Author: rssmasher

Brands like Uber, Ubisoft and Bayer have evolved their programmatic in-housing tactics in recent years – and all three outlined those changes at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco Wednesday. In the early days of in-housing, brands often bit off more than they could chew – or lacked the proper resources to implement and maintain… 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 Peter Micciche, CEO at Certain. If 2017 was the year of the data breach, 2018 is shaping up to be the year of data privacy. Data breaches impact millions of… Continue reading »

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At the Digiday Retail Summit in February in Austin, Texas, we sat down with 53 retail executives to learn about how Amazon affects their businesses. Check out our earlier research on media buyers’ concerns about transparency and ensuring campaign performance here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• The number of retailers that sell most of their products through brick-and-morter retailers dropped 12 percentage points since 2017, according to two Digiday surveys.
• Retail executives in Digiday’s February survey expect Amazon to threaten both wholesale and vertical retailers.

Sales from e-commerce grow, while department store sales decline
2018 has already been a devastating year for retailers. More than 3,800 stores are expected to close in 2018, with companies like Walgreens, Toys R Us and Best Buy announcing plans to shutter failing stores. The number of retailers that sell the majority of their product in department stores has plummeted. Only 19 percent of respondents to the survey from the Digiday Retail Summit say department stores are responsible for the majority of their sales, down from nearly a third of respondents at Digiday’s July retail summit.

The post Digiday Research: Brands are relying less on retailers appeared first on Digiday.

AdExchanger: Origins AdExchanger: Crisis In Ad City (Part I) AdExchanger: Crisis In Ad City (Part II) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part I) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part II) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part III) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (The Conclusion) AdExchanger: Angels And Startups AdExchanger: Rumble In Arbitrage Plaza (Part I) AdExchanger: Rumble In Arbitrage Plaza (Part II) AdExchanger:… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Spirit Of Competition This summer, the EU is is expected to rule against Google in the most important of three antitrust cases levelled at the US tech giant by Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s top antitrust regulator, Reuters reports. Its aim is to stop Google’s… Continue reading »

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Getting rival agencies to put aside their differences and collaborate could be big for Procter & Gamble, but it will be a complicated endeavor.

The advertiser’s decision to bring rivals from the big ad networks Publicis, WPP and Omnicom together to form a new creative agency has been the talk of the industry this week. It was enough to convince telecommunications firm O2 to disclose its own attempt to bring talent together from competing agencies, eight months after it shared its plan with Digiday. Both advertisers pitch their latest attempts to squeeze value from agencies as a break from the status quo, driven by a need for business effectiveness rather than procurement efficiencies. Sounds good on paper, but reality tends to be a bit, well, messier when the agencies all have different agendas.

For P&G’s model to amount to more than just cost savings and higher margins, chief marketer Marc Pritchard must ensure his agencies are all incentivized against the same KPI, while establishing a leader that can drive the new agency and be accountable. The skill required to make rival agencies work together is less glamorous than the idea.

There should be no commission model to avoid biased recommendations to the benefit of more content development and media activation, said Laetitia Zinetti, managing principal for media management at Ebiquity. Pritchard’s plan is a “very ambitious,” said Zinetti, and given the state of agencies it will be interesting to see how accommodating they will be. “The agency model has to change. But change takes time, and it seems that things will change only if advertisers take the lead. P&G and O2 are pioneers, challenging the market. The changes those advertisers are about to make to their agency models will impact the whole industry.”

An O2 spokesperson said its own so-called planning hub, which unites planners from across its media, creative and customer-relationship management agencies, prioritizes a “team culture” to foster greater collaboration with “shared objectives, social events and guest speakers.” It may have been created with a mantra of agility, the spokesperson added, but the focus is very much on effectiveness. The planning hub is based out of one office three days a week, with an O2 executive ensuring the different agencies collaborate. This O2 executive has both integrated agency and client-side experience, according to the company. O2’s CMO Nina Bibby and other senior members from her team also have regular meetings with the planning hub’s agency heads to discuss brand effectiveness.

While it wouldn’t reveal specifics, O2 is using performance-related metrics to make up part of the fee to the agencies involved in the initiative. The advertiser is so impressed with the model that it plans on extending it beyond planning to other parts of its marketing. If that happens, O2 could end up with a model that is similar to Deutsche Telekom’s attempt to get competing businesses to work together on its media planning.

Working more closely together will always produce more powerful creative work. Yet the so-called “new models” from P&G and O2 sound like “reinventing the wheel,” said Philippe Dominois, founder at media performance consultancy Abintus Consulting. Granted, the full details of each model have yet to be disclosed, but Dominois believes the industry has seen similar moves before.

“For me, the solution needs to be a good fit with the advertiser and offer a model which is a mirror image of the advertiser’s structure and decision-making process,” he said. “Is it a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach? These are some of the things to consider when offering a agency model to advertisers.”

Those questions aren’t alien to Pritchard and Bibby. Having different agency groups is nothing new to those marketers. Not all advertisers use one agency group globally. Some use different agency groups, split by market, region or brand. Some advertisers use two agencies for the same market and pitch them for every single campaign.

All parties involved in any model that pulls together rivals must share the same ambitions, and measurements of success need to be singular and fair, said Scott Moorhead, the founder of media consultancy Aperto One and a former media buyer at Publicis and Havas. “You need to ensure that you have removed self-interest and silo mentality,” he said. “How do you ensure that all work is only produced in the advertiser’s best interest and not the influenced by individual parties? Get that right, and the model is a no-brainer.”

The post ‘Reinventing the wheel’: The reality of getting rival agencies to work together appeared first on Digiday.

As the pivot to paid gathers pace, publishers like The Telegraph are refining their newsletter strategies to help drive registrations, and eventually, subscribers.

The Telegraph, which plans to surpass 3 million registered users this year, has launched or redesigned six editorial newsletters in the past two months. The Telegraph has roughly 25 email newsletters, some covering editorial topics, others for marketing purposes and those specifically for premium subscribers.

By building up a large pool of registered users, the publisher can learn more about its audience in order to then convert them into paying subscribers to its premium subscription, where readers have access to roughly 20 percent of The Telegraph’s best content.

In January, before the 6 Nations Championship rugby competition, The Telegraph launched three weekly rugby newsletters — Rugby Nerd, Rugby Reader and Geech — written by former player Sir Ian Robert McGeechan and sponsored by NatWest, title sponsor of the tournament. It also redesigned its political Brexit Bulletin email and technology-focused Tech Intelligence email, along with launching political daily email Front Bench. Silver said Tech Intelligence is its most popular editorial newsletter, but that it was too soon to share exact figures. The Telegraph is in the process of understanding how newsletters convert subscribers, but said it was too soon to share conversion data.

The Telegraph’s newsletters are personality-driven, fronted by Telegraph reporters or notable figures like McGeechan, and link to other stories around the web. Because of this, open rates are as important a metric as click-through rates, which more effectively monetize traffic sent back to publishers’ sites. The Telegraph said open rates and click-through rates are above industry averages. The average open rate for media and publishing newsletters is 22 percent, according to email marketing company MailChimp.

Silver said The Telegraph’s newsletters can be read as standalone editorial products, as the publisher adds the context of why stories are important, what Silver calls “authored analysis.” “The best newsletters take you behind the headlines and give context to the stories,” he said during an interview with Journalism.co.uk.

The Telegraph uses newsletters to get readers involved, too, through interactive polls and reader submissions. The publisher will ask readers to vote on a poll on-site in the morning and then share the results in the Brexit Bulletin, which is sent in the afternoon, including comments from readers explaining their votes. Rugby Reader, meanwhile, is more of a recommended guide from its readers about what to read from the world of rugby, as 50 percent of its content is user-generated, like picturesque rugby grounds or photos of rugby teams, rather than editorial content written by The Telegraph. “Making it more conversational with readers was important to us,” said Silver. “We’re bringing users into the newsletter and bouncing them backward and forward between them.”

The Telegraph plans to launch more newsletters this year across content verticals like news, business, technology, sports, lifestyle and personal finance. Silver said the newsroom wants to create more newsletters, but needs to refine the process of choosing which ones to launch. “The enthusiasm is great, but we need to make sure they are viable,” he said. “Newsletters are time-consuming and a big commitment, and you can have too many.”

Finding the most effective software and technology platform to produce and send newsletters is equally important: For The Telegraph, newsletters were originally more of a promotional tool, so the tech platform was designed with marketing rather than editorial needs in mind.

“You have to build communities over time rather than overnight,” he said. “You need patience and willingness to experiment.”

The post ‘You have to build communities’: Inside The Telegraph’s newsletter strategy appeared first on Digiday.

Artificial intelligence is a fancy way to describe computers making sense of data. But too often marketers are providing AI programs with not enough data or, more problematically, nonsense data. That’s been a big topic at this week’s Digiday AI Marketing Summit in Santa Barbara, California, where marketing executives compared notes on the opportunities and challenges in using AI.

“If you don’t have the data, then you don’t even want to touch AI,” said one brand exec.

During a closed-door town hall session on April 12, one brand executive asked fellow marketers if the data being fed to AI programs today is bad data that may lead to ill-informed results. “I don’t think it’s a question. We’re making decisions off of bad data,” responded one.

Fortunately for marketers, they aren’t yet using AI to make major business decisions. The examples that attendees most frequently cited during the summit were tailoring product recommendations and personalizing marketing communications. And even to the extent that marketers use AI to make major decisions, they are using it as a gut check. “I think AI is all about decision support. It’s there to tell you what not to do,” said one attendee.

But brands hope to eventually use AI to automate more of their businesses. One brand exec said she hopes AI can automate approval processes and ensure her company adheres to regulatory requirements.

“If something takes less than a second for a human to do, it can be automated. Humans make mistakes. Computers presumably in a lot of cases do not make mistakes,” said Samir Desai, Equinox’s chief information officer, onstage on April 11.

Of course, computers do sometimes make mistakes, and those mistakes can stem from the data being supplied to them. For example, Equinox experimented with AI to recognize the faces of people in its gyms, track how they moved around the space and what equipment they used. But the test generated a lot of false positives and mismatches.

“When you get it wrong, it’s way worse. Even just getting 5 percent wrong negates the 95 percent you get right,” Desai said.

So what’s a brand to do? It could try to identify the bad data and sequester it from being fed into an AI program that models that information in order to learn what it means. But brands are already hard-pressed to have enough data to derive usefulness from AI.

“You shouldn’t take the data out of the model. In order for models to work, you need hundreds of millions of data points,” said an attendee during one of the summit’s working groups.

Another option is asking people to correct the bad data they may have provided the brand. One brand in attendance is looking to do this in order to fix an issue with people selecting the wrong language they’d like the brand to use in communications with them.

This brand is having its privacy team review a potential marketing campaign that would use its customer data to determine which individuals have provided it with bad information and then notify those people to update their information. “It’s almost like asking the user to buy into this concept [of cleaning up the brand’s data],” said the exec.

Another brand attendee said her company has similarly emailed customers asking them to update their account information and seen “sky-high” open rates. “People actually respond to it,” she said.

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