Month: August 2019

Why did you go freelance?
I realized I could be doing the same things I was doing for agencies for myself. Also, as a woman, I got sexually harassed a lot at a few agencies. I couldn’t do anything about it. I knew I couldn’t go to HR to talk about it, especially when I wasn’t a creative director yet. I just didn’t want to deal with [office] politics. I decided to be freelance so I don’t have to put up with an environment. I come in as a hired gun and I leave. I also get to work on a lot of different projects and get experience across the board. Usually, at an agency, you work on [a set number] of brands. I like being able to work on different projects throughout the year. It keeps my skills strong. Being freelance, I get to see how good agencies function and how bad agencies function.

Why did you feel like you weren’t able to address harassment issues? 
It opens up a can of worms. Everybody knows who those people are at different agencies. There’s a culture that allows it. You feel like a whistleblower or that you’re going to get a lot of attention and get a lot of people in trouble. It’s just easier to leave and start in a fresh place because if I did report it and it would open up a can of worms, then I wouldn’t be able to do my job. I’d have to deal with it, and I’d have to leave anyway.

Is freelancing more lucrative than being at an agency?
If you treat freelancing like a business and the economy is good, it can be very lucrative. Granted, you’re going to work sweatshop hours because ad agencies believe that they own you. Once you’re there, you can’t go home until the work is done. For me, my time is more valuable. I like to be able to have more free time to work on my own projects and do other things without being stuck at an agency. Whenever I’m at an agency, I can’t even maintain my health. I can’t go home at 5 p.m. There are very few agencies that allow you to do that.

Are freelancers paid late? With the rise of extended payment windows from clients to agencies, does that impact when you’re paid?
Yes, sometimes it does. I was at an agency last year that waited 60 days. That’s a long time for a person and it’s unacceptable. Being a freelancer, there’s a lot of things you pay out of pocket for. I pay for my own tools, insurance, software, obviously my own computer. There’s a lot of overhead that goes into being a freelancer. You’re paying for your own equipment and your own healthcare. We don’t have vacations, and we don’t have sick days; that’s not covered. If I’m sick and I can’t work, that comes out of my own pocket.

With more project work versus agency-of-record work, there seems to be more reliance on freelancers. Has that changed the dynamic?
A lot of businesses still rely on freelancers to do the work. If they’ve won new business and they have to execute the work quickly or if they have too much work, they bring in freelancers. I think a lot of agencies are run by freelancers, and that’s the secret that nobody talks about. There are also a few agencies I know of that have won Cannes Lions with work done by freelancers. That’s a dirty little secret that no one talks about as well. Sometimes it’s not the full-time employees who are doing award-winning work, but it’s the hired guns.

The post ‘It can be very lucrative’: Confessions of a freelance creative director appeared first on Digiday.

Porsche is the first advertiser to test whether gamers will opt for a branded choose-your-own-adventure over one of their favorite streamers. Porsche wanted to promote its first electrical racing car to a younger audience of 18- to 34-year-olds but wanted to do so in a way that wasn’t reliant on traditional TV and radio buys, said Adam Harris, director of custom solutions in Europe for Twitch.

There’s a lot of crossover between racing and gaming, which is why several car advertisers have stepped up efforts to target gamers, with some like Kia focusing on sponsoring esports events while others like Porsche coveting the more than 15 million active users Twitch claims watch its streams daily.

Porsche’s first game on Twitch, launched yesterday, Aug. 28, has been produced like a virtual-reality experience. Viewers who played it directed two drivers around a real Porsche facility over four hours. At certain points during the livestream, viewers were able to vote on how each of the drivers tackled a series of puzzles like a giant escape room. Once the challenges were completed, the advertiser’s new Porsche Formula E race car was revealed.

It wasn’t too dissimilar to the Bandersnatch interactive movie on Netflix, said Harris.

Viewers, for the most part, seemed to like the approach. There were around 28,000 views of the Porsche-branded game at any given second during the live broadcast, while the total number of views since the broadcast began hit 2 million, according to Twitch. Harris wouldn’t share figures on how many people interacted with the game. Typically, concurrent views for Twitch’s most popular streamer Ninja hovered around the 40,000 in the weeks leading up to his move to rival gaming video site Mixer.

“Bandersnatch made people realize that the choose-your-own-adventure-game has legs,” said Harris. The campaign for Porsche paves the way for Twitch’s in-house creative team to create so-called “real-life games,” where viewers control the campaign, said Harris, who serves as the video site’s creative director in the region. “We’re looking to creative narratives and stories that can last the course of a stream where we can actually allow viewers to control the content they’re watching,” said Harris.

However, advertisers could take some convincing before they invest due to certain challenges. For instance, advertisers need to cede control over to audiences for them to work, which could lead to campaigns being hijacked by Twitch viewers who can be quite antagonistic toward brands at times. Plus, branded games can cost more than your typical ad campaign on Twitch, which can range from $2 to $10 per CPM, said one agency executive who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern of damaging commercial deals with the site.

On brand safety, Harris said Twitch would only use partnered streamers to develop potential branded games to ensure brands were kept away from inappropriate content. Moves are also being made to explore how the interactive overlays that sit over the branded games can be easily adapted for different game ideas, and therefore cheaper for advertisers.

If advertisers are able to fork over the money to appear in an interactive game on Twitch, then the money is likely to come from TV budgets, said Charlie Riggall, account director at Universal McCann London. “As brands change the way they plan media campaigns, they’re no longer thinking about the audiovisual component of that as ITV and then the ITV player catch-up service,” said Riggall. “They’re thinking about platforms like Twitch and YouTube as part of that approach now to make sure that overall video reach is good.”

Twitch has been working toward interactive branded games for some time. In 2014, it launched Twitch Plays Pokemon as a crowdsourced attempt to play the popular game. Four years later, it worked with Warner Bros. on a game that let viewers control a version of video game character Lara Croft through a series of different puzzles in a group chat feature.

Image courtesy of Porsche. 

The post ‘Like a live version of Netflix’s Bandersnatch’: Twitch pitches branded games appeared first on Digiday.

Both the price and contents of the Sports Gold product vary. The NBC Sports Gold pass for the 2019 Rugby World Cup, for example, costs $199.99, while NBC Sports Gold for pro motocross, which runs til May 2020, costs $9.99. And while some consist mostly of exclusive access to matches or competitions, others include ancillary or shoulder content repurposed from television: In addition to pre- and post-game coverage, a Sports Gold for Philadelphia sports fans offers player profiles and documentaries about retired players, including former Phillies Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins.

While NBC Sports is not the only company gathering up niche sports rights for direct-to-consumer offerings – FloSports, for example, offers customers streams of everything from Professional Bull Riding to women’s college soccer – the vertical strategy stands out in a world where large media companies are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into expansive streaming video subscription products.

“It’s by no means one-size-fits-all,” said Portia Archer, vp of direct to consumer services at NBC Sports Group. “We really do take it sport by sport, property by property.”

By NBCU’s standards, many of the customer bases for some Sports Gold products are small. For example, the most-watched Pro Lacrosse League match in 14 years averaged 412,000 viewers across NBC’s linear and digital channels.

Archer declined to share specifics on how many subscribers the Sports Gold products have accumulated, saying only that she was pleased with the progress and that the subscriber growth had “exceeded expectations” internally.

NBC Sports can often stand up Sports Gold offerings without significant added costs. While a major North American sport like the NFL or the NBA would command an enormous media rights fee, the streaming rights to many smaller leagues are available for much less. Increasingly, these rights are even available on a profit-sharing basis, said Steve Smith, a managing partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner and co-leader of the firm’s sports and entertainment practice.

“The rights fee model is less prevalent,” Smith said of streaming rights for smaller leagues. “You’re going to see more, ‘You get X percent of the revenue for each person who signs up.’”

The content is often easy to produce as well, thanks to investments made by rights owners. Rather than having to dispatch large production teams to far-flung locales, nearly every single Sports Gold product NBC Sports produces uses a feed of video content provided directly by the leagues or rights owners. “Everybody is trying to stand up their own network or DTC [product],” Archer said.“You see those production values going up.”

That leaves marketing, which NBC Sports is happy to do across every channel it has, including linear television, digital, social and email. And just as Disney went across its stable to promote ESPN+, NBC is not above using bigger NBCUniversal brands to promote Sports Gold products. At the beginning of the year, for example, a Today show segment about Alysia Liu, a 13-year-old figure skating champion, also plugged a Sports Gold product focused on figure skating. A recent spurt of promotion that aired during TK focused on the Sports Gold product for rugby, rather than the linear broadcast.

NBC Sports also works directly with the leagues and rights owners on marketing outreach and strategy, not just on messaging and audience profiles but sometimes in directly communicating with league fans.

Moving forward, the rising familiarity with the DTC model and sinking production and distribution costs might make it attractive for some leagues to go it alone. But those competitors can’t match NBC’s promotional muscle, a consideration that may trump more revenue per customer for some smaller leagues. “If you’re asking why would you go to an NBC [versus going direct], the answer is because it’s NBC’s NBC,” Smith said.

The post With Pub Pass, NBC Sports tries B2B bundles for specialty sports programming appeared first on Digiday.

What is it used for?
Using device fingerprinting to identify and track someone online is similar to recognizing someone in a police lineup. A witness may remember certain characteristics of a suspect — like how tall they were, their hair color and length, whether they were male or female, etc. — and if someone in the lineup shares those characteristics, the witness may assume that person is the suspect. They may be right, but they’re effectively making an informed guess about the person’s identity based on this patchwork of information.

Device fingerprinting can, in some ways, be a more reliable way of identifying and tracking devices online. The practice emerged within the online advertising industry as an alternative to the cookie for environments like mobile apps where companies cannot place cookies to definitively track individual devices. And since people can delete cookies from their browsers but are less likely to change operating systems or reset their IP addresses, device fingerprinting can provide a more consistent way of tracking people around the web.

Device fingerprinting seems shady. Is there any way for someone to not let companies use device fingerprinting to track them online?
Not really. People can use virtual private networks to disguise their IP addresses, but for the most part, device fingerprinting is hard for individuals to prevent. That’s because the information used for device fingerprinting is basic information that’s passed anytime a website loads in a browser in order to make sure the site loads properly, such as by recognizing that a person is using a browser that doesn’t support a particular feature or is set to view content in a particular language.

Can’t web browsers do anything to prevent device fingerprinting?
Yes, and they are. Over the past year, Apple, Google and Mozilla have announced that they will be limiting device fingerprinting within their respective browsers. They are taking different approaches to this. Apple obscures the data that is collected and combined for fingerprinting in an effort to make it harder for companies to use that information to identify a device while still passing enough of the data for sites to load properly. Mozilla relies on a third-party list that names specific companies that perform fingerprinting and blocks those companies from accessing the information used for fingerprinting. And Google has proposed, but not implemented, a “privacy budget” to put a cap on how much of the information used for device fingerprinting a given company can access at a time.

Do a lot of ad tech companies use device fingerprinting to track people?
It’s unclear, even among ad tech companies. Digiday asked seven ad tech companies — BounceX, Dataxu, Index Exchange, LiveRamp, Lotame, Sovrn and Tapad — if they use device fingerprinting, and all seven said that they do not because of the difficulty in providing people with an option to opt out of this kind of tracking.

“I don’t see a wide utilization of fingerprinting,” said Mark Connon, COO of Tapad, an ad tech company that specializes in cross-device advertising.

However, while those companies don’t use device fingerprinting, others might. Ad exchanges have asked Dataxu CTO Bill Simmons whether the automated ad-buying firm uses device fingerprinting, and when he replies that Dataxu does not, “people are surprised we don’t,” said Simmons, who has taken the exchanges’ response as indication that many ad tech companies may use fingerprinting.

A clearer indication of which companies use fingerprinting can be found in the list of companies that Mozilla uses to block fingerprinting. That list includes ad verification firm DoubleVerify and demand-side platform MediaMath. MediaMath declined to comment on its use of fingerprinting, and DoubleVerify did not respond to a request for comment. However, it’s possible that neither company uses fingerprinting to track people for ad targeting purposes.

Is this just for ad targeting?
Not at all. Bank websites, for instance, can use the same information to check whether a person trying to log into a given account is the person who owns that account based on whether they are using a device or browser that has been previously used to log in, said Lotame CMO Adam Solomon. It can also be used for measuring ads across multiple devices. Companies often use IP addresses to associate multiple devices that connect to the same wifi network within a single household. This association helps them to recognize how many times a given brand’s ads were shown across those devices so that they can manage the frequency with which people are bombarded with the brand’s ads.

The post WTF is device fingerprinting? appeared first on Digiday.