Author: rssmasher

Telemundo’s biggest screen for its World Cup coverage is the smallest screen.

The NBCUniversal broadcaster, which has Spanish-language rights to air every World Cup game in the U.S., said between 48 and 51 percent of its live digital viewers consistently watch the games on their smartphones. The other half flips between connected TV and desktop streaming, said Peter Blacker, evp of digital media and emerging business for NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises. The most popular screen for streaming live video — including sports — remains the connected TV, according to recent FreeWheel data.

“What we’ve learned is that inside of our streaming numbers, we have two different groups: We have the mobile device group, which is using smartphones, and we have the other group, which is on connected TVs and desktops,” Blacker said. “The mobile device group has stayed steady, no matter how much numbers have spiked from game to game.”

By the end of the World Cup’s group stage, which consisted of 48 total matches, Telemundo said its livestreaming coverage had reached 10.7 million unique viewers, 105.3 million total livestreams and more than 1.6 million total minutes watched. The games averaged 2 million livestreams per match. On average, Telemundo’s digital coverage of the games delivers an additional 15 percent of viewers to its TV-only audience, the company said.

Key highlights include Telemundo’s broadcast of the Wednesday match between Mexico and Sweden, which peaked with 1 million concurrent livestreams, according to Telemundo — the second time any NBC Sports broadcast has hit that mark and second only to this year’s Super Bowl, which averaged 2 million livestreaming viewers and a peak of 3.1 million concurrent viewers. (The relative success of countries such as Mexico and Colombia in the World Cup — each of those national teams advanced to the knockout round — has unsurprisingly been a boon for Telemundo.)

Telemundo, which has more than 500 people on the ground in Russia for its coverage of the monthlong tournament, said its results so far demonstrate how much time U.S. Hispanics spend time on mobile devices — even when it means watching live and long-form programming such as a World Cup game.

“With [the mobile device] group, I would have thought that come the weekends, they might have put the phone down and switched to connected TVs, but they remain die-hard,” Blacker said. “This is different from the Olympics [which Telemundo parent NBCUniversal broadcasts], where there was a much greater variety of folks swimming back and forth.”

For Telemundo, the World Cup is an opportunity to demonstrate to marketers the consumption habits of U.S. Hispanic audiences and how they are more digitally savvy than what others might think, Blacker said. By the end of the group stage, Blacker said Telemundo had revised its total revenue estimate for the World Cup twice — and beaten it both times.

“This is forcing a dialogue around scale when we talk about the multicultural audience,” Blacker said. “Maybe folks in our industry didn’t understand or see it previously, but when you see this level of scale, you quickly realize that this is the marketplace, and this is where the audience is.”

Next up for Telemundo: educating its own users about authentication with TV Everywhere services. Through the group stage, Telemundo offered its livestreams for free. In the tournament’s elimination rounds, Telemundo will try to get its users to sign in with their cable and satellite account info. A few early tests that Telemundo ran during the group stages beat the broadcaster’s initial expectations, Blacker said, though he declined to provide specific conversion rates.

“Anytime you remove a paywall, you’re going to see a amazing audience growth — we have seen that repeatedly across the board with the streaming services we work with,” said Hui Zhang, chief scientist at streaming video analytics company Conviva. “Conversion rates will be the key parameter, but this was the right move for Telemundo. At a foundational level, consumers are king, and you need to get them to your app first.”

The post Half of Telemundo’s live digital viewers for the World Cup are watching on mobile devices appeared first on Digiday.

Looks like Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) is an agency business after all. Interpublic Group said Monday it acquired Acxiom’s legacy data management business for $2.3 billion. AMS represents about three-quarters of Acxiom’s total revenue. Dennis Self and Rick Erwin will serve as co-presidents of AMS, which will remain a standalone unit aligned with IPG Mediabrands.… Continue reading »

The post IPG Acquires Acxiom Marketing Solutions appeared first on AdExchanger.

Today, Interpublic Group confirmed rumors that it will pay more than $2 billion to acquire Acxiom, an Arkansas database marketing company that collects and distributes information drawn from an estimated 2.2 billion consumers around the world. The holding company believes that this acquisition will help clients better target their ads while relying less exclusively on…

Citi Bike, a bicycle-sharing network ubiquitous in New York, is getting a new owner. Lyft, the ride-hailing company originally known for its pink mustaches, announced it’s acquiring Motivate, the parent company of Citi Bike and other bike-sharing networks. The deal, announced today, gives Lyft access to Motivate’s technology, business operations and existing city contracts even…

Data-driven marketing has a problem. Unilever chief marketing officer Keith Weed set off alarm bells recently when he called for “urgent action” in response to the problem of fake followers of supposed social media “influencers.” Given Unilever’s $8.4 billion marketing budget and hundreds of consumer brands, those comments carry tremendous weight. Beyond social media, third-party…

Quartz is changing hands and pivoting to paid. On Monday, the digital business news publisher announced it had been acquired by Uzabase, a Japanese media company that operates Speeda, a business information terminal and NewsPicks, a news curation app operated jointly by Uzabase and Dow Jones, parent company of The Wall Street Journal.

Uzabase will pay somewhere between $75 million and $110 million, depending on how much revenue Quartz brings in over the remainder of 2018. It earned $28 million in revenue in 2017, almost all of it from advertising, and has targeted revenue estimates of $35-38 million for 2018, according to Uzabase documents.

While Quartz’s operation, with its focus on branded content and mobile-focused products like chatbots and newsletters, will remain unchanged for the most part, the immediate priority is to develop, then graft on a separate paid offering.

Quartz is now responsible for building two brands: Quartz and NewsPicks, which earns half its revenue from subscriptions, which cost $15 per month.

Digiday spoke on the phone with Quartz publisher Jay Lauf about the news. The conversation has been condensed.

You’re estimating $35-38 million in revenue for 2018, which suggests Uzabase paid a multiple of a little over 2.5 times revenue for Quartz. is that good? How do you feel about it?
I’d say everybody is saying it’s a good price and a good valuation. We feel really happy with it in that sense.

In a memo sent to staffers this morning, you mentioned this is a bet on where media is going. Can you elaborate on that?
One of the ways media is headed is toward businesses that have multiple revenue streams. More important than that is content that users and readers will pay for is becoming increasingly important on a lot of levels. It’s a signal of distinctive journalism that really matters to people, which is a healthy place for us to be. It’s been something that’s been on our radar screen from the beginning. and it was becoming a more earnest part of our strategy as we headed into this year. That’s where we see the future of media: reaching a targeted, high-value audiences with content that is valuable enough for them to pay for it. That’s the foundation of a valuable business model.

Are you going to have to hire more reporters to build the content-focused side offering?
We don’t think so, in the beginning. We’ve built a pretty strong reputation for building high quality content. We’ve been doing a lot of research and surveying of our audience over the last number of months in preparation of our own plans. We’ve found a high propensity among our readers to pay for products. That’s based on a product like we already have or could execute with the staff we’ve got currently. I wouldn’t speculate yet on the growth of the editorial staff around this initiative, but you could imagine that down the line.

Would you have gone after consumer revenue if you hadn’t gotten acquired?
Yes absolutely. It was very much on the drawing board. This year, as we started building developing executing against 2018 strategy, part of that was to experiment with a paid product.

What made you feel like you were ready to do that?
We’ve talked about it in our strategy sessions every year since we’ve been born. We’re just at a scale and an age where we felt like we could do it effectively. We’ve got 20 million users that come to the site. we’ve built an incredibly loyal audience over five years. It was the phase of existence we were in, as much as anything.

The post Quartz’s Jay Lauf: Getting readers to pay is critical appeared first on Digiday.

The world, and especially the internet, took a walk down Nostalgia Boulevard as Toys “R” Us officially closed their doors on Friday and bid the beloved (albeit debt-riddled) toy chain adieu. There were fond memories about weekend trips to the toy mecca and plenty of acknowledgment and sadness about the brand’s mascot since 1965, Geoffrey,…

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Facebook notified users about another privacy-related bug, this time affecting more than 800,000 people on the social network and its Messenger application who may have had people that they blocked unblocked. Last month, 14 million people were affected by a bug that sprung up during the post-creation process, automatically suggesting that those posts be made…

Alimama, the digital marketing arm of ecommerce platform Alibaba, has released an artificial-intelligence-enabled Chinese language copywriting tool that it says passed the Turing test and can produce 20,000 lines of copy a second. It wasn’t clear if Alimama actually conducted a Turing test–in which humans judged whether copy came from a person or AI–or if…