Author: rssmasher

Facebook said it’s about to adjust its political ads policy to create a separate section in its archive to separate news publishers’ promoted stories from traditional political and issue ads, but won’t exempt news publishers from the archive as they hoped.

In a June 26 update, Facebook’s head of global news partnerships, Campbell Brown, wrote that in the days ahead, Facebook would launch a news publisher-specific section of its ads archive called Promoted News, which will carry the articles publishers have paid to promote that fall under what Facebook considers political topics. The policy was enacted after the fire Facebook came under for its role in Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election.

News organizations that have protested the policy said it still treats promoted news stories like traditional political ads. The most telltale sign of that is the umbrella archive is still called “Archive of Ads with Political Content.” Facebook’s position is that the archive is for any ad from any advertiser that includes text or images that Facebook defines as political content.

“Facebook continues to conflate journalism with political advertising, which is just plain dangerous,” said David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, which represents some 2,000 newspaper companies, including The New York Times and News Corp, and is one of seven news organizations that have protested.

Facebook continues to put the promotions in the “political archive,” which “confounds the distinction between journalism and political advocacy,” said Michael Golden, president of WAN-IFRA. “They somehow believe their users will notice a difference since the ads are in a subarchive within political.”

The blog post also doesn’t deal with the stories that Facebook has mistakenly flagged as political. That was the case with a story about mistreatment of migrant children that investigative reporting site Reveal tried to promote on Facebook.

“In trying to combat the spread of fake news and other disinformation ahead of 2018’s elections, Facebook is putting barriers in front of legitimate news organizations that want to get their stories in front of a wider audience,” said Byard Duncan,
engagement reporter for Reveal. “On top of that, its system for identifying so-called ‘political’ content is already running into problems, both technical and philosophical.”

One local publisher called Facebook’s addition of publishers to the political ad policy “wildly infuriating,” saying Facebook blocked promotion of a story about a county fair because the story mentioned a politician, even though the politician wasn’t running for re-election. Rather than spend the energy fighting Facebook, the publisher is shifting its spending to Twitter, this person said.

News publishers have protested the policy. Publishers pay Facebook to boost exposure of their articles, and they say having those articles in the same archive as political ads would make their content appear biased. Some publishers have stopped spending on Facebook rather than be subject to its policy.

Facebook says its process won’t be perfect but that there’s an appeals process to deal with situations like that.

Jon Slade, chief commercial officer of the Financial Times, said on the Digiday Podcast last week the view of many publishers: “It is dangerous to describe journalism as political content. Journalism is journalism, and political lobbying is political lobbying. To conflate the two is an extremely dangerous precedent, particularly in this era when there are so many question marks about the veracity of news.”

The process has also revealed how Facebook has dealt with opposition from the publishing industry. The loudest opposition came from the News Media Alliance, but Brown said she would deal with publishers directly rather than their trade organizations. On June 26, she emailed details of the archive update to around 18 publishing execs. In the message, she wrote that Facebook worked with four other organizations, including the Local Media Consortium and Local Media Association, to determine what news outlets should be in the archive. None of those organizations were among the seven that protested the policy, though.

The ads policy is one of several sore spots in publishers’ relationship with Facebook, which has frustrated publishers in their attempts to find audiences and make money from the social network. Facebook also has been testing subscription sales, which it says has had promising results so far, but it only has one month of results.

The post Facebook tweaks political ads policy, but not enough to satisfy irate publishers appeared first on Digiday.

PayPal-owned Venmo is using a debit card to work with retailers — and (finally) make money.

This week, it rolled out a limited-release Venmo debit card issued by the Bancorp Bank that customers can use anywhere Mastercard is accepted. It’s a lever the company can use to elevate the Venmo brand’s reach from the digital to the physical world — an entry point for profitable tie-ups with retailers.

“A card familiarizes [Venmo’s] brand with merchants as a payment mechanism – and merchants are going to be the biggest factor in Venmo achieving profitability,” said Rachel Huber, payments analyst at Javelin Strategy and Research. “Think marketing and loyalty tie-ins, integration fees, and promotional deals. Venmo has access to an extremely desirable consumer segment – expect them to use that to their advantage.”

While rolling out a physical card may seem odd for a mobile-first payment platform, it’s a recognition that mobile payments aren’t quite mainstream yet, and most transaction activity still occurs in physical stores. According to Huber, nine out of 10 transactions are still carried out at the physical point of sale, allowing PayPal to bridge the gap between physical and online transactions.

Venmo’s social feed is of particular interest to retailers. Transactions that take place through the debit card will be logged in Venmo’s user history, much in the same way peer-to-peer payments are recorded — adding possibilities to promote purchase activity through Venmo’s social feed. It’s a largely untapped method for consumer companies to acquire social endorsements from the Venmo feed, and push targeted ads to users based on their behavior.

“The unique social aspects of Venmo could provide a path to advertising revenue — few other payment platforms make it fun for users to share their payment activity with friends,” Morningstar analyst Jim Sinegal wrote in a recent report.

Over the past year, PayPal has accelerated its efforts to profit from Venmo through partnerships with e-commerce brands. Last year, it launched Pay with Venmo, which let customers use Venmo as a payment method with 2 million online retailers, including Grubhub, Seamless and Williams Sonoma. In January, it rolled out instant transfers for a $0.25 fee, but growth of Venmo as an e-commerce vehicle has been slow. Between January and April of this year, just 11 percent of Venmo users engaged in a “monetized experience”  — in other words, used Venmo to pay for consumer goods — according to the company.

Venmo wouldn’t comment on its broader monetization strategy, but a company spokesperson said it’s been focusing on offering customers more ways to use Venmo. A physical card may generate some interchange revenue, but it’s not likely to be significant; the objective is to expand Venmo’s reach, which in turn, can set the stage for new types of revenue-generating partnerships.

“[The thinking is] ‘let’s solve the scale problem first and deal with monetization later,” said Omri Dahan, chief revenue officer of Marqeta, an API platform that powers prepaid debit and credit cards.

By putting a physical card in the customer’s hand, it opens up additional revenue streams beyond charging transaction fees to merchants and consumers, including co-brand relationships and customer incentives.

Despite the growth of bank-backed peer-to-peer payments tool Zelle, PayPal is banking on Venmo’s stranglehold over the millennial market to grow its reach among consumer brand partners. During the first quarter of 2018, Venmo processed $12.3 billion in payment volume.

The post With debit card, Venmo eyes retail partnerships as path to monetization appeared first on Digiday.

Lego is focusing increasingly on Amazon, not just Google, when it comes to search advertising.

Online retail and voice assistants are fast-growing areas for the advertiser’s ads, said Luis Navarrete Gómez, head of global search marketing at Lego. Amazon dominates both areas, which has resulted in the online seller taking a larger slice of Lego’s paid search budget. Gómez said that growth is admittedly from a low base, but is showing no signs of slowing down, particularly now that Lego has an established Amazon store and a two-month-old Alexa skill for the Amazon Echo.

“[Spending on] Amazon ads has increased over the last three years, and it does a job for us now that it didn’t do before,” Gómez said. “If Amazon keeps growing consistently [for Lego], then its role will become more important.”

Lego’s Amazon store acts as a dedicated landing page on Amazon where no competitors can advertise, making it an ideal place to drive traffic from external sources such as Facebook. Nearly 6 in 10 (56 percent) of shoppers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany and France start their product searches on Amazon, according to a Kenshoo study of 31,000 people.

Amazon shoppers are generally lower-funnel purchasers that aren’t as engaged with Lego as those who go to the company’s site and usually take time researching and then searching for specific ranges.

“By investing on their own presence on Amazon, [Lego] at least get to control key points of their overall brand experience and deliver a sense of remaining special and valuable,” said Rob Sellers, who leads the shopper marketing arm at ad agency Grey.

Voice is another area the toymaker thinks could one day take more of its search budget. But Gómez sees early marketing gains to be made in developing content for kids who might not be old enough to search for Lego content with their fingers. Last month, Lego launched a skill on Alexa called Lego Duplo Stories that gives parents and kids a selection of stories with audio prompts that guide physical play.

“It’s in the interest of the platforms to make sure voice assistants help people buy the products they want to buy, so we see voice search as more an opportunity than a challenge,” said Gómez.

Despite Amazon’s rise in the eyes of Lego’s marketers, it’s not the only retailer to catch their attention. “Whether it’s Amazon, Argos or Walmart, we don’t see any retail platform that we work with as competitors because we respect what the user’s preference is and try to offer them the best products for that particular experience,” Gómez said.

Lego’s attempts to get closer to retailers comes amid pressure to sell more toys. Earlier this year, it revealed it would spend more on data and analytics after sales in 2017 slipped 8 percent to 35 billion Danish krone ($5.5 billion), its first drop in sales in more than a decade. Some of that money could go toward a data management platform, said Gómez, who is in talks with Adobe to find new ways of improving the effectiveness of Lego’s media buys.

The post Lego eyes Amazon for a larger slice of retail search budget appeared first on Digiday.

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