Month: October 2019

Inventory splits would appear to be straightforward arrangements. A publisher agrees to let a CTV platform or FAST service sell a certain percentage of its ad inventory — typically 30% in the case of Amazon and Roku — the publisher sells the remaining share, and the two sides keep 100% of the revenue from the respective ads they sold. However, in practice, these arrangements are not so straightforward.

Sometimes there can be a hierarchy in which the CTV platform or FAST service has the right to sell an impression before it’s made available to the publisher to sell, and sometimes publishers deduce that a platform or service is not filling its share of the inventory and try to negotiate for rights to revert that unfilled inventory back to the publisher, according to industry executives.

The haggling over how publishers’ streaming ad inventory is divvied up evinces where the balance of power stands and how it is shifting as the connected TV ad market develops. Connected TV has grown to account for 50% of video ad impressions served in the second quarter of 2019, up from 31% in Q2 2018, according to ad tech firm Extreme Reach, which operates its own video ad server. As more ads are being served on connected TVs, publishers, CTV platforms and FAST services have been building up their sales teams and backend infrastructure to equip themselves to sell a larger share of the available impressions.

When publishers are initially building up their streaming ad businesses, they typically agree to let the CTV platforms and FAST services sell their ad inventory in exchange for a cut of the resulting revenue. This revenue-sharing arrangement enables publishers to quickly generate ad revenue while they build out their sales teams, technology and advertiser relationships to eventually handle the sales themselves.

The technology side of handling streaming ad sales can be particularly taxing “because each platform has its own proprietary ad-serving environment,” said one media exec. By comparison, the revenue-sharing arrangement can be relatively plug-and-play. “You can turn it on and leave it on. The downside is you lose transparency into what’s happening,” said a second media exec.

When a CTV platform or a FAST service sells a publisher’s inventory, they share the revenue but not much else. For example, publishers do not receive information regarding how many impressions a platform or service was able to fill of the publisher’s available inventory. That lack of transparency has been a factor pushing publishers to angle for deals in which they split their ad inventory with CTV platforms and FAST services instead of sharing their revenue.

The conditions of how a publisher’s streaming inventory is split varies, usually in accordance with the prominence of the publisher within the TV-and-video market. TV networks and major streaming services are usually able to negotiate for the most control over their inventory because they recognize that CTV platforms and FAST services need to their programming to convince people to buy their devices or tune into their services.

Hulu does not allow connected TV platforms such as Roku sell its own inventory, Hulu svp and head of advertising sales Peter Naylor told Digiday in an interview earlier this year. Similarly, some TV networks retain full sales rights for their connected TV apps and 24/7 streaming channels, while others are able to negotiate down the percentage of inventory allotted to CTV platforms and FAST services to mirror the roughly 12.5% allotted to pay-TV providers for their linear channels in order to honor a clause in their pay-TV carriage contracts, according to multiple TV network execs.

In cases where TV networks do split their inventory with a CTV platform or FAST service, the networks are often able to ensure they have the first opportunity to sell impressions as they become available. “We want to control our inventory. In our deals, we always maintain the ability for first right of sale,” said one TV network exec.

Mid-sized and smaller media companies do not always receive such a primary sales position. “Depending on the partner, they have first right of sale, so we don’t get full visibility into total volume,” said the first media exec.

That lack of visibility is considered by publishers to be a power play by the CTV platforms and FAST services. If a publisher is able to see how successful or not a platform or service is at filling the publisher’s ad inventory, the publisher could use that insight to solicit the right to sell a larger percentage of its inventory. Some publishers are trying to access that information without a CTV platform’s or FAST service’s involvement. “There’s some degree of reverse-engineering and different types of testing you can do, but it’s hard,” said the second media exec.

It can also be hard to apply the knowledge of how successful (or not) a CTV platform or FAST service is able to fill a publisher’s inventory. Some publishers have begun to try to renegotiate their deals with the platforms and services to include options for backfilling, according to an industry executive familiar with the matter. In these cases, the publishers have proven their ability to fill their share of their inventory and have been able to infer that a platform or service is not filling as much of the inventory allotted to them.

But asking a CTV platform or FAST service to relinquish their share of a publisher’s ad inventory is not so simple. Even if the platform or service is effectively letting that inventory go to waste, they still have the opportunity to make money from it if they were to fill it, so publishers are being forced to figure out how to make the inventory exchange worthwhile for both sides.

One option would be to reverse the traditional revenue-sharing model by having the publisher sell this backfilled inventory and sharing a percentage of the revenue with the CTV platform or FAST service, which would introduce a new model for the streaming ad market. “I’ve never seen a deal like that,” said the industry exec.

The post Publishers angle for more sales rights to their connected TV inventory appeared first on Digiday.

BI had 85 million monthly unique users in the U.S. in August, according to Comscore. But its mobile traffic accounts for approximately 85% of its entire global traffic — a large proportion of which is accessed via Apple iOS devices using Safari, though BI wouldn’t reveal the exact split. Third-party cookies have never worked well on mobile, so figuring out how to deduct more meaning and insights from its mobile traffic had long been a priority.

A year ago, the publisher began working with first-party data-based demand-side platform Permutive, which creates persistent IDs, which are identifiers that provide a single, unduplicated view of an individual across different devices such as desktop and mobile web and in-app. First-party data was then mapped to each ID, based on how that specific user interacts with the BI site.

BI then uses the first-party data to create new targeting options for clients, such as enhanced contextual targeting — regarded as a safe haven for businesses not wanting to risk misuse of personal data. For instance, if a reader is regularly returning to the site to read stock market quotes and behaving in a way that indicates they’re an active investor, BI can move that ID into a segment that a marketer can then target based on any kind of article they’re reading on the site. The publisher will also monitor readers’ site behaviors, such as, which articles they read, how regularly and for how long, to better understand their habits.

That’s led to a big boost in advertisers wanting to do private programmatic deals, whether it’s via PMPs, programmatic guaranteed or any other kind of programmatic-direct deals, said Spande

“We’re providing additional insights to media buys that used to be somewhat blind,” he said. “We’re able to grow the amount of audience we can deliver considerably as all those mobile impressions are now eligible for that targeting.”

Both the volume of deals and the amount of advertising bought per deal has risen by double digits, in some cases triple-digits, said Spande, though he wouldn’t reveal hard figures.

For large advertisers that already spend a lot regularly, either via programmatic or insertion-order based deals, BI can feed back insights on how their creative has resonated with their target groups or whether they’ve skipped a video ad, who has responded to the ad and what that reader’s interests are based on their site behavior — for instance, whether an individual is reading a review of the new Samsung smartphone, from their iPhone. That’s potentially new customer acquisition information that would be valuable to that brand.

“We want a unique relationship with the advertiser, rather than a causal one that happens in the open marketplace,” added Spande. “We want to be valued for how we are specifically, not just as the deliverer of an audience member with a specific cookie. First-party data is a kick driver for establishing that kind of direct relationship. We’re trying to help people find many needles in the haystack.”

This is where scale is critical. Business Insider has a freemium model, in which select articles are locked for Business Insider Prime members. Typically, first-party data is associated with consumer-granted information usually obtained via subscriptions of free log-in data, or newsletter subscriber lists. Naturally, that can present a scale issue when it comes to creating IDs. But BI has been able to create reader IDs and map them to first-party data, due to how its first-party based DMP works.

“We create persistent IDs using the first-party storage space granted to publishers by the browser, typically a first-party cookie or local storage,” said Permutive CEO Joe Root. “These are then connected to subscriptions, logins and newsletters links via the Permutive identity graph.

In time, there are plans to add the kind of specific first-party data attained by subscriptions data in order to provide additional targeting opportunities in future, according to Spande.

The third-party cookie’s failure to effectively target and measure mobile ads has been a talking point for years. But despite publisher traffic shifting drastically to mobile over the last few years, it’s a more recent threat that has spurred them into urgent action. Namely, the pressure from data protection regulators with laws like GDPR and CCPA, plus the fact that a large chunk of audience inventory has now gone dark on Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox, due to the anti-tracking stances taken by each browser.

For that reason, publishers are pushing their first-party data strategies hard, in order to prepare for the time when the cookie is — if not dead then extremely diminished. But agencies are another matter, with many of their own ad transactions based very much still on the third-party cookie. Last week in the U.K., BI underwent a major agency roadshow to pitch the capabilities to agencies, and educate on the opportunities available.

The post How Business Insider is preparing for life after third-party cookies appeared first on Digiday.

The team posts between two and three times a day to each account regardless of the market unless it’s a game day when there’s more content to share. Where the social media strategies for each platform differ, however, is in the type of content shared on them.

On Facebook in the U.K., the focus is more on community engagement and reach, with most of the posts aimed at sparking discussions around games and players alongside reposting content from fans. Unlike in the U.S., the Vikings have chosen to build its audience around a Facebook Group rather than a page. The scale of groups on the social network is tiny in comparison to pages — the Vikings group in the U.K. has 423 members at the time of publication — but the engagement is high. Some posts over the last month have generated as many as 23 comments, whereas others have had just one. Sports teams have been experimenting with groups ever since changes to Facebook’s algorithm last year knocked their reach on the social network.

It’s a similar approach to Germany where the team has launched another Facebook group, which had 547 members at the time of publication. A local moderator is used to manage the group and localize the content with memes and pics more suited for a German audience.

“You can’t just translate content from one region to another, which is why we have someone in Germany creating content for the Minnesota Vikings,” said Lewis Wilkshire, consulting partner at Seven League, the sports agency that runs the international accounts for the team. “Germany has its own internet culture independent of the U.K., which means a meme or internet trend in one market means absolutely nothing in another.”

On Instagram, the NFL team’s efforts are more focused on video and being creative with imagery of players and fans. There’s a bigger emphasis here on pushing some of the local sports terminology through certain posts. When two football teams from the same region or city in the U.K. have a fierce rivalry, it’s sometimes referred to as derby. Ahead of the Minnesota Vikings’ game against the Chicago Bears last month, the team used the #derbyweek hashtag to articulate the intensity of the rivalry between the two teams from the same division to local fans. There’s more shared content between the Instagram accounts in the U.K. and Germany compared to the other platforms, with content on the social network taking more time and money to produce. So far the strategy has brought more success in Germany — where it had 342 followers at the time of publication — than it does in the U.K. where the follower count is 192.

Germany is being eyed as the next big market for the NFL after the U.S. and the U.K. It’s thanks to a handful of German players who have broken into the league. Games are streamed in Germany on DAZN. The Vikings see Germany as a big market and want to take the lead with a dedicated social media strategy. Attempts from teams to extend their international reach come amid wider concerns that the NFL is struggling to attract younger fans in the U.S.

There are many fans of the Vikings who live outside of the U.S. and may not ever get to attend a game or meet their favorite player. “By opening social accounts for the U.K. and Germany, we view this as the first step towards building an even stronger connection with our fans overseas,” said Vikings executive director of digital media and innovation Scott Kegley.

The post How the Minnesota Vikings target social media fans outside the US appeared first on Digiday.

While consulting firms have made inroads into agency services, many on the agency side claim that the “threat” is overblown — that they don’t run into many consultancies during pitches, for example. 

It’s an assessment WPP made back in 2017, when it said in an earnings report that the impact of consultancies on the industry is an overhyped trend. And it’s something that’s come up previously: Brands are finding that consultants aren’t able to clearly execute on turning certain issues into actual actions that will change a business.

“There’s a certain arrogance that goes with the consulting firms that have the ear of the C-suite because they know as a senior marketer you sit outside of that,” one executive told Digiday. “Even though they’re not experts when it comes to media and advertising, they’re able to get away with it because of the position they have.”

It’s true that who does the work is shifting: Among respondents to Digiday’s survey, for example, only 17% of respondents said they were “mostly using agencies” for marketing tasks. No respondents said they’re 100% relying on agencies. More than half said they are managing marketing mostly in-house.

The post Digiday Research: 69% of marketers aren’t looking to use consultancies for ad agency work appeared first on Digiday.

At Germany’s tent-pole ad tech event Dmexco in September, German publishers were gripped with anxiety over how the latest Firefox browser update had blocked their ability to monetize large chunks of their audience. But they exuded an air of resigned pragmatism, choosing to revisit potential solutions around shared IDs and first-party data strategies previously shelved in order to focus on more urgent pressures, according to publisher and ad tech sources. Many publishers are now looking expectantly to ad tech vendors to come up with viable solutions, and there are already examples of publishers like MailOnline recouping lost Safari audiences as a result of successful ID trials.

“We will do all we can to build out the tech and data actions on first-party cookies,” said Chris Guenther, News Corp’s global head of programmatic. “What will be interesting is focusing on partners who are minimizing their reliance on the third-party cookie, and on how the buy-side plans to leverage data. For everyone, it has to be a question of: how quickly can you do this?”

Some publishers are keen to take the lead on determining a standardized ID. This week, some U.K. publishers have begun to try to chivvy their peers into coming together to agree on a unified ID currency. That will be key if publishers are to be able to fully leverage their first-party data advantage, in a way that doesn’t make it harder for agencies to scale media buys across a bunch of disparate IDs. — Jessica Davies

Where are the DTC brands?
Direct-to-consumer brands like Rhone, Bombas and Function of Beauty, among others, may have been highly visible at Advertising Week but their absence will be felt at the Association of National Advertising’s annual Masters of Marketing conference this week. Even as DTC brands have challenged legacy brands, redefined categories (shaving will never be the same) and changed the way marketers see performance channels, DTC brands, curiously, won’t be a big focus of the ANAs this year.

“DTC brands have a new way of doing things,” Husani Oakley, director of technology and innovation at Deutsch NY, wrote in an email. “They’re not just disrupting their verticals, they’re disrupting how they work with adjacent topics, marketing included. From the DTC CMO perspective, I wonder if they see as much value in events like the ANA as traditional brands and agencies do.”

Ultimately, it could be that DTC brands don’t see the value of the Orlando, Florida-based gathering as Metric Digital CEO Kevin Simonson posits: “DTC brands, frankly, couldn’t give a shit about the ANAs.” Or it could be that even as the industry is starting to take DTC brands more seriously — not only looking to acquire more brands but also to create start-up studios to grow them — there’s still a sense that they aren’t quite ready to sit at the big kids’ table that is the ANA’s. It’s odd as DTC brands could certainly give in-depth keynote-like presentations that the ANA conference is famous for but maybe there’s a sense that much of the DTC brands still need to earn their stripes. — Kristina Monllos

The post The Rundown: What publishers think of the demise of the third-party cookie appeared first on Digiday.

The business models for Eater events vary. Eater Talks, a local restaurant industry discussion series that launched in London and now takes place in various cities, sells tickets around the $20 mark to complement its partnership with the Ace Hotel, where the series is held. The Eater Young Guns Summit, which took place in New York this past July, saw roughly 900 attendees at $60 per ticket. Sponsors for that event included Grey Goose Vodka. Some ticket prices for Eater events are as low as $10, like the upcoming Eater Book Club. 

Eater editor-in-chief Amanda Kludt said the relatively low ticket price allow the events to be accessible to a younger audience; particularly for the Summit since up-and-comers from the food and dining industry is the demographic that Young Guns is aimed at. 

“It’s been a project this year to see if [ticket sales] is a real business for us,” she said. “And sometimes having a ticket gets someone’s buy-in — it’s less about the money and more about having an audience that’s going to show up and is more willing to be engaged.”

The events are all executed by Vox Media Experiential team, which is currently made up of 10 staffers but is in the process of growing, in collaboration with Eater’s editorial team and who looks to their audience for new ideas.

According to vp of experiential marketing Vanessa Fontanez, every event that Vox Media puts on is brought to sponsors, though Eater would not disclose how much revenue its events business would generate this year.

“It’s a growing key, core line of business,” said Fontanez, in large part due to the face-to-face sponsorship opportunities that experiential allows for. “With these offerings, we’re able to go to a partner and say that this is a unique opportunity that we can bring to you, and we can ensure that that partnership feels very authentic and thoughtful.”

Kludt sees the opportunity to expand this franchise even further in 2020 with more dinners — this August, Eater put on a trio of pop-up dinners with Young Guns chefs — but also with workshops since workshops and demos were a popular element of this year’s Summit. 

But because Eater’s events tend to have a quick sell-out rate — such as the Wine Club, priced at $40 per ticket, which sold out within an hour — it’s a signal to Kludt that Eater should continue ticketing its events, even if that’s not the primary revenue driver. 

Todd Krizelman, CEO and founder of MediaRadar, which recently launched MediaRadar Events to track brands’ spending on experiential, said that even three years ago, it wasn’t in the business plans for most publishers to invest heavily in growing their experiential divisions. However, these companies are now making big hires and are creating entire events teams. 

“It used to be the belief that [media companies] would make their major claim to success through digital investments,” said Krizelman. “But now there is a recognition that these events are working,” because this platform allows brands to demonstrate their ability to be compelling and drive emotional responses from audiences on a face-to-face level, which advertisers love. 

Right now, Fontanez said that between consumer-facing, B2B and branded activations, the company is producing three or more events per month. However, with the recent acquisition of New York Media, the events portfolio will increase even more, including Vulture’s Vulture Festival in November. 

“We have a small team, so there’s a certain capacity issue that we’re going to be dealing with,” said Kludt. “But as long as we have the bandwidth, we’re going to keep trying to put on these events.”

The post ‘The economics of experiential are really attractive’: How Eater is expanding its events business appeared first on Digiday.

Yet every day, even so-called video-forward media brands struggle to produce enough ongoing, dynamic video content for building and maintaining traffic, engaging audiences and satisfying advertiser demand.

But the only thing growing faster than audiences’ insatiable appetite for original video is the cost and complexity of creating, producing, delivering and monetizing video. Approach a video strategy in the wrong way, and the technology, licensing, editorial and operational resources for an ongoing video publishing operation can quickly set a business back millions each year.

Video doesn’t have to be an uphill battle or an enormous expense. Here are a few best practices we’ve seen bubbling up from some very enterprising publishers, from small niche players to bigger brands.

Use relevant video for each article
The best video executions ensure the content is relevant to the core editorial content. However, even publishers who aren’t able to produce video for each article are smartly finding ways to use videos that are in the context of a place, person or thing referenced in the story. Some sites dedicate an editorial staffer to ensure ongoing synchronization of video with each article. Others work with automated solutions. Either way, it makes a world of difference in engaging audiences.

One perfect example is CNN, which integrates a video player into every story. CNN’s smart playlists keep a continual rotation of relevant video playing. It might be about a subject or place in the story, or it might be an earlier video for the same story. We’ve also seen publishers use smart playlists that can be geo-targeted to the audience.

Optimize for increased viewability 
It’s crucial to place the video player at the top of the article. It often gets pushed below the fold, which dramatically drives down viewability. But some publishers have taken things a step further, having their videos move with the reader by ensuring that the video player adheres to a certain section of the site, or even by docking the player at the end of the article.

Take CBS News: As the reader scrolls, the video player moves right and adheres to the right rail. C/Net docks their contextual player on the lower right. This approach is a win-win: readers get more compelling content, and publishers have quality ad inventory that satisfies their partners.

Limit to one video per page
Avoid cannibalization: smart publishers make sure different video units aren’t  competing with each other. MSN Entertainment keeps the reader engaged in the article with a single integrated video player, which scrolls down and to the right of the text.

Leverage video-as-a-service platforms
The examples cited here are of big media brands, but these same best practices are within reach of digital publishers of nearly any size.

It’s true that, until very recently, a typical small-to-medium sized publisher might be faced with an annual cost of several million dollars per year to get an ongoing video operation going. Those costs might include licensing a player, creating and curating content, hosting, encoding for various platforms, transcoding, serving ads, video distribution, ad operations and analytics — not to mention a need for an internal team to manage all of it.

But just as software-as-a-service revolutionized enterprise software, video-as-a-service platforms are making polished, engaging and money-making video both scalable and accessible, with little or no upfront cost. It’s also streamlining the number of vendors needed to manage and help publishers transform a money pit into an affordable operation.

It wasn’t too long ago that a slew of publishers rushed off to make a  “pivot to video” — and many failed. But a select few invested wisely enough to create video operations that worked, while others waited things out for a more affordable way forward.

The winners will continually fine-tune the balance between technology and editorial talent. That’s a combination that can ensure in-context video that engages audiences, offers brands an authentic connection to readers and offers publishers a friction-free way to leverage that connection.

The post How publishers can nail a video strategy without blowing budgets appeared first on Digiday.