Month: February 2020

IMDb TV has been talking with entertainment companies about producing scripted and unscripted original shows to augment the streamer’s library of old movies and TV shows, according to entertainment executives familiar to the matter. The service is offering to pay low- to mid-six figures per episode for unscripted shows and higher amounts for scripted series, the execs said.

The amount of money that IMDb TV is spending on original shows is competitive with other ad-supported streaming services, though far from the millions of dollars per episode that subscription-based streamers like Netflix and Apple pay. For example, Walmart-owned Vudu has offered to pay $500,000 to $600,000 per 22-minute episode for shows, and Facebook Watch’s initial budgets for TV-length original series ranged from $250,000 to more than $1 million, Digiday has previously reported. In each case, these streamers appear to be modeling their budgets off of what cable TV networks tend to pay for low- to mid-tier shows. “It’s cable TV money,” said one of the execs.

An IMDb TV spokesperson declined to comment.

IMDb TV acknowledged its interest in original programming on Feb. 20 when Amazon announced that it would move the streaming service’s content team within Amazon Studios, which produces original movies and shows for Amazon Prime Video as well as traditional distribution outlets.

In lining up original programming, IMDb TV is looking to differentiate itself from its streaming sibling as well as rival ad-supported streaming aggregators like Roku’s Roku Channel. Amazon introduced the streaming service in January 2019 as IMDb Freedive before rebranding it as IMDb TV in June, and the company made the service a cornerstone of its upfront pitch to advertisers last year.

“The general thinking of what they’re looking for for IMDb TV versus Prime [Video] is something a bit more appealing to general America,” said a second entertainment exec.

Whereas Prime Video’s shows like “Fleabag” and “The Man in the High Castle” mirror the edgier programming on subscription-based services like HBO and Netflix, IMDb TV’s shows are meant to be more family-and advertiser-friendly fare, akin to the shows that air on broadcast and cable TV networks, according to the entertainment execs.

“They’re the kinds of shows you might see on TNT or a modern broadcast network or the show ‘The Middle’ [which aired on ABC],” said a third entertainment exec, who described the shows that IMDb TV is in the market for as “family viewing.”

Amazon’s IMDb TV appears to be following a similar playbook to Walmart’s Vudu. The latter streamer has been stocking up on original programming intended for budget-conscious families that may be seeking out free alternatives to subscription-based streamers.

The addition of original shows to IMDb TV could help the service to win over audiences as well as advertisers. Given the glut of free, ad-supported streamers in the market, such as Roku’s Roku Channel, ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV and Tubi, these services are pressed to distinguish themselves from one another to give viewers a specific reason to tune into one service over another.

A similar dynamic is at play among advertisers who tend to see these services as generic inventory sources to be added to a campaign. “It’s kind of like when you go to the grocery store and there’s the store-brand stuff,” said one ad agency executive.

From Aug. 3, all new apps in the Google Play store will need to pass a review process before collecting location data in the background, Google said last week in a blog post. The policy will expand to existing apps by Nov. 3. Google is asking developers to consider factors such as whether users would have an expectation that the app would be collecting their data while it wasn’t open and in use, and whether the app can deliver the same experience without such data. The precise dates could change, Google said.

Location-data vendors tend to work by paying developers to embed their software development kits into their apps. For some apps, location-sharing makes sense to the user — a running tracker or a weather app, for example. But it’s less logical to give over such permission when the app in question is a flashlight or a calculator. Location-data vendors say that they seek consent before collecting location information, but that doesn’t always mean users are fully aware about the types of companies that are consuming their data and what they are doing with it.

New versions of the Android mobile operating system (from Android 10 and beyond) now include a prompt whenever an app is collecting a user’s location information. The user is then given the option to only grant the app permission to access their location when they are using the app. “Over half” of Android 10 users have selected the “while app is in use,” option Google said in the blog post. Android 11 gives users more controls over how their location data is shared.

The changes bring Google more in line with Apple’s stance on location data. Apple has included similar prompts and controls since its iOS 13 update last September. U.K.-based location vendor Location Sciences said it has seen a 68% drop in background location data being shared since the iOS 13 update, according to CEO Mark Slade. The forthcoming Play Store policy change will likely stifle available GPS data signals further.

“There wasn’t so many checks and balances in the Google Play Store, so you could get away with more if you were an app developer than you would on iOS,” Slade said. The data stifling “will probably apply to the longtail of apps, which contribute a lot of the amount of GPS signals.”

Still, Slade added, despite the reduction in GPS data supply, owing to the recent Android and iOS changes, prices for location data haven’t budged over the last six months. “The market is not behaving like a free market,” he said.

While some media buyers find value in serving ads to people when they are in the vicinity of a physical store, “there’s always been a skepticism about location data and the scale” of it, said Doug Chisholm, CEO of data firm Rippll. “I think some [location] ad networks figured out clever ways of explaining they can get reach and hyper-targeting — which is an oxymoron — but they figured out how to sell that story.”

Ultimately, many advertisers don’t verify the accuracy of the location data they get back from their vendors, said Shailin Dhar, CEO of marketing analytics business Method Media Intelligence. For example, already when there is no ad ID present, some attribution and targeting providers look to other signals such as IP addresses (which often include multiple users and devices,) or the type of device or browser being used to pad out their datasets.

“Location data isn’t like some magic pill for making your campaign effective,” said Dhar. Yet, marketers aren’t always incentivized to check the data they’re being offered their location-data vendors, not least as it comes with an added cost. “Nobody feels a financial pinch by not verifying — there’s no penalty,” at least not one that is immediately clear, Dhar added.

From a targeting perspective, city-level data is usually sufficient for most campaigns, according to Raman Sidhu, vp of business development at analytics company Beemray, who added that location data tends to be more useful for insights versus targeting.

Coupled with the recent Apple and Google changes, new global privacy regulations have already put some location-data vendors in a tight spot. In 2018, some location-based ad companies, such as GroundTruth and Verve, closed their European operations, citing concerns related to the General Data Protection Regulation. (Verve was sold last month to German investment group MGI, after significantly reducing its overall headcount.)

Also in 2018, French data protection authority CNIL issued warnings to location ad tech vendors Fidzup, Teemo and Vectaury. The CNIL has now closed those investigations, and the companies avoided fines.

“The supply of [location] data in the market was already diminished, was already to some degree questionable in its authenticity, now [advertisers] will be looking elsewhere,” said Beemray’s Sidhu.

“An always on, new primetime audience is how we see [Home/Made’s viewership],” said Lloyd D’Souza, head of content development at Condé Nast Entertainment.

At launch, the slate of content in the network will include some of the existing popular shows for Condé, including Vogue’s “73 Questions,” which follows celebrities around their homes while they answer questions; Architectural Digest’s “Open Door,” where celebrities give tours of their homes and talk about interior design; and Glamour’s “Money Tours,” where anonymous individuals talk about how they spend their incomes.

D’Souza said during the Home/Made launch event that GQ Sports is launching a new show where athletes give tours of their closets; Wired will have a new show called the “Future of Home” that talks about in-home technology; and AD will launch a version of Bon Appétit’s “Back to Back,” which will feature celebrities attempting to do DIY projects with only auditory instruction.

While GQ, Vogue, Bon Appétit and Glamour are not home improvement or shelter brands endemically, Barish said he sees an opportunity to show to advertisers how the non-endemic brands can still cover topics related to home.

“They don’t associate us with mass home to begin with,” he said, so by creating content that talks about accessorizing a home or gives a celebrity home tour, these non-AD brands can also provide some connection to home content for advertisers looking to place their ads in that category. 

That said, if a viewer is coming to a video featuring a celebrity house tour, it can be hard to place whether or not they’re watching for the architecture and interior design inspiration, or if they’re curious about where their favorite celebrity lives. Looking through the lens of home improvement, the programs on this network don’t necessarily have the pure DIY or home remodeling content that shows on HGTV or DIY Network delivers. 

According to Condé Nast, the publisher has a total of 38 million subscribers on YouTube across all of its brands in 2019. Additionally, the company reported over 5 billion total video views on YouTube in 2019.

Condé Nast also recently invested heavily in the development of video content for five of its brands — GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Wired– launching individual video studios for the brands to attempt to create franchises.

Condé Nast has three primary ways for brands to purchase ads on the network, including standard pre-, mid- and post-roll ads, integrated products within shows and then custom content running ahead of programs that is produced by the Condé Nast Entertainment studio.

According to Alicia Weaver, executive director of offline activation at media buying agency Mediassociates, there is an inventory issue around home improvement content on linear television, with the DIY Network and HGTV being two of the only media companies producing exclusively this content. Therefore, she said it can be “next to impossible for brands” to run ads on those existing TV networks because the demand is so high and the prices can increase significantly. 

CPMs for linear channels like HGTV and DIY can range upwards of $10 to $19, Weaver said, adding that the combination of brand safety and generally high ratings can make brands feel more sure footed in spending their advertising dollars there. Because of this she said it seems like a safe move for Condé Nast to try and sell against this topic. 

“No network is a must buy, but if you’re [looking to reach] a women or adult demographic, [HGTV and DIY Network] would be at the top because of their brand safety,” Weaver said.

And though Home/Made is not a linear network, Weaver said she would expect that brands are still going to be interested in getting opportunities to reach the demographics that are typical to the home improvement audience — such as women between 25 and 54. 

“It’s really accelerated in the last six months,” said Bedir Aydemir, head of audience and data at News UK, referring to requests for data partnerships. “Before that, it was only data-heavy clients who had invested in their own data management platform and cookie pools. Now it’s on most partnerships as a matter of course.”

Publishers are capitalizing on advertisers’ wish to access more of their audience data by touting first-party data strategies in a number of ways. The Washington Post and Inside Inc. have launched tools for targeting and campaign reporting to get closer to advertisers. Publisher alliance Ozone has beefed up contextual targeting capabilities. Ultimately, more direct deals cut down on intermediaries. The growing trend has also meant more publishers are striking more programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals leading to revenue bumps.

For Conde Nast, over 50% of its programmatic revenue now comes from programmatic guaranteed deals, which doubled in the last year. Two years ago, half of Conde Nast’s programmatic revenue came from campaigns sold on the open auction, according to Elli Papadaki, head of programmatic at Conde Nast. Now just 32% of programmatic revenue comes from open auction deals.

However, more direct relationships between publishers and advertisers also throw up questions about user consent, adding time pressures when time is of the essence since Google announced it’s phasing out third-party cookies by 2022. 

Both advertisers and publishers want to future-proof their ad sales strategy away from third-party to first-party data. Incomplete or limited data sets from small logged-in audience pools mean that mingling data and data partnerships will persist.

“It’s still murky about what [data partnerhips] means,” said Aydemir. “It opens up a whole world of other questions. Are their cookies being used in our DMP or our segments in theirs? Do we need a matching partner or a data cleanroom? The issue is around the pipework.”

News UK has staffed up too to make sure the right combination of legal teams and programmatic specialists are in the room. It’s in the process of hiring a compliance manager to work out how compliance works as data flows through partners. It’s also hiring a commercial insights specialist who will translate the publisher’s first-party data into digestible forms for agencies and advertisers, an area where publishers have struggled with in the past, said Aydemir.

Going through the required information security processes for companies to license data takes time depending on the types of company. Campaign cycles have increased post-GDPR because of the lengthier process in figuring out whether partners are compliant. One deal where a company was licensing data from another for event transactions took over two years from gestation to fruition, according to Richard Foster, chief revenue officer at Infosum, which works with publishers like The Telegraph as a data cleanroom.

“If you’re aware that the Google doomsday clock is ticking down and want to move to first-party assets, but every time you make a move you’re hit by the burden of compliance or a lack of trust [of partners’ data], then you’re facing a perfect storm,” said Foster.

Aside from larger data partnerships, publishers are looking for ways to share data to target brand audiences on their sites, similar to Facebook Custom Audiences solution.

“Every publisher we’re engaged with is working to unlock that capability because the walled gardens have done so well from it,” said Foster. “That means the deal cycle comes down and they can work more collaboratively on longer-term creative partnerships.”

The increase in data-partnerships means the finer details take more time to iron out as the right processes are put in place. This could be as simple as publishers asking for evidence an advertisers cookie pool is compliant. Even so, the onus is on publishers to make it simple and attractive for clients to spend with them.

“Clients and agencies have huge amounts of money to spend and we don’t want to see that going elsewhere,” said Aydemir.

The mobile operator is expanding 5G across the U.K. following a limited launch in London last year. By the end of the month, 5G will be available in 68 major cities across the U.K. The mobile operator expects 50% of its traffic in the U.K. to come from its 5G network by the end of 2020. It’s a rapid rollout for Three Mobile that belies how much it has riding on people choosing its 5G network over rivals.

Beyond faster connection speeds and ultra-low latency, 5G paves the way for mobile operators like Three Mobile to become more than the so-called “dumb pipes” that are used by other companies to explore new revenue streams. While those concerns have been exacerbated by the growth of Facebook and Google, mobile networks haven’t felt they’ve had a way to play a more assertive role in mobile communications until the arrival of 5G.

As such, the business is exploring more experiential concepts such as turning certain areas in bars into gaming areas or building more services for the connected home, said Three Mobile’s CMO Shadi Halliwell. Everything from shopping to live events, sports, even healthcare and education are potential opportunities for the mobile operator’s 5G network, said Haliwell, particularly as the mobile operator searches for new revenue streams.

“Today, our business is about device financing but I think that model could become more hardware-focused, whether it’s a games console, surround sound or lighting, with the emergence of the connected home on our 5G network, said Halliwell.

Despite 5G’s potential, many of the immediate use cases for it are in augmented and virtual reality.

In fact, Three has created an AR lens for Instagram to promote its latest campaign, which launches today. The Wieden+Kennedy-created campaign gives people a glimpse into what 5G-powered future looks like, with the creative offering humorous predictions on things like gaming, dating and travel.

“The most immediate future for 5G with consumers is in AR and VR, said Halliwell. “We’re going to be looking at content partnerships around augmented reality and virtual reality.”

Beyond the campaign, Three is already looking to other industries like fashion to flout its 5G credentials. The bandwidth from the mobile operator’s network let attendees to a London Fashion Week event earlier this month see a virtual version of model Adwoa Aboah, through 5G handsets, strut down what appeared to be an otherwise empty catwalk.

Haliwell’s decision to promote the benefits of using a 5G network echo what her rival telco marketers are doing. EE, O2 and Vodafone are all focused on either making 5G tariffs and data plans as attractive as possible or promoting the benefits of the technology to potential customers. Given how new 5G networks are, there’s still a large portion of mobile device users who don’t know enough about the advantages of faster speeds and better performance that come with them to make an informed decision about why they should upgrade to the technology. EE is showing the public how to use 5G from a touring bus that travels the U.K., for example.

Both 3G and 4G moved the needle in terms of mobile advertising, whether it was by connecting mobile devices to the internet or allowing them to share more data. And yet neither network could push mobile advertising beyond traditional advertising formats, said Lawrence Dodds, client director at Universal McCann..

“5G will allow advertisers to become more inventive in how they engage consumers — and they need to as we increasingly employ ad blockers, or simply become blind to banners and the like,” said Dodds.

5G’s potential is huge, but there’s still work to be done before advertisers can reap those rewards. It will likely be several years before the 5G user base becomes large enough for advertisers in part due to the politicization of who provides the technology. In the meantime, advertisers like Three will be in a test-and-learn mode, whereby they demonstrate the potential of emerging ad formats like AR to convince people there’s more to 5G than novelty value.

“Being ready for 5G and understanding what will be possible in preparation for it is essential,” said Mark Melling, head of RYOT and 5G for Verizon Media’s businesses across EMEA. “Marketers need to find partners that understand how 5G will impact content experiences to help them navigate their way forward.”