Month: October 2020

However, even for brands who are comfortable with in-person shoots, such projects are still being partially produced remotely. To protect people’s health and safety, the media companies, agencies and production studios that marketers hire are limiting the number of people on set, among other precautions like hiring covid compliance officers and requiring anyone on set to wear masks and be tested regularly for the coronavirus. As a result, certain people who would usually be on set, such as brand executives, are monitoring shoots remotely via Zoom or other video conferencing platforms. 

“Clients are open to being remote. Directors are often remote. Our producers are often remote,” said Meagan Maudsley, managing director at creative agency Mustache.

However, somewhat ironically, limiting the number of people on set can complicate in-person branded video productions. “It opens you up to having more chefs in the kitchen on the client side,” said a second producer at a company that creates branded videos. For example, the remote monitoring enables brand executives who wouldn’t normally be on set, like the CMO or company president, to check in and try to direct a shoot despite not having the expertise.

To be clear, brand executives are often on set for branded video shoots. But normally they can be physically seated off to the side where monitors are set up for them to see what is being shot. Producers will check in with the brand executives throughout the shoot to solicit their feedback, but the producers are also able to have conversations with talent and crew members out of earshot from the brand executives. When the producers are also remote and those conversations are taking place over Zoom, it can be all too easy for brand executives to insert themselves by offering unnecessary notes and questioning production practices or simply interrupt the lines of communication. 

“When you’re all in Zoom and it’s also a place where a producer needs to be saying something specific to the crew, I see a lot more potential for wires to cross and to get confusing for people involved with that communication coming in from the client and the set crew,” said Gabriella Mangino, executive producer for video at Food52.

To mitigate the potential for wires to cross, some producers have tried to limit brands’ remote presence by presenting them with detailed storyboards and outlines ahead of shoots and then sending photos and videos throughout the day during shoots. Others have opened up alternative lines of communication, such as remote producers using Slack to communicate with colleagues on set. 

Mustache has even set up a separate remote channel for clients apart from the one used by producers to communicate with on-set crew members. “Not to cut the client out of conversations, but rather to not bog them down with stuff that is not their thing to worry about,” Maudsley said. The agency has also started exploring using cell phones as walkie-talkies so that if a shoot’s director is remote, but their assistant director is on set, the director has a direct line to the AD.

“That’s another way to separate those lines of communication,” she said.

The tool allows publishers to serve its direct-sold ads — specifically reservation and mediation demand, but not programmatically traded inventory — to users who have explicitly opted out from accepting cookies and being shown personalized advertising. 

The launch follows Google’s decision to integrate with the updated version of IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (the current version is TCF 2.0) — an interoperable industry framework for compliance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation that enables users to grant or withhold consent over how publishers, advertisers and vendors process their data.

The TCF includes 12 “purposes” for which users can consent or reject to their data being processed, such as “Purpose 1” — storing and/or accessing information on a device — or “Purpose 4” — select personalized ads.

As it stands, Google says limited ads will be requested when consent for Purpose 1 is missing but publishers — using a consent management platform, displaying a choice to readers — have managed to secure consent for Purposes 2 (select basic ads,) 7 (measure ad performance,) 9 (apply market research to generate audience insights) and 10 (develop and improve products.) Or, Google says, publishers can use the “legitimate interest” lawful basis for processing personal data under the GDPR. The legitimate interest basis requires businesses to undergo a test to determine whether their interest in collecting the data outweighs the interest of the individual for not having the data collected.

Therein lies the rub. Industry observers told Digiday that it’s highly unlikely, when presented with a consent wall, that users would cherry pick for which purposes they will and won’t consent to sharing their data — they usually choose to “reject all” or “accept all.” Many consent management platforms and publishers have also decided that they will not send legitimate interest signals to vendors if users decide to hit the “reject all” button. Plus, U.K. data protection authority the ICO has already made it clear that businesses who are using real-time bidding and claiming a legitimate interest stance won’t be GDPR compliant. (French trade publication JDN also previously reported about the Limited Ads feature’s drawbacks.)

With Limited Ads, Google’s interpretation of the TCF is so hardline that it is essentially letting a user decide whether or not a website will serve them ads at all, according to Fabien Scolan, vp of advertising at French online classifieds company Leboncoin Group.

“[Google] cannot take this type of position — this is the role of the publisher,” said Scolan. “Fulfillment of GDPR [compliance] and providing the right advertising for the right person is our mission with only one mindset: respect users’ privacy. Google [cannot decide] if it will load the ad or not. [That’s] … completely crazy.”

Adrien Thil, corporate development director at ad tech company Smart AdServer, also questioned why Google needs to obtain consent signals from the user and refuses to serve non-targeted ads that don’t require any data processing.

“Our limited ads offering doesn’t rely on cookies or mobile identifiers, but does utilize data like IP addresses in the course of ad delivery,” said Google Ad Manager product manager Eric Lo via email in response to a list of questions. “We are actively working on this offering and hope to share more in the near future.”

Meanwhile, if users don’t consent to the use of cookies, other options such as frequency capping and fraud detection are not available within the Limited Ads feature.

“This could cause issues with numerous brand advertisers when it comes to doing publisher deals on this inventory,” said Dale Lovell, UK managing director and co-founder at native advertising company AdYouLike.

Google, as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative, along with other advertising and browser companies are currently working on proposals for how advertising functionality will work on the web without the need for third-party cookies.

“We’ll continue to invest in longer term solutions to address these issues, in the interim, we want to launch a feature to help our publishers continue to monetize when a user declines the usage of cookies,” said Google’s Lo.

The global launch of the Limited Ads feature is set to coincide with the end of the TCF 2.0 implementation grace period, scheduled for November 15. Google is currently aiming to launch a feature to allow publishers to manually trigger Limited Ads on the web by the end of October.

As for alternative solutions, Benoît Oberlé, CEO of data and advertising addressability company Sirdata, said publishers with enough resources could consider two options. One would be to set a primary, non-Google ad server to deliver contextual ads when no consent is given and to call Google’s ad server afterwards, to act as a competitor to the first ad server if the user has given consent for cookies. That way, the publisher could introduce price competition between the two ad servers if consent has been given — but it could cause lags in page loading time for users. The other scenario is to use tag management to load Google Ad Manager if consent has been given, or the alternative ad server if consent hasn’t been given. However, this requires more investment, both in terms of time and cost for the publisher.

“Of course it will be a bad user experience, but it will also probably be the last user experience if publishers don’t have any money any more — they won’t be able to proceed,” said Oberlé. “As a user, you have to think about paying for content now.”

Ziff Media Group, which operates sites including Mashable and PC Mag, has been using advertiser unease around Facebook to promote its private programmatic marketplace, hoping its flexibility and scale can pique advertiser interest. Group Nine Media, which has enjoyed soaring video views across several platforms besides Facebook since the pandemic began, has pitched brand-sensitive advertisers a cuddly alternative in the form of its animal site, The Dodo; and podcasters, who saw performance-focused advertising dollars come their way during the Facebook boycott in July, are hoping to rekindle those conversations with brands as election day looms on Nov. 3.

Not every brand is going to step away from Facebook in the next six weeks, and many that do understand it will come at a cost: None of the alternatives to Facebook, whether it’s a social platform or a programmatic marketplace, offer Facebook’s exact combination of scale, addressability and convenience, three media buying executives said.

But even if the temporary pause in spending only lasts a few weeks, and even if the shift doesn’t permanently rebalance brands’ budgets, many publishers are relishing a new opportunity to pitch themselves as an alternative to Facebook, especially at the end of a year that has been so challenging.

“It had the one-two benefit of providing an alternative, and also allowing us to educate,” said Eva Smith, svp of sales and marketing solutions at Ziff Media Group, who noted that she and her colleagues first identified brands’ election unease as an opportunity back in the first quarter of the year. “Some [clients] wanted it as an alternative; some just wanted it as a tactic.”

Brands will often pause their ad spending in the final few days before a presidential election, though not always across the board. Lex Friedman, the chief revenue officer of podcast company Art19, noted that podcast advertisers did not pause their spending around the election in either 2018 or 2016.

This year, publishers got plenty of signals that brands would be taking their money off Facebook at this time. Ryan Pauley, the chief revenue officer of Vox Media, noted in August that “a lot” of brands planned to go dark on Facebook in the final days before the election. “If you’re a DR media buyer, you saw a value arbitrage opportunity mid March-April as a bunch of brands pulled out of market. you’re gonna get another opportunity in the 7-10 days around the election,” Pauley wrote on Twitter.

In a normal year, the drop in spending might only last a week or two. But the unusually high volume of mail-in votes expected to be cast this year has many experts predicting that it could take weeks, if not months to declare a winner in the presidential race. 

“People are starting to bake in the idea that there may be this [issue] longer than just the election itself,” said Anthony Rinaldi, vp of media activation at Essence.

That raises the stakes for publishers hoping to sell new campaigns or grow the size of deals already in the works. And this summer, publishers got the chance to develop a playbook for courting advertisers who weren’t spending on Facebook, after a crop of advertisers boycotted the platform for a month.

It is difficult to tell how much money the boycotting advertisers kept off the platform — Facebook’s revenues rose 10% year over year in the third quarter — but many of the brands that participated are among Facebook’s biggest ad spenders. Five of the brands continue the boycott spent a combined $237 million on Facebook in 2019, according to Pathmatics data.

Rather than let their Facebook ad budgets go to waste, many brands simply moved the money into other channels.

“We definitely saw multiple kinds of advertisers who came to us and said, ‘We’re ready to spend with you,’ or ‘We’re ready to spend more with you,’” said Lex Friedman, the chief revenue officer of podcast company Art19.    

Many of the advertisers that sat July out on Facebook have continued their boycott or will pause their spending again, said Geoff Schiller, the chief revenue officer of Group Nine.

But the publishers aren’t only competing with one another, and as usual, publishers face the challenge of competing on flexibility and speed. “Direct publisher [buys] are definitely a part,” of some brands’ revised spending plans, said Semhar Amdemichael, vp of programmatic at the media agency Assembly. “it’s just that it’s a bit more of a heavy lift … and what we’re seeing from clients is a desire to go quickly [into another channel].”

That emphasis on speed, Amdemichael said, has meant a lot of client spending will migrate into things like native ad networks, which can be used to distribute the creative assets brands originally created for Facebook and Instagram, or to YouTube, which offers a comparable amount of scale.

Some of the publishers well-positioned to succeed are those that can easily move what they offered with Facebook onto other platforms.

“We’ve been able to shift to YouTube or to Snap,” said Group Nine Media’s Schiller. “We have a large distribution pool to go off of in terms of amplifying the content [we create for brands].”

Whether this window of opportunity remains open next year remains to be seen. But like so many things that have happened this year, it has pushed publishers to accelerate what they were doing already.

“This just reduces reliance [on any one platform],” said Craig Kostelic, the chief business officer of U.S. revenue at Condé Nast. “We make sure have as diversified a social commercial offering as we can.”

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.

With all the back and forth that’s gone on with TikTok, do you still feel like it’s a platform to focus on? 

In the beginning we were all really worried like, ‘Oh my gosh it might get shut down. What’s going to happen? We need a plan B.’ But now there’s been so much drama [and no action] we think the channel will stay. We’re just operating as business as usual. We’re trying to ignore all of the politics. 

How much of your media budget is dedicated to TikTok?

About 40% of our influencer budget is spent on TikTok, which is quite a lot. It’s a lot of exposure, but again our bet is that it’s just too big of a channel to go away. We’re going to maintain our spend. But I did at one point have the team come up with a plan B in the event that it would be shut off. It would go into Instagram and YouTube — do more experimentation. 

The Trump Administration has said if a deal can’t be reached that TikTok will be shut down. But you’re still spending and bullish on it. What makes you confident that it will remain?  

Downloads were supposed to be turned off on a few Sundays ago and then a judge said that was illegal and an overreach of presidential power. I know the leadership and government has made a lot of threats, but I’m not sure how plausible they are. We’ve already seen that the courts have intervened and put some rational thinking back into it. It’s just a lot of politics. Also, we don’t know what’s going to happen with the election.

In the end, it feels like a lot of hot air to make this administration look like they’re being tough on China. They keep threatening it but nothing has happened. The bluff has happened so many times and it still hasn’t been banned that I now don’t think it’s going to happen. 

Do you talk to other DTC execs about TikTok?

Yeah, a lot of brand founders are deprioritizing it for now just to see how things settle before really taking bets with the platform. We’re already really invested in the platform, but if I weren’t [I could see not spending now as] I understand that perspective. You don’t want to start investing in something that could go away. For a lot of DTC founders it’s still unknown territory. 

Overall, how do you feel about this situation where a platform you’re heavily invested in could be shut off any moment?

It’s frustrating. In the beginning, I was a lot more swayed by the news but now I just tune it out. We just have to keep doing what we’re doing. It would be such a shame if it got banned, but until it does we’re just keeping our heads down.