Month: July 2021

Doubling down on the investment, Ro rolled out an NYC subway-based train takeover as part of Roman’s summer campaign, with plans to expand to transit in Chicago and Philadelphia, said Rob Schutz, chief growth officer and co-founder of Ro. Both will be full city takeovers, including digital bulletins on major Chicago expressways, and digital bus shelters and wrapped newsstands in Philadelphia, he said.

For Ro, it’s a move to take advantage of current OOH media rates discounted between 30-40% off and diversify away from a reliance on digital ads, which are becoming increasingly more expensive. As earlier reported by Digiday, a hashtag challenge on TikTok could run advertisers up to ​​$150,000 per week — a number that could significantly increase when working with a creator or influencer on the short-form video app. 

“Inevitably, [social media ads] will be more and more expensive, over the course of time,” Schutz said. “So finding ways to focus on more geographically-based [media buys] to test out surround sound strategy, out of home plays a really big role in that.”

The brand’s digital ad spend takes up the largest share of media dollars, though Schutz declined to give a percentage of what that looks like — or exact figures. But even as the world grapples with new Covid variants, the DTC co-founder says it’ll continue to steadily increase its investment in OOH.

Given the nature of OOH advertising, like the lack of measurable attributes and KPIs, and the global pandemic still at bay, Schutz admits the channel is a risk. However, it’s one that the brand has built into its strategy, he said.

“I think we have a baseline understanding of what impressions we would expect, given where the world is right now,” Schutz said. “You always have to anticipate that it could go in either direction and we’ve kind of built that into how we think about the pricing and the modeling.”

Subway ridership has yet to reach pre-pandemic levels, hovering around 50%, according to Brian Rappaport, CEO of OOH agency Quan Media Group, which counts Ro a client. However, that makes for discounted OOH media rates with about 30-40% off for some ad real estate, down a bit from the 70-80% discounted rates offered at the top of the pandemic, he said.

As many offices plan for a fall reopening, Rappaport expects ridership to increase alongside OOH media costs. Trying to get ahead of rising costs, Quan’s clients, Roman included, have already planned OOH media buys for the fall, Rappaport said. DTC brands like Prose hair care and mobile banking app Current have also launched a subway presence, per Rappaport. Quan’s client list also includes Away, Banza, and Fresh Direct.

“They’re playing out of home strengths right now in this reopening,” he said. “I think Roman did it right by being one of those legacy brands to come back right away and get in front of [its] audience.”

OOH is becoming more tech-savvy with digital billboards and better analytic tracking, making it a viable post-pandemic challenger to traditional digital advertising — an increasingly oversaturated and expensive market, said Gavin Wilson, chief revenue officer at digital OOH agency VIOOH. 

“The cross-channel positioning of this innovative way of trading outdoor media is more and more understood,” Wilson said via email. “And this is coupled with the mass vaccination plan and increased traffic in key hubs like New York, Boston and Chicago.”

USA Today added two AR experiences around the Olympic Games to its mobile app on July 19:

• One is narrated by professional skateboarder Tom Schaar, who gives a tour of the Olympic Games’ skateboarding course, displays simulations of skateboarding tricks, and provides a look at his career
• The other is narrated by Schaar and Olympic climber Krya Condie, who explain bouldering, scoring and different types of holds (the pieces on the wall that climbers grip). Condie describes how she tackles each wall, with videos of her past performances. An animated hand shows how to hold different grips.

These experiences are aimed at giving audiences a “better understanding of what to watch for [during the Games], the competition format and the scoring — and have the pro athletes be the voice that helps introduce them” to these new Olympic sports, said Ray Soto, senior director of emerging tech at USA Today’s parent Gannett.

USA Today has seen some success already for this kind of storytelling: AR stories had 15 million impressions and 1.5 million views across USA Today and other local apps, Soto said.

“We are seeing more and more engagement with interactive experiences,” Soto said.

The Washington Post has three AR and experimental video series that debuted on July 20, each on a new Olympic sport: climbing, skateboarding and surfing:

• In one, Olympic climber Brooke Raboutou shoots up a 15-meter wall in about 10 seconds, which appears in your own space at scale when you launch the experience by scanning a QR code within the story on a phone camera
• In another, Olympic skateboarder Heimana Reynolds suspends himself in the air with 180 degree views in another experience
• In the third, Olympic surfer Caroline Marks rides a wave in a step-by-step, annotated slow motion capture video. 

The Post used motion capture for the first time to show the climbing AR experience — a strategy characterized by Elite Truong, director of strategic initiatives at The Post, as the publisher’s “take on motion capture and animation as a visual explainer.” To do this, editors created a 3D model of Raboutou from a photoshoot to show how she moves while climbing. For the skateboarding and surfing experiences, The Post used 36 GoPros to capture video that allows users to freeze the experience and take a 180-degree slow-motion view around the athlete.

For editors, it came down to storytelling.

“We could write a long paragraph on sprinting up a 50-meter wall in 10 seconds, but we try to figure out how to show that to you, in your own space, how tall 50 meters is,” Truong said. The Post declined to provide exact figures that speak to the popularity of this coverage — and the medium.

How publishers are investing in AR storytelling

Emerging tech is still a relatively new area of investment for publishers, many of which don’t have the resources to experiment, but Truong is convinced that it will “be everywhere” one day. “We will see more and more mainstream adoption,” she said.

There might be a fair amount of advertiser interest. Brands have gone from “testing out the marketplace to committing to pretty impressive investment in this space,” said Jason Steinberg, managing partner at Pretty Big Monster, a digital agency that has worked on web-based AR and VR experiences for brands like Sony Pictures.

Both publishers are working through where to offer readers these experiences. The Post’s AR coverage is now accessible by QR codes in articles, on the publisher’s app, iOS devices — and with its Olympics project — on Android phones. Previously, the experiences were exclusive to the publisher’s app which inadvertently “created a bit of the walled garden scenario” of inaccessibility, Truong said.

USA Today is adding capabilities to improve AR performance in-app. While AR experiences are only available on USA Today’s mobile apps, Soto said they are “exploring opportunities for web AR as well.”

How these publishers have structured their teams

Both publishers’ teams leading the foray into emerging technologies are made up of five people with backgrounds that range from product development to design. Neither company provided figures that speak to the amount of money they receive to experiment with new types of storytelling.

Truong said The Washington Post’s Lede Lab works on four to six large projects a year in a continuous trial and error. The team had a “big budget” for the Olympics project, which took about five months to complete, Truong said. She did not provide exact figures on what the monetary investment was, but said the team got “about a dozen smaller-scale learnings.”

USA Today has a similar goal. After the siege on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, the emerging tech team built an AR package around the event in about eight hours. The idea is that more investigative, deeper dive stories will one day be considered premium content for USA Today subscribers, and AR projects built around breaking news will be free and accessible to all.

AR and VR experimentation should be left up to “the big guys” to gauge audience demand before other publishers jump on board, said Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development and marketing firm Twenty-First Digital. “It’s too expensive for most publishers without knowing if this is something their audiences even want,” she said, suggesting that most publishers should “let those with deeper pockets… be the early adopters.”

Matching services that allow advertisers to onboard customer email lists to ad sellers’ systems to target ads to specific people have been around for years. Now, the NAI wants to expand the privacy options it gives people into that realm of audience matching beyond just blocking tracking cookies. The group now requires its member companies to provide an opt-out from services using hashed or encrypted emails as the links between a brand’s customer data and identity graphs and other audience matching systems.

Criteo is one of the NAI members enabling the opt-outs. “When Criteo receives an opt-out request, we will stop targeting the [hashed email address] for audience-matching and we will stop using the [hashed email address] for tailored advertising,” said Karsten Rieke, senior director, product management, identity and privacy at Criteo. “This means we will no longer serve personalized advertising to the identifiers we receive or are linked via this new email process in full compliance with the NAI guidelines,” she added.

People who want to opt-out of audience matching for ads must visit the NAI site and — yes — supply their email address. “If you don’t want information linked to your email address to be used for digital advertising, please enter your email address below, and our participating members will not use this data,” states the new tool on the NAI site. In most or all cases, a link to the tool will be available inside privacy policies or data collection choice areas on the websites of NAI’s members participating in the program. 

But, with links to the opt-outs buried inside privacy policies, the tool could have limited impact on consumer privacy in general. “How many consumers are going to find and understand this opt-out?” asked Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy and technology policy for Consumer Reports, calling the approach “weak sauce.”

Gaps and questions

In all, along with Criteo, six NAI member firms are enabling the email opt-out: Google, Neustar, Oracle Data Cloud, Inmar (formerly OwnerIQ) and Verizon Media. Notably, some of the biggest audience matching players are not included, because they are not NAI members: Facebook and LiveRamp.

Plus, there are questions about how Google will implement the opt-outs. It is not clear, for instance, whether opting out from Google’s audience matching via the NAI system will disable targeting inside Google-owned properties if people are logged in to Google, or if the opt-out would only apply for ads targeted through audience matching in the open web.

“Those details still have to be ironed out,” said Anthony Matyjaszewski, NAI’s vp of compliance, regarding Google’s opt-out implementation. Google did not provide a response to that question in time for publication.

There are other questions and gaps, too. The opt-out process misses many of the growing number of alternate identity technologies that use email addresses to build encrypted identifiers for use in programmatic ads in an effort to replace data sharing that currently happens using third-party cookies. This, despite the fact that most of the NAI’s members are ad tech firms, some of which offer ad targeting using identifiers built from hashed emails, or allow email-based IDs to pass through their ad systems.

Matyjaszewski said the NAI is working toward finding ways to provide opt-outs for those types of technologies. “It’s just a question of shifting dynamics in the ecosystem where these ad ID companies are sort of shifting their products on the fly in response to the market,” he said.

“Not everyone is happily marching along”

But even getting members to agree to the opt-out from audience matching was not necessarily a cake walk, said Matyjaszewski. “Not everyone is happily marching along,” he said.

Meanwhile, government pressure on advertisers when it comes to data collection and use is only intensifying, said Brookman. “Regulation is coming for these companies, and initiatives like this are just rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship,” he said.

“Fundamentally we’re scraping public data on the Internet that exists on forums and blogs, and applying natural-language processing,” said Arkalgud. “But we’re less interested in the exact verbatim of the consumer, which is what every other big data company is doing. We’re interested in how meaning is given to each topic. I often tell our clients we didn’t invent the study of meaning — all we’ve done is apply modern technology and tools.”

Arkalgud noted that since all the information is publicly available, Motivbase’s efforts are GDPR-compliant — no consent is needed. And since Motivbase stores words detached from personally identifiable information, the company feels it sidesteps other privacy concerns.

“We’ve built this living breathing model of consumer culture,” he said. “What people are buying is access to that, and of course access to our expertise to help them make sense of it.”

Motivbase works primarily with innovation and strategy departments at large companies, but Arkalgud said marketing is coming along for the ride. “The reason is, innovation and corporate strategy has to think beyond the next quarter,” he explained. “They need to answer the question: ‘what does the future of my business look like in the next 12, 24, 48, 72 months?’ And they have to make bets now.”

At Mars Wrigley, Lisa Saxon Reed, the global director of sensory, said Motivbase has been able to exceed her own company’s efforts at ethnographic research to develop new products. “I was really intrigued by their pitch of AI plus ethnography, doing disruptive innovation or breakthrough innovation,” said Reed, who added that she was motivated to experiment with Motivbase recognizing the opportunity to replace in-person ethnography, which can be costly and takes time.

The speed and scale of Motivbase’s insights compilation motivated Reed to introduce Arkalgud to other divisions at Mars Wrigley, including pet, food and marketing. “It’s absolutely helped on product [development], specifically understanding what are the consumer needs, and what are the characteristics our product needs to have,” said Reed. “It could have to do with ingredients, or with claims, or more broadly, that it can do X, Y or Z.”

In a partnership with gaming company Razer, Mars Wrigley produced a gum targeting gamers, called Respawn, which aimed to boost their playing abilities. Before Motivbase, the company talked to gamers. But the company realized those same sentiments were validated “in a fraction of the time” by Motivbase.

“With that proof of concept, I knew this would be valuable for us,” Reed said.

Although the pandemic neither helped nor hurt Motivbase’s business, Arkalgud said the current U.S. political divide has led to a search for deeper meaning among companies. “Meaning is now recognized as a significant question,” he said. “People used to ask, ‘What are people talking about?’ Now we’re getting them to ask, ‘What do they mean by what they talk about?’ … Our job with these companies is to create an understanding of why that view is held.”

That said, for advertisers and publishers alike, a lot needs to change. Google’s delay might represent a brief reprieve from the loss of certain targeting and tracking capabilities, but the writing is on the wall. We’ve glimpsed the future of advertising, and it requires a different playbook. Here we take a look at where our industry needs to be focusing its energy between now and the rescheduled cookie doomsday. 

Cohort onboarding is the key to unlocking first-party data

For marketers, the longer road to a cookieless reality grants companies more time to develop and fully leverage their first-party data. One powerful avenue for doing this — not only in the U.S., where deterministic data has been overemphasized to date, but also globally, where a consistent solution can be applied across multiple markets — is through cohort onboarding. 

Cohort onboarding represents a consumer-friendly solution to harnessing first-party data by enabling marketers to transform their first-party data assets into powerful digital audiences to reach new customers, enhance marketing analytics, deepen insights and boost omnichannel campaign performance. After all, most brands collect a lot of valuable information about their customers — CRM data, transactional spending, loyalty card metrics, survey responses and more. This data often sits in silos and, therefore, can be challenging to put into action. With cohort onboarding, advertisers bring these disparate sources together and transform them into addressable digital audiences to target and engage. The resulting propensity models enable brands to reach new consumers, at scale, who demonstrate the same attributes and behaviors as a brand’s existing customer base. 

Retailers in particular have an abundance of siloed first-party data that they can use to enhance their marketing intelligence. Take, for example, a grocery store chain with a popular loyalty card program. Using propensity models, the grocer could analyze its loyalty card data across specific geographic areas to create audience cohorts that are, for example, female and purchase organic products. Those audience cohorts could then be matched to privacy-compliant online IDs to create digital audiences that enable the retailer to send tailored offers through traditional and digital channels. The same approach allows them to acquire new customers focused on certain product offers, and strategically place advertisements. The potential is there as well to sell privacy-compliant data to consumer packaged goods organizations for campaign targeting.

In other words, in a cookieless world, cohort onboarding enables retail brands to develop high-scale, relevant audiences using first-party data. These same methods can be applied to other industries with similar results.

Future-proofing through agnostic ID solutions

Of course, identity resolution will remain a core focus of advertisers and publishers moving into the future. What the industry has learned during the much-extended “cookiepocalypse” is that dependency on a single technology or concept is simply unsustainable. As such, going forward, all stakeholders must place an emphasis on agnostic identity solutions that can create global data interoperability while also increasing digital reach and activation. Only in this way can marketers be sure that they’ll have continued access to audience identifiers, regardless of changes within the industry.

It’s not about establishing a single identifier to succeed the cookie. The truly future-proof solutions will be the ones that connect all areas of data input that collect audience identifiers, whether those are mobile IDs, hashed emails, first-party data, contextual data or other unique identifiers. By connecting data in this way and then probabilistically and deterministically matching IDs on a cross-device graph, users can identify and activate the right audiences in a privacy-compliant way without the use of cookies or third-party identifiers. 

Future-proofing also means putting a focus on interoperability through the lens of consumer privacy. Now is not the time for complacency or competitive elbowing. It’s a time to come together around a consumer-first vision for advertising and take the steps needed to preserve strong customer experiences while helping brands continue to grow their businesses. The ad industry has been given a little extra time to get this right — it must not waste it.