Month: January 2022

A big theme that came out of these conversations was that in 2022 there will be a significant focus on transforming fan bases into active consumers and participants of the blockchain, who are not solely investing their money and time for the monetary payout, but for the utility of being closer to the artists and celebrities that they love. And as that happens, a mutually beneficial relationship between the two parties. 

The key details: 

• NFTs in the form of digital art are not only the most popular iteration of the software right now, but they also have the least amount of friction when it comes to how NFTs are used and sold to consumers, according to Erick Calderon, founder and CEO of art-based NFT marketplace Art Blocks, who spoke in the “NFT, WTF” session on Wednesday. But one of the most significant impacts that NFTs have had on the art world is giving control back to the artist when it comes to secondary markets. By embedding royalty structures into the smart contract of digital art NFT pieces, the artist or creator will earn a percentage of all secondary (and so on) sales. In a traditional art transaction, the artist loses out on the revenue generated from any future sales after the initial one. 
• In the entertainment industry, NFTs are able to solve a lot of the content distribution challenges that have been caused by the streaming wars, according to Scott Greenberg, CEO of Blockchain Creative Labs, which is owned by Fox Entertainment. Turning everything from video frames to full episodes into NFTs gives fans the social value of boasting their love of the show, but it also solves a distribution problem where they can actually own the content. Streaming prevents viewers from owning the program. Instead, they buy a license from a distributor.  
• This summer, actors and investors Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis partnered with the Ethereum blockchain creator Vitalik Buterin to create a digital animated show called “Stoner Cats” that is only accessible to viewers who bought the show’s NFTs. Those NFTs holders also got to have their input on the show. Greenberg, who is also CEO at Bento Box Entertainment (the animation arm under Fox Entertainment that produces shows like “Bob’s Burgers” and “The Great North”) said that this is a model that his team may explore down the line for new shows. 
• The WWE is partnering with Blockchain Creative Labs to create NFT assets from its intellectual property, such as videos from bouts or images of the wrestlers. While this audience may not be considered crypto-native, Scott Zanghellini, head of new revenue at the WWE said the audience has a history of buying a lot of WWE memorabilia, a habit that he believes will transfer into the digital realm. 
• Mass adoption is reliant on making the user experience easy. One way that Greenberg is trying to ease the process of making a crypto wallet or buying an NFT is having the WWE wrestlers tell people how to do it as part of the programming. During the “Creator Economy in the Context of Crypto” session, he said “Fox taught America how to text with American Idol. Remember, more people voted for the winner of American Idol than they did in the presidential election. You had Ryan Seacrest saying, ‘Open your flip phones.’ Well, we intend to do the same thing.” 

Utility vs. value 

While Blockchain Creative Labs is a revenue-focused business, Greenberg said that the primary focus for his team is less on monetary value and more on rewarding fans with utility. By giving avid viewers bonus content or access to private discussion boards with other fans or the talent themselves, the utility of the NFT becomes more than a digital asset you look at. 

“It’s really important that a project that’s released in the NFT space has intrinsic artistic value, intrinsic community value — both, if you’re lucky — and we’re still trying to identify what those markers of value [for] driving value in this space,” Lesley Silverman, head of digital assets at United Talent Agency, told Digiday after her session “NFT, WTF” wrapped on Wednesday. 

‘Support the ecosystem before you take from the ecosystem’ 

When brands and celebrities decide to take part in the blockchain, Silverman said their first instinct cannot be “about coming in and grabbing a quick bag of cash.” Rather, she said there needs to be organic and authentic approaches to demonstrating that they belong in this community of crypto-native consumers. 

“We’ve seen brands come in and take tremendous chunks of liquidity out of the environment, without ever having done anything to put into the environment. The gold standard will evolve rapidly and is going to be, ‘Support the ecosystem first before you take from the ecosystem,’” Silverman told Digiday. 

L’Oréal was one of Silverman’s recent clients that she said executed this golden standard well when it launched its first NFT collection. The artists the company collaborated with were able to keep 100% of the profits of the first sale, and then subsequent sales made in the secondary markets were donated in part to charity, ensuring that the beauty company only earned revenue after that point. 

L’Oréal “demonstrated that they’re here to support the community of artists,” said Silverman. “And what the brand gains from that is relevance in a space [that’s] highly competitive.”

But with many things in media, the reality has proved to be more complicated.

Criteo has joined forces with The Trade Desk to begin testing OpenPass, the single sign-on technology that would harvest all the email addresses needed to power its tech to replace third-party cookies, Unified ID 2.0 (UID 2.0).

These leading companies began banding together, thanks in part to the stewardship of Prebid, the advertising standards body that UID 2.0’s creator, The Trade Desk, had handed UID 2.0’s reins to just a few months earlier.

Prebid was put in charge of UID 2.0 partly to convince the industry at large that it would be steered by an impartial set of hands. But with Prebid at the wheel, the story has taken some dramatic turns. Today, the fate of OpenPass is in doubt after tests in Europe stalled, publishers in the U.S. hesitated to hand readers’ email addresses off to a third party, and Criteo, which was supposed to handle OpenPass’s tests in Europe, now also backs Prebid SSO, a separate, non-email-based sign-on technology that doesn’t require email addresses.

In that same period of time, rival solutions and strategies have eaten away at the enormous head start that UID 2.0 built up. Sources have told Digiday its ascendancy to becoming the de facto ad targeting tool for the open internet is far from fait-accompli with rival tech standards.

And with Google’s deadline to deprecate third-party cookies now less than 18 months away, Prebid, which is currently in the midst of a leadership change, now must decide how forcefully to steer, and in what direction.

Seeking peer-approval

When The Trade Desk unveiled UID 2.0 in July 2020, the ad tech company had to convince the wider industry that its targeting tool wasn’t just a proprietary solution primed for its own commercial advantage for it to scale. 

UID 2.0 won the backing of the majority of the industry’s holding groups with Omnicom Media Group, Publicis Groupe and IPG all endorsing the standard, the latter of the trio named as a “closed operator” of the ad targeting standard in July of 2021.

In a bid to win over ad tech peers Prebid has been an “operator” of the targeting standard, with The Trade Desk eager to point out that Unified ID 2.0 would be interoperable with alternative identifiers, such as LiveRamp’s IDL or Prebid.org’s SharedID.

Naming Prebid as an operator of UID 2.0 was the precursor to The Trade Desk’s OpenPass collaborations; a Criteo spokesperson told Digiday a formal launch of the SSO is expected “in the coming months” after testing began in April 2021.

Opinions are not so unified  

But enthusiasm for UID 2.0 was considerably more muted among one crucial group of stakeholders: publishers expected to use it. Given their first-party relationships, publisher buy-in is critical to the success of UID 2.0. And while tests are ongoing, a number of household names from the publishing world are still mulling their options.

Household publisher names have backed UID 2.0 with BuzzFeed, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and The Washington Post all signing up to the standard. Although others have publicly adopted a wait-and-see approach, including The Guardian and News Corp.

It’s unclear how many publishers are experimenting with UID 2.0.

For some publishers, whether to back UID 2.0 is a philosophical quandary, said Stephanie Layser, Prebid.org board member, and vp of data, identity, and ad tech platforms at News Corp. “It’s a question of what we want the new internet to look like,” she explained. “Do we want it [the advertising experience] to be more contextually relevant than it was prior to that? I think it’s also a question of whether publishers want to take their most valuable asset and do you want to share it to help the open internet?”

A News Corp. spokesperson further clarified the publisher’s stance: “News Corp is evaluating the solution and is most likely going to make decisions differently for each domain depending on their value proposition in market.”

In contrast, The New York Times told Digiday that UID 2.0 was “not a priority for us right now” in April 2021. “We don’t look favorably on solutions that in the end are still about a lot of data transfer about individuals’ online behavior in ways they don’t understand,” explained Allison Murphy, svp of products at The New York Times at the time.

Administrator wanted 

There is also a crucial distinction between stewarding and owning a product like UID 2.0. And nowhere is this clearer than the European Economic Area, where all those involved in the handling of consumer data have to abide by GDPR. This is because the European privacy regulations require companies to define themselves as either data controller or data processor.

For many, individuals’ email addresses, encrypted or not, are classified as personally identifiable information under GDPR. That’s left many parties wondering who should assume liability for any potential legal fallout. It remains unclear as to when these concerns can realistically be resolved; European trials are still in a holding pattern.

Such disagreements stymied earlier efforts from The Trade Desk to find an administrator for UID 2.0, a role that would require a third party to ensure all those with access to the targeting standard’s encryption code act in accordance with laws such as GDPR.

Magnite’s Garrett McGrath, the interim chairman of Prebid.org, told Digiday the administrator role was offered to both PreBid.org and The IAB Tech Lab, but neither body felt the role of “ad tech police” within their charter. Both bodies prefer to see themselves as facilitators of tech standards, not outfits with powers of sanction.

“Once the administrator has been determined, that is the point, one would assume, that UID 2.0 will go fully into production, and get out of the holding pattern that it has been in,” added McGrath.    

Divergent single sign-ons 

However, just whom should act as “the ad tech police” isn’t the only front where The Trade Desk and Prebid.org’s membership appear at odds.

The Trade Desk maintains it is fully committed to its earlier plans to develop OpenPass, whereby audiences are encouraged to authenticate their identity by consenting to their email addresses being accessed and then later encrypted, with full cooperation from PreBid.org.

But with some Prebid.org constituents feeling The Trade Desk’s proposed SSO gave it too much control over their platforms, Prebid decided to build an alternative.

Phil Bohn, svp of sales and revenue at Mediavine, and member of PreBid.org’s board of directors said OpenPass and Prebid’s SSO have diverged into separate independent projects as many publishers felt asking website visitors for their email addresses may be too disruptive an experience.

“To maximize adoption, Prebid is building both semi-authenticated and fully-authenticated identity solutions,” he added. “Both will be overly transparent to users, but the semi-authenticated ID opens the possibility that users can rely on a more consistent experience, with their preferences better respected across multiple digital properties.” 

A spokesperson for the ad tech body declined to comment, but a source with knowledge of the ongoing developments within Prebid explained the breadth of the divide that had to be crossed.

“The SSO moniker has been confusing to people,” said the source who works within Prebid’s ranks, but requested anonymity due to their employer’s PR policies. “We’re not really building an SSO, what we’re talking about is generating interoperable, addressable identifiers that also have an accountability framework associated with them.”

A Criteo spokesperson explained how the ad tech company intends to placate both camps, “Criteo continues to help drive creation of the open-source Prebid SSO solution, which doesn’t require email authentication. Criteo strives to make these, and other solutions ​like OpenPass, interoperate to achieve our above goal.”

So, while the constituents of the open internet, ad tech companies and publishers alike, have a common cause in their desire to disrupt Big Tech’s dominance over marketers’ ad budgets, philosophies on how to do so in an increasingly privacy-centric world differ starkly. Discussions within Prebid.org will be crucial to preserving a delicate confederacy.

When the business launched back in 2013 with young people of color at the helm, “everyone thought we were nuts,” Mosley said. Now, companies are approaching Adolescent Content to access the team’s network of more than 4,000 creatives, 80% of which are female-identifying, people of color, LGBTQ+, Mosley said. Last year, companies like Tinder, Walmart and Snapchat worked with Adolescent Content.

Digiday caught up with Mosley to talk about what the next wave of change looks like and where the next generation fits into the conversation.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

What’s the importance of a Black- and female-founded Gen Z company like Adolescent Content in this industry?

Economically, as well as racially, we’ve focused on primarily women of color and people who are part of the LGBTQ+ community. Very quickly, what we realized was that it had to go beyond an older white man coming up with the concept and a younger person of color directing the piece. Over the years, what we’ve done is created space. We’re really here to create space.

How did the summer of 2020 impact your business and what does that look like now?

There was a huge shift. When we launched, everyone thought we were nuts. They would say, “You’re so niche” or, “You have too many Black directors on your roster,” which was super offensive. It was a hard thing to get people to understand not only the idea of a young person but young people of color. For the six years of business, we were constantly running up against this bias. We didn’t shift our business at all as far as what our focus was.

The other thing that happened with George Floyd’s murder and this terrible beginning of the reckoning, suddenly people started looking around, like, “Oh shit. We actually have to listen.”  It finally raised into the consciousness of brands, ad agencies and people did start to look to us. I can’t tell you how many other agencies are female [and] Black-owned. Suddenly we were getting calls and opportunities to step into the room. But it’s still at the very beginning. I can’t say our lives have changed, people are coming in and throwing down money. It’s still a little bit of the lip service and “We want to do this,” but then they still go back to working with the same groups.

With that being said, has the industry’s efforts really made a difference?

It is an opening. I do see it shifting. And for the first time, I see the horizon, the opportunity and incredible value proposition that we’ve created is that the door has opened, or we kicked down the door, and are able to walk through. No longer are they looking at us so confused when we say there’s a fundamental need to hear stories from a variety of points of view. You can no longer keep telling the same story about the white boy or white girl whose heart was broken. Now, we want to hear different stories of are what makes the fabric of our society and our history, really. It happens to be these diverse stories told by diverse people. 

So, where do we go from here?

We have to get beyond this concept that people are doing us a favor by working with us and get to the idea that this is a huge value. What they’re getting from these diverse storytellers is not charity. You’re not doing them a favor, they’re doing you a favor. What we know is people of color lead all things. They lead culture, great ideas and art. A key part of our business still is to continue that education and continue proving ourselves.

I’m like a gardener planting seeds and I believe those seeds are going to grow. I believe the pain is temporary—the pain of trying to communicate our value, which is rough because people sometimes don’t get it. But pain is temporary and the future we’re headed toward is one in which people get the incredible value that we have here.