Author: rssmasher

When Publicis Media launched a practice combining commerce and media a few weeks ago, it tapped former EMEA commerce and innovation head Ali Nehme to lead the group globally. Like Publicis’ programmatic and data, technology and innovation practices, the commerce practice centralizes research, technology and innovation for the holding company agencies, who work directly with… Continue reading »

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“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 Jay Friedman, chief operating officer at Goodway Group. As the attention on Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimonies dies down, the conversation is shifting instead to what should have been addressed. From an… Continue reading »

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At the Digiday Media Buying Summit last month in New Orleans, we sat down with 63 media-buying executives to learn their thoughts on running ad campaigns on Amazon. Check out our earlier research on U.S. publishers’ adjustments to Facebook’s news feed changes here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Sixty-three percent of media buyers in Digiday’s survey from the event said they have bought ads on Amazon.
• Campaign measurement is the most common challenge when advertising on Amazon.

With an ad business that earned $1.7 billion in 2017, Amazon is quickly outgrowing other major e-commerce retailers’ ad businesses. Accordingly, 63 percent of the media buyers surveyed at the Digiday Media Buying Summit reported purchasing ads on Amazon, making it the most popular platform to advertise on among respondents. Of those that bought digital retail media, 89 percent of them purchased ads on Amazon.

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“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Somer Simpson, GDPR product lead at Quantcast. The May 25 deadline to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is only weeks away. When it comes into effect, website owners that want to… Continue reading »

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by Toby McKenna, executive vice president of global advertising at Bazaarvoice

Today’s marketers have access to an unprecedented amount of technologies, tools and data, giving them the ability to execute increasingly sophisticated campaigns, better report the ROI of their efforts and inform future marketing plans. However, with an abundance of data, platforms and channels being used, it’s hard to isolate the best marketing metrics and attribution models to prioritize. Business leaders are demanding more of their marketing teams, challenging them with proving the ROI of their digital campaigns and linking metrics back to meaningful business results.

Facing increasing pressures to deliver the most accurate and appropriate metrics, digital marketers must understand how to measure and report on customer behaviors. This is a complicated problem given consumers’ non-linear and complex paths to purchase and the multitude of channels and platforms that are available to digital marketers today.

To uncover varying industry perspectives and expectations around attribution, we surveyed nearly 250 professionals representing brands, agencies and publishers. Here’s what we found:

Understanding and evaluating different attribution models
Before diving into which attribution models are the best, it’s important to first understand the different types being used today. According to the survey results, 63% of respondents said the ideal attribution model would be able to track customers throughout the entire marketing funnel—something which is close to impossible to achieve. Most marketers use either a last touch, first touch or multi touch attribution model to measure their campaign activities, with advantages and disadvantages to each process.

Offline metrics in the digital environment
All three of the above digital attribution models are being used by today’s marketers, but brands must not neglect the vital role offline data plays in attribution. In fact, only 1% of survey respondents stated that offline attribution was not important to them. Collected from non-digital sources—typically at the point of sale—offline data can portray a customer’s fluid journey between the digital and physical environments.

In the offline realm, brands can collect valuable customer data like names, contact information and even demographic information, enabling brands to serve highly targeted advertising and personalized messaging to certain customers. When brands combine their offline data with their online marketing activities they’re able to see what types of customers are consuming their digital ads, which messages they’re receptive to and, ultimately, whether or not they resulted in conversion.

Selecting the right KPIs
With multiple attribution models, sources of data and ways that marketers are tracking the efficacy of their campaigns, it can be difficult for brands to know which model or combination of models are appropriate.

More than half of marketers (52%) said that sales metrics such as conversion rates and return on ad spend (ROAS) were the most effective when evaluating campaign success. Traffic metrics like click-through rates, average time spent on page and unique visitors came in second at 36%. Interestingly, only 17% of marketers want their brand and agency partners to put a stronger focus on sales metrics, while 50% of marketers want their partners to focus more on traffic-related metrics.

The industry may disagree about the best marketing metrics to use, but ultimately, selecting the right metrics comes down to identifying the goals of the campaign. For example, if a brand is trying to build brand awareness, traffic metrics and first-touch attribution models can isolate the moments when customers first interact with the brand. Conversely, brands who want to drive concrete sales should consider returns on ad spend and last touch attribution models to determine which ads impacted conversions and overall ROI.

After pinpointing campaign goals and the most appropriate KPIs, it’s equally important for brands to communicate these goals with their agency and brand partners. Almost 40% of brands feel as though their agency and brand partners aren’t aligned on delivering consistent or accurate metrics, demonstrating a considerable need for clearly defining marketing KPIs at the beginning.

In order to effectively show marketing results and their influence on business outcomes, brands must thoroughly understand and evaluate the different types of attribution models, establish distinct marketing objectives and openly communicate campaign goals and KPIs with their agencies and brand partners. There’s no singular solution for measuring marketing success, but mapping different metrics and attribution models to clearly defined campaign goals will maximize the value of marketing activities and spend. To learn more about different digital attribution models and how brands, agencies and publishers are using them, view the full report here.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Free Ride Spotify updated its free, ad-supported app on Tuesday with personalized playlists and other features. The changes elevate the user experience to within spitting distance of its paid tier. So why would anyone buy a subscription? “The better our free experience is, the… Continue reading »

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The millennial-aimed Mic has represented just about every digital media trend since it started seven years ago, distributing as far and wide on platforms as possible by chasing viral hits and then video views with its woke brand of social justice journalism, fueled by $21 million in venture funding. But now, with platforms left and right disappointing publishers with failures to deliver reliable traffic and monetization, Mic is preaching the new gospel of “deliberate distribution.”

The shift has taken a few forms. Cory Haik, Mic’s publisher, said she’s taken a more systematic approach to platforms, working with evp of revenue Sarah Iooss, who joined Mic last August from Viacom, to evaluate how much effort to spend on them. Haik, who published a manifesto a couple years ago pronouncing the rise of visual journalism, said she’s banned use of the term “growth hacker” and has a new term for her mantra of the moment: “deliberate distribution.” By the end of the year, all Mic’s distributed content will be paid for, said Chris Altchek, Mic co-founder and CEO, recently on the Digiday Podcast.

“Before, we would have said to a platform, ‘What do we need to do?’ Now, we’ll experiment, but less so,” Haik said.

The numbers speak for themselves. Mic publishes half as much on Facebook as it did a year ago, according to Facebook-owned CrowdTangle; it’s also stopped doing partner swaps with other publishers, Haik said. It once had a 10-person Instagram team to go after specific interest groups; it’s pulled back from that Facebook-owned social app, too, and those people have been reassigned to other roles in the newsroom, Mic said. Instead, Mic is paying more attention to Apple News and Twitter. In the case of Apple News, Mic sees the potential to reach a big audience with the kind of videos it does best. Twitter is delivering some monetization.

Haik is quick to say Mic still considers Facebook a very important channel, given its huge audience base and importance to Mic’s big branded content distribution business. Mic is still in the early stages of forging a brand. It doesn’t have a subscription business. “Mic would not exist if Facebook were not here,” Haik said. But as Facebook has deprioritized publishers, Mic has had to do the same for Facebook.

The newsroom has evolved accordingly. Once there were editorial teams dedicated to cranking out viral hits for search engine optimization and trending stories for social media; they have been disbanded, and reporters are now organized around beats. When Haik joined Mic two years ago, it published as many as 75 articles a day, mostly with an eye toward Facebook. Now, it publishes around 25 a day. Mic recently started measuring editorial content based on time spent rather than view counts.

Mic joined other publishers in the pivot to video last year, and its video output remains steady, but it’s shifted from undifferentiated clips seeking virality to videos lasting several minutes that are narrated and shot in the field. There have been successes along the way: Mic, with Time, recently won a coveted American Society of Magazine Editors award for video for an 18-minute mini-doc on the opioid crisis, “Life After Addiction.” The doc racked up 118,000 hours of time spent in November, making it a top video in time spent that month. Another example of the push to viewing time is a three-minute video on an unwarranted arrest that had only 2.2 million views but 30,000 hours of time spent.

“There’s been a hard shift from undifferentiated work,” Haik said.

It might seem like this change is a reaction to the January bombshell that Facebook dropped when it said it would deprioritize publishers’ content. That progression has actually been happening for more than a year, and Haik began the changes in editorial strategy over that same time period. Publishers have seen the writing on the wall as platforms have become sometimes fickle partners. Young publishers especially realize that to endure, they need to establish a brand people value enough to visit directly, not just on Facebook or Instagram. Facebook isn’t the place to build a loyal audience, Altchek said.

The open question is whether the move by Mic and others to time spent will lead to more revenue and a more direct relationship with readers. Mic’s traffic to its site has plummeted to 5 million uniques in March from 17 million a year ago, per comScore. Mic has said this decline reflected its focus on video over text posts and did not capture the increased reach the publisher was getting on social platforms.

The assumption is that the longer people watch videos, the more they can be monetized with pre-roll ads. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the ad message will stick. Publishers that have optimized for audience scale for years also have to do the work of reprogramming their click-addicted staffs.

Haik was part of creating that culture. In her old job as head of emerging news products at The Washington Post, Haik was an evangelist for distributing its news as widely as possible, a message the legacy publisher needed to hear. “I was a cheerleader for it in the biggest way.” But times have changed, and her message today is all about impact.

“We’ve had to change the fundamental groundwork of Mic,” she said. “The moral is, we have to build our journalistic brand.”

The post After years of chasing Facebook traffic, Mic goes for ‘deliberate distribution’ appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook’s algorithm has been boosting Watch shows in people’s news feeds, and now the company is testing a way to convert that heightened attention into intentional viewing. Facebook plans to test running trailers in people’s feeds that preview Watch shows, hoping to make people more interested in the shows.

During the test, Facebook will attach these so-called “preview trailers” — snippets of the program — to the regular Watch episodes appearing in people’s feeds. The trailers will play automatically when posts come into view; tapping a post will take people to the Watch program. The promos are only being made available to Watch shows that have opted to carry pre-roll ads. Even then, Facebook will only test the trailers with a small number of those shows initially, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

Much is not yet sorted out. Trailers can be any length, but the company plans to experiment with different preview formats and will likely work with some show makers to determine the format of the trailers and how they should be created, the spokesperson said.

By tethering these previews to pre-roll ads, Facebook appears to be attempting to address one of the biggest questions looming over its pre-roll ads: Will people tolerate them? The answer is unclear at best, but it’s more likely to be yes if viewers have a better idea of what’s on the other side of the ad and have signaled a stronger interest in seeing it than simply pausing while scrolling through their feed. Facebook also seems to be trying to prove to Watch producers that it’s willing to take a more active role in building their shows’ audiences and revenue.

When AwesomenessTV premiered its first Watch show in November 2017, “it was kind of like launching into the abyss,” said Liza Glucoft, an executive producer at the digital video network who worked on the show. Facebook had introduced its dedicated video hub for TV-like shows three months prior, but the company hadn’t done much to make audiences aware of Watch. That’s the problem Facebook is looking to solve.

“I’m thrilled if this is just an indication of more to come. No platform, let alone a publisher, can assume that if you build it, consumers will show, even if you’re at the scale that Facebook is,” said Deanna Brown, president of The Young Turks Network. “I do think it’s about time, though.”

The test seems to attempt to address the dilemma that Facebook faces as it tries to wean show producers off its subsidies and establish a revenue model in which it splits ad money with the media companies. Crucial to that transition are Facebook’s pre-roll ads, which are supposed to make it more likely that a view generates revenue than mid-roll ads. The problem: Those ads don’t appear when people watch an episode in the news feed, and people primarily watch episodes there. But Facebook’s test will try to change that.

In addition to the preview trailer test, the company is looking to expand its marketing team to promote Watch and its shows. Called The Studio, that team is part of Facebook’s in-house agency, The Factory, and is charged with producing trailers and campaigns for Watch shows, according to a job listing posted earlier this month.

“For content in other mediums, marketing has always been a big component of that. Whether it’s releasing a movie or a television show, if the content requires real capital and effort to make, it needs to be marketed to get to a scale that’s bigger than what happens organically,” said David Grant, president of PopSugar Studios.

Facebook is doing other things that demonstrate it is prioritizing this programming over other videos. For example, Facebook is rethinking whether it should insert ads in “videos of repurposed clips from other sources with limited editorialization” because these videos don’t engender the kind of engagement that “original, thematic or episodic videos do,” the company announced last week.

“It clearly shows that Facebook is moving in the direction of a network, especially since they’re favoring quality content,” said Glucoft.

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Viacom and Snapchat are working together to create new shows that would star top Snapchat stars.

In a multiyear original content and advertising deal renewal, the media giant said Snap approached Viacom about developing and producing shows using top Snapchat celebrities. Viacom could cast those stars in existing programming that it’s producing for Snapchat — say, as a guest on the Snapchat version of the reality series “Cribs” — or develop new show ideas and formats with select influencers. Viacom and Snap hold weekly development meetings, during which they exchange ideas on shows as well as casting, said Kelly Day, president of Viacom Digital Studios.

“[Snap has] identified a number of different top influencers on the platform and said that if we can develop shows with those folks, it’s something they’re looking at doing going forward,” said Day. “That’s something that has worked on other platforms in the past, where you can lean into the people who are already popular on the platform.”

Snapchat has original content and advertising partnerships with other big media giants, including NBCUniversal and Turner. A Snap spokesperson wouldn’t say if it has made similar proposals to other media partners.

Snap’s relationship with social media stars has not always been warm, with the company favoring friends and personal relationships over public content created by Snapchat stars. That has changed in recent months, as Snapchat tries to grow the audience, time spent and revenue from the platform.

The renewal calls for Viacom to produce original video shows and continue publishing daily editions of MTV Snapchat Discover channels for the U.S., France and other international markets. Viacom also plans to produce and choose public stories tied to major events on its TV programming calendar, including the MTV Video Music Awards, Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards and the BET Hip Hop Awards.

To start, Viacom will bring back two of its existing Snapchat shows, “Girl Code” and “Cribs.” A third show, which does not have a premiere date yet, is called “Promposal” and will feature teens asking potential dates to prom in outlandish ways. Day said Viacom has a pilot for a fourth show in development, but wouldn’t give specifics. All of the programming will be produced by Viacom Digital Studios, a new 300-person division inside the company that brings together social and digital content and marketing teams across all Viacom networks.

For major media giants such as Viacom, Snapchat is a platform where they can extend existing media brands and intellectual property to new and younger audiences — “Girl Code,” “Cribs” and “Promposal” are all based off of TV shows of the same name — effectively making the platform a marketing vehicle for the media companies.

“Right now, our emphasis is on brand awareness, audience development and audience engagement,” Day said. “We will focus on profitability and monetization [on Snapchat] down the road, but our first priority is audience awareness and engagement.”

Day wouldn’t say if Viacom’s Snapchat efforts are profitable.

Viacom’s deal with Snap gives it total control over the ad-sales inventory across its programming on the platform — something the company will talk to clients about and push at the NewFronts.

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“We are not politically correct, but we have good ethics,” reads the opening to a webpage on American Apparel’s new global e-commerce site, which officially relaunched Tuesday in 200 countries.

The statement sets the tone for American Apparel 2.0, as the much maligned brand reveals a revamped identity that embraces its past while ushering in desperately needed change. After filing for bankruptcy in 2016 and subsequently shuttering 110 stores, American Apparel took stock of its failures and prepared for a turnaround, aided by an acquisition by Canadian retailer Gildan. Though the company rejoined the U.S. marketplace as a digital-only brand in August 2017, Tuesday’s global relaunch marks a new era for a brand that spent most of the last decade mired in controversy.

Now with a new site and reformed marketing approach, American Apparel is focused on maintaining its brand DNA by sticking to what worked in the past and ditching the rest. To introduce a similar but refined tone and aesthetic, the company is rolling out its “Back to Basics” campaign to a global audience.

“We asked, ‘Do we completely rebrand? Or do we look at what was good and re-envision that, and lean into it more strongly?’” said Sabina Weber, director of marketing at American Apparel. “The latter is ultimately the perspective that we took.”

The homepage of American Apparel’s revamped global site

With its fresh look — featuring a diverse array of un-retouched models that are still sexy without being too sexy — and expanded international presence, American Apparel is working to position itself once again as a global retail player and regain the devotion of consumers.

“Making American Apparel great again starts with a bold admission that the brand hasn’t lost its cool, its sexy design or marketing strategy,” said Jim Fosina, CEO of Fosina Marketing Group.

By scaling down inventory, smartening up its approach to sex appeal, testing new digital tactics, listening to consumer feedback and leaning on Gildan’s arsenal of resources, American Apparel is aiming to make an official comeback.

Rethink product
Before building out a marketing campaign, Weber said the first step of the rebrand was to parse down the company’s expansive inventory. The team honed in on what items defined American Apparel and resonated with customers, identifying specific products as essential, like hoodies and T-shirts. It retained these products while slimming down its selection of specialty products, sticking to garments like tennis skirts and bodysuits that originally helped set American Apparel on the map.

Significantly scaling back product served as the basis of American Apparel’s “Back to Basics” campaign, which it used to promote its return to U.S. retail in 2017 and maintained for the global site relaunch.

“We were over assorted, we had too many SKUs in the range,” Weber said. “We looked at what are the core products that made American Apparel really good. It’s always been a basic fashion component to a really good wardrobe.”

Reclaim sexy
Sex sells, but American Apparel recognized that one of its biggest downfalls was taking this idea too far. Its once tasteful and alluring campaigns soon became the target of significant controversy as they evolved into gratuitous nudity and suggestive imagery that its harshest critics said verged on pornographic. Gripes about the hyper-sexualized marketing only intensified as rumors emerged that founder Dov Garney was accused of engaging in sexual misconduct with several employees.

A controversial 2014 American Apparel advertisement

Still, sensuality was part of American Apparel’s DNA, and Weber said she felt compelled to maintain its sex-positive approach, particularly amid today’s political climate and the intensifying #MeToo movement. Rather than do away with American Apparel’s sexual side, she toned it down and reverted to the imagery of its early days.

“Being sexy is not bad,” she said. “The question is: How do you do it the right way, so that it’s empowering? It’s a sexy brand. We sell clothes that you feel good in. When you feel good in your clothes, there’s a confidence that comes out. That was our focus. If we had completely backed away from it, what would the brand be?”

Embrace digital
While American Apparel is in the nascent stages of reopening brick-and-mortar stores in select locations, Weber said one of the company’s primary challenges was its transition to a digital-only brand. Without the ubiquitous storefronts that once acted as “living billboards,” she said American Apparel has shifted focus to how it uses social media and works with influencers. As a result, the new site features user-generated social media posts and editorial in the form of the #AAblog, which includes interviews with “real influencers,” such as lesser-known artists and musicians.

@zoedlawrence in the Cotton Spandex Halter Bodysuit + High Waist Denim #AAselfie #AmericanApparel

A post shared by American Apparel (@americanapparelusa) on Apr 15, 2018 at 11:45am PDT

While the brand historically does not pay influencers and just repurposes fan content, Fosina said the brand may want to rethink this tactic in favor of a structured influencer program that better reflects its new identity.

“The company needs spokeswomen — celebrities that embody the messages that resonate with the new branding,” he said. “This is an audience of customers that will follow the lead, but they need splashy evangelists to jump-start the resurgence.”

Listen to criticism
Above all, American Apparel went back and listened intently to the grievances of customers that foreshadowed its 2016 demise and continued to do so as it worked to rebuild. Social media listening became a pivotal tool for the company as it tweaked strategy leading into the global relaunch. It was comments from consumers on platforms like Instagram that inspired a shift to more uniformed sizing, Weber said, following several complaints about products running small.

“People are very vocal, and that’s why social media is so powerful. It behooves every brand to pay attention,” she said. “Now our XL is really a true XL. That came purely from the feedback we were getting. We realized that, yes, it’s hard to hear. But that we just had to go, ‘Yes, we suck.’”

Form a solid foundation
Beyond financial backing, the leadership of Gildan helped provide American Apparel with the resources it needed to revitalize, including more robust sourcing and manufacturing tools. One of the biggest changes brought on by Gildan was expanding manufacturing beyond just Los Angeles and into other countries where it already operates, like Honduras.

While this has ultimately helped the brand bring down costs and lower prices, Fosina said American Apparel will need to be savvy in how it markets its new global approach, as it long touted being California-born and -raised.

“Gildan will have to really watch how they deal with the American component of their positioning. The new company is not an ‘American’ company, but the fashion is uniquely American,” he said.

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