Month: February 2023

AdImpact broke down the ratings for the big game, starting with the national anthem, through a controversial penalty call late in the fourth quarter that influenced the game’s outcome and finishing with the presentation of the Lombardi trophy to the Kansas City Chiefs, who defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35.

Here’s how the Super Bowl’s ratings tracked, from beginning to end: 

• National anthem (6:30 p.m. — all times Eastern): 77 million 
• Kickoff (6:43 p.m.): 98.8 million
• Eagles‘ first touchdown (first quarter): 104 million 
• Chiefs‘ first touchdown (first quarter): 107.8 million
• End of first quarter: 114.6 million
• Eagles‘ third touchdown (second quarter): 120 million 
• Halftime: 124 million
• Rihanna’s performance during halftime: 123.5 million 
• Start of third quarter: 121 million
• Chiefs‘ third touchdown third quarter (8:56 pm): 122 million
• End of third quarter: 120 million
• Chiefs‘ fourth touchdown (fourth quarter): 120 million
• Before the two-minute warning in fourth quarter (10:04 p.m.): 109 million 
• After two-minute warning: 115 million
• End of the game (10:15 p.m.): 113.6 million
• Presentation of Lombardi trophy: 75.9 million

“Advertisers who participated in this year’s big game experienced consistent higher ratings as the two teams battled down to the final field goal of the game,” said Rick McGuire, AdImpact’s director of sales, who said viewership was 20% higher than last year’s game. “The combination of a close game and a younger-skewed halftime show, made for the perfect combination to keep viewers’ interest right to the final seconds.”

According to AdImpact’s analysis and ratings tracking, it seems FanDuel’s ad featuring former NFL player Rob Gronkowski kicking a field goal (he apparently missed the field goal, although to this viewer it looked like the ball went through the uprights) got the highest audience, given it came in the ad break right after the Chiefs’ third touchdown in the third quarter. 

To help with the transition, Melody Brown was hired as Blavity Inc’s new associate vp of consumer media in Sept. 2022 from Travel + Leisure to help with the construction of this revenue stream, including launching a new home interior brand “Home & Texture.” But the push into commerce doesn’t stop there. Brown said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast that the company’s lifestyle brand 21Ninety and travel title Travel Noir were both also pivoting to a commerce-first business model to both bring in a new revenue stream, but also to give readers more assistance from the content they’re already reading. 

“We’re shifting from display first advertising, because we’ve seen that the effectiveness of that form has really dropped. Readers and audiences are focused more on the content that they desire. The focus here is commerce-first, not display ad-first,” said Brown.

Below are highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Growing into commerce 

Home & Texture is the brainchild of passion [from] our CEO, Morgan DeBaun. She’s definitely been forward thinking and knowing that display ad-first advertising is dwindling and we need to lean into this affiliate shoppable content. Again, [we’re] four months in, but we’re growing very, very quickly, which also excites me. From our commerce team’s perspective, there are three editorial teams – for Home & Texture, we have an editor lead that we’re hiring for. We also have content writers and contributors who are going to be creating this content for us. Same is true for 21Ninety as well as Travel Noir. So there’ll be three editorial teams for each of our three commerce-first brands. We do have a social team that’s going to be dedicated to commerce, as well as a creative lead. We’re also working with external agencies to help pony up this content and get more eyes on it. Because at the end of the day, we want to make sure we are where our audience is.

Social media is a critical growth tool 

I like to say if content is king, then video is the crown. So when talking about things like DIY, [a] franchise that really covers transforming old unattractive pieces into fabulous accents, we want those types of content pieces to be social first. But there will be a complimentary article to go with that, including items to buy, as well as items to buy on our social channels. So from a content perspective, yes, we’re doing articles. But yes, video. 

When we’re talking about photos, Pinterest is going to be huge for the Home & Texture audience. So we’re definitely exploring all different deliverables when it comes to content creation. But video definitely is king for us.

Strategizing for social commerce 

We’re three weeks [in] and we’re still looking to grow our audience, but one of the things that we’ve discovered with some of the social content we’ve been posting [is], we’ve been getting comments from our audience about things they want to buy. Then in return, we’ve been creating content articles on HomeandTexture.com to showcase some of those items. So it’s definitely been two-fold where yes, there’s brand building on the social channels, but also we’re listening to our audience. 

[Blavity] leans into what the audience is doing, which is one of the reasons why we’re transitioning [our lifestyle brand] 21Ninety and [our travel brand] Travel Noir to be commerce-first brands. We have a strong stake hold in those areas of lifestyle of health and beauty and travel. We feel like our audience is already with us with this content. Now let’s serve up the things that they want to purchase or buy, whether it’s trips, whether it’s hair, whether it’s makeup, [whether it’s] anything around your home.

Lessons from recent history could help inform how to prepare for the proliferation of generative AI. For example, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal from just a few years ago sparked new data privacy debates over who should and shouldn’t have access to user data across social networks and the broader ad-tech ecosystem.

Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at McAfee, offered another example: The wave of self-replicating malware worms of the late 1990s and early 2000s — such as Code Red, Nimda and SQL Slammer — which prompted cybersecurity experts to completely rethink standard operating procedures for protecting computer networks.

“We’re right in that lane with this technology now,” Grobman said. “We’re going to have to figure that out. And some of the best practices in 2022 we might need to think about differently as we move forward.”

Over the past few years, McAfee and other companies increasingly applied AI tools such as natural language processing to assess and categorize the web. For example, McAfee researched using adversarial AI — which uses machine learning to make AI attacks fail — to determine how malware bypasses AI-based detection mechanisms.

There are also plenty of examples of how AI text generators are prone to providing wrong answers — known as the “hallucinations” — that pose concerns about the proliferation of both accidental and intentional misinformation. Last week, Google’s market cap fell by $100 billion after a promotional video for its new Bard chatbot featured inaccurate information. And in January, the misinformation research firm NewsGuard said it tested 100 false narratives on ChatGPT and received “eloquent, false and misleading claims” about 80% of the time including topics like Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and school shootings.

“The report shows that this technology as a whole has the potential to democratize the troll farm,” said Jack Brewster, an enterprise editor at Newsguard who worked on the report. “If a bad actor is able to get a hold of this tech and get around the safeguards, they suddenly have the power of 20,000 or more writers that can write clean copy at the push of a button. That could have an incredibly harmful impact on democracies around the world.”

Although the latest AI platforms are still relatively new, they’re already seeing mainstream adoption. ChatGPT, which only debuted late last year, analysts estimate it had 100 million monthly active users in January. And like with past innovations, there’s also the danger of technology proliferating too fast for the appropriate guardrails to keep up. Companies like OpenAI are already working to improve various concerns, but some point out that bad actors don’t play by the same rules and could still use the tools for malicious purposes. Just last week, researchers found that hackers have already found a way to bypass restrictions for generating illicit content.

AI chat systems have “a tendency to get over the end of their skis about knowledge,” said Jon Callas, director of public interest technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. He added that there are other concerns related to privacy, intellectual property rights and hate speech.

“I believe that what we are seeing is another generational thing of something we’ve seen in the past,” Callas said. “The chatbots learn from people who chat with them and malicious people can turn them into saying obnoxious things.”

The latest wave of AI tech could also create new problems for e-commerce with fake product reviews or images and other uses. But content moderation was a tricky task even before the rise of generative AI and requires a combination of both machines and humans, said Guy Tytunovich, co-founder and CEO of CHEQ, an Israeli-based cybersecurity firm that helps marketers detect and prevent ad fraud. On the other hand, more bots could also generate more business for companies like CHEQ as the cat-and-mouse game of preventing malicious AI speeds up.

“Prohibition didn’t work well 100 years ago,” Tytunovich said. “And I think trying to stop AI will be just as futile.”