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When Facebook updates Ads Manager or tests a new ad placement, agencies – and even their account reps – are sometimes the last to know. In some cases, new features are enabled by default without any overt communication from Facebook, which can be “par for the course,” said Anita Walsh, director of social strategy at Horizon… Continue reading »

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Turner Broadcasting’s new CMO, Michael Engleman, is on a mission to make TBS and TNT’s brand marketing engine much more agile. Engleman, who helped rebrand the Sci Fi Channel as SyFy during his time at NBCUniversal, thinks broadcasters will be forced to adapt as new content producers and channels compete for consumer attention. For years,… Continue reading »

The post TBS CMO: Art Helps Us Create Content, But Data Shows Us The Path To Consumption appeared first on AdExchanger.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Up To BAT The programmatic market in China grew roughly 49% to $16.7 billion in 2017, according to new figures released by eMarketer. Almost 80% of programmatic spend in China went to mobile.  Programmatic’s share of display spend in China is 60%, which still… Continue reading »

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Last week, Accenture opened its new Accenture Innovation Hub Tokyo, which the agency said will foster its use of technology as it plans to increase its “innovation” offering.

The office was unveiled at a news conference. The sizable two-floor space aims to provide employees everything they need to accomplish anything from design thinking to prototype development — from ideation to actual development of products and technologies — and features a swanky cafe, a co-working space to encourage collaboration and a Japanese-style room designed to inspire creativity.

“We wanted to make a large-scale facility in Japan that is on par with Accenture’s other digital hubs around the globe. Our Tokyo hub accomplishes this goal,” said Atsushi Egawa, country managing director for Accenture Japan, at the start of the presentation.

The festival neighborhood of Azabujuban
The new hub is located on the eighth and ninth floors of the Sumitomo Fudosan Azabujuban Building in the Azabujuban neighborhood of Tokyo, an area next to the popular Roppongi district that offers glimpses into traditional Japan. Past the entrance to the hub on the eighth floor, a towering construction in the center of the room dominates the office.

“Azabujuban is famous for its summer festival, and so we wanted the space to reflect that. The tower takes inspiration from the tower built for the festival, and the booths are reminiscent of festival food stalls. There are over 20 booths, each focused on a different theme or technology, like customer experience, AR/VR and RFID,” said Yoshinori Tachibana, supervisor of the Accenture Innovation Hub Tokyo and vp of digital consulting.

For the presentation, 27 booths were set up and divided into zones, such as an industry zone focused on health care and manufacturing, an artificial intelligence zone (a field Accenture is concentrating on) and a virtual shop zone that closely resembles an online store. In-process projects will rotate in and out of these booths, and the booths themselves will be kept in the garage area when not in use.

Accenture first announced the new facility in May 2017, and the hub is supposed to be an embodiment of Accenture’s Innovation Architecture, a companywide program providing comprehensive support for innovation. The program is composed of several divisions: Accenture Ventures, which promotes open innovation; Accenture Labs, which are devoted to applied research and development; Accenture Studios, which design, research and prototype digital services; and Accenture Innovation Centers, which act as hubs for testing solutions.

The street and the home
The two floors of the facility serve separate purposes, with the eighth floor intended to encourage collaboration and new ideas and the ninth floor to turn these ideas into new services and products. The eighth floor is a hub where a variety of outside parties, including big companies, startups, research centers and government and academic institutions, can collaborate. The ninth floor acts as a lab and studio where digital creative production is possible.

Junichiro Kurokawa, Japan lead for Accenture Interactive and Digital Consulting, said he visited Accenture’s digital hubs and innovation centers around the world when coming up with ideas for the lab and designing the office. What he decided on was the Japan-friendly concept of “the street vs. the home.”

“The eighth floor acts like a street, a place where various ideas can come together. The ninth floor is the home, where we have our creators, UI/UX designers and experts in AI and other fields,” he said. “Something that is unique here is that we even have clients stay here to work. Projects each get a separate room, each of which is outfitted to accomplish creative production and prototype development in a span of three months.”

Booths are set up like food stalls and can be arranged differently depending on project, like the RFID and Dfree booths.

The ninth floor is also home to IMJ, a company that Accenture purchased in April 2016 and made a wholly owned subsidiary in December 2017. “Having them on the same floor means we’ll be able to work more closely together,” said Egawa.

Collaborative creation
Other consulting firms are strengthening their abilities to function as digital agencies and hubs for innovation, like Boston Consulting Group’s Digital Ventures, Deloitte Digital and PwC, which opened an Experience Center in November 2017.

With many different companies in Japan — consulting and non-consulting businesses alike — actively launching new open innovation facilities and technology accelerators for fostering startups, there is a lot of competition. Accenture is looking to put its strengths to the test.

Tachibana said one unique aspect that sets the Tokyo innovation hub apart is its ability to offer “collaboration.” “Our company doesn’t actually develop technologies or products, so it’s our job to bring companies that have good technology together,” he said. “By breaking down barriers and being an effective matchmaker, we can create innovation that is possible only in Japan.”

This article originally appeared on Digiday Japan. Translation by Jason Morgan.

The post Inside Accenture’s new Tokyo innovation hub appeared first on Digiday.

Welcome to Co-Produced, the podcast about the many hands that make cool ideas, and how they come together. In conjunction with the 2017 Digiday Awards, this four-part series will bring together creatives, brand marketers, and account professionals to reveal the central role of creative collaboration in building some of this year’s most impressive nominees. 

 

Episode 4-Wieden+Kennedy’s many-tentacled team build Old Spice a multiplayer squid

Episode 3- Something Massive and Plum Organics recruit parents to ‘Do Your Partner’

Episode 1 – Condé Nast and Reynolds Brands make Cooking Magic

Episode 2 – Deep Focus and Engine Media use data to bridge cultural divides

The post ‘How do you get a giant squid through customs?’: How Old Spice’s many-tentacled team won over teen gamers appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers that find themselves at the end of their rope with Facebook have found favor with one person there: Adam Mosseri.

Mosseri, 35, has been at Facebook about 10 years, serving as product vp for the last two. His main responsibility is the news feed, the core of most users’ experience on Facebook and therefore the main distribution artery for publisher content. The spotlight has been on the news feed in recent months, first with Facebook acknowledging it was testing a newsless news feed in six countries outside the U.S., then announcing earlier this month that it would deprioritize news content in the feed and use user surveys to help decide which news sources are legitimate.

Those moves have thrust Mosseri into the spotlight, as he’s written blog posts about the changes, given interviews to the likes of Wired and others and gone back and forth with journalists and publishing folk on Twitter, where his candor and willingness to engage have won him fans in the publishing crowd.

On Twitter, a platform known for bringing out the worst in people (and not his own company’s platform), Mosseri comes off as exceedingly polite, responsive to problems and self-deprecating. Mosseri reports to Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, who’s just one rung down from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and has hundreds of people under him just on the news-feed team. That matters to publishers, which are used to being handled by a partnerships team they doubt has lots of sway at headquarters.

DM your ideas for what you think we should do and I promise we’ll take them seriously.

— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) October 27, 2017

So… good feedback, thanks!

— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) January 13, 2018

“Adam is willing to come on our turf and engage us where we are,” said Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed. “He’s not a PR guy.”

Mosseri’s goodwill tour comes at a time when publishers feel they have few allies at the platform, from Zuckerberg on down. Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, was brought on ostensibly to improve relationships with news outlets, but many feel the results of her main initiative, the Facebook Journalism Project, have been mixed and see her as sticking to the Facebook public relations script. Dan Rose, vp of partnerships, has a big constituency, of which publishers are just one small part. (Facebook wouldn’t make Mosseri available for comment for this article.)

“[Mosseri is] the only Facebook exec anybody can stand talking to because he seems not to lie all the time,” fumed a publishing exec.

Mosseri has gained visibility over the past year, showing up at publisher events and newsrooms as part of the Facebook Journalism Project. He’s known as not just a good listener, but someone with real pull within Facebook and who is willing to go beyond common Facebook talking points.

“He has a stunning capacity to not come across as defensive at all,” said Vivian Schiller, a former NPR and Twitter news exec who’s seen Mosseri in person at a handful of events. “He’s calm, steady, comes across with authority and knowledge and has incredible credibility because he is in charge of the news feed. It’s a fine line between acknowledging there are issues but without taking too much of the blame. And he manages to do that.”

At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, last year, he surprised listeners by speaking openly about changes Facebook was thinking about making to the news feed. “He said, ‘I’m sharing this with great reluctance because we don’t usually talk about things we’re thinking about because they might shift course,’” Schiller said. “I appreciated that he said that, as opposed to, ‘You’ll be the first to know.’ It was very unplatform-like.”

Facebook, along with other tech companies, has been blasted for its lack of transparency, especially when it comes to how it decides how it orders the news feed, but Mosseri offers a sharp contrast. On Twitter, his exchanges function to explain Facebook’s thinking to the journalist, engineering and audience development world, which he can do because he comes from a position of credibility.

“I’ve tweeted Adam with specific problems, questions about major changes to news-feed rankings and even looped him into problems I’ve seen other people on my timeline raising,” said Ziad Ramley, a digital news consultant. “Ninety percent of the time, he responds quickly, even on weekends. If you’ve followed him on Twitter for a significant length of time, you’ll regularly see him responding to tagged posts or big articles about Facebook in the media. Sometimes, his responses feel like official Facebook PR, but for the most part, they seem genuine. I don’t know other Facebook people who are so senior and so open to having real, public discussions with critics.”

“He seems to be the only person functioning in this semiofficial capacity, like a back-end communication source for Facebook,” said Aram Zucker-Scharff, ad engineering director at The Washington Post. “He’s an ideal ambassador. He’s in the company but not too high up; he understands the core problem; he seems to be on top of the editorial and engineering concerns. If there’s one thing I’d criticize is, and there are limitations on Twitter, but I wish there could be more detail on the whys.”

If there are other criticisms of Mosseri, it’s that if he doesn’t break promises, he also doesn’t solve publishers’ problems. And that’s no surprise: Facebook has clearly decided the news feed’s reason for being is to promote so-called meaningful user interaction, not solve publishers’ distribution and monetization needs.

“I’ve never met him. He’s never called or emailed me,” said Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, a trade group for digital publishers. “That’s all you need to know about him. At this level of problem and the concerns we expressed, it would have been expected he would call or email. His tweets were simply replies to comments along with the rest of the public. I’m not criticizing him personally, just saying when something is a priority, it’s a priority. This hasn’t been.”

The post ‘He’s not a PR guy’: Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of news feed, has become an unlikely good guy to publishers appeared first on Digiday.

At the Digiday Marketing Summit in December, we sat down with over 30 industry executives from major U.S. brands and discussed marketing in the era of Donald Trump. Check out our earlier research on the upcoming enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Top findings:

• Seventy-six percent of brands said they explicitly avoid advertising next to Trump-related content.
• Roughly three-fifths believe brands should not engage in cause marketing.
• Only 14 percent think it’s in a brand’s interest to wade into political commentary.

Brands continue to keep their distance from Trump
Trump is the gift that stopped giving to publishers. From the height of the 2016 presidential election and throughout the beginning of the Trump presidency, publishers were awash with new traffic. Audiences couldn’t stay away from Trump. But those times are over for publishers, as pageviews and subscriptions have flatlined. Readers have become accustomed to Trump’s sensational comments and Twitter outbursts. HuffPost editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen told Digiday that during a recent tour of the country, Americans were far more focused on local concerns, rarely mentioning Trump.

The post Digiday Research: 76 percent of brands are avoiding Trump appeared first on Digiday.

The New York Times’ lofty goal of getting to 10 million subscribers is an all-hands-on-deck mission — involving even its Interactive News desk, the group charged with creating graphs and other interactive elements that support the paper’s long articles.

In recent months, the team has launched calendars to integrate into readers’ Google and Apple calendars to inform them of content produced by the paper. Later this year, it will launch a modified version of a text message experiment it ran during the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. It’s also helping the Times’ recently formed Reader Center find more ways to connect more tightly with its reader base. The idea: Foster loyalty and habit, the key pathways to subscription.

“When I first started, interactives were kind of imagined as an add-on,” said Ben Koski, director of the Interactive News team. “We’ve started the shift toward better engaging readers. It’s around reader interaction, rather than one-offs.”

Koski and his team report to multiple departments, including the news design division and the graphics department, and the team’s job is to help the newsroom’s desks find new ways to tell stories.

Sometimes, that interactive work winds up front and center with readers, as it did with the Tax Bill Calculator. Other tools are built for internal use, like a program to tally election results data in real time.

But lately, Koski and his team have begun working on things to build habits in readers with products that can be replicated across verticals and areas of interest for Times readers. One example is a space calendar launched in August that informed users about major events happening in the world of astronomy. It amassed over 80,000 subscribers, so Koski and his team replicated it for The New York Times Book Review.

While the team doesn’t have internal metrics that show a correlation between the use of its products and subscriptions — like the ones it has for newsletters — its mandate is to find more ways to encourage regular reader engagements.

These products do have to be cost-effective. For example, the interactive team ran an experiment during the 2016 Olympics in Rio, which allowed readers to get text message updates from a Times sports reporter from Rio. That experiment, along with a program designed to deliver texts from the host of its podcast, “The Daily,” drove a promising amount of engagement, but it also proved costly. “SMS is very expensive,” Koski said. “We’ve thought a lot about making something that’s more scalable.”

Koski’s team also is working more closely with the Reader Center, an initiative launched last spring to involve readers more in the paper’s coverage and distribution. The goal is to help the Reader Center get readers to share information and content the Times can use to get them to subscribe.

“Historically, we’d think of [reader requests] as a transactional thing: collecting reader photos or reader comments,” Koski said. “One of the shifts we’ve been making internally is thinking of these reader callouts as a point of invitation.”

The post How The New York Times is using interactive tools to build loyalty (and ultimately subscriptions) appeared first on Digiday.

About 250 miles north of New York City, Jackie Wilson, founder and CEO of American Fashion Network, is quietly producing private-label collections for some of the biggest names in the retail industry.

Since she started the company in 2013, Wilson has mastered the art of speed-to-market manufacturing, a valuable skill in the era of fast-fashion and two-day shipping. By identifying ways to increase efficiencies in the production process — from design conceptualizing to streamlining the supply chain to getting clothing on the rack — Wilson has been able to win over business from brands including Amazon Fashion, American Eagle Outfitters, Kohl’s and JCPenney.

“From the beginning of time, I had a Vogue magazine in my hand,” Wilson said. “I loved fashion. I saw fashion as art. I’m 5-foot-1, but I see myself as 6-foot-2.’’ I always looked at fashion as something I couldn’t wear, so I both envied it and admired it.”

Wilson, who studied journalism to be a foreign correspondent before turning to retail, now operates her company out of Syracuse, New York, though she maintains close relationships with her 21 employees located across the U.S. and at factories in Guatemala and China. She cut her teeth in the industry while working as a sales associate at JNCO during high school and college, working her way up the ranks until she became an assistant buyer, using her eye for trends to help select women’s dresses. After a stint at the Limited Group, where she learned the art of wholesale design, she decided to go out on her own.

We spoke to Wilson about how she’s managed to become a valuable asset to mass retailers and e-commerce juggernauts alike.

You produce private-label lines for some of the biggest fashion brands in the industry. How did you identify a niche that set you apart from other manufacturers?
I had a lot of help from Kohl’s, out of necessity. So much innovation is born out of necessity. The management and sourcing team at Kohl’s knew they needed to jump on fast fashion. They saw the model of my company and realized that, because of our size, we were able to be agile. We could transform the company to what retail needed to be. So Kohl’s did an experiment where they brought in six manufacturers, and they asked us to pick up on an item off the table and say, “I can turn this over in five weeks.” Out of the six vendors, we were the only one that did it. It was painful, and there were a lot of tears. We lost a lot of money. But we needed to prove ourselves. From that moment on, we got typecast into “speed to market.”

Once you found your competitive advantage, how did you work to hang on to that, especially with the rise of fast fashion and competition in retail?
Today, everyone is fast. It’s easier than ever to be faster, and the market supply chain has done a lot to adapt to that. Our niche, in addition to design, is speed to development. We stay small, at a manageable size. It’s super important to be a chameleon and change into what the market wants you to be, so I never let my size get too big. That doesn’t mean my volume size, but the number of employees and the footprint of where my offices are. I want to keep that tight. It’s about finding balance.

How do maintain your relationships with factories abroad?
My customers are so important to me, but I can always find another customer. I can’t always find a great factory. My supply chain is my biggest asset. I work hard to make sure their needs are met and their lines are full, with an easy flow of production and without starting and stopping.

You recently started helping Amazon manufacture product for its ever-expanding private label collection. How have you adapted your business to fulfill the needs of a major e-commerce company?
We’ve really massaged the supply chain to be excited about small orders. Amazon is very thoughtfully approaching the private-label business. They’re not going in with huge quantities. They’re trying different fabrics and styles, and supporting customers using consumer ratings. Similarly with American Eagle, we’ve been helping with online-exclusive fashion products. Nobody likes a small order. You have to put just as much work into 300 pieces as 300,000. I used to hate the question, “What’s your minimum?” But today, the mindset has shifted; I’m so happy to do any amount.

How do you stay connected to the fashion world from upstate New York?
We get in front of our customers every three to four months. We’re not in the fashion capital of the world here in Syracuse, but we spend a lot of time on planes to get in front of our customer and learn what’s working and what’s not. We know how to read a rack and see what’s selling. Having an ear to the ground with the customer has been how we’ve navigated the waters. We strive to be their design office in the field. It really is all about product and having the right talent to deliver the best product to the right customer.

What do you predict will be the future of retail in the age of Amazon?
My prediction is that Amazon makes a play for Kohl’s. It won’t be Target. When I step back and think about what Amazon is trying to do from a private label perspective, that would make logical sense. I’ve never been freaked out by the Amazon factor; all I can say is there needs to be a proper balance. Shopping is a pastime, and something that we do with our friends and our kids. The face of the American mall and what it represents is going to change. I foresee [the rise of] more regional stores — like a Dollar General, let’s say. Those are Amazon-proof. Stores are going to try to get into that smaller format space.

The post Inside American Fashion Network, the manufacturer spearheading speed-to-market appeared first on Digiday.