Month: November 2019

Invest in talent
Bon Appétit’s influencer treatment of its editors was a deliberate decision editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport made when he joined in 2011, but he didn’t anticipate exactly how it would translate across platforms like Instagram and podcasts. “Everything had to be from the minds and bellies of the Bon Appétit editors. I wanted the users and listeners to feel as if they were traveling with us and cooking with us and hanging out with us.”

When Condé Nast moved into the new World Trade Center in 2015, Rapoport noticed his staff hanging out in the test kitchen and thought it’d be a good idea to bring in cameras to film editors simply being themselves. “How do we make [editors] feel like themselves and not try to be a morning show host or be a TV cooking show host?”

The November issue, which features eight different covers for each Test Kitchen editor, coincided with Bon Appétit’s YouTube series, “Making Perfect,” with each of the nearly hour-long episodes featuring recipes found in the print issue.

Condé Nast’s head of marketing, Bree McKenney, said promotion of the Thanksgiving issue gave Bon Appétit a 616% increase in print subscribers across native digital channels compared to the same time last year. “The video success is tying back to our legacy product in print.”

But as successful as this talent-based strategy has been for Bon Appétit, it isn’t necessarily something that Eater or other publishers want to replicate fully.

“I don’t want [our editors] to be known as influencers in the way that we think about influencers today,” Amanda Kludt, Eater’s editor-in-chief said. “There’s no talent contract or interacting with our sponsors. Once you cross that line, it can be hard to get that integrity back when you report on brands and restaurants every day.”

The New York Times food editor Sam Sifton said that while many of his section’s contributors, like Melissa Clark, are brands in their own right, they aren’t seen or treated as influencers. Sifton has been successful in luring food contributors with large social followings, like Alison Roman (who used to work at Bon Appétit and BuzzFeed) and Serious Eats’ J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.

“An argument could be made we’re pretty big influencers, but it’s not a label we cherish or look for, and it’s certainly not a goal,” Sifton said. “All of us share one thing in common: Our last name is The New York Times. It’s the height of that platform that allows all of us to succeed with different voices.”

Embrace as many video platforms as possible
Both Bon Appétit and now, Eater, have OTT streaming channels, too. Bon Appétit launched its channel on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Android TV in February, and it debuted at No. 1 on Apple’s “Apps We Love” list. McKenney said average watch time on Bon Appétit’s streaming channel is more than an hour per person.

Eater debuted its Roku channel on Monday and eventually plans to add Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV channels. It also has a PBS broadcast series, “No Passport Required,” and is launching its first Hulu series, “Eater’s Guide to the World,” next year. Vox Media Studios also cut a multi-year deal with chef David Chang’s Majordomo Media and Chrissy Teigen’s Suit & Thai Productions to develop and produce food-related media content for Hulu.

Go for the subscription model
Recipes are particularly challenging for media brands to claim as their own. In the U.S., the core part of a recipe isn’t protected by copyright law but some, like The Times, have found ways to monetize them.

Sifton said that the idea behind the Cooking app and subscription, which debuted in 2017, was to revive the more than 17,000 “dead article assets that lived in our morgue.”

A subscription to The Times’ collection of recipes isn’t included in the paper’s basic digital subscription; access costs an additional $5 a month, or $40 a year. In the third quarter, The Times had a total of 856,000 subscriptions for both its Cooking and Crossword products and they alone brought in some $24.6 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2019, representing 7.8% of total revenues from all digital subscription products.

“The truth about recipes is there are probably only 10 or 11 recipes in the whole world, anywhere,” said Sifton. “You can get that roast chicken recipe by going to a search engine. Go ahead. I’m prouder of our roast chicken because I know the reporting that went into creating that recipe.”

“Most recipe sites are all ad-driven,” said Amanda Rottier, The Times’ head of new products and ventures. “And Google is their best friend. They rely on SEO to generate page views.” But The Times felt confident enough to develop a subscription-based app. “There is a precedent in the market with America’s Test Kitchen. People also buy cookbooks. People still buy food content,” Rottier said.

The Times doesn’t have any plans yet to combine its recipe content with its restaurant reviews, but Sifton said “that would be a logical next step.”

As for Bon Appétit, whose recipe content is currently free, Rapoport said putting up a paywall “is something we definitely have our eyes on and want to figure out.”

Play host
Bringing community to life at events is yet another way to engage and build audiences, as well as generate revenue.

The Infatuation, the restaurant reviews publisher also in the midst of relaunching Zagat, hosted 65 events last year, including the popular EEEEEATSCON in New York and Los Angeles which together drew a total of 17,000 attendees.

The Times, Eater and Bon Appétit all hosted events this year in New York City that all three plan to repeat next year.

The Times’ Food Festival was spread out over the course of two days this October, and drew 54,000 attendees.

Eater drew a few mixed reviews for its sold-out Eater Young Guns Summit, a celebration of up-and-coming chefs held in July — there was a shortage of food for lunch at one point. Nevertheless, Vox Media publisher and cofounder Melissa Bell said the summit proved that this was a franchise worth repeating and could generate revenues, even with the relatively low ticket price of $60, which was purposely meant to attract younger audiences. “More than 800 people gathered in Brooklyn for a day,” Bell said. Grey Goose Vodka was a major sponsor.

In October, Bon Appétit evolved its annual BA Hot 10 Restaurants party into Best Weekend Ever, which included 14 different events, most of which were hosted by its Test Kitchen editors. “We had 3,000 people across all four days,” said McKenney. “Every single event sold out. Our ticket prices ranged from $1,500 for an all-access pass to general admission to the party, which was $20 a ticket.”

Mix content and commerce
The Times is constructing a new studio kitchen near its Hell’s Kitchen headquarters, scheduled to open next year. The last time the paper had a space like this, Sifton said, was in the 1970s, and it was much smaller.

“It’s not just a place to develop and test recipes, but also serves to amount to a stage set or studio environment in which we can tell more stories about food and cooking in front of a video camera,” Sifton said.

Eater, which isn’t necessarily known for developing recipes, also has its own New York-based test kitchen — formerly owned by David Chang’s Lucky Peach — in which it films a variety of different videos, including a Kitchen Gadget Test Show. The space also doubles as a venue for hosting ticketed wine clubs and book clubs that pay for themselves, but could eventually become sources of additional revenue.

Time Out is going all-in on food halls. The first Time Out Market opened in Lisbon in 2014 and last year it drew 3.9 million visitors, making it one of the city’s most popular attractions.

“It’s not just a brand extension — it’s a new and important revenue generator for the company at the same time,” said Julio Bruno, Time Out Group CEO. “It’s a 360-degree view of the Time Out media brand where you have chefs you talk about and they’re also part of your offering. It allows us to have a business that much more integrated.”

Since opening Lisbon, Time Out has added markets in Miami, New York and Boston, with other markets scheduled to open in Chicago and Montreal by the end of this year.

For the first half of 2019, the markets generated approximately $8.5 million in net revenue (£6.6 million), up 72% from the same period last year. Total transaction value in the first half of 2019, Bruno said, was £21.8 million or $27.9 million. By next year, analysts predict 60% of Time Out Group’s revenues will come from its food hall business.

Bon Appétit doesn’t have plans to open a food hall or restaurant anytime soon, but it did launch a delivery-only restaurant concept, or ghost kitchen, in partnership with Chicago-based restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises and Grubhub in September.

Kludt said she has no plans to get into the restaurant business anytime soon, but Eater might consider curating dining options at a stadium, as long as Eater doesn’t have to double as a landlord.

“I think for us the conflict of interest is too real because we cover so many of these operations,” she said. “Opening our own restaurant would be a very big distraction for us, and restaurants are an even harder business to run than a media company.”

Food52’s e-commerce business accounts for 75% of its revenues and The Times, Bon Appétit and Eater are all looking at ways to get deeper into e-commerce.

Sifton said The Times is looking for ways to collaborate more with its peers at The Wirecutter, while Bon Appétit plans to do quarterly merchandise drops.

Kludt said now that New York Magazine’s The Strategist is a part of Vox Media, she hopes “they can teach us about doing e-commerce really well, and do it in a way that’s enjoyable and doesn’t feel cheap.”

Vox’s Bell added that there are no plans to fold New York Magazine’s Grub Street brand into Eater, either: “We have no plans to change that.”

Eater is, however, planning to expand its extensions into travel. Earlier this year, it partnered with tour operator Black Tomato to bring its food-focused travel guides to life in the form of pre-packed trips.

With all of their respective ventures, it’s clear these publishers are doing exactly what you’d do with any recipe: tinkering as much as possible.

“We take calculated risks and we’re building on the work that’s come before, and we’re putting our audience first and being strategic and calculated over time about what experiments to try,” Bell said.

And, as Rapoport noted, there’s no better time than now when interest in food is so high: “Strike while the iron is hot.”

The post ‘People still buy food content’: What food media is doing right in finding sustainable models appeared first on Digiday.

Politico is betting big on Protocol. It has hired “several dozen” journalists, according to Vanity Fair, and Politico CEO Robert Allbritton has aspirations for Protocol to be “as big, if not bigger than, Politico.”

“There is a void in tech journalism,” the Protocol pitch deck begins.”Today’s coverage of the industry and its impact is too biased, too commoditized, and too broad to add real value for executives, influencers and 
decision-makers.”

Protocol will focus on the following “narratives”:

• Existential struggles between the disruptors and the disrupted.
• Fight for power within the tech industry.
• Battles between tech giants and government regulators.
• International conflicts over trade and technology.
• Profound questions about tech’s impact on people and the planet.

At launch, the ad inventory Protocol will be focused on daily news briefings, which will be distributed as email newsletters, podcasts and via messaging software like Slack. A slide in the deck suggests that advertisers will have an opportunity to distribute through Slack, though Protocol’s general manager, Bennett Richardson, said it had not yet finalized plans for how that would work. Protocol will also offer ad and sponsorship opportunities on a separate product that will gather up opinions and analysis from influential people in a sector responding to a specific question, Richardson said.

In addition to Braintrust and its Daily Briefings, Protocol will offer guides on important topics, such as autonomous vehicles, which will live on its site, as podcasts and as videos, as well as interviews which could include everything from office hours with Protocol reporters to news-making interviews with high-profile subjects. Those conversations will manifest both as digital interactions, in the form of Slack or text messages, as well as in-person events, in the form of large-scale events or more intimate dinners.

After years on the fringes of business and national news coverage, technology companies and storylines have now become center stage, both because of the importance of issues such as digital privacy and cybersecurity and because of the disruption technology is causing in previously mature industries. According to Richardson, Protocol intends to capitalize on that by eventually building subscription products aimed at industry readers trying to understand how technology is disrupting health care or retail.

Protocol is committed to launching in the first quarter of 2020, though Richardson said it was not certain that the site would be up and running in time for CES, the first high-profile event on the tech news calendar.

Excerpts from Protocol’s pitch deck can be found below.

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Last year, the company — now known as With Clarity following a rebrand this past June by Frank Collective — generated $18 million in revenue with the average order value coming in at roughly $7,000. Shah isn’t alone in his mission to DTC-ify engagement and wedding rings. A glut of DTC brands have cropped up recently, all with the aim of changing how you shop for an engagement ring. Instead of going to a brick-and-mortar jewelry store, brands like With Clarity, Erstwhile Jewelry, Manly Bands, Majesty Diamonds, Brilliant Earth and Vrai, among others, are looking to sway millennial consumers to purchase engagement (and wedding) rings online. 

Founders of DTC engagement and wedding ring brands believe that millennials would rather research and buy their rings at home, free of the pressure to plunk down thousands from a pushy jewelry store sales rep. Engagement rings aren’t cheap — the average ring costs $5,764, per research from The Knot. The founders also say that the wave of DTC mattress companies making big purchases online has been normalized for younger generations. 

“It’s a high-priced item, and it’s not an impulse buy,” said Manly Bands founder Johnathan Ruggiero, adding that this year Manly Bands will garner nearly “eight figures” in sales. “What really blazed the trail for the rest of us were the mattress companies. Never in my life did I think I’d buy a mattress online. But we’ve seen the online advertising. You get used to it, and it’s lifted the barrier to entry [into DTC] for luxury items. People are comfortable buying a $2000 mattress online, so they might as well buy a wedding ring.”

It makes sense that DTC founders would eye the cash cow that is the wedding industry. It’s big business: The wedding industry is expected to generate $76 billion in revenue this year alone, according to IBIS World research. There are roughly 2.4 million weddings every year in the U.S., per U.S. Census data, which also calculated that as of 2017 there are approximately 5,800 weddings a day. 

“The wedding industry was long overdue for reinvention,” said Caroline Seklir, strategy director at YARD NYC. “Millennials are looking for brands that fit into and understand their lifestyles — and many of the traditional players in the space had begun to feel stuffy — more like their parents’ brands than their brand. So we’ve seen everything from wedding dresses to registries move online and into styles that are geared to a millennial’s lifestyle and price point. They want quality, but without the markup, and that’s what DTC can offer.”

As for the wealth of DTC engagement and wedding jewelry companies, Erstwhile Jewelry co-founder Alisa Klusner sees a shift in the jewelry business in general. “It used to be very insular,” said Klusner. “People would study at the GIA [or Gemological Institute of America]. Then they would apprentice. Now, all the information is at your fingertips. Because it’s so accessible you can be a little bit of an expert in a field without apprenticing. It’s become democratized.” 

It’s not just the democratization of the jewelry business, said Klusner, but the way “the internet and social media has democratized access to customers. Jewelers used to rely solely on department stores and smaller retailers for an introduction to clients, unless they could afford to open their own brick and mortar store, which often was out of range. But launching a website is far more cost-effective and launching a social media account is free.” 

The DTC engagement and wedding ring brands use the typical DTC playbook of Google, Facebook and Instagram ads to get consumer attention. Some, like With Clarity, are careful not to mention price in those ads as they don’t want to make the experience feel less premium. Others, like Majesty Diamonds, have leaned into the price differentiation.

“With the amount of time people spend on Facebook and Instagram, it’s the perfect place to push anything, even wedding rings,” said Paula Serafino, vp, Integrated Media Director at GYK Antler. “[People] are searching and pinning their dream wedding venue, dress and ring.  Facebook and Instagram’s algorithm will make certain those DTC brands are front and center of the consumer at the right time, fully understanding their level of intent, and once they find the right consumer, it’s an easy sale.”

“It’s ironic that people would rather be targeted with ads than be bothered by in-store salespeople, but overall, the DTC model does put less pressure on people to make immediate decisions and gives them more control,” said Jason Miller, vp of social media and public relations, OH Partners. “Imagine being able to tag your partner or fiancé in a few Instagram posts of rings you like versus having to take a day or longer to drive around and visit ring shops. It’s a game-changer and fits seamlessly into how the next generation of couples likely want to plan their big day.”

People often ask friends for recommendations as to where to buy an engagement or wedding ring, and DTC founders believe their brands will benefit from that as people tend to tag the brands they purchase from online and tout them in their posts. “One of the most shareable moments in your life is when you get engaged,” said Shah. 

Of course, simply being able to target consumers with ads and give millennials the kind of online experience they desire doesn’t guarantee it will work for everyone. A millennial male who asked for anonymity as he is planning to propose this weekend and doesn’t want to blow the surprise shared that while he tried Brilliant Earth and With Clarity after being targeted with Instagram ads, the online purchase route wasn’t for him. 

“It didn’t feel personal, and I feel like you need to be walked through a purchase like this from start to finish,” he said. “I also had photos of what she might like and trying to build that stuff online was miserable. My friends stressed that they were able to secure deals by dealing with jewelers directly as well. I’m a big fan of many of the DTC brands out there, but this wasn’t one of the situations where I was going eschew tradition.”

The post ‘Geared to a millennial’s lifestyle’: Engagement and wedding rings have gone DTC appeared first on Digiday.

Historically, media companies like Disney haven’t had much access to people’s email addresses. It doesn’t have direct relationships with the people who buy tickets to its films, watch its TV networks or purchase its merch from third-party retailers. But Disney has been trying to change that. It has a Disneyland app for people to log in to buy tickets. It has ESPN’s ESPN+ subscription-based streaming service. It has Hulu. And now it has Disney+.

Disney doesn’t really do things in a silo. It makes movies that it promotes on its TV networks and turns into rides at its amusement parks where it also sells toys and clothes featuring characters from the films that also appear on its cruise ships and at its vacation resorts. The direct relationships and data provided by Disney’s direct-to-consumer products are a way for Disney to deploy that strategy in the digital world and apply it to a convergent advertising business.

The ad sales unification also continues. In 2017, the company combined ad sales for ABC and some of its cable TV networks. A year later Disney added ESPN’s ad sales to the fold and signed a deal with Google to consolidate the ad tech across its digital properties. The next phase in this fusing is to bring together Disney’s linear TV and digital ad inventory so that campaigns can be served across platforms. 

Disney’s attempt to unify its ad business has had setbacks. Glitches from the switch to Google’s ad tech sacrificed millions of dollars in revenue, according to The Information. However, that could push Disney to eventually bring its ad tech infrastructure in-house by switching to BAMTech, the streaming technology provider it acquired in 2017 that powers the company’s streaming services, including Disney+. That technology has not been error-proof. But it is Disney’s technology serving Disney’s audience with Disney’s content and could be used to serve Disney-sold ads targeted using Disney’s data. It’s a Disney world, and we’re just living in it.

The post The Rundown: Disney+ is going to help Disney’s ad business appeared first on Digiday.

One key alternative it’s working on is federated learning of cohorts, which is a way for browsers to continue allowing interest-based advertising on the web: Instead of observing the browsing behavior of individuals, companies observe the behavior of a cohort (or “flock”) of similar people. Here’s a primer on what to know.

First, what are we talking about here?
More broadly, federated learning uses machine learning to build a robust model without sharing personally identifiable data, a positive step forward given that everyone agrees privacy is a hot-button issue at the moment.

At a high level, the system uses machine learning to train an algorithm across multiple decentralized devices without sharing or exchanging the data from those devices, that data remains stored locally. This makes it much more privacy-compliant. It differs from other centralized machine-learning systems where all data is uploaded to one server. It’s also different from distributed learning in a few ways; for instance, distributed learning assumes all the data sets are identical. In federated learning systems, the data can vary hugely.

So how does Google plan to use federated learning? And why now?
A few months ago, Google set out proposals for federated learning of cohorts, which uses machine learning algorithms that run on the device to group people together into audience interests based on behavior like browser history. Through self-learning, the model builds and becomes more robust, with the flocks representing groups of thousands of people rather than individuals, so is deemed more privacy compliant. This model can then be used to let agencies and advertisers identify the optimal audience segment that are more likely to engage with an ad for a finance or luxury client, for instance.

Makes sense. What’s new about this?
These systems have been around for a while for non-ad related purposes. One of the earlier examples of FLoC frameworks came from Google’s Keyboard, Gboard, to train its smartphone keyboards to use predictive text. Privacy regulations meant it was impossible for Google to upload all the input text data from people’s phones to its own server to train the algorithm to guess the right words. The amount of data that the system would suck up from users’ phones would be prohibitive too. Facebook also uses federated learning for improving its apps and also in its publisher and advertiser products. The main benefit is it uses privacy by design.

Sounds great. What’s the catch?
There are a few. Google has been getting feedback from across the ad industry about how some of its proposals around developing a privacy-first ad-funded web. But critics are wary of letting Google hold the keys to the artificial intelligence model that it created. Google’s FLoC has come under fire for potentially allowing bad actors to still access sensitive data. Each browser’s flock name identifies it as a type of web user, shared in the HTTP header, which is shared with everyone they interact with on the web.

What about other industries?
There will be more federated learning systems to come. There are applications in industries beyond advertising, including defense, telecommunications and healthcare. Applications are being explored for training self-driving cars, as federated learning would limit the high volume of data that needs to be transferred (in more traditional cloud-based machine learning) and speed up the process.

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Twitter’s sense of what users are interested in can be broad and somewhat puzzling. A search of the author of this article’s “Interests from Twitter” page included topics ranging from “water” and “egg” to “weather” and “孫正義” — SoftBank’s billionaire CEO Masayoshi Son. (You can click here to view your own.)

Maria Karaoli, media activation business director at media agency Essence, said she thinks Topics “will allow Twitter to offer more accurate and detailed interest targeting because users will actively select which topics to follow.”

In an emailed statement, JP Maheu, Twitter vp of U.S. client services, said topics will make it easier for users to follow their interests, adding that the cultural relevance of brands feeds into consumers’ purchase decisions.

“Topics is yet another resource that empowers not only consumers but also marketers. From topics like painting, to NBA, or Game of Thrones, the new feature will enable brands to increase their cultural relevance and build equity with audiences,” Maheu said. “We look forward to exploring how we can integrate these cues into our future ad products.”

While the product update might seem iterative from a consumer perspective, enhancing its ad targeting around specific topics and events could be a differentiator in the eyes of advertisers, particularly in the build-up to big events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars that tend to command high ad prices, said Shamsul Chowdhury, vp paid social at digital agency Jellyfish. And enhancement to Twitter’s ad targeting was needed, Chowdhury said.

Chowdhury also added that Twitter has stumbled in the past when launching new ad products. Chowdhury recalled that in a previous role, one of his clients was among the first to run a Promoted Moment, but the campaign underperformed and “wasn’t picking up what we necessarily thought it would for the price tag.”

“Oftentimes advertisers are very unforgiving and have very short-term memories: If something comes out the gate and it’s not right, they are not going to touch it again in six months, or ever,” Chowdhury said.

Twitter’s stock nose-dived last month after the company reported third-quarter revenue and earnings that fell below analysts’ expectations. The company said unexpected bugs within its mobile app promotion products had hampered its ability to target ads effectively and report data to measurement partners. The company said it expects the blowback of the issue to continue into the fourth quarter.

Ad buyers also expect Twitter will follow its usual playbook of introducing a “sponsored” offering to Topics later down the line, much like it did with publishers’ Moments, Promoted Trends and Promoted Trend Spotlight ads within its Explore tab.

Regular ads will still sit between tweets on users’ timelines. So even before Twitter rolls out a dedicated Twitter Topics ad product, “advertisers can best leverage this opportunity through relevant targeting strategies like keyword targeting and conversation targeting to reach consumers who might be engaged with relevant topics,” according to Natalie Carder, social lead for media agency Zenith Global.

Topics could also be a boon for brands and publishers hoping to boost their organic reach on Twitter, according to social agency We Are Social’s head of strategy, Harvey Cossell. Topics could also give social media managers more clarity about the people who are influential about a particular subject.

“If your content is on the beat of the cultural discourse, then you’re going to increase the probability of being noticed,” Cossell said. “Topics can also hold lots of different points of view, so it can take you beyond your echo chamber.”

Twitter is hoping Topics will help new users with the onboarding process, encouraging them to stick around for longer even if they don’t follow or engage with many accounts. Of course, more users and increased dwell time give Twitter more chances to serve ads. Twitter said it had 126 million “monetizable daily active users” in its third quarter, up 9% year over year.

The post Ad buyers hopeful Twitter Topics will improve the platform’s ad targeting appeared first on Digiday.

“Retaining used to mean we didn’t want people to leave BuzzFeed, but now we look at it more like we want to maintain relationships with them,” said Andrea Mazey, head of talent partnerships at BuzzFeed. That means a creator doesn’t have to be a full-time BuzzFeed employee but could be an alumnus of the company or even an external content creator who hasn’t ever been associated with the brand.

The program has 31 in-house creators and five external creators, and last month the company announced the first class of creators for its travel-focused Bring Me! vertical, which includes two in-house staffers and three external creators, including a professional BMX athlete filmmaker and a couple that runs a network of food Instagram accounts.

The Try Guys, a comedy group that was formed within BuzzFeed’s video group in 2014 and later broke off in 2018 to form their own production company, gained custody of their brand rights and social media accounts in exchange for BuzzFeed serving as the group’s advertising and branded content sales representative, allowing BuzzFeed to maintain some stake in the group’s success.

BuzzFeed also uses the program in order to expand its reach into specific areas. “These audiences have unmet needs — for instance, dad content — so we look externally for the talent to meet that audience,” Mazey said.

BuzzFeed producers Jen Ruggirello and Kelsey Impicciche, who are both in the Creators Program participated in a Creators Program campaign this fall with The CW Television Network for its new show “Batwoman.” It included a branded video of Ruggirello and Impicciche transforming into characters from the show, which was promoted on the company’s YouTube page, and received nearly 1 million views on its Facebook Watch channel. A clip of the video was also shared on both creators’ Instagram channels, bringing in a total of over 25,000 likes and 110,000 views.

Refinery29, Group Nine and Condé Nast have all looked to create influencer marketing hubs. The advantage BuzzFeed has, according to Jesse Rosenschein, vp of digital and account strategy at media buying agency Mediassociates, is its ability for the talent to co-produce and star in longer-form content, as a way for brands to develop their own original series and create brand ambassadors. Additionally, she said that publishers who retain influencers as extensions of their editorial staff are likely to have properly vetted these individuals, providing more brand safety to partners.

“Influencer marketing has gotten a bad rap,” Mazey said. 

The post How BuzzFeed has built a creators network for branded content appeared first on Digiday.

This year, worldwide digital advertising spending will total $333 billion, according to eMarketer. By comparison, all the gold in the famed US government vaults of Fort Knox, Kentucky today is worth only $219 billion.

But while Fort Knox’s gold is protected by concrete walls and cutting-edge electronic security, too many companies use much less rigorous protocols to safeguard their investment in digital advertising. In some cases, advertisers even leave the metaphorical vault door open — and assume losses from fraud are an unavoidable cost of doing business online.

However, rather than accepting those losses, forward-thinking advertisers are asking themselves and their partners to think beyond baseline standards and introduce the same kind of security-grade solutions that most other industries rely upon.

How we got here
Unlike offline advertising, one of the great strengths of digital has always been campaign attribution: the ability to fully measure the impact, actions and outcomes from ads. That accountability has driven much of the growth of the digital medium. Yet, along with that growth also came new opportunities for bad actors to exploit technological gaps, supply-chain holes and lack of transparency in the marketplace.

Today, The Drum reports that the cost of global ad fraud could top $30bn in 2019. Despite massive efforts by industry players, fraud isn’t slowing down. Fraudsters have become even more sophisticated and are now launching complicated attacks that involve hacked servers, fraudulent validations, infected consumer devices and illicit distribution channels.

Fortunately, there are security-grade solutions in the market that bring together advanced analytics, massive data sets, leading security tools and deep human expertise to identify and help companies mitigate fraud.

Those security-grade solutions go beyond traditional tag-level fraud identification tools that examine the contexts of each ad wrapper to detect wrongdoing. Security-grade verification involves combining a multitude of macro data sets — such as web traffic routing patterns and known botnet detection datasets — with tag-level detection, so it can monitor not only the vault door but also activity in the bank and street outside.

A case study in security-grade detection
One example of this security-grade protection was demonstrated this past February, when a collaborative team of security and fraud researchers at Oracle exposed “DrainerBot”, an infected toolkit for app developers that created a backdoor for hidden and unseen video ads.

Apps infected with Drainerbot could waste more than 10GB of data per month, driving wasted impressions for advertisers and increased costs for consumers. The sophisticated DrainerBot scheme was initially discovered by security analysts who identified suspicious network traffic, then worked with ad fraud experts to peel back the layers of the onion.

Staying ahead of the game
If fraudsters are committed to being one step ahead, then we need to be two. As the industry invests in IVT prevention, anti-fraud technologies are advancing rapidly, and companies should work closely with their fraud verification and prevention partners to make sure they are taking advantage of the latest security-grade tools. As new and innovative ad channels gain broader acceptance (like OTT/CTV), you need to ensure that your fraud measurement and verification systems keep pace.

In short, you’ve invested a lot of advertising gold in your campaigns, so let’s make sure your vault is equipped with the best protections against the criminals who want to steal it.

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