Month: February 2020

With quality data about consumers becoming scarcer, prices for it could increase as well. To that end, publishers are trying to grow their addressable audiences through authentication and registration strategies. They are attempting this on their own, as Belgian publisher DPG Media has done, or through alliances like Ozone Project, launched by a group of publishers in 2018 to create an alternative to the platform companies’ walled gardens.

Commercial executives at Ozone Project are citing greater demand for its “more private environment,” said the Ozone Project’s chief revenue officer Craig Tuck. The alliance is creating value for advertisers by arranging for publishers’ content to load faster and to have more relevant advertising displayed at the right frequency, Tuck said. This is done by gaining user consent across multiple publishers’ web domains, he added.

Unlike the platforms’ traditional walled gardens, these publisher-backed alternatives let advertisers share the personal, anonymized data they own without having to cede control over it. Data in the Ozone Project’s walled garden, for example, can be audited by an external party should advertisers request it.

DPG Media wants to create and sell to advertisers its customized solution, powered by its own technology and data. “With everything that’s happening around the identity and consolidation of supply, publishing groups have to think more clearly about how they act as a direct gateway for media buyers” said Stefan Havik, chief revenue officer of DPG Media.

Some advertisers interviewed by Digiday are keen for publishers to create their own closed ecosystems. “Publishers could be doing more for cross-platform measurement to help the advertising ecosystem,” said Unilever’s svp of global media, Luis Di Como. He is helping his company build its own network of trusted publishers to purchase ads from: It’s Unilever’s version of a walled garden, he said, noting that the consumer packaged goods company wants other advertisers to join the initiative.

While platform companies like Google and Facebook control an abundance of data about consumer purchases, they don’t own an abundance of content like publishers do. Therefore these platform companies cannot collect as much data about people’s engagement with content. For advertisers with large customer databases, availing themselves of the opportunity to match their own data to the unique rich data sets owned by publishers is a safe, effective bet in a market with a growing scarcity of quality audience intelligence.

Some advertisers like American Express are turning to ad tech vendors like Neustar for help. “There’s an opportunity for advertisers to build measurable ecosystems of partners that include the top publishers they buy from, while still working [within] the traditional walled gardens like Google and Facebook,” said Neustar product marketing director Devon DeBlasio. Thus ad tech vendor Neustar is capitalizing on its publisher relationships to facilitate the synching of publishers’ data with that of advertisers, DeBlasio said.

Thus, variations on the proverbial closed walled garden ecosystem are gradually becoming more prevalent, whether through login alliances that let users enlist a single account to register with multiple sites, publisher alliances like the Ozone Project that allow advertisers to match their data with a pool of publishers’ data, or data clean rooms where advertisers and publishers collectively share their data in privacy-protected fashion.

Media agencies also see an opportunity in tapping into the publisher-backed walled gardens. Since investments will need to be made to enable optimization of data shared between the various walled gardens (including the smaller ones and even those of Google and Amazon), media agency executives see their companies as serving as navigators in what will become an increasingly complex ecosystem.

“With the added fragmentation, less reach will be delivered, but it will be nicer and attuned to certain demographic interests, such as a Guardian reader versus a Vice audience,” said Paul Kasamias, managing partner at Publicis Media agency Starcom. “Agencies will need to build plans that are layered with multiple programmatic guaranteed deals; one alone will not deliver on client KPIs.”

For these alternative walled gardens to thrive, publishers must pitch the depth of their addressable audience rather than just the number of unique visitors, Stuart Colman, a sales vp for ad tech vendor InfoSum. Previously, publishers have found it hard to articulate the strength of the data they possess in their walled gardens, which in turn has given advertisers an excuse to spend their money elsewhere, Colman added.

“Ultimately, the success of a walled garden must come down to the addressable audience it’s built on top of,” Colman said. “Every publisher has to go on that journey of getting more people to register to their sites to access the content.”

Corporate social responsibility campaigns have been identified as a top opportunity for Group Nine’s sales teams, NowThis president Athan Stephanopoulos said. His hope is that Group Nine’s work for companies CSR efforts can lead to more direct advertising relationships with them.

And video-focused publisher ATTN has had so much success in this arena that it has sought to promote its branded content and creative services as a “must-buy” for companies seeking to highlight their socially responsible activities. “We’ve really set up the business to have a defensible niche there,” ATTN co-founder Matthew Segal said. “It’s how we purposely structured our business.”

The Guardian, which recently vowed not to accept advertising from the fossil fuel industry, has a sales executive focusing purely on clients seeking to tell stories about sustainability.

After years on the fringes, corporate social responsibility divisions have started to become more visible parts of the largest corporations. In 2005, 64% of the Global Fortune 500 published a report on their corporate social responsibility activities, according to KPMG. By 2015, that percentage had grown to 92%. In 2018 corporations spent $20 billion on corporate social responsibility initiatives, according to research conducted for UNESCO.

At first, this kind of spending was done mostly to ward off government regulation, said Susan McPherson, the founder of communications consultancy McPherson Strategies. “You would do the bare minimum to keep them out of your way,” she said.

But the internet has made it easier for consumers to learn about how corporations behave, and social media has led to the sharing of information about businesses’ missteps and misdeeds. That’s led some corporations to put their corporate social responsibility efforts more front and center in their marketing efforts, said Annie Granatstein,  Edelman’s creative newsroom director.

“CSR is becoming more central to brands’ entire way of marketing and communicating,” Granatstein said. “Publishers are thinking about this as they’re thinking about how they can get more of brands’ ad dollars.”

The marketing budgets for corporate social responsibility projects are comparable in size to the ones available for branded content campaigns, Segal said.

But companies’ CSR needs differ from their other marketing needs in a few key ways. Whereas a retailer might wish to concentrate its spending to be during big shopping seasons, CSR activity happens all year, and especially in connection to key dates like International Women’s Day or Earth Day.

The budgets for these campaigns are not always housed in the same place. Whereas a company’s media agency might once have controlled most of its ad expenditures, spending has become more “diffuse” as corporate social responsibility messaging has become more important, Granatstein said.

Today, a media agency might control only about 60% of the spending related to corporate social responsibility, with the remaining 40% spread between a communications agency and an internal company unit. Segal said members of his sales team hunt for ways to capitalize on these CSR campaigns, spending about half of their time speaking to corporations’ marketing teams and the rest with their internal communications teams.

“The sellers [at Group Nine] know that when they’re talking to brands, one of the points of entry is to be focusing on the CSR groups,” Stephanopoulos said.

Paying attention to corporate social responsibility efforts also gives some smaller publishers a chance to scramble the list of contenders that companies typically hire for advertising and branded content campaigns. And the rebel mystique that a large publisher like Vice has, for example, might work against it in attempting to win CSR work, Segal said.

But like other branded content or advertising campaigns, corporate social responsibility campaigns must deliver on  the metrics. Granatstein said it’s common for companies to measure the reputation of their brand before and after a campaign to see if it moved the needle in that way.

And companies typically pick the publishers with the largest distribution. Publishers “can be awareness vehicles,” McPherson said, “if they have massive footprints.”

WTF is the CCPA’s definition of sale?
The CCPA defines a sale as the exchange of someone’s personal information for money “or other valuable consideration.” In other words, its definition of sale is not as straightforward as stating that it is a literal sale in which personal information is directly traded for dollars.

What does “other valuable consideration” mean?
It’s unclear. The law does not define what is meant by “valuable consideration.” As a result, companies and their lawyers are left to interpret that language and how it might apply to their businesses. This poses a particular problem for companies that buy, sell or facilitate the sale of targeted advertising.

Why is the definition of a sale an issue for companies in the targeted advertising business?
Many of the types of data that publishers, ad tech companies and advertisers use to target ads are considered personal information under the CCPA. The law explicitly cites cookies, mobile ad IDs and IP addresses as forms of personal information. Therefore, if one company shares that information with another company in order to buy or sell a targeted ad impression, that activity could be considered a sale of personal information under the privacy law.

“There’s a clear fault line between the way the [online advertising] industry views cookie sharing, which is more like sharing and not a sale, and the way consumer groups are articulating their belief, which is, if the cookie is going to track the consumer across the internet on nonowned-and-operated properties, that would constitute a sale,” said Dominique Shelton Leipzig, co-chair of the ad tech privacy and data management practice at law firm Perkins Coie.

Does that mean a publisher selling targeted ads is technically selling personal information?
Maybe. Publishers have diverged in their interpretation of the CCPA’s definition of sale. Some publishers have adopted the strict interpretation that they do sell data under the law. But other publishers have asserted that the law is not clear enough about whether the use of tracking mechanisms like cookies constitutes a sale of people’s personal information.

“A lot of times when people are doing targeted advertising, they’re using other companies,” Reynolds said. “So the fact that there is an exchange or dissemination of that information and some monetary or valuable gain, [that] would, in my view, constitute a sale.”

What do companies that sell personal information under the CCPA need to do?
These companies are required to take several actions if they sell California residents’ personal information. These firms must display a “clear and conspicuous” link on their homepages titled “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” so that users can request that they stop selling their information. Additionally, these companies must provide users a list of the types of businesses where their data has been sold.

Is there a way for companies to share personal information with other businesses without this constituting a sale?
Yes, a company can designate another company as a service provider. This allows a publisher, for example, to share a California resident’s IP address with an ad tech company in order to sell a targeted ad. But the ad tech company would be able to use that IP address only to facilitate the sale of the targeted ad. The ad tech company would not be allowed to add that data point to its device graph that it uses to sell targeted ads for other publishers.

When will there be any clarity about what counts as a sale?
This is also unclear. “Ultimately certain things are not going to be made any more clear in the [regulations], and my prediction is we’ll be seeing this play out” in court, Shelton Leipzig said.

Gen Zers have “seen a lot of video platforms come and some go, but the ones that have made a big splash are the ones that let this generation express themselves with minimal input for a lot of output,” said Drake Rehfeld, Ntwrk’s director of product. TikTok’s editing tools are easy to use, and because of that the “percentage of people who create on TikTok is higher than those on other platforms,” Rehfeld claimed. His company Ntwrk has an app that livestreams shopping opportunities.

“TikTok is a platform where we’re part of a generation where every single kid wants to be an entrepreneur or an influencer,” asserted Madison Bregman, CEO of youth marketing consultancy GirlZ. “It’s easier to build a following on a platform like TikTok than on YouTube.”

And TikTok makes it easy for aspiring Gen Z influencers to have their posts go viral, said Tiffany Zhong, CEO of Zebra IQ. Charli D’Amelio, a dancer who just started using TikTok last spring, provides the perfect example of this, she said. In less than a year, D’Amelio has amassed nearly 24 million followers on TikTok and appeared in a prime-time Super Bowl ad for Sabra.

The viral nature of TikTok is baked into how the app was designed, said Zhong, whose company provides a real-time Gen Z insights platform. “It’s a level playing ground and anyone can go viral. The default For You feed highlights accounts that a user does not follow, she added.

“So it’s become a place where you can be your own weird self and still get complimented and [have your posts] go viral for that, whereas on other platforms you’re trying to be as perfect as possible and you don’t have that level of discoverability,” Zhong said.

TikTok’s algorithm is designed to promote “content that survives through different waves and tests so it stays viral,” explained Ishan Goel, founder of marketing agency Goel Strategies. TikTok content is generally tested in smaller audience buckets or pods, he said, adding that the more shares, rewatches, comments or likes a video receives, the bigger the bucket or audience it’s introduced to — so that it has the chance of going viral.

The motivation for Gen Zers who seek to create viral content or become a TikTok influencer is not because they feel insecure, said Connor Blakley, a Gen Z marketing consultant. They want to feel good and share this with others, he said. “Gen Z understands that social media is like a highlight reel, and we choose to show what we feel best about.  It’s less about insecurity and more about being a self-confidence booster.”

TikTok posts are not like Instagram’s curated highlighted reel, however, said Andy McCune, co-founder of Unfold. Content on TikTok is “more real and raw and comedic,” noted McCune, whose company provides a mobile design toolkit and was  recently acquired by Squarespace. “Sometimes it’s even self-deprecating. It’s more humorous. It’s more about being relatable.”

Added McCune: “That real raw content that feels relatable that people can scroll through at the end of a long day and laugh at and be like, ‘that’s so me’ — that’s super powerful. I don’t know those people on TikTok, but that’s why it’s so powerful.”