Author: rssmasher

Story-sharing app Wattpad is riding branded content’s pivot to video to Asia.

Wattpad Studios, the company’s entertainment arm that partners with brands and entertainment studios to turn stories that appear on Wattpad into print, films, digital videos and TV shows, is expanding into Asia as the app’s popularity grows in the region.

Last week, Toronto-based Wattpad hired Dexter Ong, previously the director of corporate development for 21st Century Fox Asia, to oversee a new office in Hong Kong, where he will oversee the company’s expansion in Asia. With 130 employees worldwide, Wattpad plans on adding 40 more positions this year to support its entertainment business. The Asia expansion comes after the company recently raised $51 million in funding from Asian investors, including Tencent and Globe Telecom’s Kickstart Ventures.

“Southeast Asia is one of our most important regions globally, with some of our most dedicated and passionate users,” said Aron Levitz, head of Wattpad Studios.

The move helps the 12-year-old company, which has also worked on growing its presence in the U.S. and Europe in the past year, in its push to become a multiplatform entertainment company and work with global brands interested in reaching its international community of users, according to Chris Stefanyk, head of brand partnerships at Wattpad.

Today, brands and publishers are figuring out how to effectively create entertaining video content that relates to specific audiences. Wattpad doesn’t just want to be a platform brands can advertise on, but the creator of branded content. Asia is proving to be a hotbed for marketers and platforms that want to expand because of the high adoption rate of mobile overall.

“For us, we’re on the path of being the owner of social storytelling,” said Stefanyk.

Known for its community of fan fiction writers, Wattpad started off as an online community for a young audience that enjoys reading long-form content. Wattpad Studios launched a year and a half ago to connect media executives and brands to Wattpad stories and creators. Then, a year ago, Wattpad introduced Tap, an app where users read short stories in the format of text messages. According to the company, 90 percent of its traffic comes from mobile and consists of a millennial and Gen Z audience.

Wattpad has 65 million users worldwide, according to the company, and 17 million of those users live in Southeast Asia. Wattpad.com averages about 5.6 million unique monthly users, while the app averages around 2.6 million unique monthly users, according to comScore data. Overall, Wattpad has seen a year-over-year growth rate of 40 percent, according to Stefanyk.

Since Wattpad’s brand partnerships division was formed four years ago, Wattpad has worked with over a hundred brands such as AT&T, Kraft, GE and Coca-Cola to run campaigns on Wattpad, including story contests that ask users to write about a certain topic, branded lists, sponsored posts and display and video ad formats. Movie studios such as Lionsgate, Fox and Paramount have also recently worked with the platform. For writing contests, brands examine the number of impressions, the minutes spent reading a piece and how much of a piece is read to assess campaign performance. Wattpad does not reveal the prices of its branded content offerings.

Stefanyk said Wattpad users have spent more than 200 million minutes consuming lists and branded stories, reading, on average, 30 minutes at one time. “Wattpad community produces thousands of stories as part of branded writing contests each year,” said Stefanyk.

Brands can work with Wattpad Studios to determine what Wattpad stories might have the most commercial success as video and TV products, and then collaborate with partners such as Universal Cable Productions, Entertainment One, CW Seed and HarperCollins to turn them into branded entertainment.

So far, Wattpad is working with around a dozen brands in Asia on branded video content through Wattpad Studios. Stefanyk said putting more resources in the area should increase these opportunities.

Stefanyk noted a 2017 campaign Wattpad worked on for Unilever ice cream brand Cornetto for the Philippines. Together, they created a branded story on Wattpad written by one of 200 Wattpad Stars, the platform’s influencer network. Cornetto also conducted a contest that asked Wattpad users to submit stories about summer romance. Wattpad Studios took the winning story and made it into a full-length movie called “This Time,” featuring Filipino teen stars James Reid and Nadine Lustre.

The post Story-sharing app Wattpad looks to Asia appeared first on Digiday.

A day after Gizmodo Media Group’s top executive left the company, the Univision Communications Inc. unit’s employees clashed with their new digital boss at a meeting that left people “panicked” and “frustrated,” according to those in attendance.

The exec was Sameer Deen, who was recently elevated from head of Univision.com to lead all Univision digital, including Fusion Media Group. FMG encompasses the former Gawker Media properties, including Gizmodo, Jezebel and Lifehacker; as well as The Root and The Onion.

Deen was put in the new position last month as the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision looks to make budget cuts across the company soon after canceling its IPO plans. Other FMG executives have been pushed out in recent weeks. On April 9, Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti left the company; Narisetti said in his departing memo that he asked to step down, but others disputed that he left on his own.

According to FMG staffers at the meeting or close to the company, Deen and FMG staffers got off on a bad foot. FMG staffers, many of them from the former Gawker Media, repeatedly asked for specifics about the possibility of staff cuts that have been reported.

The back and forth happened during a regularly scheduled monthly meeting that editorial director Susie Banikarim holds with staff. Some gave Deen credit for coming to the meeting and taking questions, which went on for more than an hour, but whatever goodwill there was replaced by anxiety. Deen said Boston Consulting Group, which was hired to do a review, would be around another five or weeks, but then when pressed, backtracked and said he didn’t know, said those present.

The consulting group recommended cuts of as much as 35 percent at FMG, The Wall Street Journal reported. That would drastically reduce staff at a unit that one former exec with knowledge of the numbers said was a bright spot within Univision, making its first quarter sales goal. (A company spokesman said the figure was inaccurate.) At the staff meeting, Deen confirmed there would be cuts, but said no decisions had been made about where and how many.

“The anxiety is just ridiculous,” said someone close to the company.

“Sameer didn’t have any real answers for us — or didn’t want to share them,” said one person in attendance.

Part of the clash was cultural — Deen comes from Univision.com, which is dominated by lifestyle and entertainment content aimed at a Hispanic audience, and FMG, which Univision bought in 2016 to diversify its audience, is known for its passionate and irreverent news staffers. Deen told a story about Gawker co-founder Nick Denton and expressed his affection for Gawker, but faced a room that was skeptical that he understood what their brands were all about.

Another issue hanging over FMG is that Univision is integrating the group into the rest of the company. The company reportedly struggled to integrate the former Gawker properties back when they were acquired, resulting in benefits and administrative problems, and the bad memories haven’t entirely faded. It’s the story of a “legacy media company trying to get into digital media and fucking it up because they can’t help themselves,” a former employee said.

FMG spokesman David Ford said in a statement: “Gizmodo Media Group is a company built on open and honest dialogue — even when it isn’t comfortable. Sameer came to listen to the staff, to hear their concerns, and answer questions as best he could at this time. Our digital media brands are an important part of UCI’s evolution as a company and diversification strategy, and they will continue to be moving forward. Right now the company is focused on ensuring they are positioned to grow, adapt, and compete in a rapidly-changing media landscape.”

Deen agreed to come to the next labor-management meeting, confirmed the Writers Guild of America, which represents some of the editorial employees at FMG.

The post Fusion Media Group employees clash with new digital boss appeared first on Digiday.

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The post Zuckerberg Faces Congress: We’re Sorry, We’re Responsible For Content, We’re Not There Yet appeared first on AdExchanger.

By Peter Brito e Cunha, Vice President, OpenX

Few topics in ad tech have been covered in greater depth than header bidding and containers. Yet, despite hundreds of articles and panel sessions dedicated to the subject over the past year, today the conversation sits squarely on the backburner, with little innovation in the space. While many may be happy to leave the container conversation in 2017, the fact remains that there is still much more to talk about.

The digital ad ecosystem is wrought with complexity. Overburdened publishers have become saddled with unmanageable and in some cases, mediocre technology, not to mention partners incapable of delivering the level of quality and clarity they desire.

As over-complexity, lack of transparency and sub-par technology floods the market, it is clear that the state of publisher container management has fallen enormously short of expectations. It’s time for a return to simplicity.

The unsustainable state of the publisher tech stack

Containers were created to make life easier for publishers. Managing several header bidding technology partners was difficult, and if a publisher could ease their load by implementing one more platform, that was an easy decision to make.

Unfortunately, management of container solutions is often left to the technology owner, which forces publishers to relinquish control over their monetization strategy and rely heavily on their partners for strategic guidance and optimization in what are often closed environments. A move meant to streamline header bidding management has instead now left publishers with a lack of transparency over their own businesses and technology companies with entirely too much control.

In this environment, experimentation and optimization are no longer up to publishers. Stripped of decision-making power, they sacrifice the ability to move quickly or act strategically in their own best interest.

Furthermore, the fragmentation associated with how publishers manage and make changes by outsourcing to container vendors or their engineering teams can prevent them from moving forward with any changes at all. The associated cost or strain on resources is too great.

Relinquishing control impedes publishers from understanding how containers work, which opens the gate to another issue: transparency. Container technology, in particular open source efforts like Prebid, has improved significantly in the last year, but education and mindshare around these innovations isn’t readily available.

Locked behind the closed door of the Github community, programmatic professionals without an engineering background often find it difficult to sift through the open community updates to find the answers to their questions. For those leveraging third-party managed service solutions, it’s even more unclear.

When a publisher leans completely on a technology partner, they must be able to trust them completely. This requires putting checks in place to keep partners honest, ensuring that every partner has the publisher’s best interest in mind, and refusing to work with a company that is reluctant or unwilling to help the publisher understand the complexities of managing integration health across every demand partner.

When publishers ask these questions and dig deeper, they begin to see that a platform built on open standards might be a better alternative than closed, proprietary container solutions.

Eliminating fragmentation and restoring control

Publisher technology should be about streamlining processes on behalf of the publisher to make their lives easier. But while containers do solve one problem, they introduce many others. The onus should be on tech partners to add value by providing publishers with more controls, insights and tools, not black box technology that hinders effective decision making and, even more dangerously, benefits the container provider in obscure ways at the direct expense of publisher revenue.

This means things like new analytics modules and data for publishers, experimental frameworks for testing floor pricing and traffic settings, centralized workflows and other operational efficiencies for programmatic professionals.

For that to happen, the path forward must start with restoring control to publishers. Making adjustments, major or minor, to optimize page performance and improve monetization may always require manipulating the configuration of a web page, but those tasks should be made easier and more accessible for today’s publishers.

Publishers cannot remain beholden to submitting updates to engineers. Container management must be simplified so that publishers are less reliant on third parties and every publisher, regardless of size, expertise or resources, can take command of their programmatic strategy. If a publisher is going to work with a third party and depend on them to drive revenue, that partner should add value in multiple ways, not just one particular niche.

For programmatic to continue growing and expanding into new areas, it’s critical that the industry doesn’t lose sight of creating technology that caters to the end user. The ultimate promise is delivering relevant and engaging ad experiences to consumers. To achieve this, we need to reduce complexity in the market and empower publishers with the tools and technology they need to deliver the best possible outcomes.

The post Life after containers: A publishers quest for control appeared first on Digiday.

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