Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
Nielsen didn’t have a contingency plan for being unable to service its panel during the pandemic. In some ways, that’s understandable. Most companies weren’t ready for COVID-19. The problem was how Nielsen acted after its undercounting came to light, says Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), a trade organization that… Continue reading »
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TripleLift claims that it’s the world’s largest source of in-feed inventory. But can the same ad experience work for CTV? Native product placements in programming could be a viable alternative to interruptive ad experiences – and a cash cow for CTV publishers – but it’s not very scalable and it’s hard to execute, says Michael Shields, GM of CTV at TripleLift.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A Squeaky-Clean Apple Apple was charged in the EU with boxing out wallet apps and payments, using its monopolistic power to force consumers to use Apple Pay, The Wall Street Journal reports. Outside payment services particularly want access to one-touch or mobile contactless purchase… Continue reading »
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Netflix’s recent capitulation to adding advertising to its revenue stream means yet more marketing that consumers will be exposed to.
That could pose a problem for all the connected TV providers that offer ads, according to a new study about to be released by IPG’s Magna unit in association with contextual intelligence platform GumGum, which is in the business of suggesting new ad solutions to digital platforms. However, the study suggests that ad-supported CTV providers roll out overlay ads, which they found to be less intrusive, more affordable and slightly more sticky.
For starters, overlay ads run literally as a small amount of signage appearing in the content, either in one corner or along the bottom of the screen — rather than interrupting programming with a traditionally rendered ad message. Though there’s widespread debate over exactly which company first employed overlays, they haven’t yet caught on broadly, given they’re not easily incorporated into the post-production process, according to GumGum CEO Phil Schraeder.
As for the study, which Digiday obtained ahead of its release today, Magna’s Media Trials unit recruited 807 respondents ages 18-54, who were then randomized into exposed and control groups who were asked to watch a 30-minute streaming show of their choice which included :15 and :30 video ads or :06 overlay ads. Advertisers in the test included Viacom, New Balance, Tracfone and the Mini car brand.
“CTV is the space that has the most potential, but so little is happening when it comes to ad format innovation,” said Kara Manatt, Magna’s executive vp of intelligence solutions. “I think a lot of people in the industry, including our clients are concerned about obviously capturing and holding consumer attention. That topic never goes away, because it’s a consistent problem.”
Perhaps the most troubling finding for ad-supported CTV providers is the fatigue viewers feel about the amount of ads they’re seeing. A total of 65 percent registered an increase in the number they’re exposed to — 71 percent of respondents 18-24 noticed an uptick, higher than other demos. That younger age bracket also tries harder than older respondents to avoid ads all, or at least some, of the time.
The study also found that overlay ads don’t “feel” as invasive as regular spots. When four overlay ads were served to participants, they perceived an average 1.72 ads; whereas when they were served six video ads, they perceived an average 5.33 ads. Overlays also are generally perceived as less distracting — according to the study, only 17 percent agreed or strongly agreed they disrupted the viewing experience.
“How do we help brands see and test these alternatives that could really be more powerful, more effective, but also set the advertiser and their partners up for where the future is ultimately going,” said Schraeder.
Overlay ads, according to the study, offer even a slight bump (+5 percent) in brand favorability along with a 4 percent purchase intent bump. His suggestion to marketers: look for opportunities to place the overlays contextually in the content. (The study showed a sample overlay of a kitchen mixer when the content included a baking recipe.)
Schraeder added the research can also guide advertisers and agencies toward new solutions in even more nascent ad environments than red-hot CTV. “When we think about where this is all going, the next big [opportunities are] in gaming,” he said. “We’re looking at what the meta[verse] looks like, and all of these new emerging digital environments.”
The post Why CTV ad fatigue is real — and why overlay ads may be a solution, study appeared first on Digiday.
Digiday’s NewFronts coverage is presented by Amazon.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s four-day NewFronts digital video ad pitch-palooza kicked off Monday with a commingling of TV and technology. TV and tech companies, including Amazon, Fox’s Tubi, NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Vizio, talked up the coming together of traditional TV and streaming.
In addition to the typical programming reveals, the announcements revealed new products designed to insert advertisers into the programming as well as to evaluate the performance of advertisers’ streaming campaigns.
Despite a surge in streaming viewership over the years, though, traditional TV is still taking the bulk of ad dollars, according to IAB’s latest report on video ad spend. Digital video, it seems, is still in the buffering stage, not unlike the start of the IAB NewFronts, which were delayed by nearly 20 minutes due to issues with the live stream to audiences tuning in from afar.
The key details:
YouTube, which decided this year to be in both the upfronts and the Newfronts, held a presentation in collaboration with consulting firm MediaLink, to discuss best practices and opportunities of working with creators, such as the importance of segmentation and targeting so that the content matches the audience’s values, developing a long-term relationship with a creator, as well as trusting the creator to know how to speak to the audience a marketer wants to reach.
“Knowing who you want to work with, and trusting them and letting them drive the car and get it right within clear briefs is really critical,” said Sophie Kelly, svp of the North America whiskeys portfolio at Diageo, during a panel discussion.
YouTube also announced an exclusive deal with Paramount to livestream the “Top Gun: Maverick” movie premiere on Wednesday. It’ll use YouTube’s new “Live Redirect” feature to send audiences from Paramount’s 150 YouTube channels to the livestream in real time.
YouTube creators like Cassey Ho and Collins Key were invited onstage to discuss the successful businesses they have built by working with brands, and the traffic and conversions they have delivered to brands. Ho’s brands Blogliates and PopFlex are “both their own eight-figure businesses, and each one doubled sales year-over-year,” she said. Key pointed to a recent campaign with Invisalign, which included five videos, driving 2 million views and “delivering over 500% of website traffic and 300% of conversions,” he said.
After NBCUniversal hosted a NewFront presentation last year, this year the Comcast-owned conglomerate’s streaming service Peacock held a solo presentation to announce new ad formats and additions to its programming library. Peacock said it has 28 million monthly accounts and that more than eight million accounts have watched the drama series “Bel-Air.”
Peacock announced two new ad formats: frame ads, which appear around the video content to “frame” the scene, and in-scene ads, which are inserted dynamically within a scene post-production. Both are currently being tested with the Peacock Streaming Council, which is made up of some of Peacock’s advertising partners.
The in-scene ad can be dynamically placed during post-production to embed a brand’s ad directly into the content, such as on a billboard in the background of a scene. If a viewer tunes into a show and then re-watches that same episode, they could see a different brand appear in that billboard, for example.
The frame ads can also be geo-targeted: If two people are watching golf, but one is in New York City and the other in Seattle, the New York viewer might get an ad from Talenti, while the one in Seattle might see one from Breyers. Brands can also add a QR code to the frame ad.
Peacock also touted some shows and movies that will be moving onto the streamer:
At its second NewFronts presentation, smart TV company Vizio provided an update on its CTV footprint and unveiled a new analytics tool.
With 20 million connected TV owners that have opted in to let Vizio track their viewing behaviors via automatic content recognition technology, the company announced an expanded suite of analytics tools to help advertisers plan, target, measure and optimize multi-platform campaigns. The company said Vizio Analytics can provide custom analytics services and enable advertisers to see incremental audience reach and frequency from ads purchased through Vizio in real time, based on affinities, geographics or demographics. The presentation also highlighted a new suite of tools called Vizio Enact, which works across Vizio TVs enabled for universal addressable advertising to deliver ads inside cable and broadcast TV programming. Vizio’s advertising division, Vizio Ads, secured over $100 million in commitments from agency holding companies after its 2021 NewFront, according to the company.
Vizio also promoted WatchFree+, its relaunched free, ad-supported streaming TV service with linear TV channels and an on demand library. It now has over 5,000 movies and TV shows and 250 live free streaming channels (including A+E, CNN, Fox and the NFL), and doesn’t require a subscription or a login.
Vizio’s “home screen hero” banner ad unit drove a 95% tune-in lift for a series premiere from a broadcaster, according to Nyma Quidwai, Vizio’s senior director of client services.
Owned by Fox Entertainment, free, ad-supported streaming service Tubi now has 51 million active users, up from 33 million at the end of 2020, according to Tubi chief revenue officer Mark Rotblat. The company said more 3.6 billion hours were watched in 2021 across its 40,000 titles, a 40% increase year over year in total viewing time.
To boost that watch time, Tubi is building up its library of on-demand programming as well as its lineup of 24/7 streaming channels. The streamer will release more than 100 original titles in the next year, including three adult animated films, new monthly documentaries co-produced with Fox Alternative Entertainment and specials with TMZ. It will also add 24/7 streaming channels for FOX Entertainment’s “The Masked Singer,” TMZ and Studio Ramsay Global’s “Gordon Ramsay.”
And to buoy its pitch to advertisers, Tubi highlighted some recent measurement-related announcements. The company has struck a deal with Nielsen to enable its Digital Ad Ratings measurement for ads running on Tubi. And it has released an analytics tool called Campaign Insights that groups together “unique content groups,” or “content clusters,” to give brands “ a complete picture of audience and context together,” Rotblat said.
In a recent campaign, Tubi found two-thirds of the impressions fell within three content genres: comedy, drama and action. But, when Tubi broke down the same delivery, the top two-thirds of impressions ran across 20 content clusters, and the leading category was “Black history and culture,” Rotblat said. A deeper mapping of the audience found that this content cluster had a high index for high-school educated, 18-34 year old, single African Americans living alone, who enjoy technology, politics and reading, he said.
Amazon used its NewFronts presentation to pitch advertisers on its portfolio of streaming services, which span its flagship streamer Prime Video, its FAST service Amazon Freevee and its live-streaming platform Twitch.
The presentation also highlighted Amazon Ads, such as a new Streaming TV Media Planner, which lets advertisers see their incremental streaming TV reach and compare it to linear reach. Currently in beta, the Omnichannel Metrics product provides measurement to allow advertisers to make changes in-flight to optimize their campaigns.
Prime Video
This fall Amazon will have exclusive rights to the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games, which will stream on Prime Video and Twitch starting on Sept. 15. The company said that its technology will mitigate the risk of lag times and buffering that can disrupt the live-streaming experience.
Amazon announced a new virtual product placement (VPP) open beta program, which allows a brand’s products to be inserted into participating Prime Video and Amazon Freevee original content, once filming has wrapped. Products or branded signage can be inserted into scenes, such as a can of soda appearing on a kitchen counter, or a billboard on a building in the background. “Reacher,” “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” and the “Bosch” franchise are among some of the titles currently participating in VPP. A CPG brand experienced a 6.9% increase in brand favorability and a 14.7% increase in purchase intent for their campaign, according to the company.
Amazon Freevee
Amazon’s FAST service, formerly known as IMDb TV, now has more than 75 channels available. New programming coming to the service includes “Hollywood Houselift” — featuring interior designer Jeff Lewis working on the homes of celebrities like Anthony Anderson, Melissa Rivers and Wilmer Valderrama — and “Bosch: Legacy,” the spinoff of the Prime Video series “Bosch.”
Amazon Freevee has secured a short-term film licensing agreement with Disney to stream a limited selection of titles, such as “Deadpool,” “Deadpool 2,” “Logan,” “Hidden Figures,” “Murder on the Orient Express” and “The Post.”
Twitch
Twitch highlighted a few newer options to advertisers to embed themselves into the live-streaming platform.
Interactive live-shopping game show “POG Picks” and upcoming live unboxing show “Drops with Swagg” are two live shopping-related programs hosted by popular Twitch streamers, where brands can have their products featured in these episodes (in giveaways, or in shoppable chat boxes, for example), like a “Twitch QVC,” said Sarah Iooss, Twitch’s head of sales, Americas.
Another new option is “For Twitch, With Twitch,” in which brands will be able to sponsor specific creator-produced programming — in some cases, created in collaboration between creators and Twitch’s advertising division — that will air on Twitch’s owned-and-operated channels, such as /Twitch Rivals and /twitchgaming. During March Madness, for example, the /TwitchSports channel streamed two shows featuring top Twitch streamers, sports analysts and athletes, with Wendy’s and Philips Norelco sponsoring custom programming throughout the shows.
Twitch also discussed its Co-Op Drops program for brands to sponsor Drops, an existing Twitch experience where in-game rewards are granted to viewers for watching streams on Twitch. Adobe was the first brand to test the program in March through a series of sponsored streams with six Twitch creators playing Amazon Games’ New World, which received 3.1 million total views at launch.
Three out of four buyers said CTV is a “must buy,” according to the IAB’s 2021 Video Ad Spend and 2022 Outlook” report, which was shared during Monday’s NewFronts and conducted in partnership with Standard Media Index (SMI) and Advertiser Perceptions. The report did not disclose how many ad buyers were surveyed.
The numbers to know:
However, the report also identified challenges inhibiting ad dollars moving to CTV. Nearly half of the undisclosed number of video buyers surveyed for the report cited measuring incremental reach across platforms and publishers as a challenge when it comes to CTV advertising. Other issues include managing frequency, a lack of transparency within walled gardens and fragmentation of programmatic supply paths.
Video buyers predicted a coming-together of the linear TV and CTV markets: nearly nine out of ten buyers (88%) anticipate a converged linear TV/CTV marketplace in the coming years. Two in three (66%) linear TV/digital video buyers now have a single planning team for the two channels, and another quarter (25%) expect to have one planning team in the future.
The post The Rundown: CTV platforms and ad-supported streamers kick off NewFronts Day 1 appeared first on Digiday.
This article is part of a cross-brand Digiday Media series that examines how the creator economy has evolved amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Explore the full series here.
Influencers have developed a special knack for making a product go viral, selling it out seemingly overnight, and as more and more retailers and brands notice this, an opportunity has emerged for creators to take their talents (and followings) to new platforms to sell products in a more formalized manner.
Enter influencer Katie Sands, who has run her lifestyle and fashion blog — as well as her Instagram account @HonestlyKate since 2016. In early 2020, she joined Amazon Live as one of its first live stream hosts to test, recommend and curate products from the online marketplace that are not only in line with her personal brand but will appeal to her followers to click the buy button.
Sands has 332,000 followers on Instagram and she uses the social platform to give both fans of her blog and fans of her Amazon Live stream a look into her personal life, which is used to plan out the narratives and themes of each live stream. In the two-year period since acting as a host, she has accumulated anywhere from 1,000 to 20,000 active viewers per live stream.
Other brands — particularly in the beauty and fashion space — work with Sands in long-term capacities to increase their sales amongst her following, which is where she said the bulk of her income comes from.
In this final episode of the Digiday Podcast’s four-part creator series, Sands unpacks what it is like being an Instagram influencer in 2022 and why working across several platforms is necessary, as well as what it’s been like moving into the considerably newer role of live stream shopping influencer.
Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.
The reason that I have followers on Instagram [is] they want to see what I’m doing in real-time, they want it to be extremely honest and authentic to me, which is why my social Instagram name is @HonestlyKate. I wanted it to be that bridge in the spirit of the sponsored products and content, but then also be really real about it.
[For example] in the wedding realm, I am not only guests for 22 weddings this year, but I also had my own wedding. And I did a few streams on [wedding] registry must-haves and what you should buy as a guest if you’re going to a destination wedding. I feel like with Amazon, specifically, your whole world can live on Amazon in so many different aspects so I can really touch on all those aspects and bring them into the stream and have them under the carousel no matter what the topic of the day is.
I like to work with brands on a long-term partnership. I find that whenever I do a one-off partnership, it never really is successful because people want to see that you’re using it continuously throughout the year, throughout different seasons, throughout different points in your life. And I’ve really noticed that with my following. So I’ll always try to pitch a long-term partnership between six months to a year.
Currently, I’m working with a bunch of different beauty brands [and] whenever the beauty brand or a skincare brand has a new launch, I’ll come on and start talking about the newest product and why I’m using it and I always test out the products for at least three months in advance before agreeing to any partnership because I want to make sure that I can use it in my [daily routine].
But I find that you know, the money in the industry is in the beauty industry and I think it’s interesting that it’s not as much in the fashion industry anymore. It’s really in the skincare space. And [the deals are] usually anywhere between like three to four frames on Stories on Instagram, and then a static post, maybe going live with the brand, and it always ranges.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was putting themselves on TikTok, I was like, I’ll just take all my content from Instagram and put it on TikTok, which I realized wasn’t what people wanted to see. I didn’t have the time and space, even though it was during the pandemic, to start creating more types of content because I was streaming full time on Amazon [Live] and setting up a whole studio from my childhood bedroom, so I took myself off of it. I still watch it from a private account, and it’s not to say that I won’t go on [again] in the future because I know my team would love me to go on it, but we’ll see.
I do use Instagram Reels, [but] I use it mostly when brands are requesting a Reel. I don’t personally love Reels because I do think it is a copy [of] TikTok. I do think it’s fun to watch short videos, [but] I find that Reels really cuts off the video that I’ve made and something is wrong with the editing feature. But a lot of brands do request a Reel and sometimes I’ll say to them, “Why don’t I just create a video for you instead? It could be longer, it could be shot differently.” And they want to have a Reel because they know with Instagram, [the platform] gives you points like, she used a Reel today, she used Stories today, she used a location tag today, and that’s how your algorithm goes up.
So the brands know that they want to get in with the algorithm and so of course you have to comply with some of it to continue and have a higher algorithm, but I really just think as a creator you have to stick to who you and what your bread and butter is because you don’t need to be everything for everyone. You can just be something for that someone.
The post With commerce at the center, how an Instagram influencer turned Amazon Live host appeared first on Digiday.
In recent months, marketers have seemed to be more and more bullish on the metaverse. Pitches for various metaverse activations — some with in-person extensions — have been consistent as marketers seem to be hoping to garner headlines for simply having brand activations in the metaverse, agency execs told Digiday.
Marketers are always looking to be part of the next big thing, whatever that may be, so experimentation makes sense. That being said, it’s still unclear if the metaverse will actually become that next big thing or be yet another quick fad that marketers were once pouring cash into a la apps like Clubhouse or Peach or technologies like chatbots or AR and VR. (Remember a few years ago agencies were so bullish on VR as the next big thing that they were eating the costs of testing it out for clients?)
Some agency execs question the purpose of metaverse marketing, wondering what problem it solves for marketers as well as the audience. Others say it’s already giving marketers access to audiences they wouldn’t be able to interact with without it and that it’s worth continuing to test out various activations even if the audience isn’t there yet.
“The fact that nobody can agree on what the metaverse actually is is a good sign that the pressure to be there is more about FOMO than about common sense,” said Mark Pytlik, CEO, Stink Studios, when asked about the future of metaverse marketing. “Marketers need an audience to market to, but the ‘metaverse’ is so fractured and so platform-dependent that there’s no critical mass of consumers in any one place to really merit serious long-term investment from most brands.”
Pytlik continued to say that some of the metaverse activations feel like a bid for “quick PR” but even that has “diminishing returns.” “So much of it feels like pure hype and PR and speculation,” he said.
The possibility of PR or being the first brand to do something can sway some marketers to experiment with trends and spend on apps that make little sense in actuality for their brands. Take the metaverse — it’s still unclear if the audience will grow to make it into a marketing budget staple.
To get contextualize the popularity of these technologies, Sarah Stringer, evp and head of US media partnerships at dentsu, turns to Google Trends, which provides public data on what terms users are searching for.
As examples, she said, VR peaked in interest in Dec. 2016, blockchain a year later, e-sports in 2019 and metaverse at the end of 2021. Even if the Google Trend data shows a downtrend, marketing efforts for the metaverse still seem to be on an upswing as brands continue to pitch new efforts.
“All these technologies and concepts are building to bigger trends over time, however interest wanes when scale and audience don’t follow,” Stringer said. “We see interest remerge when opportunities evolve and the technology becomes more scaled and accessible. Metaverse became a hot buzzword, which feels like it’s being quickly replaced by broader conversations around Web3.0.”
The metaverse has recently motivated some marketers to experiment with AR and VR again. Maybe the years and years of marketers and agency execs touting AR and VR as the next big thing were just a few years too early? Or maybe agency execs are trying to spin it that way to make those experiments worthy of their time? Time will tell.
“The criticism that the metaverse is Emperor’s new clothes version of Second Life is a reasonable one, but it ignores some fundamental factors that make this new era potentially as important in changing the landscape for marketers as the emergence of TV or the open internet,” said Berlin Cameron, Founder, Ewen Cameron.
Cameron continued: “Blockchain technology and the tokenization of assets that are built on it, creates the potential for customization and personalization of marketing on a scale we’ve never seen before in history.”
Even as Cameron is bullish on the possibilities of the metaverse — and NFTs and Web3 — for marketers he recognizes the metaverse in its current form may not deliver the needed return on investment for all marketers.
“Today the metrics of Decentraland may only make sense in ROI if your target audience is teenage males with a propensity for fantasy gaming,” said Cameron. “However, the applications of blockchain technology, Web3 and the metaverse offer endless possibilities for brands. These technologies help marketers find new, breakthrough pathways to awareness and engagement before and better than their competition, which is what good marketing is all about.”
How are you thinking about marketing and advertising as legalization efforts come down the pipeline?
A lot of people are starting to discover cannabis. We spent, especially the last two years, a lot of time trying to build our brand in a more mainstream way for people who aren’t as comfortable with cannabis. A hardcore consumer might be very intentionally looking for a specific type of concentrate that’s done a certain way, from a certain strain, whereas your more casual consumer might be [less knowledgable.] How do you serve to both those audiences and speak to them? That’s been a lot of the balancing act that we’ve been doing over the last couple of years.
What strategies have you used to achieve that balancing act?
On the marketing side, what we’ve done is figure out where we need to show up. We really try to find areas where we can in some ways be more transactional and more sophisticated with our consumers, but at the same time make it something that’s very approachable from a discovery perspective for newer consumers coming into the space.
How do you achieve a mainstream audience being a more niche brand?
It’s definitely about levers. Our levers are inevitably restricted by who will take cannabis advertising and the censorship that still happens around it. We’re very fortunate that we’re not a plant-touching business, right? Because we’re just technology which means we get a lot of publishers or partners that are more comfortable with working with us. We do a lot of activations; we were at a lot of festivals last year as things were coming back from COVID. — Kimeko McCoy
At the height of the pandemic, women bore the brunt of home life duties which lead to the phenomenon of the so-called “shecession.” Now, as what’s being called the Great Resignation looms, companies are rolling out various perks to attract and retain talent. To understand what it’ll take to get women back in the workplace, DE&I consultancy Have Her Back conducted the Women in the Workplace study, which was provided exclusively to Digiday. Find details from the report below:
“To a lot of younger people, there’s no such thing as esports; it’s all just video games.”
— Rob Moore, CEO of esports organization Sentinels Gaming, on the difference between gaming and esports.
The post Marketing Briefing: Marketers are going all in on metaverse marketing, but is it premature? appeared first on Digiday.