Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
The evolution of the customer data platform market can be tracked based on the type of RFPs vendors have received over the years from potential brand clients. Around 2014, it was “sort of a DMP-plus type of RFP,” says Cory Munchbach, chief operating officer at CDP BlueConic, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “You… Continue reading »
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The Trade Winds The balls keep bouncing for advertising lobbyists. Yesterday’s newsletter cited the IAB’s transition from publisher-focused group to a representative for all internet advertising stakeholders. The decision could open a lane for Digital Content Next, a publisher lobbying group that advocates against the IAB in many instances. On the flip side, the IAB… Continue reading »
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Agencies normally aren’t shy about passing work costs on to their clients. Yet as more agencies work to gather and store data about internet users, a significant percentage of independent agencies are bearing that cost on their own, according to new Digiday+ research.
In November, Digiday polled several dozen agency and brand professionals on a number of topics, including how they are preparing for returns to the office and what kinds of vaccination policies their employers have. Forty independent agency professionals with knowledge of how their organizations approach data collection answered questions about that practice.
While a significant chunk of independent agencies do not offer this kind of service to clients, among those that do, close to half said they bear the costs themselves, rather than passing it on to clients.
Anecdotally, respondents who said they worked at holding company agencies were much less likely to pass the costs on, but an insufficient number of holding company agency respondents weighed in on the topic.
While agencies have been collecting data about internet users for years, the relationship to that data — and to the third party brokers that provide it — has changed considerably since Google said it would depreciate support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser.
The data is typically one service among many agencies provided to clients. Two thirds of the independent agency respondents indicated their agencies offered some combination of creative, media and performance marketing services to their clients.
The post Digiday+ Research: Independent agencies bear the cost of data collection appeared first on Digiday.
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BET actually entered the streaming wars before Disney and Apple. Two months before the debuts of Disney+ and Apple TV+, the ViacomCBS-owned TV network rolled out its own subscription-based streamer BET+. Now, as the current streaming era enters its third year, BET is preparing some updates to its streaming strategy in 2022, including testing an ad-supported tier and selling a subscription bundle with sibling streamer Paramount+.
“We are very excited about the premium positioning that we’ve established with BET+, and so we’re working through what is the approach to a premium service with an ad-supported model. What I think our audience will see in 2022 is us kind of experimenting with different pricing models to see what their response is to those,” said BET CEO Scott Mills in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.
Having overseen the launch of BET+ in 2019 while serving as president of BET, Mills was named CEO of the TV network owner in November 2019. But, as he explained in the interview, that was mainly a change in title and he had already been serving in the role stewarding BET, which like every other TV network is sorting out how to balance its business between traditional TV and streaming.
“The offering we have in BET+ is not identical to our linear offering. There are some services where the offerings are identical. But the BET linear offering actually is different than the BET+ offering, and so we do position them as different offerings,” Mills said.
Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.
Testing the ad-supported waters
We’ve determined that our audience has actually different distribution of payment types than other streaming services’ audiences. And so what we really want to understand is how many people want a premium service that is devoid of ads? And is there a big enough portion of our audience that wants to be able to avail themselves of the service within ad-supported.
Bundling up
There will absolutely be a BET-Paramount bundle. It’s really a sequencing thing, as there is a Showtime-BET bundle. Intriguingly, when we first launched BET+, a third-party streaming service called and asked if we would bundle with the third-party streaming service. And we really said, “Actually, we’d far prefer to save BET+ to bundle it with our internal services.”
Reaching audiences on others’ platforms
Our most recent venture, BET Studios, was really born of this idea that we’re always going to have people who are going to be subscribers to third-party platforms. And Studios allows us to be in front of our audience on those platforms by creating content and selling it to third parties. So it really is about this complementary ecosystem.
Providing equity ownership to BET Studios creators
This is a really unique structure in that it allows the talent to have not only equity participation in the content they create but all the content that the studio sells. So we think it’s a really exciting model. And it’s attractive to talent because they get to say, “Well, I’m happy to be bet on myself because I do believe in myself. But the neat thing is I’m also getting equity participation in the content that’s being created by the other participants in this venture.”
The post BET’s Scott Mills shares plans for BET+ in 2022 and why the network has formed its own studio appeared first on Digiday.
COVID-19 has forced children across the world to spend huge chunks of their lives online, spurring an increase in under-18 internet use that was already well underway before the pandemic. In 2021, kids grew accustomed to spending their lives in virtual worlds; by July 2020, over half of U.S. kids had a Roblox account.
With virtual spaces becoming a playground for under-18 internet users, brands and platforms have adapted accordingly, making their online activations safer and bringing them in line with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in order to engage with this burgeoning demographic of digital consumers.
In September 2020, Epic Games acquired SuperAwesome to help make its platforms and services — the building blocks of Epic’s metaverse — safer for underaged users. The company has expanded significantly since then. At the moment, SuperAwesome has 250 employees spread across the globe — and it’s in the process of hiring more.
Digiday spoke to Dylan Collins, CEO of SuperAwesome, to learn more about the recent increase in kids’ online activity — and how his company is developing technology to make the internet safer for underaged users.
Children have always been present on the internet. But with pandemic restrictions forcing children across the world to become accustomed to socializing and attending school via virtual platforms, underaged online activity has increased significantly over the last two years, both in video games and in general.
“When you look at screen time for young audiences, over the course of 2020, that jumped, rather unsurprisingly, by about 50%. That whole period, and the year that followed, really heralded this further acceleration into gaming,” Collins said. “So, virtually every young person is now playing games, and they are shifting from not only linear TV, but also from livestreaming. Today, 90% of kids under 16 are playing games, and the majority of those are spending somewhere around about two hours a day in front of games content.”
This increase in underaged gaming activity coincides with the rise of gaming as a pastime across older demographics as well. With children and adults frequently intermingling in virtual spaces, maintaining these users’ safety and priority is more important than ever.
The pandemic-fueled increase in kids’ online activity has led to two significant challenges, according to Collins. The first is regulatory: “The brands that are coming into this space and trying to figure out how to interact with these young audiences, they’ve also got to navigate their way through an increasing number of digital laws for kids and teens,” Collins said. “Whether it’s COPPA, whether it’s age-appropriate design code, whether it’s GDPR [Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation guidelines] — they’ve got to handle that.”
The second major challenge is technological in nature. “We’ve generally got an environment that that hasn’t really invested in what we call kidtech historically. The Internet was originally designed by adults, for adults; by and large, much of the game space was designed in essentially the same way,” Collins said. “And now you’ve got young audiences that are really becoming an increasing factor here. So we’ve got to think about community health, we’ve got to think about toxicity, we’ve got to think about parental consent, we got to think about data privacy.”
In addition to an initiative to start a dedicated team to help relatively inexperienced brands engage with gaming communities genuinely, SuperAwesome’s main technical focus this year was to roll out a parent verification product — a developer-side tool to ensure that parents can safely and confidently give consent for their children to play in virtual spaces.
The tool, which is free to developers, allows users to pre-verify their parental consent within the system, making it much easier for parents to approve their kids’ activities across multiple unconnected platforms. “You can imagine how complex it is for developers to get their head around, because it’s not just even like, ‘okay, we’ve got to build a flow for parents,’ it’s, ‘we’ve got to figure out how to make this compliant with all the laws that continue to change and evolve,” Collins said. “So we roll that up into a single service, super easy for a developer to implement.”
Scaling up was top of mind for Collins as SuperAwesome approached the Epic acquisition last year. “We could scale our mission to make the internet safer for kids in a way that no amount of VC dollars would have been able to unlock for us,” Collins said.
At the crux of the acquisition was Epic’s role as both a game developer and infrastructure company running services such as Unreal Engine and Epic’s online game store. “[CEO Tim Sweeney’s] view, in terms of values on privacy and values on audience inclusiveness, really lined up,” Collins said, “and I can tell you from lots of conversations that rarely happens.”
With the confidence that comes with Epic’s backing, SuperAwesome was able to expand its services in 2021 by making tools such as parental verification free to developers. “Before we were acquired by Epic, we were powering about 10 or 11 billion consumer transactions a month,” Collins said. “At this point, I don’t think we’ve released any numbers, but you can assume it’s significantly more than that.”
Though SuperAwesome is an important element of Epic Games’ infrastructure services, its offerings are not limited to Epic-associated developers, nor to the brands that primarily partner with Epic.
“Our SuperAwesome gaming team facilitated with MGA in Roblox, and with DreamWorks, and a lot of the in-game stuff that we’re doing with Paramount and Nickelodeon and Moose Toys,” Collins said. “In terms of really helping some of the big brands just get a toehold into the gaming environment and start to understand that this really is the new landscape for the next couple of decades, I think our team has done a phenomenal job there.”
The post Case Study: How SuperAwesome helped brands engage young audiences safely in 2021 appeared first on Digiday.
Late last week, Peloton quickly deleted its viral ad featuring Chris Noth following a report by The Hollywood Reporter that two women accused the actor of sexual assault. The ad had been published just four days before it was pulled. Prior to the news, it had been the buzz of the ad world, lauded for its speedy turnaround as it was made in 48-hours as a response to a scene in the Sex and the City reboot.
The ad is gone but its impact on advertising is still unknown. Questions abound: Will this change how quickly advertisers — known for being risk averse and slow-moving — move? Will the push to move at the pace of culture (whatever that means) stop? Will they be less receptive to responsive advertising? Will advertisers vet celebrities more carefully? Will Peloton be another Pepsi?
It’s been years but everyone remembers the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad and the controversy that came with it. If you’ve been in advertising circles you’ve certainly heard people use the Pepsi ad as a shorthand of sorts, an easy example to point to of something not to do. In the aftermath of the controversy, many used it as an example of why in-house creative teams are a problem (i.e. there isn’t enough distance, people aren’t objective enough, etc.).
It’s unclear if Peloton will become another cautionary tale in the same way. One agency exec believes that marketers may call for a more thorough vetting process of talent as a result of this ad. “Every time we work with a celebrity there’s tons of vetting,” said the agency exec, adding that typically vetting can take anywhere from 48-hours to two weeks. “What this might initiate is the speed of vetting, maybe someone will create a 12-hour vetting business.”
Others see it as a ding on responsive advertising that the agency behind the spot, Ryan Reynold’s Maximum Effort, has become known for. With responsive advertising, there’s only a small window to reply to something in culture and doing so comes with greater risks, explained one agency creative.
“With ‘real time’ (or a full commercial in 48 hours in this case) you risk jumping into something without having thought through all the angles,” said the creative. “You’re not doing the same level of due diligence you might do on a shoot that has six weeks of pre-production. That’s not inherently a bad thing. However, that’s the risk. The reward is increased relevancy, news and buzzworthiness.”
Some don’t see that risk as worth the potential cost.
“The digital world is moving at breakneck speed and companies shouldn’t feel the pressure to match that,” said Mack McKelvey, founder and CEO of SalientMG. “For every company that gets it right, far more get it wrong. Moving at the speed of digital requires skipping steps; sometimes that can come at a cost.”
McKelvey continued: “I’m a huge fan of Ryan Reynolds and his approach to the advertising industry, and certainly no one could have foreseen this particular fall-out, but there’s a reason that marketing teams embrace inclusive planning, research and testing. This doesn’t always mean months of delay, but it could be the difference between cultural relevance and an accidental, potentially costly misfire.”
As the third-party cookie continues to crumble, what does that mean for Mozilla?
Advertising is absolutely central to the internet economy, but it’s extremely intrusive and often used in ways that can potentially cause real harm. Mozilla works to influence the data ecosystem and online advertising to make it more private, transparent and to give people more control over their data. To do this, we look at the levers we can pull to challenge the status quo.
We attack this from several angles: With our products, by blocking cross-site tracking in Firefox since 2018; in the advertising surfaces we offer in our products, by scraping PIIs and working with partners that share our values; in our advertising, by transparently disclosing the targeting parameters that we use; and more recently by developing our own ad network.
We think that all browsers should move expeditiously to meaningfully limit cross-site tracking. As we near the end of third-party cookies, the industry is at a fork in the road: we can either end up with brand new technology that has a similar harmful impact (or worse) or we can choose to move toward a better model with more privacy built in.
Has it impacted marketing strategy? If so, how?
We believe that the future of online advertising is much brighter if more private and transparent than what exists today, one where more people have control over their data. With that mandate in mind, Mozilla, which also makes its money from advertising, has been creating and experimenting with privacy-preserving ad technologies, including our own ad network, and offering ad space in the news app Pocket, the Firefox News Tab and in Firefox Suggest, a new custom search feature available via Firefox’s URL bar. If we’re going to suggest and really advocate for these big changes in the ecosystem, we have to participate too and show what effective, non-creepy advertising can look like: it’s transparent, it uses only the data that is necessary, and people have control over their data.
How is Mozilla thinking about the future of data privacy as more protections come down the pipeline?
We’ve learned that advertising efficiently in a privacy-preserving way is a super new proposition only available to a few. It also requires many resources to set up, which smaller businesses may not have. The only way the ecosystem will move to a privacy-first advertising solution is if the new solution is able to keep a similar level of efficiency. To do that for ourselves, to advertise efficiently in a way that is transparent, private and that respects people’s control over their data, we’re currently building bespoke growth marketing privacy solutions — custom technologies that only collect the data absolutely necessary to run our campaigns and assess their effectiveness. These are early days, but we’re very excited about these privacy-preserving growth marketing solutions we’re building. — Kimeko McCoy
Since the top of the pandemic, millions of people have quit their jobs. Meanwhile, the so-called Great Resignation has shown no signs of slowing down, leaving employers scrambling to find ways to not only attract new talent, but maintain their current workforce. According to a recent survey conducted by workforce management platform HiBob and online freelancer services marketplace Fiverr, employees have resigned from their jobs citing everything from COVID-19 safety concerns to pay disparities. Find key statistics from the report below:
“We need to get past talking about pronouns in bathrooms. That should be table stakes. We’re almost to 2022. We should be beyond that. We need to be talking about transition guidelines, inclusive healthcare and how to guarantee the rights of our transgender employees in the workplace.”
— Jenn Renoe, associate media director at Publicis Health Media told Digiday when asked about Publicis Groupe’s work to make the holding company more gender-inclusive.
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