Month: December 2019

Whitelists are often perceived as a bane to publishers. But for advertisers, whitelists can be a useful tool. In January, a number of buyers told Digiday that they had suppressed their use of Facebook’s Audience Network because of the lack of publisher whitelists and other brand-safety features.

“It’s been good,” said Kieley Taylor, global head of social for GroupM, which is participating in Facebook’s pilot. “We’ve been asking for a true whitelist solution for sometime, so it’s great we were able to understand how that works when applied on their platform.”

Taylor said one thing she noticed during the testing phase is that while so much of the inventory from Audience Network is in-app mobile, many of the safety and visibility tools are built on desktop inventory where it’s easier to crawl or scrape through the content.

“When something is in app, it becomes a bit cumbersome to understand brand suitability and to be able to measure and catalog and interpret it,” Taylor said. “If we didn’t have view in app on that publisher, we didn’t include it in our whitelist. We want to better understand how to balance scale and safety.”

Because there are so many monetization partners being added to the network on a constant basis, Taylor said Facebook’s decision to only add them after an advertiser has selected them is a good default to have, at least in the pilot phase.

“The hope is we will get to a place with third parties or otherwise where we can review on a regularly frequent basis who those newly added partners for monetization are so we can build into the whitelists in a slightly less manual way,” Taylor said.

Another ad buyer said that rather than rely on whitelists for his clients, he prefers third-party measurement that enables real-time analysis of the inventory.

“By choosing the whitelist or blacklist solutions, you’re just limiting yourself and accepting the worst-case solution. Blocking an entire site negates the fact that content is constantly being updated; I know very few sites that are static in terms of their content on their pages or apps.”

This buyer said that while whitelists may be preferred by more conservative advertisers, what platforms like Facebook really need to provide are improved controls and more third-party verification integrations.

Facebook currently has four brand-safety partners: Zefr, DoubleVerify, Integral as Science and OpenSlate.

Charlie Hunter-Schyff, head of programmatic and paid social for EMEA at ForwardPMX, said his agency shies away from Audience Network because of brand-safety concerns, but the possibility of having a whitelist option is “a very appealing move forward” although he hasn’t yet participated in the pilot.

One thing he hopes Facebook adds to its whitelist feature is the ability to categorize publishers based on their audiences. “So, you can create audience lists buckets that could be transferable, just as publishers are building audiences for their advertisers,” said Hunter-Schyff.

Buyers Digiday spoke to generally welcomed the whitelist and said Facebook has been taking more steps toward improved brand-safety controls, but said there’s more it could be doing. Next on their wish lists: in-feed contextual adjacency, or knowing what other content your ads are showing up alongside in someone’s personalized Facebook feed. And having some sort of technology that preempts your bid against inventory if it doesn’t meet brand suitability standards.

“Brand safety is never going to be solved completely as far as I can tell,” said Taylor. “But these are steps in the right direction.”

Ten months after Barstool Gold’s introduction, the future of Barstool Sports’ subscription business is somewhat in flux as Barstool wrestles with how to build a recurring revenue stream for its business while building a big fan base for its talent. That dichotomy is not a new development, though it may be aggravated by the growth of Barstool Sports’ overall audience over the past year. In October 2019, 8.6 million people in the U.S. visited the publication’s site, up 436% year over year, according to Comscore.

“We’re very mindful of that tension. We have personalities who want to find more fans and become more recognized, make content that makes people laugh and to reach as many people as possible. A subscription product can be counter to that; at the same time it brings you closer to a really loyal customer, a really loyal fan,” Nardini said.

Barstool Sports continues to sort out the future of its subscription business, including what content to put behind the paywall and whether to introduce other subscription products, Nardini said.

But there’s also the future of Barstool Sports still to be determined. The Chernin Group is considering selling a majority or minority stake in the publisher to a sports gambling company, according to The Big Lead. Asked about the acquisition talks, Nardini said that “we’re talking to a ton of people” as Barstool Sports did more than a year and a half ago before The Chernin Group opted to invest more money in the publisher.

Barstool Sports is “not really looking at M&A in the media space,” said Nardini, who said the publisher is profitable but declined to discuss revenue figures. Instead she sees the publisher as being a better fit with a sports gambling company and noted that 60% of Barstool Sports’ audience are bettors. “When Dave [Portnoy, the publication’s founder] started Barstool Sports, he started it as a betting newspaper,” she said.

Gambling companies and sports publishers alike have seized on connecting sports betting and media after the Supreme Court last year overturned a ban on sports gambling outside of Nevada. Some media companies like the Score have introduced their own sports betting platforms, while others such as Vox Media have worked with the likes of DraftKings to create sports gambling verticals.

For its part, Barstool Sports debuted sports gambling vertical Barstool Bets in September. The property features weekly betting shows and free-to-play contests. Barstool Sports is also building “a gambling cave” in the middle of its office “where there will be games on 24/7 and people betting on games,” Nardini said.

Barstool Bets would make Barstool Sports an attractive acquisition target for gambling companies that could see it as a more efficient source for acquiring new bettors than traditional advertising, according to a former sports media exec. Barstool Gold would be another selling point. “Their subscription product and the fans they have credit card information for is valuable, although 30,000 is not a big number yet,” said this exec.

Ten months after Barstool Gold’s introduction, Barstool Sports is “still figuring out exactly what becomes of Barstool Gold, to be honest with you. We’re a company that’s so public that we’re trying to understand what sits behind the paywall,” said Nardini.

Barstool Sports has been dealing with the dilemma of what content to put behind the paywall since it decided to create the subscription program, which provides subscribers with perks like exclusive videos, bonus podcast episodes, fewer ads and access to exclusive merchandise. The publisher’s making-of documentary series “The Barstool Documentary” is exclusively available to Barstool Gold subscribers, but in March, the publisher made the series’ second episode available to all viewers. That remains the only episode that has been put in front of the paywall, but the publisher continues to consider whether the rest of the series should remain behind the paywall, Nardini said.

Barstool Sports is also weighing whether to introduce other subscription products, such as selling subscriptions through a third-party platform or getting into the subscription commerce market with a monthly merchandise box, said Nardini.

Even though Barstool Sports is still ironing out its subscription business, it continues to prove its ability to get people to pay. “Tens of thousands” of people pay $20 to watch the Rough N’ Rowdy amateur boxing matches that Barstool hosts, Nardini said. In October, the company announced that it had sold 1 million bottles of the Barstool-branded vodka that it created with New Amsterdam Vodka. And for Veteran’s Day this year, Nardini said Barstool Sports raised around $200,000 in three days for Headstrong, a nonprofit organization that provides mental health services to military veterans and their families.

As for whether another company will pay to buy Barstool Sports by the end of the year, Nardini isn’t offering any odds. “Oh I don’t know,” she said.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau is discussing the case and releasing a statement this week. Maximum Media said an internal investigation found this was an isolated incident unauthorized by the company. Last year, click farms in audio were used to game the ranking of podcasts in Apple’s iTunes charts through accounts leaving reviews. In the case of Maximum Media, it’s been alleged that listens to the podcast episode on SoundCloud leapt from 3,000 to 21,000 overnight.

On podcasts, advertisers can run spot ads, host-read ads, sponsorship or branded podcasts. Branded podcasts can reach between 10,000 and 100,000 listens per month, said Charlie Yeates, commercial trading partner at MediaCom. This type of advertising could cost the brand between £50,000 ($65,000) and £250,000 ($323,000), he added.

“Live reads are ambiguous, sporadic and ad hoc,” said Yeates. “To get a guaranteed set amount of listens, it might take 50 mentions. All advertisers care about is reaching the audience. It’s not about mass reach, it’s about the right reach.”

Setting up fraudulent farms, fake accounts and cross-posting doesn’t require a lot of sophisticated tech. Calculating the financial impact is thorny. In Ireland, the 2018 IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers online ad spend study calculated €2 million ($2.2 million) was spent on digital audio ads (which include podcasts). In the U.K., agency sources have estimated podcast advertising in the region of $12.73 million (£10 million). Compare that with the U.S., which totaled $479 million (£376.27 million) in 2018, according to research by the IAB and PwC.

Despite the growth in podcasts as a channel, subpar measurement and reporting capabilities hold back larger brands from committing more of their ad budget to less tried and tested audio channels. Keeping the environment brand-safe and fraud-free will determine whether or not podcasting will live up to its promise.

“It doesn’t feel like the commercial side of podcasting is maturing at the same rate as the audience engagement,” said Nick Wright, managing director of Jump, Havas Media. “It’s really hard to understand, from the making-of-a-podcast point of view. The commercialization can be quite confusing.”

Key podcasting platforms like Spotify, Acast and Dax operate their own networks adding another level of comfort for advertisers.

“Monitoring at the publisher level and having visibility over the previous month’s performance means there’s less room for error,” said Lawrence Dodds, client director at Universal McCann. “If a publisher triples their size overnight, that granular detail can show it’s an isolated problem.”

Accessible first-party data is the key to success 
Successful subscription businesses make sure their marketing teams, and their data science and analytics teams, are all operating from the same source of customer data truth – a single source of customer or first-party data that multiple teams and their technologies are leveraging, as opposed to relying on different versions of the data due to disparate sources, channels and technologies in your marketing and technology ecosystem.

When customers are browsing, subscribing, engaging across channels and revealing their preferences for products and content (either explicitly or implicitly), they are giving you a treasure trove of information. This data can be used to predict what they’ll do next so you can create unique experiences that result in favorable outcomes.

The problem is this data comes from a variety of places that don’t inherently connect with each other.

It isn’t a question of whether you have the best marketers or data scientists to maximize your first-party data opportunity. It’s about whether those teams (and their tools) have access to first-party data with the speed, accuracy and utility required.

Overcoming organizational barriers to activating data
The first step is to unify first-party data across channels and sources, and then make that unified data accessible to the rest of the organization. Brands are adopting customer data platforms to serve as the enabling technology that brings multiple parts of the organization closer together,  with a common source of customer data truth. It’s important to note, that technology is one part of overcoming organizational barriers; companies must also evaluate and refine internal processes. Adding new technology can enable an organization to put these processes into practice by making them more efficient and effective.

Whether you’re responsible for driving new subscriptions, retaining current subscribers or building predictive models to enable both, it’s imperative the data you’re relying on is complete and accurate – not to mention readily available for modeling, segmentation and orchestration.

In the absence of an accessible, unified data set, it could take days or weeks to pull and normalize data from all your disparate channels and sources before a data scientist can build, train and deploy predictive models for marketing (e.g. propensity to subscribe/renew and propensity to churn). By then, the customer’s intent may have already changed.

The alternative is to rely on channel-specific data that lacks the breadth and depth necessary to make an end-to-end impact.

Simply put, to deliver bespoke customer experiences you need a unified, real-time view of your first-party data, the ability to apply machine learning to that data in minutes, rather than weeks and months, and a mechanism to immediately act on the data across marketing channels.

Understand what drives new subscriptions
Multi-brand media company, WEHCO Media, has built a powerful first-party data asset by unifying data into profiles in our customer data platform (CDP). They’re using our CDP’s AI Workbench to apply machine learning and understand what turns readers into subscribers – whether it was specific content or touch points – so they can use the data to influence other readers.

“Because the AI Workbench is directly tied to our unified [profile] database, our marketing team can easily run models to test different theories without having to hard code anything or pass it off to a data scientist,” says Eric Gilreath, director of marketing technology at WEHCO Media. “Because I can keep pace with our customers and our various audiences, I have the ability to anticipate their needs and meet them where they are. This is what will propel our company forward as we continue to grow our direct revenue streams.”

Engage customers to reduce the cost of churn
Like any business, WEHCO Media wants to focus their dollars where they will matter most, so they’re using unified data to drive decisions about where to invest next.

“We want to ensure we’ve got high customer engagement and can reduce the risk of churn,” Gilreath adds. “By running churn risk analysis in our CDP, we can use real-time behavioral data, subscription dates, engagement scores, as well as other subscriber attributes to create a model, then pipe the output of that model right back to the profile. Then, we create segments of individuals with a high likelihood to churn, send those to our activation channels, and focus our spend on them to reduce the likelihood of churn.”