Author: rssmasher

Although Tasty, BuzzFeed’s popular food property, commands a ton of reach, it wants advertisers to know that it’s also a performance play. BuzzFeed is making a concerted effort to prove the efficacy of its media, particularly on high-traffic properties like Tasty. “We didn’t set out to build a shopper marketing offering, but because of our… Continue reading »

The post BuzzFeed’s Tasty Cooks Up A Full-Funnel Campaign For Scotch-Brite appeared first on AdExchanger.

The head of Tesla’s Autopilot semiautonomous-driving system departed for Intel, adding new turmoil to a key program for the auto maker that is already beset by executive departures and safety questions.

When Attn: launched four years ago, it aimed to be a mobile-first news platform for millennials. The publisher relied heavily on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to distribute short-form video on important societal topics in a digestible, entertaining format. Since then, Attn: has diversified its distribution strategy. It’s also exploring new types of… Continue reading »

The post Attn:, The Millennial News Brand, Turns Its Attention To TV appeared first on AdExchanger.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Greg Paull, founder and principal at R3 Worldwide. Zero-based budgeting is one of the most radical approaches to cost-reduction, yet it has become the go-to model for big-name companies like… Continue reading »

The post Why Agencies Should Embrace Zero-Based Budgeting appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Criteo Swaps Out CEO   With the GDPR compliance deadline bearing down, Criteo has restored its former CEO to the corner office. JB Rudelle will once again take the reins at the company, as Eric Eichmann steps into an advisory role prior to transferring… Continue reading »

The post Criteo Gets A New CEO; Sorrell Fill-In Mark Read Speaks appeared first on AdExchanger.

Learn more about how IBM Watson Marketing has worked with universities.

The post Infographic: How does your resume compare to an AI’s? appeared first on Digiday.

The blame game between advertisers and agencies is stalling the former’s efforts to uncover what happens to money spent on programmatic ads.

Transparency was unsurprisingly the recurring theme at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit Europe in Estoril, Portugal, where it was clear the issue is far from solved. Advertisers blamed poor guidance from agencies more concerned with protecting margins on programmatic buys, while agencies challenged advertisers to pay more to understand how those investments work. Both sides want the other to take more responsibility for programmatic’s problems of hidden fees, fraud, viewability and brand safety, but neither are willing to take the lead.

“If we have problems with [transparency] today, then it’s not because of the technology powering advertising — it’s because we’re not sharing the information needed to stop brands throwing money into a black hole,” said one ad executive. “We’re having these conversations about transparency over and over again, but the knowledge needed to change the situation isn’t being shared.”

When Duracell realized how much of its money was swallowed by hidden fees versus what it spent on actual ads, it decided to build its own hybrid model. It struck a direct deal with a demand-side platform to manage its programmatic buys and a similar direct deal with a brand protection vendor so that it ran both the objectives and the reporting of its media buys. “We owned the bookends of our programmatic strategy,” said Jon Ones, head of digital for Duracell’s international markets, during his presentation.

The key to Duracell’s hybrid model is that it eliminated the risks for any hidden fees, said Ones. “If you own the contract for a demand-side platform, then it’s no longer possible for anyone to do media markups or publisher rebates because you [the advertiser] see the true costs directly in the platform that you own,” he said. “Having that visibility on those costs also means you can negotiate the right service fees.”

Marketing procurement teams aren’t equipped to make decisions on the right ad tech partners, said Nick Graham, global director of digital marketing and media at Huawei, during his session. There are still “pockets” where decisions are price-driven rather than made on the quality of the ad tech vendor because procurement hasn’t changed fast enough with the innovations, said Graham.

His point was revisited during a closed-door town hall discussion, where none of the marketers could say they had met their ad tech suppliers when asked by one executive.

“The best meeting I ever had was understanding how the supply chain worked for the company [advertiser brand] I worked for,” said the same executive. “But in paid media, there may be one or two people who get it, and the rest are scrambling around trying to understand the ecosystem. If you just understood how your supply chain worked and took the fundamentals, speak with the publisher, understand who gets paid, ensure the publisher is getting paid a fair fee.”

For other advertisers attending the summit, the challenge of building more transparency into their programmatic supply chain isn’t isolated to agencies — getting the likes of Facebook and Google to open up about how their ad technologies and algorithms work is a bigger issue.

“Agencies, for me, are not the problem: Google and Facebook are even less transparent than agencies,” said one marketer during the town hall discussion. The duopoly is “trying to stuff” advertisers into its technology stacks without explaining how the systems powering them work. The duopoly is the “bigger problem,” said the marketer, adding that “for me, the fear is coming way more from them and Amazon versus my agency.”

An agency executive responded by advising brand advertisers to interrogate the platforms, like Google and Facebook, as much as they do traditional publishers. “Clients can be so keen to work with, say, Google, that they just don’t interrogate them in the same way that a publisher would get interrogated [for running ad campaigns], but they should be.”

Jessica Davies contributed reporting.

The post Advertisers, agencies agree transparency in ad buying is a problem, but not so much on the blame appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook would seem an ideal place for cannabis-related businesses to find new customers, offering an array of targeting techniques. But Facebook, along with other major platforms, doesn’t take ads for cannabis products. That isn’t stopping many cannabis businesses, which use various hacks to get around the bans.

Some cannabis companies are paying influencers to spread the word about their topicals, edibles and other weed products. Others are working directly with publishers to use their social credibility or creating fake pages to test what kind of ad content will fly. The result: These niche businesses are playing something of a cat-and-mouse game with Facebook and other platforms, seeing what they can get away with.

Cannabis company Kiva Confections, for instance, is making its first push into influencer marketing with hopes that it will sort out its own sordid history on social media. Because of product-focused ads, Kiva’s Instagram page has been shut down eight times since 2015. As a consequence, the company has lost 60,000 followers and had to change its Instagram handle every time. What was once @kivaconfections is now @teamkiva1, a handle much harder to discover in search. And while Kiva has 10,400 followers on Twitter, it only has 5,500 followers on Instagram.

Christie Strong, marketing communications manager at Kiva, said Kiva has tried various approaches to prolong its stay on Instagram, such as making its Instagram profile private, not advertising prices and making sure it doesn’t provide ways for users to order products directly from the page, but to no avail. Now, while the company’s products have come up organically thanks to celebrities like Sarah Silverman and Charlize Theron, it plans to reach out to wellness influencers who Strong said are “emerging as the informal authority on cannabis,” as the company expands to states beyond weed-friendly California, Arizona, Nevada and Illinois.

“Individuals can share with impunity, which means influencers are in the unique position to share products they are passionate about without fear of getting shut down as a business would,” said Strong, adding that several influencer partnerships are in progress.

In general, the use of influencers in cannabis marketing is rising. Influencer analytics platform Traackr analyzed the top 250 cannabis influencers and found that overall, edibles producers like Incredibles and Wana have increased their use of influencers by 32 percent from this time last year, and weed delivery services such as Eaze, greenRush and SpeedWeed have increased their use of influencers by 29 percent from this time last year.

Another strategy involves working with publishers on branded content, which can still be shared to social media since the content is editorial and not strictly promotional. That’s precisely why Nevada-based cannabis company Caviar Gold worked with cannabis news site Herb on a video that advertises its range of flavored products, which was posted to Herb’s Facebook account that has almost 10 million followers. Krista Whitley, founder and CEO of marketing agency Altitude Products, which worked with Caviar Gold on the video and also works with cannabis companies like Whoopi Goldberg’s Whoopi & Maya as well as skin care companies Bella and Felix & Ambrosia, said it’s a tactic that has always worked on Facebook, even before the platform began tightening its control of weed ads in the summer of 2016.

But there are also various nuanced ways cannabis companies get their paid ads through on social without getting penalized, and it comes down to the language and media used in the posts.

Delivery service greenRush has discovered a stealthy way to continue to use social to its advantage. Mike Schwartz, CMO of greenRush, said the company creates fake Facebook and Instagram pages to test which ad content will be allowed. His advice: “Don’t test on your own page — it could be gone the next day.”

In doing so, greenRush found that the more generic the content, the better. “It’s about creating content that appeals to cannabis consumers, without explicitly offering them weed to purchase,” Schwartz said. “You can target cannabis consumers; you can brand to them. You just can’t directly solicit their business.”

For instance, on April 21, greenRush posted a Facebook ad with a video from a 4/20 event greenRush sponsored the day before, with only a comment reading, “What did you get up to yesterday?” That post, said Schwartz, will not be taken down because it does not explicitly try to sell weed. Next, greenRush will see who engaged with the post and send them more promotional, product-related messages over Facebook Messenger, where Facebook’s algorithms cannot as easily pick up illicit activity, said Schwartz.

The platforms themselves aren’t exactly clear what kind of content they will accept. Their policies tend to be blanket statements. Facebook’s, for instance, reads: “Ads must not promote the sale or use of illegal, prescription, or recreational drugs.” However, ads with educational or advocacy content is fine.

“[Platforms] are so vague about what we can do,” said Olivia Mannix, co-founder of cannabis marketing agency Cannabrand. Mannix said the agency has gotten away with a few sponsored posts in the past that promote products, although she said it avoids using language in posts that references cannabis so “algorithms don’t crawl the ad.” “We even talk to [Facebook’s] corporate team, and it’s really hard to get any answers.” Mannix points to the response Cannabrand received from Facebook after the agency inquired about its inactive ad account, which the platform shut down two weeks ago because of a sponsored post placed on behalf of client Mary Jane’s Medicinals. The ad was for cannabis-infused topicals that don’t get users high, but that didn’t matter. Cannabrand’s ad account is still on lockdown. “That’s why we have to be strategic,” Mannix said.

Meanwhile, social media platforms like Weedmaps and MassRoots, which cater exclusively to marijuana enthusiasts, have emerged, ready to take the ad dollars that Facebook, Instagram and others are so ready to give up. However, platforms like MassRoots also have much smaller audiences that already frequently consume cannabis, which is why Altitude Products still plugs away on Facebook, where it can find broad reach — at least for a short period of time, said Whitley. Even with Facebook blocking Altitude Products’ paid ads every two or three days, the agency still tries to “push those boundaries” because it’s worth the impressions its ads receive before Facebook’s algorithm pulls them down.

The post How the growing weed industry gets around anti-cannabis ad policies on Facebook and other platforms appeared first on Digiday.