Month: October 2019

“Maybe they can start to bring more demand into the open web ecosystem,” said a former executive at one publisher that used Outbrain.

In the years running up to the acquisition, Taboola and Outbrain’s battle for supremacy was good for publishers, which were able to extract rich guarantees by threatening one to take their business to the other. By 2018, those checks were harder to come by, with both companies instead pivoting to CPM guarantees instead, often offered as so-called downside guarantees, where guaranteed CPMs were worked out based on a test: If, after 30 days of running a test, a publisher won an average CPM of $1.75, for example, the guarantee might be for an amount slightly lower, such as $1.60, a source at a second publisher said.

“It’s just good enough not to quit it,” that source added.

In markets outside the U.S., revenue-sharing deals, typically tilted in favor of the publishers, were more common, two sources said.

But for many publishers, particularly those desperate for revenue, the unsightliness of the widgets’ content made them a lightning rod that often divided publishers’ revenue and product teams. Though publishers have some flexibility in what kinds of ads they allow into the widgets, the lack of quality control at some publishers made the recommendation widgets synonymous with a certain kind of low-rent internet ugliness.  “There was a contingent here that absolutely did not want to partner with somebody like Taboola,” said an executive at a third publisher, which still runs Taboola on its site. “The math made it very clear [that we should].”

While  recommendation widgets, which normally sit at the foot of articles, are typically not among a given page’s top-performing ad units, the lack of demand for inventory with that level of viewability makes them much more attractive than most programmatic alternatives, two sources said.

“It very much outperforms [the competition],” that third executive said.

Now that the two companies are set to merge, some publishers worried it meant not only the end of those guarantee checks, but a change of dynamics, with revenue sharing tilted in Taboolabrain’s favor. Yet for now, the company sees limited upside in such a move.

“We’ll still have to be competitive,” said Outbrain founder Yaron Galai. “I think most publishers that use us or Taboola, it’s about 10% of revenue. The rest is in-house, Facebook, Google, Teads. We can’t take that competition and say, ‘We can do whatever we want.’”

Taboola also faces stiffer competition from its smaller peers, who are trying to compete by endearing themselves to premium publishers. Over the past 12 months, Revcontent, a smaller content recommendation competitor that reaches around 400 million unique users per month, made a number of changes to its platform, including cutting the size of its network down by 60% to improve performance; Revcontent also allowed advertisers to white-list the publishers they want their ads to appear on, moves that have raised the effective CPMs for publisher partners by nearly 120%, according to chief operating officer Richard Marques.

Those moves are part of an attempt to solve a broader problem that content recommendation widgets face as a whole: That they are not brand-safe.

Part of the appeal of a combined company, Taboola and Outbrain say, is their combined scale will allow the company to offer marketers a level of scale that might make them an attractive alternative to Facebook and Google. Both companies reach over 1.2 billion monthly unique users.

Yet agency and buy-side sources seem skeptical of that comparison. “In many instances, this kind of inventory gets flagged as a non-brand safe environment,” said Joe Shieh, a manager of digital investment at Mindshare USA.

“There are huge strides needed to eliminate this problem, or the unit just gets avoided altogether. There’s also a reputational issue – for example, when speaking with a client about these widgets, their own personal experiences with it draws a negative connotation, and that impacts whether or not they would consider it for a campaign.”

That skepticism aside, some publishers see the growth as reason for cautious optimism. “At least now there’s a reason to pick up the phone,” a source at a fourth publisher said. “We were pretty much done with them a few years ago. But now, maybe I’ll listen.”

The post With some concerns of lower payouts, publishers see upside in Taboola-Outbrain combination appeared first on Digiday.

“This industry should be a force for good and a force for growth,” said Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer for Procter & Gamble.

It’s not a unique point: As brands have come under the microscope for everything from their sustainability practices to the makeup of their boards, businesses are claiming a rebirth of “brand purpose” — that it should be about more than just shareholders, but about stakeholders as well.

Here’s more of what was discussed in Orlando last week.

Marketers want some of that DTC action.
While direct-to-consumer brands weren’t represented on stage at ANA, the impact of those brands on the marketplace was still felt. 

“We decided that one way to beat startups is to start our own,” said Pritchard. “We now have more than 180 startups that are transforming how we innovate through lean innovation.”

P&G didn’t simply start building its own startups out of nowhere. The company went to Silicon Valley, watched how startups were working and took some of those lessons back to its own brands. P&G isn’t alone; other major brands are looking at DTC as a way to get more data about their consumers as well as test out new products before pushing them out to the mass market via traditional retail. That’s the approach Clorox told Digiday it has taken and that it may in the future, like P&G, consider creating a startup studio.

The data and privacy conundrum.
In January, the California Consumer Privacy Act will go into effect, but few marketers spoke overtly about the looming regulation. Instead, the need to respect consumers’ privacy while still gathering data to serve them better, more personalized advertising, something marketers believe consumers want, was still the big topic at the ANA.

“Creating and exceptional customer experience is both an art and a science,” said SAP CMO Alicia Tillman. “We need the data to understand the feelings of our buyers so we can drive the necessary creative reaction to be relevant to them.”

Taking ownership of the data isn’t simply about feelings of consumers, though. As brands prepare for the likely death of the cookie and privacy laws, there’s the need to have more first-party data, which is why marketers told ANA attendees they are finding ways to build out their own data capabilities — and be compliant with regulations in doing so.

“We also recognized that the walled gardens will remain walled, so we’re taking matters into our own hands,” said Pritchard. “We’ve created our own database of more than 1.5 billion consumer IDs, covering 50% of people online and rapidly increasing.”

Be about more than selling your brand.
While some marketers were overt pitchmen for their brands on stage — Dunkin’s Tony Weisman repeatedly told attendees to go get some Dunkin’ coffee and donuts — a number of the presentations cautioned against having a solely transactional relationship with consumers. “When we are at our best, our brand is about more than just selling stuff,” said Target CMO Rick Gomez.

Even for marketers like Chipotle’s Chris Brandt — who told a comeback story for the brand — marketing for the fast casual chain had to move beyond apologizing for the brand’s mishaps and connect with consumers again. That’s why the chain started to speak more openly about the quality of its food. “We wanted it to stand for a movement, not just a tagline,” said Chipotle CMO Christ Brandt.

Instead of doing focus groups once a year, conducting regular online panels with consumers helped Anheuser-Busch figure out how to move beyond transactional, noisy marketing. “What people are really telling us is that you need to be more human again, you need to reconnect with us as people,” said Anheuser-Busch CMO Marcel Marcondes.

How consumers feel matters.
To create marketing that’s altogether more human, marketers need to consider how those humans feel about their brand.

“Consumers are using emotions to drive purchasing decisions more and more than ever before,” said SAP’s Tillman. “Ultimately, experience is having a major impact on every facet of business today.”

“I want to inspire people to love the brand,” said Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CMO Olivier Francois. “The greatest ROI is the one you don’t even pay for.”

In doing so, sometimes it’s clear that the feelings about your brands aren’t necessarily positive or negative. When CMO Doug Zarkin joined Pearle Vision, he recognized that the brand was no longer differentiated in the marketplace and compared its position to dating. “We were stuck in the friend zone,” said Zarkin. “You do not want to be in the friend zone when you’re a brand. Trying to be everything to everybody means you’re nothing to nobody.”

It doesn’t matter if people love your brand if they aren’t buying it.
While marketers are certainly focused on fostering a deeper connection with consumers again — rather than just inundating them with messaging that might not be relevant for them — that connection doesn’t matter if people aren’t purchasing your products. “We recognize that brand love alone is not enough,” said Target’s Gomez. “A lot of retailers who didn’t survive the disruption didn’t fail for lack of brand love but because people stopped shopping them.”

The post ‘The way to beat startups is build our own’: Top CMOs have DTCs and growth on their minds appeared first on Digiday.

There’s a whole load of legal mumbo-jumbo around GDPR and other data privacy laws, often with different terms used to describe what’s essentially a pre-existing technique. So, for those wanting to understand more about the court’s ruling, here’s a primer.

WTF is active consent?
Simply put it means that people have to manually opt-in to receive communications from a publisher or brand, whether it’s in the form of email marketing or ad targeting. In doing so, they are actively giving their consent to have their data used for whatever purpose the publisher or brand has told them they need it for. It doesn’t need to even be highly personal data — just any data belonging to that individual. In order to do so, they need to be properly informed of what they’re consenting to — another sticky point.

How come?
Part of the problem currently is that there is such an array of different consent messages, each with a varying degree of information for the consumer on why their data is required and for what purposes. For instance, publishers that are heavily reliant on programmatic advertising revenue have hundreds of ad tech partners that are involved in those transactions. Given ad tech companies aren’t exactly consumer household brands (bar Google), it’s not likely any consumer will really understand what they’re giving their consent for, and to whom. They’ll either click blindly through in order to get to the content they want, or be put off entirely and bounce.

This active consent sounds straight forward, why is that a big deal?
Until now, a massive number of websites — whether traditional publishers or brand marketers — have been working on the basis of “implied consent.” Many have relied on pre-ticked boxes in order to ensure their ability to monetize their pages, or communicate with customers via email newsletters or other marketing means, aren’t decimated. This is likely to cause some scrambling. “They will have been claw marks in the wall from marketers this week, as these [pre-checked box] practices help them scale,” added Morsy.

So who is this bad news for?
Everyone that has gone for a default opt-in, so a pre-ticked box.

What prompted this additional CJEU ruling? 
The court was asked to review a case put to it by the German Federal Court of Justice regarding a German lottery site called Planet49, which had used a pre-ticked box for a promotional game. The CJEU assessed the case and decided that users must have given their active (and informed) consent before a business can drop cookies on them for tracking purposes. The business must also declare detail on the duration of how long their cookies would be stored.

What’s next?
Many believe the CJEU’s decision, compounded with noise U.K. data protection regulator the Information Commissioner’s Office has made, will push everyone into risk-management mode. Many brand marketers have begun to put aside crisis budgets for 2020, in case they’re fined under GDPR, according to ad tech sources with marketing clients. “We anticipate that the CJEU’s decision on Planet49 will send shockwaves through the industry and push any laggards to take privacy – particularly as they relate to cookies – seriously,” said Gabe Morazan, privacy expert at digital experience platform Crownpeak.

Doesn’t sound like an easy fix. 
It’s not. The technological underpinnings of how ads are bought, sold and tracked on the open web are highly complex and involve hundreds of thousands of middlemen. That alone is enough to make the consent-request system a user experience nightmare. Ad tech vendors have predicted more “progressive consent” processes will pop up, where users need to click through to several other pages if they choose to know more, rather than being overloaded with information upfront. On the flip side, if more businesses had tried to uphold the principles of what GDPR was set out for, then it wouldn’t seem such an uphill battle now.

“It is baffling witnessing the amount of effort put in trying to defy gravity and scraping the bottom of the barrel, rather than using that energy to develop new strategies and solutions, starting from the opportunities that GDPR is opening to publishers,” said Alessandro de Zanche, independent publishing consultant.

The post WTF is active consent? appeared first on Digiday.