Month: December 2019

The Guardian now joins an increasingly crowded field of publishers hoping to use Giving Tuesday to pull in donations and build reader support. This year, NewsMatch has helped almost 200 nonprofit newsrooms undertake fundraising activities, a rise from 150 last year, said Josh Stearns, a program director for the Democracy Fund. His organization helps run NewsMatch, a nonprofit that trains newsroom staff and raises awareness of the need for quality journalism.

Other organizations are invoking Giving Tuesday tie-ins as they fundraise for projects supporting local news. While recent research has suggested that the general public does not greatly understand the challenges faced by local news organizations, certainly observers of the industry do. The urgent need for news organizations to develop a new business model is part of what drives Nancy Lane, CEO of the Local Media Association, which this year launched its first large-scale Giving Tuesday effort.

“Every week we hear about a newspaper going away or reducing frequency, and this is just going to continue,” Lane said. “We don’t want incremental; we don’t want small gains. That’s not what we’re going for: We want impact.” Having set a goal of raising $150,000 by the year’s end, the association hopes to hire another person for its startup accelerator program (Accelerate Local) and also to participate in an NYC Media Lab project exploring the use of artificial intelligence for creating local news. By midday on Tuesday, the Local Media Association had raised more than $80,000.

And the Giving Tuesday phenomenon has evolved over the years. Initially launched in 2012 by the 92nd Street Y as an informal marketing campaign,  as of last July it is a standalone organization that operates year-round. Last year, Giving Tuesday’s allied payment processors collected $380 million, a rise from $274 million in 2017. Now thousands of organizations are vying for consumers’ attention — and their donations.

This crush of activity has informed the Giving Tuesday tactics of some news organizations. For example, The Forward, changed its Giving Tuesday approach this year; it hosted a Facebook Live video session, with its new editor taking questions submitted by Forward readers. The strategy? To collect donations certainly, but also to build a relationship between readers and new editor-in-chief Jodi Rudoren, who in July left The New York Times for the nonprofit media organization focused on Jewish news and culture.

“It’s something we thought would be a little bit different and connect the readers to what they’re supporting and to showcase our editorial strength and potential for the future,” said Lisa Lepson, The Forward’s vp of development.

NewsMatch has changed its tactics, too. After leaning on celebrity endorsements over the last two years, this year NewsMatch focused on training nonprofit newsrooms to create their own donation and development strategies and thereby engage directly with their readers.

“They’re the ones most suited to talk to their communities,” Stearns said. “We put a lot more effort into teaching local newsrooms how to build direct relationships with their communities.”

The training sessions began in June, Stearns said. And while his organization’s Giving Tuesday campaign scored positive financial results, Stearns considers the event an opportunity to spread an idea he hopes will become more mainstream. “People still don’t understand journalism as a thing we should be donating to,” he said.

The potential impact of the streaming wars on ad inventory availability popped up across several conversations with brand and agency execs during the recent Digiday Video Advertising Summit in Palm Springs, California. It is the latest development in a growing unease among ad buyers that, as traditional TV viewership continues to decline, they are facing a shortage of opportunities to advertise to big groups of people on the biggest screens in their homes. The concern has now turned to whether the streaming wars will accelerate the trend and to what end. This year, TV ad revenue will decline by 7% compared to last year, and while streaming offers an alternative for those ad dollars, it won’t offset the TV ad revenue decline, according to GroupM.

“What pressure is the non-ad-supported inventory putting on OTT, and how does all of that reconcile over time? The scale still sits with linear, and it moves over eventually, but how does it actually move over?” said one agency exec in summary of the question that many ad buyers are asking.

Ad-free services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are among the most popular streaming services already on the market, but whatever viewership they may siphon away from ad-supported options has yet to impact video ad budgets, said another agency exec. “But I still think it’s early days,” the exec added.

Ad buyers are worried audiences will shift from ad-supported TV to primarily ad-free streaming — and the cascading impact that will have on ad prices. As evidenced by Hulu’s limited commercials subscription tier remaining more popular than its ad-free tier, ad opportunities will continue to exist, but those opportunities will be limited as streamers typically carry fewer ads but at higher prices compared to TV networks. Connected TV ad prices are already generally higher than cable TV ad prices, at $20 to $40 CPMs for CTV ads versus $10 to $12 for cable TV ads. With eMarketer projecting U.S. advertisers to increase the money they spend on connected TV ads by 28% in 2020, the increased demand combined with a limited supply could lead to a further rise in ad prices.

NBCUniversal’s entry into the streaming wars, Peacock, will be primarily ad-supported. However it will carry fewer ads per program than its TV networks. Meanwhile, Hulu has been pushing non-traditional ad formats, such as its pause ads, as part of its effort to have non-interruptive ads account for half of its ad revenue within the next couple years. And Amazon has cut the ad load for Prime Video’s English Premier League livestreams while increasing the cost of those ads compared to traditional TV.

The prospect of Netflix adopting ads appears to be an advertiser fever dream. The streamer has repeatedly spelled out, as recently as July, that it has no plans to introduce an ad-supported tier. But ad buyers continue to contend that Netflix will need to change its mind to compete with the likes of Disney+ and Apple TV+, both of which set the prices for their respective streaming services at less than half of what people typically pay for Netflix. Additionally, Disney has bundled Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ for $13, equal to the price of Netflix’s most popular subscription tier.

“Disney just came in and laid a bombshell on the market and said this is where your rates are going to have to be. Don’t have advertising? You’re not going to survive,” said a third agency exec, whose hyperbole reflects the threat ad buyers feel they are facing.

The ad tech industry is gravitating toward a stipulation in the law that would appear to enable programmatic advertising practices to continue, albeit with some limitations and at least as a stopgap measure until the enforcement picture becomes clearer. Similar to the GDPR’s “data processor” label, the California law provides a “service provider” designation that companies can adopt in order to process people’s personal information collected by another company without the sharing of that data being considered a sale under the law. “I think the industry is going to coalesce around it,” said Thomas Chow, general counsel and secretary at PubMatic.

WTF is a service provider?
The CCPA defines a service provider as a company that processes personal information collected by another company, but only for the purposes specified in a written contract between the companies. If a person requests that a company not sell their personal information — as the CCPA gives them the right to do — the company can still share that personal information with service providers for those specified business purposes.

How is this different from how companies already handle data collected by other companies?
The difference is that a service provider is limited in what it can do with the information it receives. For example, if an ad tech company receives device IDs collected by a publisher in order to serve targeted ads on the publisher’s site, the ad tech company cannot also use those device IDs to build a device graph in order to track people across the internet.

Will that prevent ad tech companies from sharing data with other ad tech companies to complete a programmatic ad sale?
Not necessarily. However, the various ad tech companies involved in a programmatic ad transaction would need to serve as service providers.

That sounds really complicated.
Definitely. To simplify matters, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and IAB Tech Lab have developed a CCPA compliance framework that is meant to facilitate this daisy chain of service providers. “Under our framework, what happens is companies downstream [in the programmatic supply chain] will be required to operate as service providers on the behalf of publishers,” said Michael Hahn, svp and general counsel at the IAB.

In early December, the IAB plans to release a Limited Service Provider contract that will detail the terms for ad tech companies serving as service providers under its framework. Chow has seen a version of the contract and said it lays out what service providers can and cannot do with the personal information collected by publishers “in a way that’s logical and reasonable to me.” Boiled down, the contract requires that ad tech companies have a way to isolate the personal information they receive from publishers so that the information is not used to enrich an ad tech company’s own data set.

Are ad tech companies okay with these restrictions?
They’re not wild about it. However, until Congress passes a federal privacy law that would preempt states’ privacy laws, ad tech companies have little choice but to figure out how to comply with the California law. Given the ambiguities that remain in the law, like what does and does not count as a sale of data, the service provider provision gives them some cover to continue to conduct their basic programmatic advertising businesses while they wait for more clarity regarding how the attorney general plans to enforce the law.

So programmatic advertising is saved?
No. For starters, the IAB framework only works for companies that adopt the framework. Apart from the framework, companies would need to sign service provider agreements with each company for which they process data for business purposes. Then there’s the trust required that service providers will abide the contracts and comply with the restrictions placed on their use of data. The attorney general’s office has yet to confirm whether ad tech companies operating as service providers to process data for targeted advertising would be compliant with the law.

“In our test, it’s shown to basically perform at half the [cost per order] of a manual campaign,” said Colin Russel, senior data scientist at the Times who created the tool.

The Times no longer uses Facebook and Twitter pixels on most of its pages. Chris Wiggins, the Times’ chief data scientist, said that instead of using a reader’s browser history to gain more insight into the types of content they tend to read, TAFI looks at how an article has been performing organically on social and factors that into the data the Times has on readers’ interests. 

For the past decade, tracking pixels on social media platforms was believed to be the only way for a marketer to achieve an effective and intelligent marketing campaign. 

“We’ve been able to show that we can use our data without that sort of exposure of reader history via a tracking pixel,” said Wiggins. 

Russel said that tracking pixels have been removed from all articles and browsing pages, though certain pages on the site still have them. Russel declined to share which ones.

“TAFI efficiently spends money on Facebook and Twitter, so they’re certainly benefiting because it allows us to achieve a very low CPO, which encourages us to use those platforms more,” said Russel. “We can get more bang for our buck.”

And because of the improvements in efficiency of tracking how well a campaign is performing, it also changes the calculations on how much money should go to these platforms overall, because the marketing team knows it’s not wasting money.

Russel said that the idea for the tool came around two years ago and was first launched to run international campaigns a year and a half ago. Then, a year ago, the Times pulled out of their third-party subscription marketing partnerships. 

The goal for the near future is to use the homegrown tool on other platforms, such as Snapchat and Reddit, along with paid search and paid display advertising. 

The publisher said listeners to the WhatsApp briefing were 12 times more likely to subscribe to The Telegraph than other individuals who visit its homepage. Also, those who click on the article links have tended on average to read twice as many stories as other visitors. According to The Telegraph, “thousands” of people have signed up for the WhatsApp service.

“WhatsApp allows us to build communities that our most engaged audience love around subjects like politics, fashion and the arts,” said Karen Eccles, director of commercial innovation. “We are fairly agnostic about where we find our audience. The publisher said listeners of the WhatsApp briefing were 12 times more likely to subscribe to The Telegraph than other individuals who visit its homepage. We see engagement, and it makes sense to publish there. We then look to build out commercial opportunities in a relevant way.”

The Telegraph offers dozens of podcasts. Last week, it struck a deal with ad exchange Dax to run ads for its podcasts. The Telegraph also sells its own podcast advertising.

“There seems to be a real shift in demand from brands or agencies for our podcasting,” Eccles said. “It feels different from the usual shiny new thing that has to be on all briefs and plans. Everybody is thinking about it in a more thoughtful way — has to suit the creative message and product.”

Publishers like The Guardian, The Washington Post and The Financial Times have dabbled with providing WhatsApp channels only to later abandon them. Yet WhatsApp use for news purposes tripled over four years, according to the Reuters Digital News Report.

“The Telegraph has recognized that the idea — which is a short news briefing update to hit the morning and evening commute — needs to work cross-platform and not just be confined to WhatsApp,” said Nic Newman, author of the Reuters report.