Month: November 2019

In the last four months, Google has been exploring what restricted third-party cookie use in Chrome would look like by releasing industry research on how it would impact publisher revenue, laying out proposals for building a more private web, and using machine learning to manage ad frequency.

Most recently, the proposals, set out in its Privacy Sandbox, which it launched in August, are an opportunity for each side of the ad ecosystem to throw in their hat. As Chrome controls 65% of the global browser share, according to StatCounter Global Stats, it’s a cause many parties — including Google, a predominantly ad-funded business — have a vested interest in. Now, the platform has to balance making sure it doesn’t kill off publishers or advertisers — a huge source of its revenue — while remaining compliant under new privacy laws.

“Chrome and Google’s ads business, they talk to each other, but they don’t necessarily play in the same space,” said Daniel Powell-Rees, revenue operations director at publisher Dennis. “Google is being responsible for asking for feedback for the sandbox. We don’t know how long a solution can last for before it turns into whack-a-mole. There is more than one way to do things; the industry is in an exploration phase.”

Members of the industry are feeding into how the proposals could shape up over the coming months through events and workshops hosted by Google, trade bodies and vendors. Publishers are dedicating resources to understanding the impacts of restricted third-party cookies on Chrome. Immediate Media estimates the same number of people who block ads on average across its 50 sites — around 10% of users — would also opt-out of being tracked by third-party cookies on Chrome. Ad-blocking rates — which have stabilized in Europe to between 20% and 25% — provide a fair estimate of the size of an audience that is concerned enough about privacy to seek out ways to protect it. But the impact any changes Chrome will make will vary depending on each publisher’s audience demographic.

Publishers have a checkered history with Google and its market dominance but are mostly unable to forgo reliance on its tech stack. Critics suggest Google is serving its own interests masked by a privacy approach, but this shuts down any open debate, said Alessandro De Zanche, director, ADZ Strategies.

“The industry has to decide if it prefers the cat-and-mouse game happening now with most browsers or Google’s open approach [which will] be discussed and potentially criticized publicly,” he said.

However, there are questions around Google’s proposals and how much the tech giant should be the arbiter for how a new digital ad ecosystem should operate.

To avoid using third-party cookies to track users across domains, Google is exploring federated learning of cohorts frameworks, which at a basic level, is a more privacy-compliant way of using machine learning algorithms that run on the device to group people together into audience interests based on browser behavior. As the data stays on users’ devices, and users share small amounts of aggregated data, the model builds and becomes more robust, representing groups of people in the thousands rather than individuals, so deemed more privacy compliant. Federated learning of cohort frameworks initially was imagined to support non-ad-related purposes with privacy by design, like predictive text without the content of the message leaving the user’s device. Using this framework, Google hopes to build privacy-safe models that could, for example, help agencies identify the optimal groups of users more likely to engage with a luxury ad, for instance.

“The issue is, you still end up with one person owning the artificial intelligence model that’s created,” said Nicholas Halstead, CEO and founder of Infosum, which provides a platform alternative to privacy-compliant audience targeting. “Do people trust Google to run that across devices?”

The size and scale of these black boxes are questions repeated by industry execs across other areas of Google’s proposed alternatives. Elsewhere, Google’s alternative to click-through measurement has raised questions about how watertight in protecting user privacy it is: The conversion metadata (a pilar of the proposal) could be used to make a link between publisher and advertiser users. Google has responded suggesting adding additions to the data in the form of fake conversions to prevent re-identification. Beyond remaining a potential privacy risk, the alternative would limit cross-device conversion measurement which has become quite standard in the industry.

“Some proposals are really interesting and could enable us to continue supporting the ad ecosystem, like measurement and audience targeting,” the exec said. “But the proposals do have limitations, and we need to be aware of them so we can continue to build businesses around advertising.”

The resurgence of publisher alliances like Ozone and other alliances in Europe are being pitched as privacy-first solutions that can offer alternatives to the third-party cookies that are being prohibited. Publishers are also making their first-party data work harder and are exploring how they can ask more readers to log in.

“We need to plan for the long term and accept that we are in a time of change and disruption,” said De Zanche.

The post As Apple stakes out an aggressive pro-privacy stance, Google occupies middle ground appeared first on Digiday.

These moves are designed to navigate around a set of ad buyer perceptions that have frustrated publishers for years: That publishers’ ad platforms offer inventory that is commoditized, at scale that doesn’t measure up to large demand-side platforms, which makes it hard to justify the training and brainpower that a platform asks of a buying team.

The easiest solution — taking inventory out of open exchanges and making it exclusive to one’s buying platform — is also the least practical; few publishers could withstand the short-term pain of losing out on that display revenue. So instead, publishers are betting that different pitches will catch ad buyers’ ears, while hoping that a swing back toward contextual targeting provides its own nudge.

“We’re making sure we’re building the system and the tools to have those conversations,” said Scott Hendrickson, svp of revenue at News Corp.

Larger publishers, particularly those that control large portfolios of titles, have been trying to grow their own advertising platforms for years. Condé Nast launched Spire, its own data and ad targeting product, back in 2016. That same year, Time Inc. acquired a controlling stake in Viant Technologies, a self-service ad buying platform that offered buyers a chance to target people across devices, using a mixture of different publishers’ first-party data (Meredith, which acquired Time Inc. in 2017, sold that stake in Viant back to its founders earlier this month).

Vox Media took a deliberate approach to adding clients to its ad platform. When it announced programmatic buying on Concert at the end of 2017, Vox Media started out by working with small handfuls of advertisers it had established relationships with, rather than throwing the doors open to anybody who was interested.

The idea continues to intrigue publishers. Back in September, The Washington Post unveiled Zeus Insights, the first piece of a product called Zeus Prime which, in its final form, will allow advertisers to target audiences using a self-serve platform; Hearst Audience Select, a self-serve platform aimed at direct-to-consumer brands and smaller advertisers, officially went live on Nov. 11.

But publishers’ dreams for these platforms have to confront marketers’ realities. Many agencies say that the value provided by the publishers’ products doesn’t necessarily justify the added work of learning how to use the publisher’s platform, or the premium that comes from going direct, versus buying in an open exchange.

“It comes down to how much you can use that across your business,” said Kait Boulos, vp of marketing at the media agency Varick. “There are certain DSPs that you want your team to know inside and out, and then there are a ton of ancillary offerings out there where it might be really good, but you can’t scale it.”

Buyers also say that these platforms also face a problem familiar to most publishers: scale. While most of the publishers that have invested in ad platforms are large by media standards, they still do not have the scale available on platforms such as The Trade Desk, or Facebook. What’s more, the component parts of those publishers’ combined audiences are different enough that working with them individually often makes more sense.

“If you’re looking at a reach and frequency play, we can use the DSPs of the world,” said Max Germain, svp and digital director, East, at the media agency Assembly. “If you’re looking for a true, branded moment, it makes sense to utilize their properties [individually].”

Some publishers, such as Hearst Magazines, have taken a pragmatic approach to this dilemma with Audience Select. While the platform is open to any kind of buyer, its first customers will be smaller fish that do not have the scale needs that global advertisers have.

“The more niche buyers we’re talking to have a very great interest in our inventory, but they don’t have buying seats on those platforms,” said Charles Wolrich, gm of the Hearst Data Studio. “The only option they have is an IO [insertion order], which creates inefficiencies.”

Publishers have also begun dangling carrots in front of advertisers. Back in May, Condé Nast announced it would guarantee results in key business metrics, such as store visits or increased sales, for any advertiser that spent at least a quarter of a million dollars on a campaign using Condé’s Prime Web ad units.

Proprietary units are one way around the perception that ad inventory on these platforms is available elsewhere. But for smaller advertisers, particularly newer ones, the focus on business goals might be more important. Karalyn Zamora, the director of marketing and growth for Gravity Products, said Gravity doesn’t advertise on publisher platforms because she thinks they aren’t as sophisticated as Google. Most of Gravity’s spending, Zamora said, is concentrated on social platforms, but Zamora said she thinks that display, when paired with a branded message, can help contribute to sales. But in deciding whether to spend on a publisher’s ad platform, Zamora said, transparency and validation are more important than any gaudy audience or data stats.

“We’ve gotten pitches from companies that say they have 10-100 million-plus in monthly uniques,” Zamora wrote in an email. “Then we see the data on our end that shows its impact being not as meaningful.”

The post Publishers try new tacks to drum up interest in their ad platforms appeared first on Digiday.

You’re currently pregnant. What’s it like to be pregnant and a creative director at a large holding company agency?
I haven’t seen anybody be pregnant and be a creative before, let alone a creative director. It sucks not to know what that’s like because I haven’t seen anyone do it before. There hasn’t been much in the way of female leadership at our agency.

Are you preparing for parental leave? How’s the policy?
It used to be that you would qualify to go on disability, but that’s the same thing as if you break your arm. I found that to be kind of insulting. It’s not like I’m disabled. I’m having a child. They recently changed the policy after some employees made the case for it to be changed, and it’s much better now. But I hear from friends of mine about how bad the policies are at their agencies, like one of my friends just has the PTO she has saved up to use and that’s it. It’s not just advertising, though. Parental leave is bad in any industry.

It’s getting close to the holidays and crunch time for Super Bowl ads. That can be a busy time. Do you feel overworked?
Everyone has been very cognizant that I’m pregnant, but we have been super, super busy. There was one instance where I was asked to work the weekend on a Friday afternoon for a pitch. It doesn’t normally bother me to be asked to work a lot, but I was clearly very pregnant and I feel like it’s weird to ask someone who’s very pregnant to work on a pitch over the weekend.

Has there been any change post-Me Too in the culture of the agency?
A lot of women are trying to rally together to be supportive of each other. We’ve tried to initiate some mentorship programs. But there’s still a lot of bro culture around. It’s surprising that it still exists.

How so?
There are still some ECDs who have their bros. It’s very present sometimes in the assignments that are given and a bit of the culture. I’ve had younger creatives come up and say that they feel it. Others have asked for advice on how to handle it. They say they aren’t really connecting with their co-workers because they’re not bro-y. There isn’t much you can do to fix it other than to learn to not get emotionally affected by it.

What about on the business side? Is your agency feeling the shift to project-based work? If so, has it changed the culture?
It’s definitely an interesting time. It’s scary yet exciting and totally different. Our company has clients who have been there for 40 years, but we’re also now seeing that a lot of the clients are going project-based across the industry, which is totally new. So how do we change our entire business model to go with that flow? We are pivoting.

How do you pivot? Are you staffing up and down as needed?
I think so. Personally, it’s like how do you become more nimble in your work, how do you do things faster and leaner and more efficiently?

Is it nerve-wracking to see all of that change?
For me, not really. If it doesn’t work out with this large agency I know I can go somewhere else. Maybe advertising in this sense won’t be a thing anymore in the next couple of years, and you’ll have to evolve and make something completely new, but that doesn’t scare me. 

But do people in the office talk about the shift to project work a lot?
All the time. Other people are freaking out. It’s very apparent that you need to evolve. It might be OK, or it might totally crumble. In general, people are worried that clients want more project-based work rather than long-term. That’s the immediate change we’re seeing, the money that’s coming in. Instead of us pitching multimillion-dollar accounts over a few years, now it’s less than a million for one project. There’s just less stability.

If more clients want to go project-based, does that mean your pitching more often?
We’re pitching kind of the same amount, but it’s smaller pitches — that’s all. We’ve been putting smaller teams on them because it is smaller business, but we’re still going at them the same way. It’s just fewer people. If anything, I think it’s better because I get more responsibility. When there are fewer people, you’re more involved. When there was a giant client, they would put like 20 [creative] teams on it, but now they put just one or two. It’s a lot more fun now because you’re more involved.

With fewer people on staff, does that change the mood?
It does make you nervous. You wonder how it’s affecting the place that you work. Will it make the agency smaller and better, or is it getting smaller and not going to be open for much longer? That’s what runs through people’s minds. But then again, on the creative side, you get more opportunities because there are fewer people so you get more access to more briefs. I’m still there, so I look at it as a positive opportunity rather than being scared of what’s going to happen. There’s nothing you can do anyway, so you might as well make the most of it.

The post ‘I haven’t seen anyone be pregnant and a creative before’: Confessions of an agency creative director appeared first on Digiday.

Vudu premiered its first original show in September and is assembling a slate of 12 more original programs to premiere next year. Vudu has set the budgets for projects to range from $4 million to $10 million, according to a media exec familiar with the matter. Even setting aside the six programs already in production or development for 2020 debuts, that’s at least $24 million to $60 million that Walmart will be shelling out on top of the service’s existing costs.

Netflix and Disney are willing to spend billions of dollars on original programming because that’s the business they are in. They make shows and movies so that people will pay them to watch those shows and movies. But that’s not why Walmart is in the business, and why it may be getting out of the business.

Vudu’s original shows and movies are available for free and subsidized by ads and sponsorships to promote products sold by Walmart. Given that, the venture has been effectively an expensive marketing effort — made more expensive by the fact that Vudu has struggled to attract advertisers — and appears to have become too costly for Walmart to stomach much longer. The Information reported in October that Walmart is considering selling Vudu, in part, because of the costs to support the streamer.

Walmart is not the first company to dabble in entertainment in hopes of growing another business — ex. Verizon-Go90 — and it won’t be the last.

Mailchimp and Shopify are newer entrants. In June, Mailchimp debuted a digital entertainment platform, featuring a roster of original shows, that is meant to help cut its marketing costs. However, media and entertainment execs said that the email marketing provider has offered to pay companies six figures per episode for shows, leading them to believe its entertainment ambitions extend beyond branded content.

Shopify has also been somewhat enigmatic. One entertainment exec who met with the commerce platform earlier this year said Shopify is fashioning itself as a producer, looking for shows that it can sell to Netflix, Amazon or a TV network and then promote its involvement through its own channels. Shopify’s recent hire of entertainment vet Sarah North to run its 10-month-old TV and movie production arm Shopify Studios offers further evidence. However, a media exec who met with Shopify this fall was asked to pitch an idea for a sales competition show and came away feeling like Shopify viewed the relationship as more client-agency than producing partners.

Like Walmart, Mailchimp and Shopify appear to be trying to straddle both marketing and entertainment. The streaming wars may force them to pick a side.

The post Streaming wars are starting to claim casualties appeared first on Digiday.

Being able to sell ads in online auctions frees ITV to go after those advertisers that have enjoyed the targeting of online video but are concerned over the safety of their brands in those environments. Some advertisers were so concerned earlier this year that they started using the budget they would have spent on online video to buy addressable ads in streaming programming. With Platform V, ITV wants to compete with a wider array of media owners.

“Planet V is a significant step forward for us, meeting the widening demands of advertisers and bringing ITV’s unparalleled combination of mass simultaneous reach and targeted advertising,” said Kelly Williams, managing director for commercial at ITV. Updates to the platform will come in the months after its launch, providing what Williams said would be the “very best frictionless, data-driven buy in a premium, brand-safe environment for our clients.”

The promise of addressable TV — bringing targeted advertising to classical broadcast TV — has been bandied about for a while. Commercial broadcasters like ITV have resisted building out their own addressable TV businesses until now because to do so risks putting their content into online auctions where the premium they charge can be chipped away by an algorithm that values an eyeball like any other. But the risks of those online auctions no longer outweigh their potential. People spend more time watching VOD content, which is fueling a market that will be worth €825 million ($705 million) by 2020 across the U.K., Germany, Italy, France and Spain, according to ad tech vendor SpotX.

“This presents an exciting and much-needed opportunity for increased transparency and efficiency across linear and VoD advertising,” said Jamie Clilverd, video and display director for media agency The Specialist Works.

Whether ITV is able to eat into online video budgets could come down to economics. Addressable TV is expensive. A cost-per-thousand impression is around £35 ($45) on ITV, said one media buyer on the condition of anonymity. In comparison, it costs between £10 ($13) and £15 ($19) to run ads on TV, depending on the audience the advertiser wants to reach. For advertisers to buy those impressions, they need to be able to justify that the higher price and limited levels of exposure on a mass-reach channel like TV offset the cost of using data to target households and individuals.

“We had a client that was looking at addressable TV solution where they were paying £3 ($3.85) a CPM to hit a broad audience, which inflated up to £13 ($16.70) when you put one or two audience segments into that buy. And it didn’t justify that outlay when you’re an advertiser that works on short-term metrics. It doesn’t justify the multiplication of a base CPM,” said Henry Daglish, founder of The7stars media agency startup Bountiful Cow.

The post Inside ITV’s plan to sell programmatic ads in streaming programming next year appeared first on Digiday.