that is highly engaged, and we have a low ad density. The combination of that makes us an incredibly attractive complement to a traditional television buy trying to reach 18- to 34-year-olds.

It’s interesting that the product that is the most prominent is what TV buyers are used t0: 30-second video ads.
What we hear from the marketplace is that reaching young audiences is getting more and more expensive and less and less efficient using tried and true traditional vehicles. We offer a solution to that challenge because our audience is growing substantially and we have a perfect complement product. At any given moment of the day, there are a million people livestreaming content on Twitch, any time of the week, any time of day. We have over 15 million daily active viewers, and we have the ability to do audience-based targeting and content-based targeting.

One issue that marketers bring up with Twitch and just livestreaming in general is brand safety. From your perspective, is that a misconception?
First thing I’ll say is that it is top of mind, something we’re extremely focused on and take very seriously and something that as an organization we’ve worked very hard to address head-on and will continue to invest in and take seriously. How we’ve done that number one starts with our terms of service. In order to be an affiliate or partner broadcaster on Twitch, you have to sign the Twitch terms of service which includes our standards of conduct, and that includes a whole array of expectations around creating a brand-safe environment, including no hateful conduct, no hateful speech.

How are those terms enforced?
Part of our terms of service is we have the right and have exercised the right to ban broadcasters or pause broadcaster’s ability to be on Twitch if they violate the terms of service. [Our audience has the] ability to report and we have a highly scaled, active community of human moderators that are looking for areas that might be problematic and reporting them. We also have a very robust AI solution, our auto-mod solution, which moderates things like chat, keywords.

Can marketers personalize brand-safety standards on Twitch?
Broadcasters have the ability to select the degrees of strictness of the standards for their community. Not every game and not every broadcaster is appropriate for every marketer. A tremendous amount of our audience is professionally produced content. For example, we have 85% market share of broadcast viewership outside of China for professional esports that is highly produced, brand-safe content. We also have a very robust non-gaming, premium content strategy where we do content licensing around things like Pokemon and NFL football and other professional sports like NBA G League. We have entertainment content like Doctor Who and Power Rangers and Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross art. So for brands that want to work with us, we have options.

How does Amazon influence your role?
We have separate sales organization and separate goals and in fact we report up into different parts of the Amazon organization, but the Amazon advertising leadership are extraordinarily knowledgeable about the ad market and media, and we do engage with them regularly and seek their advice and seek their partnership in terms of how we can share best practices and grow and make sure we’re communicating with each other. While our go-to-market is technically a separate initiative, we’re very much part of the same family.

Is there one particular hurdle when it comes to getting more marketers on Twitch?
When we sit down with prospects and partners there’s a lot of enthusiasm about Twitch. Our biggest challenge up to now is scaling our coverage and having enough meetings and having enough engagements and making sure all of the people and brands that should be working with Twitch have had the opportunity to engage with us. That’s why we’re spending so much time recruiting talent and scaling our sales coverage.

You said scaling is a hurdle. What about a self-serve ad platform? Is that a product we can expect soon?
We do not currently have plans to release a self-service solution.

The post ‘We have an incredible audience advantage’: Twitch is expanding its sales team as it seeks bigger deals appeared first on Digiday.

Through the first half of 2019, Forbes has produced and distributed more branded content — over 400 pieces of text, video and social content — than it did through the entirety of 2018. Though Forbes had a hand in producing most of the content, it is also using its distribution channels to share content its clients create as part of its research as well.

BrandVoice, the content studio Forbes launched in 2010, has done this by merging with Forbes Insights, its research and analytics arm. Forbes Insights once operated as a separate line of business, helping clients with custom research. But combining the two operations together has led to record growth for BrandVoice, thanks both to brands’ growing content needs and to a unified sales staff that can begin pitching clients on multiple ways of working together sooner.

“We do think about extension quite a bit,” Forbes Media CRO Mark Howard said. “We have a single distribution channel, and either of those products, [Forbes- or brand-created] can flow through.”

Forbes originally created its Insights team to help brands with things like custom research. Over the past couple years, Howard said, Insights clients began asking more for research and help with projects related to content strategy and marketing, which were often good candidates for work created by BrandVoice, Howard said. Bringing the Insights team together with the BrandVoice team allowed both teams to upsell and work together more efficiently.

For example, A program it created for Teradata earlier this month will manifest in print and digital, through Forbes’s social channels and at live Forbes events. It will launch digital “issues” of content using a digital hub product that Forbes recently made available to advertisers. The contents of the campaign were created with assistance from BrandVoice, drawing on proprietary research conducted by Forbes Insights.

Other publishers, such as Atlantic Media and BuzzFeed, have focused on ensuring that different lines of business, including consulting, live events, research and advertising, can be threaded together more tightly to win the biggest possible business with advertisers.

Mergers typically create redundancies (and, later, layoffs), but in this case, joining two groups together simply gave both sales teams more people to pitch more business, and increased the manpower available to its operations team. Forbes plans to add a “double-digit” number of employees to its ranks this year, a Forbes spokesperson said.

For now, Howard said, the team has no plans to act like a full-fledged consultancy. Instead, it wanted to consult and advise them on communications, content and distribution strategies. “We’re not going to go in there and start to change [clients’] organizations,” Howard said. “We’re not going to rebrand as a media marketing consultancy. But the assets are there and the philosophy is there.”

Forbes had a healthy 2018. Profits were up 42 percent, highest in a decade for Forbes, CEO Mike Federle said, while declining to share specific figures. Digital advertising accounted for 49 percent, with events, reprints and insights accounting for 23 percent and licensing accounting for 10 percent.

The post Forbes Media’s content solutions now account for 40% of its direct revenue appeared first on Digiday.

Unilever does not break out how much each of its acquisitions generated last year in sales, but executives have said on previous earnings calls that its acquisitions are “in aggregate” posting double-digit sales growth.

“They’ve been a little more aggressive than some of their peers [in acquiring companies],” said Keith Anderson, svp of strategy and insights at e-commerce analytics company Profitero. “Unilever has done a good job in my view in helping some of their acquired companies — even going back to Ben & Jerry’s [which it acquired in 2000] — and giving them the autonomy and latitude to preserve some of the culture and the operating model that made them successful in the first place.”

Unlike P&G, which is reportedly looking to add more niche direct-to-consumer brands to its roster to tap into the organic appeal that smaller brands have, Unilever isn’t basing its acquisitions around the DTC model. According to a Unilever spokeswoman, the company typically looks for acquisitions in “high-growth segments, areas that build capabilities or presence in new channels and geographical infills.” The spokeswoman also said Unilever is particularly interested in acquiring premium beauty companies as well as brands that will help Unilever build out its e-commerce and digital capabilities.

For Unilever, buying a new brand instead of building it in-house allows the company to enter a new product category and accelerate growth in key geographic regions, faster.

Thirteen of the 25 companies Unilever acquired between 2015 and 2018 have been in the beauty and personal-care space. Six of these brands — Dermalogica, Kate Somerville, Living Proof, Hourglass, Ren, Murad and Garancia — have been grouped by Unilever into a new division, called the Prestige Group, which holds Unilever’s premium beauty brands.

“The brands they acquire are brands that really epitomize some of the biggest trends in beauty and personal care,” Kayla Villena, a beauty analyst for Euromonitor International said, giving Unilever’s acquisition of a majority stake in Italian skin-care brand Equilibra, which touts plant-based ingredients, as an example.

Unilever’s interest in this category stems from existing expertise and a goal to double its e-commerce business. Beauty and personal care is Unilever’s largest segment, accounting for around 40% of revenue, and it plans for e-commerce to represent 10% of sales in the next five years, up from 5% today. CEO Alan Jope — who became CEO in November after previously overseeing the company’s beauty and personal-care division — has said that its premium beauty and personal-care brands is one of the areas where it sees the most promise in selling directly online to the consumer.

“My own view is that, with the technology that’s available right now, direct to consumer really makes sense when either you can have a recurring revenue from the subscription model, a la Dollar Shave Club, or you can you have a very high [single] basket with good margins, such as with our Prestige business,” Jope said in January during the company’s Q4 earnings call. “Selling one bar of Dove soap direct-to-consumer online — that’s not an attractive outlook for the future,” Jope added.

Another one of Jope’s priorities as CEO has been to build out a more robust data-analysis operation, and conduct more “content driven, highly targeted, data-led” marketing campaigns. Before becoming CEO, Jope built out a new digital center in Manhattan that handled online communications and data analysis for some of Unilever’s brands.

Acquiring brands, instead of just building new ones themselves, gives Unilever access to a new set of customer data. It also gives Unilever the chance to import talent from smaller companies that are more used to quickly building new products and iterating based on customer feedback.

During a December presentation to investors and analysts in India, Jope cited Schmidt’s Naturals — an Oregon-based natural personal-care products brand that Unilever acquired in 2017 — as an example of a brand that has done a good job of iterating based on customer feedback.

“Schmidt’s has been built entirely using data-driven marketing, hardly any conventional above-the-line spend. And that learning has been used to scale our mass consumer brands,” Jope said at the time. Last quarter, Unilever said that Schmidt’s Naturals was one of its fastest-growing brands in North America.

Unilever CFO Graeme Pitkethly also told investors earlier this year that “we tend to buy businesses that have got an established base in North America, where we have the opportunity to take that and scale that internationally.” Though 16% of Unilever’s business comes from the United States, another 60% comes from emerging markets. So Unilever is seeking out brands that are willing to expand internationally.

Olly CEO Eric Ryan said that that’s one of the reasons why the vitamin and wellness brand decided to sell to Unilever. While Olly did $100 million in sales last year and was profitable, Ryan said that he felt that he couldn’t expand internationally at the rate he wanted to without being able to use a company like Unilever’s scale. And he was worried that VC-backed competitors might get there before him.

“I didn’t want to show up in China in a few years and see five Olly [competitors] on the market,” Ryan said.

The post Unilever looks to acquire more premium beauty brands as it seeks to grow online business appeared first on Digiday.