Month: May 2020

Verizon Media’s value to Verizon itself isn’t just as a media arm that can send user data or benefits back to the conglomerate.

Rather, its base of 900 million monthly active users is significant enough to bring value just across Verizon Media’s properties, including Yahoo, TechCrunch, AOL and HuffPost, according to CEO Guru Gowrappan.

On the Digiday Podcast, Gowrappan set up the example of an article about meditation on the newly launched Yahoo Life. “You can start not just having content but taking content and saying ‘Oh, you read about something, you may want to do a meditation session,’ and bringing that entire closed loop ecoysystem in the same wall,” Gowrappan said.

Gowrappan talked about what we can learn from consumer behavior in China, what the pandemic’s effect on internet infrastructures will be and how he cut his teeth at Overture.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Where Verizon Media fits

Three big core business pillars for Verizon is the consumer group, the business group (that works with a lot of enterprises) and the third one is the media group, which I’m representing here today. In the media group, the purpose we’ve set out that fits into Verizon is we are in the business of creating top content. We’re not going into linear, scripted content, but when you think about keywords like finance, sports, news, entertainment, we’re going to do that. And on the business side we deal with all these advertisers, at least at the infrastructure level. So if you think about our ad platforms as an example, there’s quite a bit of synergy going to a lot of these customers together.

A wall between Verizon’s mobile subscribers and its readers

We don’t do anything on the Verizon side of the data. This is all the content ecosystem that we have across AOL bringing that together. There’s enough signals. We’re talking about 900 million monthly active users, and people coming in, consuming content at a much bigger daily basis.

Downturns lead to more internet investment

The ad market is not going away. It might slow and decline a little bit, but eventually, more offline moves to digital. We’ve seen that in past downturns. 2008, what happened? The programmatic world became much bigger. A lot more things went online and digital. That’s the same thing that will happen when the GDP comes back and things become normal, you will see digital getting better and the outcomes getting stronger.

Most of the content has ‘commercial intent’

We are an inspiration business. We create the top of the funnel, if you will. Let that be ads or content that helps to go create purchase intent. You could be buying travel, you could be buying fashion. Sixty percent of our content has commercial intent when you look at it. When we categorize content editorially or what we syndicate from third parties, we categorize them into ‘These have commercial intent and these don’t.’

This Friday, at noon ET, we are airing our fifth episode of The New Normal, a weekly interactive show focused on how publishers are adapting their businesses. Barstool Sports CRO Deirdre Lester will talk with Digiday editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey about adapting the company’s revenue strategy in the absence of (non-virtual) events. Register here.

During March, 52% of content Reach published across its titles related to coronavirus, this rose to 67% in April. Reach had 42 million unique users in March, according to Comscore. It found that between 65% and 75%, respectively, of its coronavirus-related content was neutral or positive in tone, and so suitable for advertising. After all, certain brands are happy to appear next to stories like sports personality Gary Lineker donating two months’ wages to charity, or details of government fiscal stimulus.

“Brands like betting companies and supermarket chains who are advertising right now are extremely sensitive,” said Ben Pheloung, general manager of Mantis. “We can be transparent in what we are looking for and what we are blocking.”

For over two months, publishers’ frustrations have mounted: Traffic is reaching record highs but can’t be monetized because advertisers are wary of bad ad placement, leading to blanket keyword blocking of coronavirus content. With advertisers canceling campaigns, eyes are even more fixed on the bottom line. Trade body Newsworks estimates news publishers’ collective loss of revenue from unwieldy blunt keyword block lists is £50 million ($63 million) in the U.K. over 12 weeks. Furloughs and staff cuts increase the capacity of remaining teams making it hard for businesses to focus on tackling industry-wide issues.

Lack of clear evidence of the how well ads perform in news environments — despite studies from Comscore and Newsworks and many others — has led to advertisers favoring blunt keyword lists to protect their ads.

“A lot of the brands who have been advertising are trending away because [ads are] blocked, but we do see higher dwell time and click-through rate,” said Pheloung. “People are more engaged with the ads.”

For one campaign Reach ran across its titles comparing coronavirus-safe segment scanned using Mantis with a client’s normal brand safety controls, the Mantis version saw a 26% increase in click-through rate.

On a weekly-running campaign, Reach compared blocking all coronavirus content one week, using that data as a control, and then using the Mantis coronavirus-safe segment the following week. The in-view time for the mobile MPU, which was the most common campaign format, increased by 48%, according to the publisher. The creative message was slightly different each week, but the brand was the same.

While this speaks to the touted network effect of news brands, it’s also because coronavirus content is pulling in lots of readers, readers who may be less used to seeing ads run here. 

“We haven’t been able to measure the impact of advertising on coronavirus-related articles versus non-corona articles,” said an executive at a U.K. news publisher. “But we do know that coronavirus articles have on average a 25% longer dwell time, 2.5 times as many comments and nearly 4 times as many shares.” 

For now, more than five soon-to-be-announced U.K. and international publishers are using Mantis, although Pheloung wouldn’t say which, as part of a commercial partnership between Mantis and Xandr. Reach has previously told Digiday that it’s not expecting to drive major profits from licensing the tech. While publishers are scrambling to find ways to trim costs, signing new tech licensing deals may not be top of the list. 

“This [partnership] allows us to apply Mantis broadly in a way so publishers can adapt quickly,” said Pheloung. The amount of coronavirus content that Reach found was suitable for brands mirrors that of other publishers that have been using the tool, he said.

Phelong said it’s trying to replicate the open marketplace as much as possible. Xandr passes news URLs through the Mantis filter to be scanned, Mantis then returns all of the brand-safe URLs. Then, Xandr aggregates the targetable inventory across multiple news publishers to make it available to buyers as a package.

While custom-publisher solutions are appealing, a lot of publishers need to be on board so agencies needn’t split their brand-safety strategies for different media plans, said Matthew McIntyre, vp of programmatic at Essence agency. 

“Even on something like a PMP-basis we would still need to look at how to segment out that part of the campaign and remove standardized keyword blocking across others,” he said. “Keyword blocklists are blunt but they are used because they can scale across whole campaigns. It’s hard to envisage a silver bullet that’s not directly involved with the advertiser. You have to have multiple opportunities to find the right mix, this definitely adds to that.”

Harsh keyword blocking methods are being used in direct insertion order deals, programmatic guaranteed deals, private marketplaces and on the open marketplace. The counter is that low quality, low yield inventory on the open marketplace naturally exposes advertiser to more risk, overt blocking is the symptom of a race to the bottom. As the programmatic open marketplace has dried up, Reach, as well as other publishers, has seen an increase in direct deals as brands want to make sure they have the right brand safety controls in place during coronavirus.

“We’ve passed the initial knee-jerk block everything stage,” said Pheloung. “Brands that are advertising are exploring how they can advertise more effectively and understand a little better the state of the world we live in.”