Author: rssmasher

AppNexus launched the first video advertising product for its demand-side platform (DSP) in late 2015. Over the next two years it built out its video offering to include a supply-side platform (SSP) solution, a video ad server, a video header bidding product and a connected-TV marketplace. With its acquisition by AT&T expected to close later… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Direct Control Direct-to-consumer upstarts are giving established brands a run for their money, and are also wreaking some havoc in the agency world. That’s because DTC brands are for the most part digitally native and do their advertising in-house. Despite its $1 billion acquisition… Continue reading »

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written by Leytal Ross, PubPlus’ VP of Strategic Partnerships

It’s no secret that Facebook is cracking down on publishers who use external Facebook pages to promote their content. This strategic move makes perfect sense for the social media giant, but it leaves many online publishers wary of the buzz that they may have heard recently about abrupt changes that Facebook is planning to roll out.

Facebook’s efforts to become more transparent amid the data scandal that surrounded the 2016 US elections, coupled with them missing out on millions of dollars in potential ‘pay-to-play’ revenue for years, shows that the next round of changes are just around the corner.

During our most recent quarterly review we began to see a noticeable drop in traffic among sites and publishers that use networks of influencers via Facebook. Most publishers have been aware of the drop in organic reach for a while, but our analysis shows a different story to the drop that almost every Facebook page experienced at the start of 2018, when the social media giant first rolled out its algorithm changes for its news feed.

Now Facebook seems to be going even further and killing off reach for specific sites that use large, external Facebook pages as a source for providing traffic. By cross-referencing some publishers whose links appear on multiple Facebook pages with SimilarWeb data, we were able to see some very sharp drops in Facebook referrals over the last month or so.

While the drop in referrals might be punishment enough for some publishers, Facebook seems to be upping the penalty.

When speaking to publishers, one told us that Facebook was definitely pursuing a policy of ‘punishing’ publishers who strike deals with external pages to promote their content. The publisher said: “Via our account manager, we received a warning from Facebook’s policy team that they were prepared to ‘blacklist’ publishers who pursue influencers outside the agreed framework. In no uncertain terms they told us this was going to be happening more and more.”

The 2018 Facebook algorithm change hit publishers like an earthquake, and as with any other natural disaster there will always be aftershocks. Publishers should take Facebook’s moves as a warning and prepare for the next disruption by changing the way they work now. While this might be a little unnerving for CEOs, CROs and audience development managers, there are solutions to help smooth the transition and build strong business models in the long-term.

The first thing that needs to be agreed is that the days of viral publishers are over, and now is the time to adopt a ‘pay-to-play’ model. However, instead of throwing money at the problem publishers need to learn and adopt the process of attributing their marketing spend to the revenue generated by visits.

The process of revenue attribution is crucial to publishers and to manage this at scale is a huge challenge. To understand which campaigns or visits are the most valuable, revenue attribution technology is vital.

In order to grow and scale it’s important for publishers to have the means to monitor and manage their visitors, and be able to do this from a unified dashboard. This is how they can see where their advertising revenues are really coming from and begin to understand the unique value of each visit or campaign. Understanding this data allows publishers to build strong audience development strategies, and dramatically increase their ROI.

Publishers shouldn’t wait for the next earthquake to hit their industry, but take vital steps towards future-proofing their businesses, starting with a holistic and realistic view of revenue.

The post Facebook is hitting publishers where it hurts: here’s what you can do appeared first on Digiday.

Science-and entertainment-focused publisher Inverse is the latest to jump on Twitch, the live streaming service owned by Amazon. But while a few other publishers including The Washington Post, Cheddar and BuzzFeed are trying to appeal to the news-curious on Twitch, Inverse is sticking to what Twitch is best known for: gaming.

The publisher is launching a new talk show that drafts off the popularity of cultural sensation Fortnite, which has some 125 million players and generated $315 million in revenue in June. Fortnite’s crossover appeal is huge; Twitch broke a record for most-viewed stream by a single player when pro-gamer Ninja was joined by Drake and played while discussing pizza and the game itself. Inverse’s show “SquadUp!” won’t be about pro-gamers but the hosts, Inverse’s video and audio head Weston Green and video producer Justin Dodd, will play with audience members. It’s going for the appeal of the popular podcast “Beautiful/Anonymous,” where host Chris Gethard spends every episode talking to a stranger.

“It’s really fun watching those gamers, but it’s a half percent of people,” Green said. “It’s fun when you’re squadding up — playing with people around the world. We thought, ‘How do we turn this into a show?’”

“SquadUp!” will live-stream twice a week for two hours each. Like other publishers that grapple with the costs of making making video, Inverse is looking for ways to repurpose video that it makes for a given channel, so each episode of “SquadUp!” will be edited down into a 15-minute clip that will then be posted on Inverse’s site and on YouTube.

Live gaming dominates the activity on Twitch; the top streams often are people with big followings playing games like Fortnite. Outside of gaming, there’s been an increase in professionally produced content from news publishers and categories like IRL (In Real Life) and non-game marathons are generating big audiences, according to Twitch.

With its core gaming focus and live commenting, Twitch isn’t a natural place for every publisher to seek out an audience. For Inverse, it made sense because it reaches a young people that are into science and entertainment but aren’t heavy Facebook users.

“It doesn’t have the natural discoverability of YouTube or the social graph of Facebook, so it’s a little harder to invest in,” said David Spiegel, chief revenue officer of Inverse. “Live streaming and games is an area few have permission to be part of. Facebook, the younger audience is not on it as they used to be.”

Other advantages are that making the show for Twitch didn’t take any additional resources other than existing people’s time, and there’s a chance to make money. Inverse is talking to gaming platforms, hardware makers and food and drink advertisers to be potential sponsors; in the meantime, Inverse is participating in Twitch’s revenue model where Twitch sells the ads and shares it with the publisher.

The post A Fortnite-themed talk show is coming to Twitch appeared first on Digiday.

It’s tough for any publisher to branch out into agency-like services, but local publishers face their own particular challenges.

Local broadcaster Nexstar grew its digital marketing and agency services revenue 38 percent to $62 million in the first quarter of 2018, representing more than 10 percent of the broadcaster’s quarterly revenue.

“I think there’s a lot of room to grow here,” said Anthony Katsur, svp of digital at Nexstar. “We’re your one-stop shop for local, SEM [search engine marketing], social, and video.”

Nearly one-third of the publisher respondents to a survey by the Local Media Association said digital marketing services like SEO, website design, native ads and social media management were their top growth opportunity. Another 60 percent said those services were a top-three opportunity. Nearly two thirds said that side of their business was profitable.

Local publishers have less competition for small marketers’ business than do national publishers. But local publishers also have more service needs that they’ll hand off to third parties.

“The path to making great inroads with the Fortune 1000 is really tricky,” said Jed Williams, chief innovation officer of the Local Media Association.

Local advertisers also have a wide range of business needs, which requires sales team to keep up with a menu that changes frequently. Katsur said that Nexstar’s COO spent nearly one quarter of 2017 on the road, putting the broadcaster’s local sales teams through two-day trainings that included a final exam.

Some agencies like Excelerate Digital, a marketing agency owned by newspaper chain McClatchy, try to serve businesses of all sizes. UpCurve, a group of services businesses owned by GateHouse Media, caters to small businesses. Most recently, it acquired Closely, a SaaS product that helps small businesses track their social and mobile presences of their competitors; and Contact Management Systems, a CRM service. Nexstar, which expanded its digital services when it acquired Media General in 2017, aims at bigger businesses, often in support of its core broadcast television advertising business.

The Local Media Association survey also showed homogeneity creeping into publisher offerings and margin pressure from competition. Upwards of three quarters of respondents offered the same services. One third of the services were offered by more than 90 percent of respondents.

But agency services let publishers offer something different from Facebook and Google and give publishers a way to deepen existing business relationships.

“We said, ‘We’ve got these trusted brands, we’ve got a big local salesforce, we’ve got the ability to market, let’s take advantage,’” said Peter Newton, chief operating officer of GateHouse Media.

 

The post Local publishers consider agency services in search for growth appeared first on Digiday.

Amazon is increasingly working directly with brands on advertising deals.

Amazon has always had a robust direct line to brands via an application programming interface for Amazon Marketing Services, the part of its ad business that includes self-serve Amazon ads. But working directly with big brands for bigger media buys, without agencies in the process, is a new phenomenon for Amazon. The company is increasingly sending its burgeoning sales team to directly meet with marketers and chief marketing officers, according to people familiar with the matter.

It’s especially well-received by marketers because Amazon Advertising has long been touting itself as simply one part of an overall “Amazon strategy” for advertisers. That means that brands should, or so the pitch goes, be thinking about everything from online Amazon stores, shipping, logistics, review management — as well as advertising.

Seth Dallaire, vp of worldwide ad sales and marketing at Amazon, said that the company works directly with many brands for deeper dives on retail analytics, data like why things may be out of stock and how to price products and offers.

“With some of our largest brands, we may work with our counterparts in the retail business to secure a deal for Prime Day, for example, and then put together a promotional plan to help make it successful,” he said.

One of those brands is HP. The company is an Amazon fan: Its global head of media, Dan Salzman, said that Amazon is now the third-biggest media partner behind Facebook and Google. The brand finds the platform most helpful when it comes to what Salzman calls “lower funnel activities.”

Of particular interest is that Amazon provides a clear understanding of what’s working. “Given that Amazon search and Amazon reviews are a key part of the purchase journey for many of HP’s customers, Amazon’s ad product is an effective tool for us to drive the customer to our brand,” said Salzman.

According to data from Standard media Index, an advertising intelligence company, Amazon ad revenue is up from 36 percent from last year from national advertisers — that is, big Fortune 500 brands. The majority — about 74 percent — is coming from display ads in the year to date.

According to Amazon’s first-quarter earnings, ad revenue overall has grown 132 percent year over year and is now $2 billion.

HP works with both AMS on sponsored products, headline search ads and product display ads, and also directly with Amazon Media Group, its internal team. “The benefits of working directly with Amazon are greater speed and operational efficiency,” said Salzman.

Lego is also using Amazon directly, particularly for search. Lego now has an Amazon store and is spending on Amazon ads more and more. As Digiday has reported, Lego has a dedicated landing page on Amazon. Nobody who competes with Lego can advertise there. 

Dallaire said the company is also working directly with smaller direct-to-consumer brands that are using agencies at all. These brands are taking advantage of our self-service tools for Amazon Marketing Services and our DSP [Amazon Advertising Platform] and then requesting more counsel on how to accelerate awareness building within our stores and on our devices.”

Agencies remain important and relevant to Amazon, the company is quick to say. The platform has been building out its ad business, and agency buyers are hearing from it more and more often.

Working directly with brands is a tried and true approach. Google did the same — increasing the number of direct deals it does with marketers in an effort to cut out the middleman. Eric Heller, founder of Wunderman Commerce consultancy Marketplace Ignition, said that when he ran marketing for Expedia Corporate Capital, Google had just started to seriously wine and dine brands directly to pitch them on advertising.

“Amazon is definitely talking directly to brands,” said Heller. “I’m not sure that everything old isn’t new again. I don’t think after Google we started hearing later that companies were dropping agencies.”

Heller said one big reason for Amazon to push directly to brands is it remains still a third-biggest partner, in most cases, for marketers. If Amazon wants to grow that side of its business, it needs to step up its game and go beyond agencies or small sellers on its platform.

The other, perhaps more-difficult-to-untangle, problem is brands still get concerned about Amazon’s role as both an ad platform and a retail company. Brands are worried that if they spend money on Amazon advertising, they’ll also be funneling it into Amazon, which is growing its private-label business — therefore helping, in a sense, its own competitors. Kevin Packler, vp at the Tombras Group in Knoxville, Tennessee, said that he’s always telling his clients that Amazon is “neither a pure-play competitor nor a pure-play ad platform. It’s in the middle.”

With that, it makes more sense, said Packler, for Amazon to step in and directly talk to brands to sell them on its value.

“Whenever you look at a customized approach, I would expect Amazon would be more involved with a direct conversation than using the agency,” said Packler.

As for brands, working directly with platforms goes hand in hand with marketers trying to be more data-driven and take control of their media. Nissan vp of marketing for Europe Jean-Pierre Diernaz said that, overall, the company is getting closer to everyone: Google, Amazon, Facebook, with quarterly reviews. “They’re becoming an integral part of our plan to be more data-driven.”

The post Amazon advertising is working directly with brands now, cutting out ad agencies appeared first on Digiday.

For Turner Sports, Friday night has become esports night as the broadcaster continues to expand its owned ELeague property to more games, viewers and advertisers.

ELeague, which is jointly owned by Turner Sports and entertainment holding company Endeavor, started in 2016 as a professional video gaming league and broadcasting operation. The league was initially focused on Valve’s popular game “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive,” with two tournaments anchored by a three-hour live broadcast on TBS on Friday and programming on Twitch and other platforms.

Today, ELeague looks very different. Turner Sports will host six tournaments this year across more games including “Rocket League,” “Street Fighter” and “Tekken.” The tournament lengths vary; one for “CS:GO” in January ran for six weeks, while a “Tekken” competition in March was just a weekend. The goal is to have a year-round presence in esports, said Seth Ladetsky, svp of sales for Turner Sports.

TBS will continue to air a three-hour ELeague broadcast Friday nights, though the content can vary by the week. If it’s the week of a major tournament, TBS will host the live games; other weeks, it will focus on behind-the-scenes action. During the recent lead-up to last year’s “Dota 2 International,” which was not broadcast by Turner Sports, ELeague produced an HBO “Hard Knocks”-style sports documentary focusing on the teams and players in the tournament.

“What we’ve come to realize is that on TBS there’s actually been a lot of interest for behind-the-scenes, documentary-style stuff,” said Ladetsky. “People want to know what these gamers do away from the tournaments and how they live, whereas on Twitch, that’s all about the hardcore, gaming competitions.”

On TV, ELeague averages 250,000 viewers per telecast. ELeague has also helped TBS draw new and younger viewers; to date, the league has brought in 10 million new viewers who had not spent any time with the network in the month prior to watching an ELeague broadcast. The median age for ELeague programming at 10 p.m. on Friday nights on TBS is four years younger than other network programming that airs on other nights at the same time. (All figures are Nielsen data provided by Turner Sports.)

On Twitch, ELeague’s “Boston Major” tournament final in January hit a peak of 1.1 million viewers. (For a rough comparison, that’s in line with what World Cup broadcasters Fox Sports and Telemundo saw with peak concurrent live streams over the past month.)

Despite ELeague’s growth, esports as a whole is not mainstream enough for most advertisers, which need to improve their understanding and comfort level with it, said Josh Spiegelman, managing director for Spotlight, Mindshare North America’s sports and entertainment practice.

For advertisers that are interested in esports, ELeague is attractive because it simplifies a still-fragmented landscape, though, said Spiegelman. “They provide a combination of digital and linear distribution, sophisticated production, access to talent and sponsor opportunities across a range of games that appeal to different audiences,” he said.

ELeague — which was profitable as of last fall, according to Turner president David Levy — has also tripled the number of sponsors for its broadcasts over the past year, Turner Sports said. Ad sponsors include Dell, Geico, Cheez-It, Domino’s and even the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Turner Sports focuses on sponsorships that include brand integrations into live broadcasts and custom videos, Ladetsky said. For the Air Force, ELeague created a “Tactics” segment which highlights what different teams and players need to do to win. These segments will run across ELeague broadcasts on TBS, B/R Live and Twitch.

Image by Jeremy Freeman/Turner Sports

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Publishers are concerned that signals that inform ad buyers when users have given their consent to be served personalized ads, are not being passed correctly across the digital ad supply chain. Several publishers have said they’ve lost ad revenue as a result.

These consent signals, which have become critical under the General Data Protection Regulation, are passed by publisher consent management platforms through the digital ad supply chain to buyers, who then know what inventory has user consent and can bid on ads accordingly. Publishers that have taken an opt-in approach to gaining user consent, rather than legitimate interest or opt out, are finding that despite generating high opt-in rates, they’re seeing a drop-off in ad buying on that inventory.

Some publishers believe the problem is due to some DSP partners not being equipped to recognize opt-in users. Digital sports publisher Givemesport lost a five-figure sum in the last month because one of its video DSP partners wasn’t properly detecting the consent signals. That meant one of its agency partners was only seeing an eighth of the publisher’s inventory, according to Ryan Skeggs, general manager for Givemesport.

The DSP in question had been giving the publisher the run-around in its responses, which meant it took a while to figure out what the issue was.

“The agency thought that’s all we were sending them,” said Skeggs. “DSP tech is obviously not up to scratch if it’s only registering an eighth of our ad requests to our agencies. That is a terrible scenario to be in for the agency and the publisher. We both lose out as we can’t sell inventory and the agency can’t buy enough decent inventory.”

According to publishers, some DSPs are not recognizing consent, some are, while others are only accepting placements if consent has been given and the rest are somewhere in the middle, according to publisher sources.

“Nobody seems to have any idea what anyone is doing. It’s all incredibly confusing,” said a publishing executive. “It’s like [kids’ games] Stuck in the Mud, Leapfrog, Kiss Chase and British Bulldog all being played together at the same time on the same playground. Only nobody is really sure which game they signed up for.”

The bottlenecks partly stem from the fact companies are not all compliant within the same consent frameworks, according to ad tech vendor executives. The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s methodology is not accepted by all DSPs yet, and neither is Google’s — so DSPs are not reading consent signals in a standardized way, they say. Google is yet to integrate with the IAB Consent and Transparency framework, which it has promised to do by the end of August.

The fact there are different frameworks so no single standardized way of reading consent signals yet, has led some vendors to create hacks to try and get the best response rates, according to ad tech execs.

That means people are amending consent signals that come from different frameworks so that they can transfer across to other players in a digital ad supply chain, regardless of what framework’s consent signals they use. But in doing so, they’re potentially causing errors in the technology, which could be causing the blockages around the publishers opt-in inventory being passed back to buyers, according to sources. “Wherever there is a hack, there is typically a problem,” said an ad tech executive who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Some exchanges are converting Google’s consent signals into IAB signals, and when you have all these different methodologies and companies trying to change the consent signal in real time, and there are billions of these happening at once — that can break a process and could affect a DSP’s ability to read it [the consent signal,]” said the same executive.

Another theory for why DSPs aren’t always reading the consent signals could be the rise of header bidding, where many DSPs are seeing five times the amount of traffic they had before the programmatic ad buying method was introduced. To combat the additional strain that responding to this volume of ad calls would have on the DSP’s tech, plus the additional costs it would incur, many are simply filtering out a portion of inventory and ignoring the ad calls.

Other publishing executives have said that the DSPs are simply not ready for GDPR and so are ignoring consent signals from the IAB until they can fully understand it. Until they do, it means publishers that have already weathered the gauntlet of encouraging opt-in user consent, may not be able to leverage that to its full capacity.

“It would be good to see SSPs, DSPs and other partners being fully approved by the IAB and not just being on a vendor list. We need to know that they can use the consent properly and pass it on correctly,” said a publishing executive.

The post ‘It’s all incredibly confusing’: Publishers complain GDPR consent signals are ignored by ad buyers appeared first on Digiday.

The influencer marketing landscape increasingly looks like the ad network landscape circa 2012 when countless companies claimed to sell ads across a lot of the same sites. In the latest in our Confessions series, where we grant anonymity for honesty, an executive at a social marketing company that sells influencer marketing to advertisers said that influencer networks, ad agencies and talent management firms often claim to represent the same talent, which can hurt the influencers’ reputation with advertisers. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

What’s a big challenge you face in influencer marketing?
The influencer marketing business as a whole is challenged. The barrier to entry is zero. Everybody who’s ever held a camera and knows an influencer thinks they can be in this business. Granted, there are different ways people are approaching it. But we all are approaching the market oftentimes with the same pitch, the same talent, the same data. It’s a race to the bottom.

Are there ways to put up walls so five different companies can’t all be offering the exact same talent?
There will be litigation, I assume, when people have some form of exclusivity. The deals probably aren’t big enough yet.

Are the brand-safety issues that flared up with creators on YouTube last year factoring into any of this?
It’s moved more stuff to Instagram, which feels like it’s easier to execute because it’s a lot of pictures, even though there’s videos. Pictures seem controllable. At Cannes, there was a huge discussion about YouTube content creators being pains in the ass.

What were the specific complaints?
There’s a lot of unprofessionalism. Here’s what happens: A creator has a thousand people selling you. Some only care about their data tool. Some are agencies and really don’t give a fuck about you; they care about the next assignment from “insert brand name.” But you let them all act equally as your proxy in the market and end up with two fundamental problems. Your pricing is ridiculous; on one deck you’re at $100,000, on another deck you’re at $20,000. And you have third parties talking on your behalf that may not have the skills or the relationships to navigate any of it.

Why doesn’t that translate to Instagram?
Part of it is the way Instagram is sold. Either you really overpay for a Kardashian or insert top-tier talent, which is a bespoke transaction with lots of representation and tends to be less muddy. Or it’s anyone under 500,000 [followers], just stick them on a list and they don’t really matter at the end of the day. It’s content by the ton.

It’s that binary?
I think actually the mid-tier — we do a lot of analysis for beauty brands that are buying heavily across YouTube and Instagram. We’re seeing the efficiency on both platforms in that mid-tier, 250,000 to 1 million, only because so many people have invaded the micro-influencer market.

So the industry’s arriving at a Goldilocks balance of people with 250,000 to 1 million followers?
For today. Nothing is static.

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Another obstacle is coming at print media.

Magazine and newspaper publishers that sell their subscribers’ data to other companies will be pressed to make changes to those businesses when California’s recently passed privacy law takes effect in January 2020. At minimum the law will compel those publishers to be more upfront about their subscriber data sales practices and to provide new opt-out options to their subscribers.

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