Month: March 2020

Push notifications have higher open rates than email, but until now push notifications have largely represented an “unexploited opportunity for consumer engagement” between brand owners and consumers, said Rafe Blandford, chief product officer at Digitas UK. The policy change “will allow a more direct link to revenue driving journeys, so I would expect it to increase app-linked revenue for apps that have transactional elements,” he added.

Still, app owners should beware “death by notification,” said Gillian Bell, director of digital services at marketing communications agency Wake The Bear. “It has to be benefit-led versus, ‘We have inventory to sell and we need to push more product’ … in the app environment people are less forgiving — make too many mistakes and, boom, you’re gone.”

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Carl Uminski, CEO of digital agency Somo, said app owners, particularly in segments like freemium gaming, may continue to test the boundaries of Apple’s rules and try to use the policy change to create short-term revenue opportunities — by selling notification placements to advertisers, or to promote virtual goods for sale, for example. (Apple’s updated App Store Review Guidelines state that “monetizing built-in capabilities provided by the hardware or operating system, such as push notifications” are an “unacceptable” use case.)

Mobile marketing experts raised questions as to how closely Apple would police the new policy. Under the previous App Store guidelines, Apple prohibited developers from inserting “advertising, promotion, or direct marketing” into their notifications, yet experts told Digiday they frequently received notifications from apps that appear to be promotional. “I get the Domino’s popup so often that I’ve become numb to it,” said Stuart Austin, audience and data consultant at concert search engine company Live Nation. “I didn’t realize it has basically been an ad the entire time.”

Apple has also previously sent its own push notifications to promote Apple TV show “Carpool Karaoke” and an Apple Music trial, as The Verge reported.

Ultimately, app owners will need to closely manage and test the frequency of the notifications they send to avoid consumers becoming disengaged and opting out.

“If a consumer wants to know when a retail app is having a sale, then push notifications are probably the most optimal way of receiving this information,” said Chris Day, chief product officer of mobile advertising agency Mobkoi. “However, notifications are also easily abused; they can become disruptive, unwelcome and ultimately less useful when sent in large quantities.”

Apple’s requirement for explicit user opt-in and its classification of marketing push notifications as a “privilege” that can be revoked should help mitigate this kind of abuse, he added.

“Launching globally, that reinforces our position as a growing and legitimate broadcaster for those rights as they become available,” said Joseph Markowski, evp at DAZN, who will be overseeing the global service.

DAZN’s international expansion will be particularly important for growing the streamer’s subscriber base to satisfy leagues like the NFL, which is waiting to see streaming services prove they can serve 25 million concurrent live viewers. DAZN has around 8 million paying subscribers, including 1 million subscribers in the U.S., according to CNBC. By comparison, The Walt Disney Company’s subscription-based sports streamer ESPN+ has 7.6 million subscribers. However, ESPN+ is only available in the U.S. That creates an opportunity for DAZN to establish itself as the early international streaming option for sports leagues and use that position to eventually contend for the leagues’ U.S. rights.

“Our ability to buy rights on a global basis now is a tremendous first-mover advantage,” Markowski said.

However, DAZN will be at a disadvantage when it comes to being able to afford to buy exclusive rights on a global basis. DAZN plans to spend tens of millions of dollars for additional sports rights and is in the process of raising $500 million in funding, according to The Wall Street Journal. For comparison, U.S. TV rights for NFL games cost $1 billion to $2 billion a year and prices are expected to at least double in the next round of negotiations, per CNBC. Even non-exclusive global streaming rights to less prestigious NFL games are costly. Amazon paid around $65 million a year to stream Thursday Night Football games, according to Reuters.

DAZN’s international expansion could offer a way for the company to address this disadvantage. Instead of angling for exclusive global rights off the bat, the company could cobble together rights by country — especially in countries where the rights may cost significantly less than major markets like the U.S. — in order to grow its business in each of the 200-plus markets it is expanding into. Then it could use those deals and the revenue they generate to eventually afford to compete for exclusive rights in the major markets.

That may be a longer process than DAZN would like, but time could be working in the streamer’s favor. The NFL appears intent on renewing its U.S. rights deals with TV networks this year, per The Wall Street Journal, and the league is seeking seven- or eight-year deals, according to CNBC. That would create a window for DAZN to build up its global streaming bona fides — and, as importantly, its budget — in time for the next round of rights negotiations in competitive markets like the U.S.

With a global distribution platform, “you can go exploit these places where the rights are undervalued, pay for them, have a good, positive return on that if you’re DAZN and a good, positive partnership with the league. Then you turn around later in time in very established markets and leverage it,” said Patrick Crakes, a former Fox Sports exec and principal of Crakes Media Consulting.

Major U.S. and international sports leagues have already shown they are willing to sell their rights to DAZN to help them grow their audiences abroad. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, DAZN has rights to stream NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL games as well as matches from Spanish soccer league La Liga. And the company also has deals in various countries with other soccer leagues, including England’s Premier League and Germany’s Bundesliga; racing leagues Formula One and MotoGP; women’s tennis league the WTA; and the UFC.

“They have those brands already planted with tier-one leagues internationally. If you’ve got a slice of the Bundesliga in Germany, you’re a real player. That’s like having the NFL in the United States,” Crakes said.

DAZN will face a tough time securing rights to stream NFL games in the United States anytime soon. The TV networks that currently hold the rights to various leagues have been establishing their own streaming services and will likely use those services to try to lock up leagues’ TV and streaming rights. Disney has ESPN+. ViacomCBS has CBS All Access. WarnerMedia will debut HBO Max in May. NBCUniversal will roll out Peacock nationally in July. Fox is in talks to acquire ad-supported streamer Tubi, according to The Wall Street Journal.

However, since the networks’ streamers have been concentrated on the U.S., DAZN could come in as an international distribution partner for one of the TV networks that could team with the streamer to bolster their pitch to the leagues, with the network taking the U.S. rights and DAZN taking the international streaming rights, Crakes said.

Of course, DAZN is not the only company with that opportunity. Amazon and Google operate global streaming services through Amazon Prime Video and YouTube, respectively, and are likely to be in the hunt. Furthermore, those companies have much deeper pockets than DAZN and would be able to pay more for rights. However, even the tech giants will need to prove that they can get enough people to tune into games. In a recent pitch deck Amazon sent to advertisers, the e-commerce giant said 2.6 million people tuned into its broadcast of 2019’s Week 6 Thursday Night Football game, which is well shy of the NFL’s 25-million-viewer threshold and may leave enough of an opening for DAZN to make its pitch.

“Regardless of what they want to do in the United States, the international opportunity is there for them,” Crakes said.

The pace of the blocking looks to be accelerating, too, as more advertisers add the word to their lists and the volume of content about the outbreak grows. A second brand safety service, DoubleVerify, found that the volume of content blocked because it was associated with the coronavirus had increased 80% in the past week, with most of the content blocked because it contained either the terms “coronavirus” or “covid 19.”

Advertisers have always wanted to avoid coverage of the most upsetting topics, and many prefer to avoid the news altogether. Joe Barone, the managing partner of brand safety at GroupM, noted that less than one third of GroupM’s clients are blocking coronavirus terms, and those that aren’t either don’t advertise against news at all or don’t do a lot of keyword blocking in general.

But so many brands have blocked coronavirus that it has actually created pricing opportunities for advertisers, particularly those in the CPG and pharmaceutical categories, IAS chief marketing officer Tony Marlow said.

As interest in Coronavirus has surged globally, publishers have launched a fleet of popup products focused on the disease, including popup newsletters, podcasts, live blogs, and even a text messaging service.

But a publisher’s ability to monetize those products is limited. There is basically zero interest in direct sponsorship of the coverage, said Sean Griffey, the CEO of Industry Dive, a B2B publisher that is covering coronavirus across several verticals. “No one wants to sponsor bad news,” Griffey said.

That leaves programmatic advertising, which typically yields lower CPMs than direct-sold advertising for news, a dynamic that worsens for publications’ coverage of things like natural disasters, said Tom Swierczewski, the programmatic media director at the media agency Cramer-Krasselt. Swierczewski noted that advertiser demand for impressions on those stories can be so low that it often lowers the CPMs news publishers get, when the impressions are sold at all. The drops in CPM vary, Swierczewski said, though they often start around 5%, and deepen the longer a story stays in the news.

And as ad inventory on coronavirus stories becomes under-priced, said Amanda Martin, the vp of enterprise partnerships at digital marketing services firm Goodway Group, that opens a window of opportunity in a year expected to be marked by higher-than-normal advertiser demand, thanks to events including the Olympics and the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, Martin said.

But taking advantage requires lots of work. Martin said the sentiment analysis tools available in the market sometimes do a poor job of determining whether a story is about something a brand would like to avoid, such as rising death tolls, rather than something more benign, such as a story listing the ways to avoid contracting the disease.

That leaves agencies to comb through stories or publications to determine where it would be safe for ads to appear. “It’s our job as an agency to do that due diligence,” Martin said. “But those steps aren’t easy.”

Publishers and brands alike have bemoaned the blunt, imperfect nature of keyword block lists. But alternatives like sentiment analysis are not widely used, and the tools that offer it require a lot of raw material to train software to identify differences, said Daniel Avital, the chief strategy officer of Cheq, a brand safety tool.

Avital said it can take up to a week for software to learn how to distinguish between objectionable stories and easy stories. In the case of coronavirus, Avital said that his colleagues trained Cheq’s software using content written in China and Japan, beginning with the content that was not actually about the virus. “It can definitely say that it’s not about coronavirus,” Avital said of Cheq’s tools. “And from a publishers’ perspective, that’s what they care about.”