Month: November 2019

Buyers are unsure of the cause as Facebook hasn’t sent out a communication to account for the issues or why they may have increased in frequency in recent months, according to agency sources. Facebook Ads Manager is notoriously unpredictable, as it has gotten worse before, but buyers say recent months have been more difficult than in the past. That’s left buyers — especially those working for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands — to come up with their own theories as to why the platform seems to be more frequently glitchy or buggy. 

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

“The rough consensus is that people think Facebook is doing major updates to the platform,” said Zach Stuck, founder and CEO of Homestead Studio, an agency that manages between $500,000 and $750,000 a month spent on Facebook Ads Manager for clients. “We just have to deal with it while they figure it out on their end. It truly feels like they are doing major updates to the ads platform and that’s what’s causing the majority of the errors we’re running into.” 

Gil David, a Facebook ads specialist for e-commerce clients in Ireland, has found that when comparing his clients’ performance on Facebook Ads Manager year over year, there’s a significant drop in performance, with one down 30% year over year. “They’ve had problems throughout the year, and there have been more outages on a regular basis,” said David. “There’s been a lot of change on the back end of Facebook Ads Manager, too, which could be part of what’s going on.” 

“As they make tweaks to their system, things break or slow down and you see weird things happen to your accounts,” said Metric Digital CEO Kevin Simonson. “Facebook tools are inherently imperfect; they break. I have no data to back this up, but I have a lot of conversations, and it [seems like this is happening more now.]” 

One example of those “weird things” might be that the manual bid strategy set will stop working, said Simonson. “Say you have a manual bid strategy to stop spending money if the bid goes over $75. You’ll go to bed, wake up and it’ll have spent a shit ton of money, way over $75 dollars. You’re like, wait, that’s not what I told the machine to do. And we have to answer for that. We told the machine to do it. Is the answer that you never sleep and refresh your browser every 15 minutes? No.” 

“What we’re seeing is a constant amount of error messages, error messages for very simple things from just trying to duplicate out ad sets to adjust ad copy within ads. We’re writing out ads, and things just get deleted,” said Stuck. “It’s super wonky.” 

One of the biggest issues that buyers say has made Facebook Ads Manager harder to manage is the longer review times of ads getting approved. Buyers looking to run ads with dynamic creative, a newer option that Facebook added recently, said they have run into the longer wait times for that type of creative in particular. “Dynamic creative ads are taking a lot longer than normal to get approved, and I’m not sure why,” said David. 

Other issues include delayed reporting and inconsistencies in the reporting from campaign level to ad set level, which can make it difficult for buyers who want to look at their accounts from a high level and optimize accounts for clients, said Stuck. Another problem, per Stuck, is that post IDs for ads aren’t showing up as they normally would, which makes it more difficult to duplicate ads across multiple accounts and keep social proof on those ads as they are used with different campaigns. 

That these issues are happening ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday has buyers worried, especially since the platform was broken the Tuesday before Thanksgiving last year for nearly 16 hours. While buyers said they will continue to use the platform some are eyeing alternatives like Snapchat, Pinterest and TikTok, where they may boost spending to make up for the lack of performance from Facebook. 

For direct-to-consumer brands, focused almost entirely on Facebook and Instagram, it’s a bigger problem.

“Everyone right now is talking about the same thing. We’re all on group chats talking about what are the other really good and somewhat scalable sources of traffic we can buy,” said investor Nik Sharma of DTC brands looking for alternatives. “It’s difficult right now. Everyone has specific revenue numbers to hit so they have to find a solution regardless. People are expecting things to calm down after the fourth quarter.” 

That said, some cite Black Friday and Cyber Monday for the issues they are seeing on the platform currently, especially the lower conversion rates as they don’t believe people want to buy products right before major sales. That the holidays are happening later in the year than usual — Black Friday is at the end of November and Cyber Monday is in December — is causing issues with their clients’ budgets as well. 

“This time of year is always rough because it’s pre-Black Friday Cyber Monday, and people just purchase less from a behavior standpoint, knowing that they’re going to purchase things pretty soon,” said Simonson. “We look at year-over-year data, and it supports this every year, including last year to this year for brands that did well for the year and/or the fourth quarter.” 

Still, some buyers said that with problems going on throughout the year, the answer can’t just be the lull of people who are waiting to buy until the sales ramp up. And the effect isn’t just on the Facebook platform but on Instagram as well, some of the buyers said, as the Facebook Ads Manager is where buyers run ads for both platforms. “Instagram isn’t performing better,” said David.

One buyer believes that the platform has hit a plateau and that the problems are simply the result of users leaving Facebook. “My hypothesis for why it’s teetering out is that the users have left the platform and no one is addressing the elephant in the room,” the buyer said. “That’s why the ads suck. No one is there to see them. The users have left the platform.”

The post ‘It’s super wonky’: Ahead of Black Friday, ad buyers and brands are having issues with Facebook’s Ads Manager appeared first on Digiday.

For now, buyers are putting up with the hassles — and that’s because TikTok is the hottest app of the moment. The year-old app from Beijing-based ByteDance, just surpassed 1.5 billion downloads on Google Play and the App Store, according to Sensor Tower, with lifetime user spend reaching $175 million worldwide.

TikTok does seem to be addressing buyers’ concerns: It has begun scaling its sales teams, especially in the U.S. Still, buyers wish the overall process for buying ads on TikTok was more streamlined and involved less paperwork that’s also easier to decipher.

“The paperwork was complicated from our side,” said Dimitrios Bourmpos, director of paid social in EMEA, for ForwardPMX, adding that it’s “a lengthy process to go through all these different documents.”

The lack of a self-serve ad model is particularly challenging. Phillip Huynh, national paid social strategy lead for 360i said he wishes TikTok would invest more in self-service and education platforms.

“This not only empowers brands and agencies who want to learn more and test the platform, but it also allows their sales staff to focus on highlighting ‘why TikTok’ and ‘how to leverage TikTok’ as opposed to executing buys for brands,” Huynh said.

In a TikTok pitch deck from June, it’s clear TikTok is transitioning to a self-serve ad model, and it’s one that ForwardPMX is attempting to test in beta.

“Going direct is fine, but it’s not that easy,” Bourmpos said. His agency hasn’t yet run any ads on TikTok for its clients but would like to.

A TikTok spokesperson wouldn’t confirm anything about a self-serve ad model but told Digiday, “We’re exploring a variety of models and opportunities to create value for our brand partners, and we’re in early experiments.”

Opening up its API to third-party developers is another wish list item from some buyers like Bourmpos. That would allow advertisers to use third-party API tools to monitor their campaigns on TikTok like they do on other social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat.

Jordan Jacobson, vp and head of social media at iProspect, said he doesn’t think TikTok needs to open up its API immediately but said, “To attract SMB advertisers, it does completely. As they grow, it will be crucial to their success.”

Huynh said he doesn’t think it’s 100% necessary for TikTok to create an API to be a regular part of media plans, assuming TikTok eventually builds a self-serve ad platform.

“This platform will not only empower end buyers, but it will also allow TikTok’s sales and marketing group to focus in on explaining why TikTok is a good fit for brands, and making sure that brands adapt to the platform with relevant creative, influencers, etc.,” he said.

Carly Carson, director of social at PMG, said she wishes TikTok had API access and third-party ads service across all ad types and to integrate CRM. “All of those are table stakes to get TikTok to be a more evergreen partner of brands rather than a testing partner. They help connect brands to the right consumers on the platform.”

Earlier this month, TikTok introduced Share to TikTok with Adobe Premiere Rush, marking a first step in allowing third-party apps and developers to integrate with the platform.

Bourmpos also said that he wishes there weren’t so many different verticals for different teams, like a vertical for fashion and another for travel. “As an agency, we want to get access to self-serve. We want to go to TikTok and have an open conversation about our partnerships because having everything in verticals doesn’t help agencies go and talk to them directly about bigger partnerships and how to get into different beta programs.”

Brand safety was another feature all buyers mentioned as a concern. “They need to build [brand safety] to marketplace parity,” said Kieley Taylor, global head of social for GroupM. “There are common brand-safety standards that would help us measure risk and have more confidence to invest more.”

Jacobson said, “TikTok’s measurement and brand-safety solutions are actually rather impressive given their infancy.”

Another way in which TikTok could improve is to make its platform more shoppable, according to Carson. “It will be important to continue to find ways to create ad types that integrate shopping and e-commerce,” she said.

The Chinese version of TikTok already has robust e-commerce features and the company is testing shoppable videos outside of China at the moment.

But there’s a balance, too. “I think part of what makes TikTok so great is that the content all feels so authentic to the platform,” Carson said. “I would hate to see that get watered down by too much ad inventory; however, as always, we’d love to see ways for ad opportunities to be a little bit more shoppable.”

The post Ad buyers to TikTok: Make it easier to buy ads appeared first on Digiday.

Those five shows got the green light, Condé Nast CRO Pamela Drucker Mann said, because of the success Condé had selling a sponsor integration into “Say I Sent You,” another IGTV series produced and distributed by Condé Nast Traveler. The blueprint for that advertising integration is part of a new advertising strategy Condé Nast hopes to bring to bear on Instagram. Instead of selling reach through the platform’s growing number of products, such as in-feed ads or Stories, Condé Nast is trying to talk advertisers into buying campaigns that manifest across all of them, and guaranteeing business results in exchange.

Rather than silo a campaign in one title’s Instagram Stories, say, or ads that a title will distribute to its followers in Instagram’s feed, campaigns sold this way could run across Stories, feed, Instant Experiences (formerly known as carousel ads), depending on the business objectives of the client.

The shift in strategy happens as Condé Nast continues to pour energy and resources into video, which it hopes will eventually turn into a billion-dollar stream of revenue, while also trying to prove it can deliver concrete outcomes for its biggest-spending advertisers.

“It’s not just video,” said Eden Gorcey, svp of enterprise strategy at Condé Nast. “It’s one thing to create it and hope that a lot of people go see it. It’s another to create an entire experience around it that we can sell.”

To date, Condé Nast has only brought one sponsor in to test this strategy, an integration of American Express into a Condé Nast Traveler IGTV series called “Say I Sent You.” Rather than sell ongoing sponsorships of the series, Condé is hoping brands will buy into integrations at the episode level of specific series, and augment that with ads in other parts of Instagram that are creatively linked.

For many publishers, particularly those who are still scarred from Instagram parent company Facebook’s pivot to video, IGTV hasn’t been a breakout hit. But a growing number have found it useful as a place to redistribute content made for other platforms; some, including Vice and Group Nine, are using IGTV as a channel for distributing branded content.

Condé Nast began testing out different kinds of content on IGTV last summer. Wired floated trial balloons like “Incredibly Satisfying Stock Footage,” while Vogue followed model Winnie Harlow on a shopping trip; GQ repurposed footage shot for various YouTube series and used IGTV to plug the contents of its Best Stuff Box.

But while the platform still offers some “first-mover advantage when it comes to branded integrations,” said Benjamin Arnold, managing director of We Are Social, the reach isn’t there yet for all brands.

That requires creative thinking when it comes to monetizing IGTV. But more publishers are starting to realize the opportunities to thread Instagram’s different ad products together in campaigns they pitch to brands.

“I think Instagram, as a platform, has done a really good job of finding a role in the advertisers’ strategy as a platform that entices shoppability,” said Rachel Bien, svp of media strategy and investment at Zenith.

Bien added that publishers have increasingly begun to offer guarantees, if only because brands are beginning to expect that they can buy results. “The social platforms offer these things natively,” Bien said. “The publishers are just capitalizing on the tools they’re providing them.”

The post How Conde Nast plans to make money from Instagram TV appeared first on Digiday.

“More generally, the relationship between price and quality of data is perceived as the likely drawback, but this is [with] the knowledge that improved data could mean further reduction in scalability, at least until addressable inventory increases across the wider TV market,” said Direct Line Group’s head of group commercial marketing, Sam Taylor.

Larger advertisers have, to date, used ads on broadcaster streaming services as a way to boost reach on TV by targeting more light TV viewers.

Alasdair Weddell at UKTV said addressable TV ads would probably account for “almost 10% of the broadcaster’s TV investment in 2020 having increased year on year.” “When the audience selection is right, we’re now seeing favorable results,” said Weddell. “The key to that is getting the right targeting.”

More addressable TV impressions up for sale across the market could create enough competition to drive down CPMs.

“With the investments made by other broadcasters to grow their addressable TV businesses it should hopefully create some leveling out in pricing because Sky’s Adsmart platform has the monopoly on that part of the market at the moment,” said Henry Daglish, founder of The7stars media agency startup Bountiful Cow.

ITV will sell ads in its ITV Hub in online auctions from next February, essentially rivaling Sky Adsmart, while Channel 4 is working on a deal with ad tech vendor The Trade Desk, so that programmatic traders using its platform can bid on ad slots during the content it streams online. Furthermore, Freewheel, which is the largest ad server in the connected TV space, has launched a header-bidding product, which lets broadcasters sell their impressions through multiple ad networks, ad exchanges and demand-side platforms.

Greater competition for addressable TV ads won’t instantly replace the reach linear can deliver, said Lawrence Dodds, communications and planning director at UM London. It will, however, diversify the routes advertisers use to access TV, he said. “The role of addressable TV could be to increase frequency against a high-value audience or to complement a wider media plan,” said Dodds.

Several members from ISBA’s TV Steering Group like Direct Line Group and Royal bank of Scotland have used and tested addressable ads when relevant to do so. This is generally to promote smaller products or reach target audiences where a higher CPM with zero wastage is more effective at delivering a return than the lower CPM against a broader audience. Larger TV advertisers share a similar view.

“We deliver high levels of reach to mass mainstream audiences at a relatively lower cost per thousand in linear TV already,” said Kelly Davis, marketing communications manager at bed specialist Dreams. “There’s no real benefit for us in paying the premium.”

Better measurement might go some way to convincing advertisers to pay the premium for addressable TV ads instead of online video. There are some advertisers that are willing to pay a higher price for better targeting, but they importantly want to see a return. Although, data shared by broadcasters to media buyers on the performance of addressable ads has always been limited. If an advertiser wanted to increase precision targeting on TV, then they would have to rely on Adsmart or an online channel away from TV. Viewability, for example, is one metric many digital advertisers focus on but until earlier this year weren’t able to do so on the ITV Hub player, which has around 30 million registered users. The broadcaster struck a deal with ad measurement firm Meetrics in the summer.

While deals like this make it easier for advertisers to compare the performance of addressable TV with online video, they also reinforce the walled gardens broadcasters are building around their ad businesses.

“We’re seeing more and more closed ecosystems in TV, which means gaining holistic insights and measurement become challenging, particularly if you want to reduce overlap or drive optimal frequency,” said Paul Kasamias, managing partner at Starcom.

Until broadcasters develop a universal set of metrics across all TV, advertisers won’t know what addressable inventory is really worth, and therefore what they would be prepared to pay.

Measurement is the only way to recognize the potential benefit of addressable TV relative to linear, said Taylor. “Measurement across TV platforms is important to demonstrate continued success and protect TV on the media plan while truly harmonizing supply and demand,” he said.

But imperfect measurement between broadcasters creates silos of money, which prevents investments from moving too quickly between different ad businesses, as the likes of Google and Facebook have shown.

“It is neither cost or supply — it is measurement,” said Peter Rowe, brand planning lead at RBS. “We would like to be able to align measurement across all TV platforms so we can clearly plan and deliver to reach and frequency in one common method.”

The post UK advertisers balk at high cost of targeted TV ads appeared first on Digiday.

Since implementing the weekly release strategy on Oct. 27, CBS News has seen a nearly 20% increase in streams for the first two episodes aired this way compared to recent airings of its other original documentaries, according to a CBS News Digital spokesperson. CBSN averages more than 1 million streams per day across its site, mobile app, connected TV apps and presence on streaming services such as CBS All Access and Hulu’s live pay-TV service.

“We decided to release them more or less on a weekly cadence in groups of six so that, if you liked the first one in the series or the second one in the series, you’d know that another one is coming soon,” said Christy Tanner, evp and gm of CBS News Digital.

CBS News has been growing its slate of CBSN Originals since debuting the documentaries in January 2016 and signing a deal with Pfizer to sponsor the series. Including the series’ third season that is currently running, the company will have produced 46 of these original documentaries, Tanner said.

As CBSN has added more original programming to the mix, CBS News has had to figure out how to slot the documentaries into the streaming service’s live schedule. “Our original series is a really super important part of our overall programming, but our bread and butter is livestreaming and being able to turn on a dime for breaking news,” Tanner said.

CBS News had previously scheduled the documentaries to air at irregular intervals on CBSN so that it would have the flexibility to cover breaking news events. The company had tried airing the documentaries on weekdays but found that news breaks too frequently throughout the week to accommodate that schedule. In April 2018, it moved the releases to Sunday nights.

The weekly distribution strategy adheres to the traditional TV distribution model that has become a widely adopted model for digital shows as well. Publishers have gravitated to weekly releases for the episodic series they upload to YouTube, and streaming services like Disney+ and Apple TV+ have chosen to release episodes for a majority of their original shows in a weekly cadence. “When you have a weekly series or set time or appointment viewing, people can then build their schedule around it,” said Gibbs Haljun, total investment lead at Mindshare.

Habituating people to tune in at particular times to increase the documentaries’ viewership can also help CBSN from an ad sales perspective. Advertisers remain wary of news programming in general and breaking news programming in particular. “Documentaries about climate change are far easier and less polarizing from a sensitivity standpoint,” Haljun said.

The TV-like release strategy also coincides with the fact that more than half of the time people stream CBSN on connected TVs. On average, 54% of streams specifically of CBSN Originals happen on connected TVs, according to the CBS News Digital spokesperson.

“We know from viewership stats that OTT viewership spikes in prime time. Sunday night is a good night for longer-form programming on the stream. We see long durations on OTT,” said Tanner. Overall viewers on average spend 80 minutes at a time watching CBSN’s live feed, but on connected TVs specifically, the average live session length is more than 90 minutes, according to the spokesperson.

Grouping the CBSN Originals into series of six by theme will help CBS News to re-air them as marathons on CBSN. CBSN began stringing its documentaries into marathons over Thanksgiving in 2017 and uses the marathons to expose people to the original programs and retain viewers across episodes. “Now that we have 46 CBSN Originals, that gives us a lot of programming to run on a holiday weekend, which may be new to some viewers. It also gives our staff who work really hard covering breaking news a bit of a break,” Tanner said.

The post CBS News beefs up streaming service CBSN with weekly documentaries appeared first on Digiday.

Here are four ways to help ensure your creativity doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone interacting with your content
Organizations create “user personas” for a reason. They help you get inside the mind of a user to ensure that you’re communicating with them in a way that will resonate. Creative content can also benefit from this process.

Whether it’s an infographic, an advertisement or even a white paper, it has to provide something your target persona can actually use — and thinking from their perspective can help you provide that. Ask yourself questions like: What problem will you solve for them with this content? How have they typically solved it in the past? You can also try approaches like “reverse brainstorming,” which forces you to take a different perspective by thinking about how to cause that problem in order to be more creative in solving it.

Don’t confine yourself to one path
It might sound counterintuitive to start your work on a project in more than one way, but you might be surprised. Take a few minutes to brainstorm the best ways to approach the subject of your project. Try to come up with at least five to ten ideas. Then pick your top two and think about how you would approach them. If you can’t pick an absolute favorite, start working on both — and a clear winner will eventually emerge.

However, don’t feel like the effort you put into the other version is wasted. There is no such thing as a dumb idea when it comes to creative content and even a failed approach can provide insights and ideas for future projects — even if it wasn’t the right fit for this one.

Don’t overthink it
As author Ray Bradbury once said, “Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.” If it’s a writing project, just start writing. If it’s an infographic, just start mocking it up. There’s a reason why the term “unleash creativity” exists. We often hold back our creative thoughts, because we don’t think they will be good enough or we think that they will be too difficult to execute. Release those thoughts and get them on paper,your computer or whatever medium you are working with.

Remember when you were a kid, and you said or did things because you didn’t know what the consequences might be? Try to think of things from that “kid perspective.”

Find ways to collaborate better
Meeting even for a few minutes regularly can be a great way for people to share what they’re working on and get ideas and insights from others. Foster the feeling that there is no such thing as a dumb idea to ensure everyone is comfortable weighing in with their thoughts before self-censorship kicks in. Also, uncover interests or hidden creativity that can help with future projects by starting a meeting with a fun, non-work-related question like: What’s your favorite movie and why?

For more about the survey and how to address some of the production processes that are hindering creativity, read our article on “The key mistakes you may be overlooking in your creative production process.”

The post Four ways to ensure your production processes don’t kill creativity appeared first on Digiday.