Month: October 2019

Some brands, like A-B InBev, have started to do some creative in-house, especially for social channels that need more content than ever, which frees up their agencies to work on bigger ideas. Others, having already experimented with creative in-house, are looking to handle more of the media buying themselves. For example, Clorox recently started testing out doing programmatic in-house and P&G says that it is now doing 30% of its overall media buying in-house. Doing programmatic in-house can save money, as it has for Ally Financial (CMO Andrea Brimmer said taking programmatic in-house made the company 25% more efficient), but it can also be exceedingly costly as building out an ad tech stack isn’t cheap and talent can be difficult to attain.

In 2018, the ANA found that 78% of its members had in-house agencies, up from 58% in 2013 and 42% in 2008. That number will likely continue to rise, according to agency and brand sources who expect the focus on in-housing to persist. And Forrester research found that in-house capabilities grew during 2019, according to Jay Pattisall, principal analyst for Forrester. That said, adding an in-house team doesn’t happen overnight. While going in-house can save brands money, per Digiday Research, it can be tough to retain staff and difficult to motivate a creative team that may be bored working on the same brand every day. But even with those challenges brands are bullish on going in-house. Even Vodafone, a company that has already tried and folded an in-house team is now giving it a go once again. 

Part of the appeal of in-housing is control. According to Digiday Research, 38% of 214 brand marketers who were surveyed last November said that going in-house is about increased control. Brands are not only looking to have a better sense of where their dollars are going and what they deliver, but as privacy regulations like GDPR and now CCPA go into effect controlling what data is used as well as how and when brands’ messaging shows up is more important than ever. While marketers do want more control, it’s also about being able to keep up with the need for content on digital channels. 

“We’re in an explosion of content, so it’s less about you’re doing less and more about we need to do more,” said Clorox CMO Stacey Grier, adding that the company has been growing its in-house shop, Electro Creative Workshop and testing doing programmatic media buying in-house. That said, Grier cautioned that the company likely won’t ever be 100% in-house with creative or media, instead using a hybrid model. 

“We feel like we’re going to need probably five times the content we need today,” said Grier. “The only way we’re going to be able to do that is [by] having great external partners, like we do with FCB and Mcgarrybowen. We’re also going to need our internal engine.” 

In-housing and agency relationships
Going in-house naturally changes the nature of the agency-client relationship. For some, like P&G, the move in-house goes hand-in-hand with a plan to rethink the agency structure as the company is not only looking to reduce costs but find ways to be more efficient. The company has already implemented what it calls a “fixed and flow” agency model where it has a set amount of work with its agency partners while also using “smaller, more agile shops” for other jobs. It has also “co-located” with Grey Midwest and Publicis Agile Lion and brought together several agencies under an integrated group of agencies called Woven, which works under the same roof as P&G’s internal teams.

At the same time, P&G has taken more creative and production in-house. For example, Secret now has its own agency, which creates and produces ads “for a tenth of the cost and in one month versus five,” according to P&G chief brand officer Marc Pritchard. 

“As part of [our] overall agency reinvention, we’re discerning between what work we should do versus what work an agency should do or any kind of supplier,” said Pritchard, adding that the company now does 30% of its media buying in-house. “It’s people trying a whole bunch of different things and moving in and out.” 

For others, like Anheuser-Busch, going in-house isn’t about changing or reducing its agency relationships. In the spring of 2018, the company created its in-house agency, known as DraftLine, which now has roughly 65 employees with half of those employees focused on gathering consumer data to drive not only the team’s creative output but the work of the various agencies working on A-B InBev’s brands. Each day, DraftLine has newsroom-like meetings to discuss what’s trending online and where A-B InBev brands can enter those conversations. For example, due to DraftLine research and work, Bud Light became a part of the Area 51 raid discussion online, which eventually led the brand to design Bud Light packaging with aliens on it and, once fans said they wanted it, to make Bud Light cans with said alien designs on it. 

“We do not want to compete with the creative agencies,” said Anheuser-Busch CMO Marcel Marcondes, adding that the hybrid model “frees up time for the big creative agencies to focus on the big things” like the Super Bowl. 

Building up data
Increasing internal capabilities with in-house teams is attractive to marketers who are focused not only on controlling more of their brands’ data but in gathering more of that data to create more targeted marketing. “We’re really focused in terms of looking at things that we can do, taking better control of our data, really building out consumer data platforms so that we understand how our customers interact with us at every single touchpoint and then really understanding what’s the next best product that we should be talking to them about,” said Ally Financial CMO Andrea Brimmer. “That’s a huge emphasis for us.”

That may seem obvious — all marketers are looking for ways to create personalized advertising to give consumers messages they want without being creepy — but consumer data from in-housing can give brands the ability to be more efficient with their messages, especially as privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA are changing the data available to marketers. “When shit hits the fan, you want to be able to say, ‘I own this,’” said Mark Wagman, managing director at MediaLink, told Digiday ahead of the ANA meeting last week, noting that in uncertain times, marketers want to be certain they have what they need to connect with consumers. “It’s almost like a doomsday kit. This is the time to do it.”

Ally isn’t alone in its data focus. P&G has created its own database of more than 1.5 billion consumer IDs which covers 50% of people online that not only helps it figure out where to spend its dollars but have its own data on consumers outside of the walled gardens. “The data that allows you to be able to more precisely reach people [and], most importantly, cut off the excess frequency, which is where the biggest amount of savings comes and then reinvest back into reaching more people,” said Pritchard, adding that the internal data has helped the company increase the amount of media buying it does in-house.

The trouble with talent
But the move in-house is not without its hiccups. Not only can it be costly, especially for those looking to build up the technological needs to do programmatic in-house. “CMOs and marketers should consider that the technology and talent investments for programmatic media operations are not insignificant and do not align with their current cost-efficiency mindset for insourcing,” wrote Pattisall in an email.

Talent, not only for programmatic in-housing but in-housing in general, seems to be the biggest issue marketers face when going in-house. Keeping talent happy while working on one brand can be a considerable challenge for brands, especially for big brands with more corporate cultures than agencies. According to Digiday Research, 43% of 53 brand marketers surveyed “disagreed” with the statement that hiring or retaining staff is easier with an in-house team. And in a recent ANA survey, 63% of respondents said that keeping internal talent energized was their biggest concern. 

That’s likely why creating a distinct agency culture at Electro Creative Workshop has been a focus for Clorox. “Kerri [Martin, who runs the Electro Creative Workshop,] who runs that for us, has spent a lot of her time creating a culture around that,” said Grier. “Agencies need culture to survive, right? It can’t just be the Clorox culture; it has to be an agency within that.”

While creating an internal agency culture can be challenging, it can add to the overall company culture. A-B InBev is just over a year into in-housing with DraftLine — talent for the shop is sourced from creative agencies, design agencies, e-commerce companies and digital agencies, among others — but it has already helped the company become more diverse and inclusive, according to Marcondes. “We talk every day about diversity and inclusion, but I am feeling the impact of really having people with different profiles in the company because now we have creative people, data-driven people on top of the beer people,” said Marcondes. “It’s amazing.”

Photo courtesy Draftline

The post Marketers feel growing pains as in-house agencies become a necessity appeared first on Digiday.

An advertiser may buy ads against a local TV station’s afternoon talk-show lineup as a proxy to reach middle-aged women in a specific city or region. However, if a smaller-than-expected audience is watching those shows when the ad is scheduled to run, the TV station cannot simply carve out a slice of the audience watching its other shows and slot in the advertiser. The station also may not necessarily be able to place the advertiser in the next day’s or week’s afternoon talk-show lineup for a variety of reasons: the advertiser had been promoting a sale that will be over by then, the talk shows will be airing repeat episodes and the inventory will be less valuable, the inventory will be much more valuable than what is owed to the advertiser, etc.

The answer to the question of how to make good on a TV buy is not as binary as to whether an advertiser prefers a refund or to run more ads. Those nuances in TV’s make-good process has made it difficult for the computer systems charged with automating TV ad buying — which literally speak in binary code — to negotiate the answer. The automation of local TV advertising helps to crystallize the complexities of automating the medium, how those complexities are being addressed and why they need to be.

As with seemingly every form of ad-supported media, local TV advertising is being automated. But, the process of automating local TV advertising is complicated. First, there is the need to get the ad tech platforms that advertisers and agencies use to be able to communicate with those used by local TV station owners. Then there’s the challenge of ensuring these platforms are equipped to handle what happens when a buy does not go as planned.

“There is some [automated] transacting going on, but it’s pretty limited. It’s still a little clunky,” said Gary Macko, vp of sales at Graham Media Group.

Digital media’s adoption of automation could similarly be described as clunky, which would be putting it mildly considering the corresponding fraud concerns. The automation of local TV has been clunky for less controversial but still complex reasons.

“Digital was able to build [automated] systems without the legacy baggage that we had,” said Steve Lanzano, president and CEO of the Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB), a local TV trade association, who described the process of automating local TV advertising as “a sea change.”

The automation of local TV advertising has been underway for several years. In 2015 local TV station owners and ad tech firms really began laying the pipes for advertisers to place a local TV ad buy as if they were ordering a pair of shoes online, according to Kathy Doyle, evp of local investment at IPG Mediabrands’ Magna Global. Then, in November 2017, local TV station owners Nexstar Media Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Tegna and Tribune Media formed the Television Interface Practice (TIP) Initiative to develop standards for automating how local TV ads are bought and sold. These standards are meant to effectively enable the buying and selling platforms to communicate with one another, and so they are. However, placing the ad buy is only an initial step in a campaign running on TV.

“The automation process is still probably more auto-manual, as we like to say, because the [ad tech] platforms in the marketplace don’t fully capture the backend or the stewardship part of our business,” said Michael O’Brien, vp of distribution at The E.W. Scripps Company.

The stewardship part refers to how a campaign is handled after the buy is placed, and a major hangup in automating this side of local TV advertising is the make-good. At the same time as make-goods pose a present problem for the automation of local TV advertising, however, the automation of make-goods is a crucial component to the future of local TV advertising, especially during election years — like next year.

Political campaigns typically flood the local TV ad market during election years, and the deluge of demand can cause problems for other advertisers whose campaigns can be preempted by candidates’ ads in connection to how political ads are regulated. “The make-good process is a nightmare during political years for our team and requires a ton of man-hours. If we get that solved from an automated standpoint, that’s huge for us,” said Doyle.

Automating make-goods in time for next year’s elections could also be huge for local TV stations. This year advertisers’ spending on local TV in the U.S. is expected to drop by 18% from the $22.1 billion that was spent on local TV ads in 2018, according to Magna Global. The fact that 2019 isn’t an election year helps to explain the drop to an extent, but excluding cyclical events like elections, Magna Global estimated that local TV ad spending would still decline by 5% this year and by another 5% next year when setting aside election spending.

If advertisers are able to fully automate their local TV buys, then local TV stations believe they will not only see increased spending from existing local TV advertisers but attract spending from national advertisers that would view local TV as another inventory source alongside the digital inventory available through automated platforms. The potential for local TV to attract national advertisers is also why local TV station owners such as Heart TV are switching from the traditional ratings-based buying model to impression-based buying to account for a more apples-to-apples comparison with digital platforms. “You can certainly do automated buys on ratings points, but you can really accelerate [adoption of automation for local TV] when you start transacting on impressions,” said Lanzano.

Being able to automate make-goods, especially in an election year, would also help to accelerate local TV’s embrace of automation. “If make-goods could be made more automated than they are today, then I think a lot of people would sign up for that automation,” said Eric Meyrowitz, svp of sales at Hearst TV.

Make-goods can be particularly common during election cycles because of the Federal Communications Commission’s rules regarding political ads. These rules require that TV stations charge political candidates whatever the lowest rate is that a station charges other advertisers. To avoid candidates’ campaigns sinking or skyrocketing ad rates across the board, TV stations are able to abide the FCC’s rules by providing at least two different rate cards, according to Shereta Williams, president of Videa, an automated TV ad sales firm owned by Cox Media Group. One rate card is aimed at political candidates and offers to guarantee when an ad is run in exchange for a higher price. The other rate card offers a lower price but with the risk that the ad may be preempted by the advertisers paying the higher price to not be preempted.

“Whenever we’re in a political year, we see more preemptions,” said Jennifer Hungerbuhler, evp and managing director of local video and audio investment at Dentsu Aegis Network’s Amplifi. Ads slated to run during local news broadcasts, in particular, are “notorious for preemptions” during election cycles, said Doyle.

The prevalence of these preemptions has created an urgency among local TV ad buyers and sellers for the ad tech firms that they rely on to make progress in automating how make-goods are handled. “We want to have the ability to auto-accept and auto-reject make-goods based on clients’ buying guidelines,” said Hungerbuhler.

Hungerbuhler expects to see make-goods running through local TV’s automated systems by the first quarter of 2020, and the ad tech firms operating those systems are looking to make good on that expectation.

Buy-side tech firms like HudsonMX and Mediaocean as well as sell-side tech firms such as WideOrbit and Videa have already begun to pass information related to make-goods between their respective systems. However, acting on that information still requires buyers and sellers to pick up the phone and fire off an email to decide on how exactly to handle the issue. But that won’t remain the case for too much longer.

WideOrbit is working with HudsonMX and Mediaocean to connect WideOrbit’s platform to their respective platforms so that within the first half of 2020 they will be able to provide ad buyers with make-good suggestions within the platforms, said Mike Zinsmeister, chief revenue officer at WideOrbit. Then, as buyers set their parameters for evaluating whether to accept or decline a make-good option, the platforms would be able to agree to a make-good option without the back-and-forth of emails and phone calls or instances when an advertiser doesn’t find out that its campaign was pre-empted until the advertiser receives an invoice 30 days later, which Doyle said does happen during election cycles.

“If a politician or a PAC comes in and blows out [other advertisers’ preemptable campaigns] and we don’t know until the invoice reconciliation, there’s nothing we can do at that point except give clients back their money,” Doyle said.

Local TV ad sellers are already counting on automation to help them to compete for the ad dollars being spent online. Automating make-goods would help them to ensure they don’t have to surrender the ad dollars being spent on local TV.

The post ‘A sea change’: Local TV ad market races to automation ahead of next year’s election appeared first on Digiday.

Given GDPR is relatively new, so is consent-string fraud. It first began bubbling to the surface as an issue last August just after the arrival of the law. It’s also been a bone of contention with ad tech vendors who witnessing other vendors injecting fraudulent consent strings into the digital ad ecosystem.

But what exactly is it, and what problems does it cause? Here’s a primer.

Remind me what a consent string is.
It’s what’s used by all ad tech vendors to identify whether or not they have a user’s consent to use their data in order to send them GDPR-compliant targeted ads. A publisher’s consent management platform stores whether a user has said yes or no to allowing their data to be used. The CMP then passes the information through to the publisher’s programmatic ad partners so everyone is on the same page. Consent strings have been assigned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe, and every vendor that is part of its Transparency and Consent Framework uses one. The string itself is a string of ones and zeros: “1” = yes there is consent, “0” signals there is no consent. The positions of the numbers identify which vendors have consent and for what purposes (like sending targeted ads).

So that’s now being manipulated?
This is ad tech, so of course. Dummy strings are being created in some instances. Currently, it is easy to manipulate a consent string, and some vendors are doing so in order to appear as though they have user consent more than they do, so they’re not blocked from buying and selling inventory. “There’s some very odd stuff going on,” said Chloe Grutchfield, co-founder of RedBud, which has developed a tool to audit compliance on behalf of publishers clients. “Completely fake consent strings are being hardcoded and shared with the ad ecosystem when the user has actually revoked consent across all purposes and vendors.”

How easy is that to do?
Surprisingly easy. You can create a dummy consent string that looks very similar to a legitimate one, but which uses a different CMP ID to the one it should. That’s only visible once it has been decoded.

Who is responsible for this?
The cases that have been detected by Red Bud are so-called “tier-two” level vendors, which means those that don’t work directly with the publisher, but rather the bigger vendors that do and which have been granted permission by that publisher to use data for certain purposes that help those publishers monetize their inventory. It’s at that secondary stage in the passing of data that there are instances of fraudulent consent strings popping up.

How common is this?
Like much of programmatic, that’s unclear. Indications from businesses that are starting to track it haven’t yet accrued enough data to show the scale of it.

Why is this happening when there are GDPR fines at stake?
Like with any kind of fraud: There’s money to be made and low risk of getting caught.

What is being done to address it?
Currently, not much. Consent-string fraud is not yet a problem widespread enough to warrant focusing on finding ways to throttle it entirely. But like any non-policed areas, nefarious tactics can grow, so it is better to be in front of it than to be playing catch up. There are two main options that have been discussed. The first is for it to be audited and policed, preferably by a neutral body. The second is to encrypt the string, something that’s not currently feasible.

“If there was a cop — whether the IAB or someone was appointed to that role — they could randomly check consent signals in the chain,” said Mathieu Roche, co-founder of ID5. “The other option is to have a by-design enforcement, so encryption around the string. It’s something potentially blockchain technology could help with, so nothing can be tampered with.”

The post The latest trend in ad tech fraud: Faking GDPR consent strings appeared first on Digiday.

Tyla is an outgrowth of Pretty 52, a female-focused spinoff LadBibe began on July 2017 that took its cues from the LadBible formula with content like “Dog With ‘Human Face’ Becomes Online Celebrity” and “Dad-To-Be Poses With Beer Belly After Wife Was Too Sick To Attend Maternity Shoot”

While Pretty 52 had initially gotten off to a decent start, on-site traffic has fallen. Last August, the site generated over 1 million monthly uniques but dropped to 325,000 in August 2019, according to Comscore. On Facebook, Pretty 52 had accrued over 7 million followers, but its interaction rate has fallen from 0.8% 12 months ago to 0.05%, according to CrowdTangle, which is still pretty respectable and matches the industry benchmarks for media posts, according to marketing tool Rival IQ.

Low brand awareness from audiences and agencies has prompted the publisher to rethink its approach.

“We looked at the broader trends impacting the women we wanted to reach. There wasn’t a massive amount of brand recognition [for Pretty 52,] but there was a real hunger to make that platform more famous, giving women a place just for them,” said Maggie Hitchins head of content at Tyla. “Clients were also really hungry to reach women at scale; we knew there was more we could do to build the brand and make it more clear what we stand for.”

Tyla will still retain some of Pretty 52’s quick-hit news snippets and entertainment content from its previous incarnation. In line with other verticals in the LadBible Group, content will sit on-site and on social platforms, particularly Facebook and Instagram. Currently, the team is eight people, and it will look to expand to 12 across text and video.

The rebrand has been a year in the making. During this time, the team took stock of what content was already performing well, ran audience surveys, focus groups and conducted interviews with clients about what they wanted from the brand. One trend they picked up on from doing so, was that 58% of 20-year-old women had been part of social action, which it will incorporate in its coverage. Tyla has also added content verticals in beauty and also health and well-being because 60% and 66% of people, respectively, wanted more content in these areas.

Over the last few years, LadBible has worked to shift perception away from negative stereotypes of the seedier side of lad culture through high-profile campaigns raising awareness for mental health and reducing the amount of plastic in the ocean. It’s also undertaken partnerships with broadcasters like Channel 4. Earlier this month, it announced that Colin Gottlieb, the former Omnicom media chief, is joining as a strategic board member.

“It certainly isn’t that people are scared of Lad and so we’re launching this,” said co-founder and chief operating officer of LadBible, Arian Kalantari. “We have a huge female audience. Now is a good time to launch something really meaningful and specific to women.”

Yet agency awareness of Pretty 52 and LadBible’s link with its female audience has been fairly low.

“Even though it has always promoted it has a big audience that skews heavily female, sometimes the perception hasn’t been that,” said Lawrence Dodd, communications planning director at Universal McCann. “This is about extending the reach and broadening out its flexibility when talking to advertisers.”

Former clients for Pretty 52 include Boots, Cancer Research UK and New Look, but the publisher wouldn’t share how much revenue the vertical delivered to the whole group. For the most part, the group works with agency partners and has a few direct clients with advertising brands. Conversations with agencies about campaigns on Tyla are live but not finalized. The idea is it will win new clients and increase deal size with existing partners.

“It’s a complement to LadBible,” said Lizzie Barclay, head of marketing at LadBible. “We want advertisers to think about doing business with the whole group; Tyla is part of the family.”

Extending its reach beyond the usual suspects fit for entertainment and female-focused media partners will also be key.

“My beer clients had no issues with it, they understood the positive aspects of this culture,” said Eleni Sarla CEO of Target Group, part of Havas Group Media. “When a brief goes to LadBible, my team says they really elevate it creatively. They have been unique and clever.”

The LadBible Group last publicly shared revenue in 2017, when it generated revenue of £15.9 million ($19.5 million). Kalantari was tight-lipped about sharing other financial details, but said that revenue is growing. Roughly a third comes from advertising on its site, a third from branded content partnerships and a third from platform revenue.

At a time when a lot of publishers are finding ways to diversify beyond potentially unstable advertising revenues, LadBible is staying in its lane with advertising and branded content partnerships. It’s also growing its distributed content model on platforms.

“We like to do a few things very well,” said Kalantari. “Platforms are beasts in themselves — Snapchat, Facebook, Google. They’re important to every single business. We’re spread across all, and we have direct traffic so we’re not heavily reliant on just one.”

The post LadBible looks to further shed bro image with revamped women’s site Tyla appeared first on Digiday.