Month: February 2022

The market is growing thanks in large part to the increased sophistication in tools to help match the right influencer with the right brand, alongside improved activation elements that inch brand-related efforts closer to the bottom of the purchasing funnel. But post-campaign evaluation and tying in to attribution remains murkier than influencer marketing’s proponents would like. 

The field “is growing like wildfire — everybody’s curious about it, and wants to spend more,” said Monika Ratner, vp of content marketing and business development at Blue Hour Studios, a unit of Horizon Media. “But the main piece of feedback we hear that’s holding our brands back, is they don’t understand what it’s doing for their business, which is a completely fair question for them to ask and our job to answer.” 

Megan Pagliuca, chief activation officer at Omnicom Media Group, said advancements have been most notable in data-driven planning — the selection of influencers — as well as the activation of multiple influencers at scale. “You can treat influencer marketing like a media channel rather than a one-off PR initiative,” said Pagliuca. “There’s this balance of being able to do it at scale while being able to still have bespoke work.”

What’s helped the industry, while making it much more crowded, is the explosion of influencer networks and the companies that help evaluate influencers, from veteran firms like CreatorIQ to Open Influence, which just three weeks ago launched a new tool called GoPrism. 

Open Influence’s CEO Eric Dahan said GoPrism’s database of more than 1 million influencers, analyzes each of their posts, runs image recognition and text analysis, maps against audience engagement, looks for anomalous activity from users, adds demographic information of their audiences and employs fraud indicators and other brand-safety tools. 

“We’re trying to create a taxonomy of influence,” said Dahan. “A lot of media buyers just want to make sure they’re benchmarking against a cohort and not underspending or overspending, especially if the rest of the industry tried some tactic and decided not to go with it.”

“Over the last 12-18 months, more media agencies are coming to us saying, ‘Hey, we want to have the capability to work with influencers,’” added Mike Balducci, head of new business and commercialization at CreatorIQ. “They’re increasingly being asked by their clients to deliver services and capabilities there. And once you start working with more than one client and more than a few influencers, you really need a platform to support that.”

Complicating matters is the growing desire by the social platforms to get a bigger piece of the revenue action with influencers, by forcing them to use only that platform’s commerce offering — but that complication is its own blessing and curse. On the one hand, “the more we can make it easy for the consumer to just press buy or go directly to Amazon, the more likely you’re going to get a return on your investment,” said Renee Vafa, director of social strategy at IPG’s Reprise agency. “I think it’s a positive.” 

On the cursed side, Pagliuca contends that there’s a blurring of lines between paid social and paid influencer work, which has led to influencer networks trying to represent paid social results as earned and paid results. “When you have your paid social taken over by an influencer network, that leads to duplication and ineffectiveness and waste of your overall paid social budget,” she argued.

“Smarter companies will ask for influencer click-through-rates, comments, engagement percentages etc.,” said Ossiana Tepfenhart, an influencer specialist with business consultant SavvySME. “The more clicks your influencer can get, or the more affiliate code uses, the clearer your ROI is going to be.”

Social agency Modifly also has adapted its approach thanks to changing priorities among influencers. “We’ve pivoted our clients to work with influencer partners more as content creators and less on content distribution,” said Elijah Schneider, Modifly’s founder and CEO. “We have our brands focus on how they utilize the content within their paid media, website and owned media activities. By doing this, it creates a similar impact that we used to see from influencer marketing and incorporates much more social focused content into the paid media mix.”

One media agency source said one solution to the post-campaign measurement conundrum is to get the social platforms to involve more clean-room technology.

“It opens up the ability for everyone to do better influencer measurement over time,” said the exec. “You really want to see if the individual saw the ad, and the only ones that have that data are the Snapchats, the TikToks or Instagrams. We want to solve that with them — push the data into those clean rooms so we can get to better influencer measurement over time.”

Color by numbers

According to GroupM’s global president of business intelligence Brian Wieser, what was once a red-hot e-commerce world is actually cooling down, perhaps faster than expected. On an annual and unadjusted basis, global e-commerce grew by 14 percent to $871 billion, representing 15 percent of total equivalent retail activity.  Though it’s a similar rate of growth relative to 2018 and 2019, it fell below 2020’s 32 percent rate of expansion, and it’s a slower pace than total retail’s growth of a “remarkable” 18 percent in the year, wrote Wieser in a report issued last week. “Put differently, e-commerce decelerated in ‘real’ inflation-adjusted terms and lost some share as consumers re-emphasized physical store purchases during 2021.”

Takeoff & landing

• OMG’s Hearts & Science won media AOR duties for Reynolds Consumer Products and Hefty out of Chicago. Havas Chicago was the incumbent but didn’t defend the business. 
• Tinuiti was named the first advertising partner for social platform Reddit, giving Tinuiti’s clients early access to Reddit ad inventory and tools, including research and Reddit’s KarmaLab. 
• In personnel moves, Havas Media Group elevated Greg James from global chief strategy officer to global chief transformation officer, leading a strategic development & client experience team … Mediacom tapped Ryan Shaw to lead its Chicago office, moving him over from a leadership position with Mediacom’s Walgreens team The Pharm … and Publicis Health named Larry Mickelberg as its first chief commercial officer; he had most recently served as group president at Real Chemistry. 

Direct quote

“One of the main challenges for any brand aiming for a metaverse presence is the quality of the experience — because best practices for designing metaverse experiences are still few and far between, and are not widely understood; so, companies will have to significantly up-level their skills and processes to succeed. Many metaverse advocates equate it with Web3 even though they are not the same thing and don’t depend on each other; but brands that learn how to design experiences that tap the power of both will lead.” 

— David Truog, vp and principal analyst at Forrester, discussing the metaverse’s potential for brands.

Speed reading

• I looked into concerns from media buyers about Spotify’s purchase of Podsights and Chartable impacting independent measurement of the podcasting space.
• Digiday’s senior news editor Seb Joseph explains why Future PLC took the scary, but ultimately successful step of moving off of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages offering.
• And Digiday’s senior ad tech reporter Ronan Shields breaks down the upside and downside of Google’s move to experiment with its Privacy Sandbox on Android mobile devices and operating systems. 

Simply put, the news is a headache to anyone whose ability to precisely target people with ads online across Europe has been reliant on consent gained via TCF. Yes, the IAB is appealing the Belgian regulator’s decision, but TCF remains unlawful to use it today. 

In the short term, this will mean that data gained from the framework must be deleted, which will affect targeting, profiling and reach. In the longer term, the consequences are far bigger. This data has, after all, been gathered since May 2018 so could ultimately affect what’s been collected and processed over the past four years. Not to mention the fact that cross-site tracking and targeting will be dampened. Think about it: companies can no longer collect someone’s data for advertising purposes without their consent because this ruling has decided that legitimate interests (more on that here) can not be a legal basis for processing it.

The industry’s reaction?

Panic: marketers are bracing themselves for a reduction in targeting data and reach as a result of TCF being unlawful to use to gather the consent needed to facilitate real-time bidding on impressions. It’s a logistical quagmire for marketers — one that’s made all the trickier because the regulators aren’t entirely on the same wavelength. 

Of the 30 data regulators across the EU that Digiday contacted, four responded. All those responses said the same thing: the Belgian data regulator has acted as the lead authority in this case, but its decision reflects views that are widely shared among its counterparts across Europe.

Some, however, like the Danish and Dutch regulators are being more assertive in getting that message across. The Dutch regulator, for example, has urged local publishers to look for alternatives to the large-scale tracking and targeting of users across the open web after coming to the conclusion that it is unlikely the IAB Europe will be able to contort the TCF far enough to comply with the GDPR.

“A lot of the behavior of web publishers and online advertisers in the EU is already contrary to the GDPR (and the U.K. GDPR) so I don’t think this Dutch guidance (if that is what it is) changes anything greatly outside the Netherlands,” said Nigel Jones, co-founder of data protection specialist Privacy Compliance Hub and is an ex-Google lawyer. “It does, however, put pressure on Dutch web publishers to look for alternatives such as relying on contextual advertising rather than behavioral advertising.”

Belgian media business DPG Media, which is also active in the Netherlands and Denmark, is weighing up whether to do just that. It’s considering abandoning TCF in favor of pursuing ads aimed primarily at logged-in visitors to its sites.

According to Stefan Havik, digital development director at DPG Media, there isn’t anything “intrinsically wrong” with the TCF system. To him, it’s a “basic foundation” for a standardized protocol to collect and distribute consent. The issue is how it enables the broadcasting of consumer data to a fragmented ecosystem, he added: “The IAB has little to do with the amount of companies a media business puts in that framework. It’s up to everyone else to act responsibly.”

Not everyone shares this view. And therein lies the problem. Now more than ever publishers should have a united perspective on how the industry goes about tracking their readers in the future. But the commercial realities of running a media business in the current climate make it hard to reach a consensus on anything including TCF.

Those divisions run deep if the messages in an industry Slack channel are anything to go on. Commercial execs from some of Europe’s biggest titles scrambled there after hearing TCF had been put on notice, said one of the channel’s members on condition of anonymity.

Some weren’t surprised, the exec continued. They’d long surmised that tracking people had become an irresponsible and unacceptable business practice. Others, however, were caught off guard, the exec continued; then that confusion quickly turned into a hope that the industry can find a legal way to continue tracking people at scale regardless of its unprecedented complexity. 

There are reasons to wonder

A transformation of this kind would saddle IAB Europe with significant new costs since it requires the development and ongoing operation of a technical accountability infrastructure, said Ratko Vidakovic, founder of ad tech consultancy AdProfs. And the requirements for this apparatus, particularly around the need to “guarantee the integrity and confidentiality of the TC String,” could be a very tall order, if not impossible, given how the OpenRTB ecosystem functions today. Radical changes would be required of both the TCF and the OpenRTB standards, he continued.

“Such changes would be a significant undertaking as these technologies underpin the entire industry,” said Vidakovic. “But it may be necessary to ensure the survival of RTB in Europe.”

No surprise some ad execs are of the opinion that it’s time to move on. 

“We must be very clear about the real issue here, which is large scale and ungovernable third-party data addressability on the open web,” said Ruben Schreurs, group chief product officer at Ebiquity. “The current OpenRTB ecosystem that underpins this is not fit for purpose under the contemporary regulations, as it allows large numbers of indirect vendors to obtain and transact huge amounts of personal data in a highly opaque environment.”

To the likes of Schreurs, tracking someone’s behavioral data has run its course — at least at the industrial level where thousands of companies were accessing troves of personal data bereft of any robust checks and balances. Remember, it’s not like audience targeting has always worked exactly as it’s been sold as by various businesses across the market. 

Privacy and data protection must take center stage now, according to marketers like Shenan Reed, senior vp, head of media for L’Oréal. That doesn’t mean well-informed and compliant ways to add relevance to advertising will cease to exist — far from it, said the marketer at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting last week. Media owners at the same event echoed that sentiment. In fact, Vox Media’s CEO Jim Bankoff told attendees that his business would find a way to generate ad income whilst putting their audience’s rights first.

“This could be ground zero for advertising in terms of how we rebuild it in a more privacy-conscious way,” said Thomas Lue Lytzen, director of sales and ad tech at one of Denmark’s biggest news publishers Ekstra Bladet. “We, the ad ecosystem, didn’t want to accommodate the concerns of lawmakers and regulators and give up on anything when we could’ve perhaps traded cross-site profiling and targeting in for the advertising funnels of frequency capping, measurement and verification. That may be hard for some to accept, but as long as there are elements of profiling and targeting across the web you will have privacy experts arguing that this is unlawful.”

Put another way: the likes of Bankoff and Lue Lytzen believe the way they’ll be able to monetize media will be less about collecting as much personal data as possible to inflate the value of their inventory and more about selling content data that helps advertisers understand how someone is interacting with content so that they can be in the right place, at the right time with the right message. This way publishers, potentially, avoid all the complications of managing consent. 

Viable as these solutions may be, none of them have much chance of success without the backing of advertisers. As it stands it’s not clear what they will do. They’ve not exactly been vocal with their opinions in the days since TCF’s future was cast into doubt. Otherwise, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, which brought TCF’s issues to the regulators in the first place, wouldn’t have sent an open letter to the CEOs of P&G, Unilever, AT&T, BoA, Ford, GM, IBM, and Mastercard demanding they stop consent spam and delete data obtained via the framework. Not that their silence is a surprise. The situation is, ultimately, a delicate one as evidenced by the IAB Europe’s response. 

“It may also seem incoherent that on the one hand, IAB Europe has announced that it will appeal the decision but on the other, it has begun working on the ‘action plan’ requested by the APD [Belgian regulator], said a spokeswoman for the trade body in an emailed statement. “In fact, these two things are perfectly compatible.  While IAB Europe disagrees with a number of the substantive findings in the Decision, it is clear that some of them – for example, whether the definitions of the data processing purpose definitions can be drafted in a way that is clearer and easier to understand – are things that reasonable people can disagree about and that we should be open to trying to improve.”

WTF is Google’s Topics?

Topics is among Google’s attempts to replace the third-party cookie as a means of identifying people online by striking a balance between preserving people’s privacy and preserving companies’ abilities to buy and sell targeted ads. 

Third-party cookies have been the connective tissue for the online advertising ecosystem since its very inception in the 1990s, but Google has decided to disable third-party cookies in its popular Chrome browser in 2023. However, establishing consensus on how the industry can move ahead has proven tricky.

Wait, haven’t they tried this before with all the bird-themed stuff we heard about last year?

Yes, kind of, but it’s probably best that we provide some context here. 

The simple fact is that Google’s previous cookie-replacement proposal — Federated Learning of Cohorts — really did put the cat amongst the pigeons if we are to stick with the aviary-themed wording. Why? Simply put, the concept of FLoCs was laden with privacy concerns (ironic, no?) and didn’t even pass muster under laws such as the European Union’s privacy law, the GDPR.

Rather than the cookie-based approach of targeting people at the individual level based on their browsing behaviors, the FLoC approach would clump people into specific interest groups — cohorts — such as people in the market to buy a car or impulse shoppers, based on their browsing history. These clusters were supposed to provide cover and give people a greater degree of anonymity online. But that privacy shield was found to be permeable.

For instance, during a trial phase, researchers raised concerns that FLoC data could be combined with people’s personally identifiable information. This meant that bad actors could expose information about people’s webpage visits and interests, raising further concerns that cohort-based targeting could be used to discriminate against particular groups of people.

However, what FLoC did introduce was the concept of using machine learning to categorize users into specific interest groups based on their browsing history. Also importantly, FLoC proposed performing this categorization on a person’s computer or phone, rather than sending the underlying data to Google’s or another company’s computers, which went some way to better preserving people’s information. 

OK, Google Topics, how does it work, and how is it different from before?

So, after the FLoC blowback, Google went back to the drawing board and came up with Topics. Like FLoC, Topics proposes targeting ads to people based on the categories of content they check out online and containing this categorization to the device. Unlike FLoC, though, Topics proposes a much more general level of categorization.

How does Topics work?

A web browser like Google’s Chrome will use the Topics API — short for “application programming interface” and effectively the means of using the Topics toolset — to determine a number of topics that best reflect a person’s interests based on their browsing behavior, such as “autos & vehicles,” “basketball,” “news,” and “women’s clothing.” The browser will determine the topic of sites based on sites’ hostname — ex. dogs.com would be categorized under the “dogs” topic — but companies may be given the option of declaring which topics to associate with their sites.

Each week, a browser would select five topics per person — including one random topic that is meant to throw off any companies attempting to wrest a person’s identity from Topics — and then choose one topic, or interest category, to assign to that person for the week. People may be given the option of adjusting the topics assigned to them and will also be able to disable this ad targeting feature.

Each topic is then kept for three weeks so when a person visits a website, the website or the ad tech firms it uses to target ads can use the Topics API to access up to three topics for that site visitor. However, the website and its ad tech firms can only access topics that are related to the given website or other websites carrying the ad tech firms’ code.

In other words, if a person assigned the topics “dogs,” “theme parks” and “weddings” visits a political news site, that site may not be able to access any topics for that person that week. But if that person is assigned the topic “politics” the following week and returns to the site, then the site would be able to access the “politics” topic at the least.

How many topics are there?

Currently, there are 350 interest groups classified by the Topics API. Compare this with the 30,000-plus user classification groups that featured in the FLoC trials. Critics said the granularity of the FLoC API made it possible to reverse-engineer data and pinpoint user data. The initial 350 topics are only a starting point, though. The list may eventually number into the thousands, though Google plans to come up with a number of sensitive topics to exclude from the list and to have an outside party be responsible for providing the list of topics to be included.

What has the reaction been so far? 

Mostly, it’s been speculative. Trials have not yet begun, and Google hasn’t publicly said when it will start letting third-party developers experiment with the Topics API.

However, advertisers and media owners alike have voiced concerns that Topics’ lack of granularity will limit the specificity of ad targeting and, as a result, limit or even lower ad prices, with advertisers typically paying more money for more targeted ads.

Ad tech execs who work with publishers have also asked for greater clarity from Google over the extent to which they will be able to control the flow of their user data should they integrate the Topics API. One concern is whether a third-party website could capitalize on the data extracted from a publisher’s website via the API to boost the third-party site’s own ad sales. And, after all, there is the potential for that third-party website to be a direct competitor.

How do I prepare?

For advertisers and publishers, the idea is still the same as it was in January 2020 when Google Chrome confirmed plans to withdraw support for third-party cookies: collect as much consented first-party user data as possible.

Publishers with a glass-half-full outlook on Chrome’s deprecation of third-party cookies view the move as offering the potential for them to charge advertisers more money for access to their first-party data. Meanwhile, advertisers are under pressure to adapt to a post-cookie landscape or risk missing out on reaching potential customers online. For ad tech companies, arguably those who are most exposed to the whims of the Google Chrome team, the best possible advice is to roll with the punches, be agile, and prepare to pivot if necessary.

Ultimately, every tier of the online advertising industry needs to participate with Google as it prepares to forge a path forward. Simply pointing the finger and complaining over Google’s dominance of the sector is unlikely to yield dividends any time soon.