Month: June 2019

Several years into the struggle for better brand safety, there is widespread dissatisfaction fueled by countless incidents and violations. In fact, our survey of over 300 Digiday audience members, made up of brands, agencies and publishers, shows that blunt brand safety tools are stifling reach and content for both the demand and supply side.

Advertiser dissatisfaction with brand safety solutions
Advertisers are increasingly putting pressure on the industry, from platforms to publishers, to ensure that safe environments are a priority. That has been a catalyst for the creation of an entire catalogue of solutions, tools and technologies marketed toward the cautious.

With 85 percent of advertisers currently using brand safety technology or tools for more than a year, it’s vital that that investment is effective. But the study shows that 61 percent of advertisers are very concerned that today’s tools are insufficient to deal with the problem of brand safety.

“It’s entirely unsurprising that so many brands are concerned that brand safety tools are insufficient,” says Sacha Wilson, a partner at law firm Harbottle & Lewis with expertise in advertising, technology, digital and data privacy. “In practice, a brand could have the most robust risk allocation clauses in its contracts with agencies and vendors, but once a reputational issue has arisen, contractual remedies after the fact are unlikely to provide much comfort for a brand.”

The discomfort goes beyond damaged brand reputation for many advertisers. Our research shows that it’s limiting reach and could lead to brands switching off controls. Ninety-five percent of brands agree that brand safety blacklists or whitelists have a tendency to limit reach and 92 percent would forgo the use of brand safety tools if they were not achieving adequate reach for their campaign.

Ryan Kangisser, digital partner at media advisor MediaSense, says clients have mentioned a lack of (or diminished) reach when using brand safety measures but that it “has become an inevitable and acceptable trade-off to mitigate risk”.

Who’s responsible for brand safety?
“We’ve become very good at finger pointing and not so good at taking responsibility,” says Leena Vara-Patel, operations and ad tech director at agenda21. And while Vara-Patel does think publishers should play a more active role in policing brand safety, she says “it’s not solely their responsibility”.

Ninety-three percent of advertisers agree that publishers should play a more active role in policing brand safety and 68 percent of believe publishers should offer increased transparency into where placements appear to help address safety issues.

It’s not just an issue of responsibility, particularly as publishers also show concern over blunt brand safety solutions. The research shows that 84 percent believe first generation brand safety solutions are over-blocking safe content on sites, which has serious consequences for publishers around monetization and editorial content strategies.

“Those who own premium content and safe environments have the biggest chance to answer tomorrow’s concerns,” according to Stephane Coruble, CEO at RTL AdConnect. “When talking with brand owners, we observe that something clicks into place when we show them that there are publishers who offer the chance to advertise within curated content in a brandsafe environment,” he adds. “Advertisers need an alternative to digital giants, they need transparency and quality.”

What’s next for brand safety?
The study reveals a call for the adoption of technology that allows advertisers customize their brand-safety controls and ensure they accurately block what’s bad for their brand, without overblocking and losing scale. Another important step being demanded by the industry is that publishers should take on a more proactive role in policing brand safety from their end.

The next steps for brand safety lie in customization for advertisers and new and more sophisticated solutions and empowering publishers; if these two components become a priority there could be real progress in solving brand safety.

The full report, Why advertisers turn off brand safety controls, can be downloaded via this link.

The post Why advertisers turn off brand safety controls appeared first on Digiday.

“First-party data is really important to us as we own our direct-to-consumer brands, but equally we’re looking to own more services,” said Noah.

Dubbed “Beauty Tech Lab,” the bespoke agency team will consist of a core group of executives from Essence and marketers from L’Oréal that will grow depending on the brief. If L’Oréal commissions an e-commerce-focused brief, for example, then experts from Wunderman will join the “Beauty Tech Lab” for the duration of the project. Sometimes those agency execs will sit with the team at L’Oréal’s offices, and vice-versa. The speed at which those teams assemble and respond to briefs is also being sped up to match the way technology companies work in sprint cycles. A project that could take a year to do like setting up an internal trading team, could be done in four months for example.

There are 50 shades of the hybrid in-housing approach, but L’Oréal is likely to lean toward new ways of working with Essence versus trying to replace them. As much as the cost of replacing an agency is always a consideration for advertisers looking to do more marketing internally, it isn’t the be-all and end-all. Instead, L’Oréal has effectively brokered a custom agency model at a time when other high-profile advertisers like Ford and Burger King have questioned their future. For L’Oréal, the model works, at least for now, due to the size of its own internal media team. There are between five and 10 in-house media specialists who plan and buy campaigns across the U.K. and Ireland, said Noah.

“For us, in-housing shouldn’t be seen as a threat to the agency,” she said. “What we’re building with our agency is about us upskilling for the future so that we can be a better client.”

A more fluid way of working with an agency requires a different way of paying for their services.

Beyond performance KPIs, Noah said payments have been defined around a “scope of work.” Essentially, this acts as a safeguard against the agency not having the resources needed to hit the agreed goals covered by the remuneration model. It’s a step closer to the outcomes-based model advertisers like Barclays have sought, to replace traditional commission-based remuneration models.

“We have a purchasing team who were involved throughout the review but it was more on the process side, said Noah. “It was a purchasing-led, financial review. It was about strategy, innovation and technology.”

The challenge with this sort of approach, however, is L’Oréal must lock in deliverables early on, which isn’t easy when it’s hard to nail down exactly what is needed. The advertiser, which has an internal media team, did ask agencies on the pitch for suggestions on how to in-house, after all. Most advertisers rely too heavily on their media agencies for media strategy, media planning and media buying, and don’t have the ammunition to challenge any proposals coming their way, said Philippe Dominois, founder at media performance consultancy Abintus Consulting. Without that knowledge, it’s hard to get the best from the agency, which is what L’Oréal has tried to reverse.

“Agencies still have a valuable role to play in terms of consultancy, expertise and strategic direction,” said Noah.

It goes to show why some advertisers like Vodafone have struggled to take specialist areas like programmatic in-house, beyond owning the contract to an ad tech vendor. Even when advertisers take specific marketing functions in-house, they often still rely on their agencies to assist in those areas — as evidenced in Digiday Research.

L’Oréal plans to slowly build its programmatic knowledge in the U.K. and Ireland. Last year, it hired two programmatic experts, according to job posts on LinkedIn, so that it could set up and run some of its own campaigns, which are bought through Google’s ad tech stack. “We won’t share numbers but the size of the media team has developed over the last two years to the point where there’s more digital and technical expertise that we’ve brought in,” said Noah.

The post ‘Upskill, not in-house’: Inside L’Oréal’s new media agency model appeared first on Digiday.

Here’s a myth buster:

Myth 1: Bid shading is new
Bid shading is not a new technique, but one that has been repackaged to suit demand-side platforms, according to ad tech sources. In fact, the technique of using historical data to calculate a bid that’s a little higher than second-price, has been around for the best part of a decade — just called something different, like bid modifying in second-price auctions.

Supply-side platforms used the technique, which then faded and resurfaced with a fresh face during the rise of first-price auctions. The DSPs that then spied a new revenue opportunity: they could use what they claimed was a clever new technique to help buyers transition from a second to first-price world, for a fee. These algorithms already existed within DSPs,” said Matthew McIyntre, head of programmatic for EMEA at Essence. “The [bid] optimizers were already there in a second-price world, because DSPs had to operate a hybrid of second and first-price for the last 18 months.”

Granted, they may have updated versions, but the fact is an extra cost is now being applied for something that was already being delivered. “Now DSPs are telling you they will charge you, in order to save you [money on your bids],” added McIyntre.

Myth 2: Bid shading will ruin publisher yields
While publishers eyed the potential yield lifts anticipated from the shift to first-price auctions with glee, they were less keen on bid shading. Understandable, given bid shading was pitched by vendors as a way to help ad buyers stomach the sudden surge in the amount they had to bid, after years of enjoying being able to bid somewhat lazily in a second-price world. Bid shading offered them an in-between. The DSP would determine what the value of that bid should be. Publishers long accustomed to a world in which they had ceded power to SSPs, have been wary of an intermediary making the calls on the value of inventory. Many believe bid shading to be yet another a black-box algorithm that could severely damage their yields. In reality, given the tech has been around and integrated into DSPs longer than they let on, there is unlikely to be any sudden major impact on yields, advertising sources say.

Myth 3: Publishers can control use of bid shading
Some of the larger publishers have begun to veto bid shading in their SSP contracts. But given bid shading has shifted from being an SSP to a DSP technique, publishers can’t guarantee that it won’t be used regardless of what their contracts stipulate. SSPs will abide by it, but they have no control over what the DSP chooses to do — only the advertising client does, in theory. Cases currently exist in which clients have requested first-price auctions to be operated, with no bid shading, but DSPs continue to run it anyway — claiming they know better, according to ad exec sources.

“Bid shading is another term for modified second-price bidding. The SSPs started it, but DSPs have turned it into an art form,” said Dan Wilson, CEO of London Media Exchange. “Bid shading is morally wrong. It is dressed up as something else. It’s been happening for a decade under different terms, and will rumble on for years in different guises and iterations.”

Myth 5: Bid shading is good for buyers
When bid shading popped up as the newfangled ad tech term a year or so ago, it was cleverly positioned as a way to help buyers navigate from a second to a first-price environment. The theory was that buyers wouldn’t have to shell out for the full amount they would bidding in a first-price auction, but they’d have to pay much more than they would in a second-price. But given bid shading was already being used to operate hybrid first and second-price environments, ad buyers no longer believe it was necessary given it was already happening.

Some DSPs will charge a percentage of what they say they save buyers from bidding in first-price auctions without bid shading. “It is impacting how we evaluate DSPs as we have to factor in the additional costs,” said McIyntre. “It will impact who we partner with.”

Previously, ad tech vendors have looked to charge fees in new areas in order to recoup losses in others often caused by an increase in technical infrastructure costs. If that’s the case here, agencies don’t appreciate how it is translated. “It is not being presented that way to buyers,” added McIyntre. “It feels disingenuous to say this is a brand new way of doing things.”

The post Myth buster: Bid shading in first-price auctions is not all it appears appeared first on Digiday.

“It’s very hard to understand who you’re reaching,” said Bret Kinsella, the editor of Voicebot, a publication focused on the voice space that also publishes a flash briefing as well as a standalone Alexa skill. “We need to be able to understand repeat usage. We also need age and gender.”

“And there doesn’t seem to be any movement to provide it,” Kinsella added.

Ever since Amazon featured an Echo in a 2016 Super Bowl commercial, publishers, sensing a chance to get in early on an emerging platform, built small teams to figure out how to connect and engage Alexa users with briefings and skills.

Publishers found a growing audience — an estimated 66 million smart speakers have been installed in U.S. households, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, most of them Amazon devices – but limited data and limited functionality.

The latter has begun to expand a bit. In late April, Amazon broadened flash briefings by launching a long-form news experience, which allows users to consume longer streams of audio and video content from publishers including CNN, Bloomberg and Fox News. In early June, Amazon also announced the launch of a new product, called Alexa Conversations, designed to allow users to hop between Alexa skills more seamlessly, opening up the possibility that publisher skills could be used alongside other developers’ skills in Alexa.

Those changes, particularly Conversations, could set the stage for new user behaviors, which could change the way publishers’ content is used, said Kelly Franznick, the co-founder of user experience consultancy Blink.

But that expansion did not deliver more data for publishers providing flash briefings, and instead, some publishers have honed in on what they can measure. For example, releasing flash briefings more frequently allowed one publisher to figure out when people were listening to them. “We have a pretty good sense of when people are listening or not,” said a source at one publisher that releases a flash briefing daily.

That extra information helps with programming and distribution strategy, but not with ad sales. Though advertising hasn’t yet arrived on Alexa, publishers are allowed to sell sponsorships to their flash briefings. But the sponsorships are typically sold or included as part of larger advertising packages, rather than as standalone investments, a dynamic that is unlikely to change until more data arrives, said Giles Martin, evp of client strategy and media operations at the media agency Oxford Road.

Ultimately, many publishers expect that they should get used to doing more with less. “I’d love to know exactly who is listening,” said that first source. “I also get that it is 2019 and user data, in particular, is a touchy issue for a lot of these companies, and we’re sympathetic to that.”

The post ‘I’d love to know exactly who is listening’: Limited analytics slow evolution of Alexa’s flash briefings appeared first on Digiday.

But for some of the more seasoned Cannes veterans, memories of their previous drunken debacles and hangover guilt are enough to justify their swapping the rosé and bad dancing at 3 a.m. for the fruit smoothies, early wake-ups and genuine productivity. An increasing number of execs, tired of enduring the fumes of alcohol dispelled from their own pores during meetings, are taking on Cannes sober.

Early bike rides
If you want a shot at meeting a global CEO, you won’t find them in the gutter bar. You’re far more likely to encounter them on one of the numerous organized bike rides. Usually there are several early-morning 20-kilometer cycle rides and a couple of half-day cycles along the coast. You need to get on the right lists, but once you do, they’re a must-have. “The conversations are very relaxed, and usually a lot about cycling,” says Andrew Buckman, COO of Sublime. “It’s a nice sedate pace so people can chat. But we’ll always get to talking shop and they will always make introductions to the people who can take it further with me. These introductory meetings [with global CEOs] happen like this, with a swim, a jog or a cycle ride in Cannes. Contracts are then signed in Dmexco.”

Find new ice breakers
Nothing quite breaks the ice like sharing a bottle (or three) over lunch or dinner on the beach. It can lubricate awkward conversations, even if in hindsight, it acts more as a much-regretted truth serum. But there are other, perhaps even more effective, ways to gel with people in Cannes. One tip: If the only time you can squeeze someone into your packed schedule is during your 7 a.m. swim — offer for them to join you. This is becoming a common go-to method, particularly for very senior executives.

Morning Carlton Terrace tips
By day the Carlton Hotel’s terrace is an elegant sun trap where visitors can quickly spy celebrities and CEOs enjoying a ferociously overpriced breakfast. For early birds there are gains to be had, according to Rob Schwartz, CEO of TBWA. “If you get there early enough you’ll be able to snag a good table on the patio out of the sun, and get a great view of the industry’s movers and shakers plotting their world domination,” he says. “You’ll also have your pick of the best smoked salmon as it goes quickly from the buffet.”

Evening Carlton Terrace tips
By night the hotel descends into a heaving, sweaty pit of drunken ad execs happily and noisily jabbering at each other. But being sober makes for an effective people filter. “Scan the terrace to find your soulmates: the pregnant women, Narcotics or Alcoholics Anonymous members, people from California,” says Austin. “I can negotiate my way around the Carlton Terrace better because I don’t get stuck in conversations — it’s a lot easier to extricate yourself from a drunken conversation when you’re the sober one in the group.” Mastering the Irish goodbye is a must. You won’t regret it, and no one will remember you did it.

Admire the view at sunrise
The view of the bay at sunrise is stunning, and more so when soberly appreciated. “A morning walk towards the south allows you to experience the bay as a sheet of glass, magnificent light and a gorgeous purview of all of boats and yachts,” says Schwartz.

Stock up on fresh, local fruit and vegetables
With so much happening along the Croisette itself, it’s easy to forget there’s a dizzying array of beautiful, quieter cobbled streets running parallel to it. For the more adventurous, there’s a very nice farmer’s market selling fresh fruit and veggies a couple of blocks behind the Carlton.

The post Digiday’s Sober Guide to Cannes appeared first on Digiday.