Month: September 2019

The panels happened, the big names spoke, and there was some mild interest in a charming presentation by Burger King’s Fernando Machado and in Gary Vee doubling down on his “don’t get paid to do what your love” creed. But overall, by far the most interesting news was coming from outside Advertising Week’s movie theatre venue on NYC’s Upper West Side. It made for a pretty weird four days, said attendees, who felt that what was happening on stage wasn’t really reflective of the world outside. It’s hard to take marketing case studies, Shingy, and Gary Vee particularly seriously amidst impeachment proceedings and inconvenient reminders that we’re destroying the planet, perhaps.

Still, you made it. As Advertising Week kicks off its fourth and final day (thank goodness it doesn’t actually go for the whole week), below are some highlights from the week that was, as well as our awards for the best and worst of what we saw.

Frenemies no more
Wait, what’s happened to Martin Sorrell? The former WPP CEO and now S4 Capital head seems to have made quite an about-turn on Google and Facebook. Sorrell, who famously called the duopoly “frenemies” of the agency and advertising industry, said in a panel with new GM CMO Deborah Wahl that the big companies, including Facebook, Google and also Amazon, aren’t competitive threats to agencies. He said his view on this has changed since he left WPP, and claimed that Google or Amazon don’t want to do the “agency job.” He also said that the key is to work with the platforms, as his company has done. It’s an interesting turnaround: Increasingly, the narrative in the industry seems to be that the best way for ad agencies to make themselves indispensable is to act as experts that can help client navigate the platforms, especially Amazon. More partners, less enemy. — Shareen Pathak

Target + Disney
Target’s Roundel is now working with Disney Ad Sales with a new offering that will give brands who advertising on Disney TV channels data around how Target shoppers are buying. So for example, brands who are advertising on ESPN will then be able to see if their products were sold in a Target. Roundel, which has made a huge splash at Advertising Week with a giant sponsorship of the Speakers Lounge, made the announcement Wednesday. It’s an interesting attempt at trying to solve for the dreaded attribution problem, but of course, is pretty narrow in its scope. The interesting thing to watch for will be if more stores and media sellers start working together to close the loop. — Shareen Pathak

The Advertising Week Awards
Best giveaway: Complimentary massages by Liverail

Best non-committal answer on a panel: “DTC is a mindset.”

Best pivot: Panera is now a purpose company.

Most lofty brand goal: Bumble, with a stated goal of “ending misogyny.”

Most common complaint: The popcorn smell

Best/worst overheard pickup line: Crazy news about Comscore, huh?

Gold for attending most panels: OMD chief transformation officer Ben Winkler.

Most out-of-touch topical reference repeatedly invoked by attendees: Greta Thunberg. In one two-hour stretch, three different executives — from the experiential, VC and mobile loyalty software worlds — referenced the Swedish activist in regard to their own advertising or branding prowess.

Coming Up
9.15 a.m. Gwyneth Paltrow joins Harry Kargman for a fireside chat about breaking through the clutter.

10 a.m. GM CMO Ivan Pollard and Karmarama exec chairman Jon Wilkins on the Agency of the Future.

10.45 a.m.  WWE superstars Becky Lynch and Kogi Kingston on the Culture Builders stage.

11.45 a.m. PJ Tucker of the Houston Rockets and Will Welch, EIC of GQ on the Culture Builders stage

1.30 p.m. Politics as Pop Culture with a host of panelists from Fox News

3.15 p.m. Time’s Up discusses the gender pay gap

The post Advertising Week Briefing: The age of dissonance appeared first on Digiday.

Unilever started creating this kind of transparent audit trail 18 months ago. To date, blockchain has only been used on small, one-off campaigns for brands in certain markets with a small group of media owners, platforms and ad tech vendors. IBM and GroupM are working with the advertiser to scale the technology.

The blockchain technology used on those Unilever campaigns acts like an old-school accountant book where every transaction, from the initial investment to the publisher, is registered on a decentralized ledger. The transparency that comes with this decentralized ledger guarantees that all parties including Unilever see any differences between what media was bought, what media was billed and what media was planned, which should leave no extra room for hidden costs. It’s an important level of visibility: One-third of ad spend in the U.S. on programmatic display ads in 2019 will go to ad tech intermediaries and other programmatic partners, rather than publishers, according to eMarketer.

“It’s still early days and we know it’s not going to be simple to implement blockchain technology, but we’re still positive about blockchain’s potential to minimize the costs involved in the financial reconciliation process,” said di Como. “Trust and transparency of the supply chain is critical and having one single source of truth is key to everything.”

Results from some of the early tests have saved an estimated 2% to 3% on ad spend. The company’s goal is to save 15 to 20 pennies on the dollar from its blockchain investments within the next five years, Venture Beat reported. The global online ad market is worth $333 billion this year, per eMarketer. So savings of the amount Unilever forecasts would equate to around $65 billion this year.

Unearthing those savings are the low-hanging fruit when it comes to how Unilever uses blockchain, said di Como given the technology could also be used to bolster the verification, measurement and attribution of its media investments as well as help consolidate spend through fewer intermediaries.

The reconciliation di Como refers to is the process advertisers use to ensure that the media they pay for is what is actually bought. In the past, this process of ad reconciliation has been difficult for advertisers like Unilever due to the number of businesses positioned between it and the publisher. But there are other ways to secure financial reconciliation on ad buys, most of which are predicated on how much data can be pulled from the buying, ad serving and verification partners used to purchase ads. With the current convoluted supply chain, financial transparency into campaigns really requires direct buys with publishers or platforms. Even having a small, solid list of vetted and preferred vendors can still result in fraudsters stealing a piece of the pie. Doing so, however, requires extensive contract reviews and revisions that aren’t always easy to broker.

“Blockchain can move into many other areas in advertising later on, but right now we believe that we need to go after the low-hanging fruit of financial reconciliation,” said di Como. “Financial reconciliation is the most obvious place to start, but it’s also where blockchain would have the biggest impact now.”

The problem with using blockchain for financial reconciliation is that it relies on all players across the supply chain submitting honest information to the ledger. In other words, Unilever would still have to trust that the vendors it works with are playing fair. Without changing the incentives around honesty and trust across the system, it could leave the advertiser with an audit trail it has to live by — once data is written to the blockchain, it can’t be changed — but may not be truly honest.

The real progressive blockchain applications start to emerge when you pair the technology with cryptography, said Rebecca Lerner, evp at MadHive.

“Coupled together, you can create a new system of incentives that not only creates real trust in the system but also enables mathematical and scientific proof of things like data provenance, while simultaneously cryptographically sealing consumer data to prevent leaks into an open ecosystem, and identifying and eliminating suspicious inventory,” said Lerner.

There was so much hype around the Bitcoin boom in 2017 that it took some time to weed out the “snake oil salesman” who was pitching basic blockchain features that suffered from the “garbage-in, garbage-out” dilemma. More sophisticated initiatives are starting to emerge such as AdLedger which has united Publicis, Omnicom, IPG, WPP’s GroupM, The Hershey Company, Meredith, Hearst and more, to provide an open forum for collaboration on how the technology could be used with cryptography.

The post ‘A single source of truth is key’: Inside Unilever’s plan for blockchain appeared first on Digiday.

As with any major marketwide change, there is fallout, in the short term at least. Here are some of the unintended consequences:

Even more power to the walled gardens
There’s always been a sense of irony around how the European Union’s attempt to curb the dominance of U.S. tech platforms, while also protecting consumer privacy, has resulted in a piece of legislation — the General Data Protection Regulation — that many argue has inadvertently benefited the likes of Google and Facebook further. The same can be said for the scramble to recreate the online ad ecosystem around the first-, not third-, party cookie.

Regulatory scrutiny is one of the pressures propelling the long-talked-about so-called “cookieless” future (meaning third-party cookieless future), although it’s the continuous changes made by the anti-ad-tracking browsers Apple and Firefox that have spurred a real sense of urgency among publishers, ad tech vendors and agencies to find an effective replacement.

Publishers are pushing forward more aggressively than before with first-party data strategies that rely on first-party cookies, but the likes of Google and Facebook remain out in front. “The walled gardens have capitalized on the death of the cookie,” said Oliver Gertz, managing partner of interaction at MediaCom Germany. “They have their own ID, which is high quality because users are always logged in. They’re the winners in this.”

A lot of changes are being made in the name of giving consumers more choice. Google has reorganized its ads business to put privacy at its heart and has appointed its first head of privacy, as reported by AdExchanger. That’s come after Google announced other changes, citing GDPR as its motive, such as its culling of attribution tool DoubleClick IDs in 2018 and adding new consumer-choice ad-tracking features to its Chrome browser.

“Google is making a more balanced approach and moving much more slowly [than Apple],” said Ben Barokas, co-founder of Sourcepoint. “There is so much more scrutiny on Google and for that matter Facebook than Apple. Everything from the privacy and browser controls to anti-trust [regulation and fines] — it’s a knife’s edge. If they clamp down on privacy, it benefits Google and brings more power to their walled garden ecosystem,” he added.

Pressure on log-in strategies and alliances
Publishers furthest along the path of developing log-in strategies are in a good position. Granted, individual publisher log-in strategies may have been established more for the purpose of building future subscriptions rather than building non-third-party cookie-reliant models. While media companies with massive portfolios of titles, may have even believed them to be critical to competing with the logged-in audiences of Google and Facebook — same goes for log-in alliances. There are numerous log-in alliances in Germany, including NetID which have publishers, broadcasters and ISPs.

But they will now be under increasing pressure to deliver on their promise. “Publishers realize they need to get their acts together or die a slow death,” said Gertz. “But these log-in consortiums are not getting a large amount of traction.” One of the core issues, is that although they have been touted as at-scale log-in, it’s difficult to entice consumers to stay logged-in given the value exchange to consumers isn’t quite as clear cut as it from using a product like Gmail or Facebook, he added.

A cottage industry of quasi-ID tech vendors
Independent ad tech businesses are, in general, optimistic about the future in which third-party cookies are no more. They kind of have to be if they’re to survive and successfully help transition a digital ad trading ecosystem that relies on them as the core currency for measurement and ad targeting. Shared identity solutions have been around for a few years but have only stirred moderate interest from publishers who had far greater fires to put out. But thanks to the anti-tracking changes at the browsers, and the regulatory scrutiny on real-time bidding, shared ID solutions are now enjoying a much-welcomed return to the spotlight. But while there are some genuinely good ID vendors and consortiums out there, there is a load of rubbish being touted too. Publishers will have to ensure an influx of sales pitches from quasi ID-solution ad tech vendors, which have already been spawned and consist of no more than some opportunistic bravado and imaginary tech promises. “There is so much noise out there,” said Jakob Bak, co-founder and CTO of ad tech vendor Adform and member of ID consortium DigiTrust. “There is a load of ad tech companies talking about identity, but it’s all a lot of hot air — there is very little tech behind it.”

Short-term pain for publishers
Publishers are used to taking serious body blows. They’ve been taking them since they lost the ability to monetize Safari users thanks to Apple’s anti-tracking changes, which began in 2017. They continue to take them in markets like Germany where Firefox is a popular browser, and long before. In the long term, the triumph of the first-party cookie will be the long-awaited boon publishers have needed to put them back well in control of their monetization both on a subscriptions and advertising front and everything in between. But in the short term, there may be some walls to scale. There are no market-ready shared ID solutions, yet that have the buy-in of all publishers, and meanwhile, they’ll be beholden to any further changes made by any of the browsers, in the name of consumer privacy.

The post Unintended consequences of the shift from third-party to first-party cookies appeared first on Digiday.

Taking the most common and readily available social lubricant — alcohol — out of events like Laricheva’s isn’t a new concept. But exploring sobriety, like by doing a month free of alcohol aka Dry January and creating spaces to socialize while sober may be more popular than it has ever been as millennials and Gen-Z are reportedly drinking less than the generations before them. In 2018, Berenberg Research found that Gen-Z reportedly drinks 20% less than millennials and 64% of Gen-Z respondents apparently believe they will continue to drink less than their older counterparts. While it’s hard to quantify exactly what drinking less looks like, as an article in The Atlantic detailed this past spring, exploring sober culture has become popular enough to create sober influencers. And, over the last year and a half, sober bars like Getaway, Ambrosia Elixirs and pop-ups like Listen Bar have cropped up in New York City.

“It’s a direct correlation to the rise of wellness,” says Quynh Mai, founder at Moving Image & Content, of the current fascination with sober culture. “People are choosing $25 boutique fitness classes over $25 cocktails. Holistic wellness is the new luxury; purchasing and participating in wellness brands have almost usurped the bragging rights of having a great cocktail. It’s better for your Instagram.”

Drunkenness has given way to mindfulness. The paragon of a life well lived is more about achieving balance and piling up experiences over wild nights. After all, a raging hangover is hard to square with dawn meditation. It’s no coincidence that sober culture is rising at a time when boutique fitness studios are popping up in every possible variation. Even the biggest substance abuse epidemic in America — opioids — traces its roots to people seeking relief from pain.

“Wellness is such an exploding trend as we are a lot more curious and concerned with our health, the environment, our well-being,” says Radha Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of the early-morning dance party craze Daybreaker. “We wanted to create an environment that wasn’t a preachy sober environment but was one that they could practice being sober, being present with themselves, meeting other people and falling in love on the dance floor without being hopped up on substances.”

Five and a half years ago, Agrawal co-founded Daybreaker, after a trip to Burning Man where Agrawal had an incendiary experience while dancing sober one early morning. Unsure if it would become popular, Agrawal created the community on the assumption that people wanted a community like Daybreaker. She was right. Now, Daybreaker has roughly 500,000 subscribers to its email alerts for its parties, and Agrawal estimates that between 70% and 80% of those subscribers have attended a Daybreaker event.

“At the end of the day, being drunk has to do with connection and belonging or lack thereof,” says Agrawal. “I drink because I want to belong to the experience more freely. When I’m sober I feel like I don’t belong, and I need to hop myself up on something. Belonging is the root cause of our abuse of drugs and alcohol and also the best friend to sobriety.”

Alcohol-free brands, like PepsiCo’s tea brand Pure Leaf and its seltzer brand Bubly, are starting to recognize the popularity of sober culture. In August, Pure Leaf hosted what it called a Modern Day Tea Social inspired by children’s book “Eloise,” which featured alcohol-free mixed drinks. At the same time, Bubly has teamed up with mixologist Julia Momose to create “spirit-free” cocktails to appeal to this cultural shift.

Cultural consultancy Sparks & Honey believes that we’re likely only seeing the beginning of this trend, with bars, restaurants and beverage companies see the demand now and will start to offer a range of products and experiences to answer to it.

Still, the popularity of sober exploration comes at a time when what it means to be sober may be shifting. For those in recovery, sobriety has meant being free of anything mind or mood altering that affects you from the neck down. But that may not always be the case for those exploring sober culture now. “The definition of sobriety has somewhat changed, due to what’s available,” says Rebecca Rosoff, co-founder of LA-based The Kimbra Group.

Substances like CBD are more readily available now than they ever were. For one creative who has been sober for over 10 years, using CBD has helped them cope with anxiety. “It helps my mental health and helps me be my sober self,” the creative says, adding that the use of microdosing psychedelics like mushrooms has also become popular. “People who consider themselves sober may use substances like that, like a one-degree shift. The new definition may honestly be more about self-searching and be more in touch with, ‘What is sobriety to me?’”

The post ‘Rise of wellness’: How sober culture is taking over media and marketing appeared first on Digiday.

The event, sponsored by Dyson and Target, marks the first time The Dodo is charging for tickets: $35 for a human and a dog, or a $79 family deal. Brian Lee, evp of commerce at Group Nine Media, said that it foresees consumer-based revenue streams and other commerce initiatives as “becoming a meaningful portion of our diversified revenue.”

The Dodo established itself as the top-ranked animal brand across platforms in terms of scale and engagement in August 2019, according to Tubular Labs — which showed that the predominantly video-oriented publisher achieved 679 million views on Facebook and nearly 90 million views on YouTube alone that month. 

But like most publishing brands, The Dodo is looking to diversify its revenue. Earlier this month, The Dodo struck a licensing deal with Scholastic to publish children’s books. Christa Carone, Group Nine’s president, said at this week’s Digiday Publishing Summit that she could imagine Dodo-branded dog toys and other products.

Lee said that the brand is primarily relying on The Dodo’s social media following — at the time of publication, has 27 million followers on Facebook, 7.3 million on Instagram and 1.7 million on Twitter — to reach potential attendees. However, the marketing team will also use billboard advertising in New York City, as well as promoting the event through in-house content on its sister sites, NowThis and Thrillist. 

The post With ‘Best Dog Day Ever,’ The Dodo is building an experiential franchise appeared first on Digiday.