Author: rssmasher

Sling has tapped The Martin Agency as agency of record, leading marketing strategy, creative development and production efforts for the streaming service.

“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 Bradley Timmers, director of product management at Integral Ad Science. The last four years have seen digital advertising adopt viewability as a primary measure of media quality, with numerous agencies,… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Still Spoofing British publisher News UK “did a test where we turned off all our programmatic supply and tried to buy our own inventory when it wasn’t available, and we found that we could,” said Ben Walmsley, commercial director at The Bridge, the company’s… Continue reading »

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Despite all the automation that’s come to media, the request for proposal has hung around like a bad retargeted ad. Sellers chase RFPs but only begrudgingly. They complain they put a lot of effort into responding to them but rarely get feedback from the agency. They can even be the instrument of abuse, as when a vendor offered to send agencies lobster rolls in exchange for RFPs.

And many agencies, believe it or not, agree. Buyers say RFPs often feel dashed off. Now some are determined to if not eliminate, scale back their use. Omnicom’s PHD US is increasingly eschewing the RFP in making media-buying evaluations, chief investment officer Craig Atkinson said. About half of Mediassociates’ media-buying evaluations are done using RFPs, down from about two-thirds five years ago, estimated Ben Kunz, evp of marketing and content there. Reshift Media, a digital marketing agency, has never sent out an RFP in its six-year history, said Kirk Allen, COO and co-founder of Reshift. “It’s pretty old-school thinking,” he said of the RFP.

Driving the shift is that agencies are consolidating their spending with fewer media sellers so there’s less need to cast a wide net with the RFP. More buyers are pursing the mantra of “fewer but deeper” relationships with buyers, especially as bigger chunks of budgets are run through programmatic (and, of course, Google and Facebook) as the workhorse for campaigns to get reach.

As a result, direct-sold campaigns have grown more original, customized and often involve custom content the media company creates. The standard RFP, with its focus on audience and ad specs, has become anachronistic.

“As soon as you get into a customized space, it’s better to take it face to face,” said Barry Lowenthal, president of The Media Kitchen. That’s why Reshift Media avoids the RFP, too. “It’s templated, and we have the resources to figure out what the strategy should be,” Allen said. “Most of the work we do is custom content to the [media] brand, and we believe it should be original to the brand.”

Another reason is that media companies themselves have gotten more complicated, Kunz said. He pointed to two he knows, Madison Logic, a lead generation marketer; and Epocrates, a mobile app used by health care providers, as examples of companies that would be hard to evaluate using the traditional RFP approach.

“The larger media vendors have become platforms with a lot of businesses,” he said. “It requires hard work to understand the value of different media outlets. There are all these nuances an RFP has a hard time getting to.”

Some media sellers say they’re getting as many, if not more, RFPs as ever, but that they see a shift in that their biggest deals don’t start with RFPs. The Atlantic said it’s gotten 37 percent more RFPs so far this year versus the year-ago period. At Bustle, they’re up 20 percent, said Jason Wagenheim, the CRO there.

Most of The Atlantic’s business is RFP-driven, but there’s been a decline in standard RFPs and a “huge increase in content- and ideas-driven RFPs,” said Hayley Romer, svp and publisher of The Atlantic. RFP campaigns are still the majority of the business at Bustle, but as its sales organization has matured, non-RFP campaigns have become “unquestionably the majority of our higher-revenue deals,” Wagenheim said.

Agencies said that instead, they’re leaning on research, conversation with vendors and in-person meetings with individual or groups of sellers. PHD holds sessions with multiple sellers, who “love this idea because they waste so much time chasing RFPs that their win rate is often very low,” Atkinson said.

Still, it’s too soon to call the RFP dead, buyers and sellers said. Scale is a part of it; one client alone might have dozens of campaigns a year, and it’d be too time-consuming to do briefings with vendors for each one. It’s an exaggeration to say all media has gotten so complex that the RFP won’t do. One publisher sees the RFP being used as much as ever, a symptom of a troubled agency business model that has many understaffing their biggest accounts and media planning arms. “It’s just agencies saying things they want to be true,” this publisher sniffed.

“I don’t see the RFP going away, but we want to be more efficient about the process,” said Tom Morrissy, president of the agency Noble People and a former longtime publisher. “The RFP keeps us in the pulse of what’s happening out there. Sometimes, there are new changes that come up in an RFP, like a new data offering or franchise. People are trying to put their best foot forward with the RFP.”

The post End of an era: Media buyers are ditching the much-hated RFP appeared first on Digiday.

For media buyers, the last few years have been rough. The days of 20 percent commission rates are over, with clients moving to a head count model that squeezes every last drop out of employees. Fees have dropped, and there is more scrutiny than ever. In this edition of Confessions, a veteran media buyer discusses how this has affected her business. Edited highlights from our conversation appear below.

What’s the biggest challenge at a media agency today?
It’s the leftovers from what ended up happening when creative and media split. Everything has become very siloed. We’re very focused on doing one thing. At larger agencies, what happened is that everyone become siloed and a specialist in one thing. Buyers don’t think about the whole picture. What we used to create were phenomenal solutions that were holistic.

How are people incentivized?
People in media agencies are incentivized to make money for their silo. Inside each agency — and it’s a dirty secret — each division is getting its own profit and loss statement. And you have to justify bringing in revenue. So there is a buyer who is a mobile buyer, who only buys mobile inventory. So they sit separately, maybe, from the trading desk. But also, the trading desk can also buy mobile. So the mobile buyers have to prove their worth. So they will recommend they only buy mobile programmatic or a buy that is all about mobile geofencing. Or a specific app buy. Or, Snapchat. And every meeting, strategy has to ask why the trading desk and mobile aren’t working together. But the answer is, “our division doesn’t want to lose money.”

What about the transparency issue?
After the Association of National Advertisers report came out, clients asked if this was happening to them. It mostly was. Now, clients say they want 100 percent transparency. What that means is that agencies need to disclose that they’re paying for exactly what the client paid for. It’s not unusual for there to be commissions on media buying. But that needs to be disclosed. If your agency has an agreement with Google that if your ad serving hits this amount, your rate drops, the agency has to disclose to the client that discount.

How has that affected you?
Clients squeezed us for years by cutting down. These fees or commissions often helped us drive head count. It’s a game right now of how cheap you can be. What they want to know is you’re doing everything possible to give them the lowest rate. Some clients have taken it to the extreme in the way that we have to justify every single thing that is bought. Every P&L has to be completely outlined. They want to know everything from how much they’re paying a demand-side platform to more. They’ve taken it to the extreme. I’ve now had clients who won’t run with certain partners unless they in turn disclose what commissions they’re making. They even ask to be provided with the actual insertion orders from agency and vendor.

Agencies are now talking about banding together to protect their own margins.
Ha. Everyone keeps talking about an alliance. I don’t think an alliance is happening. Everyone finds a way to come in cheaper somehow and other ways to get funds. What we’re doing with clients is telling them that the better partners are better, which is why they’re more expensive.

But isn’t that where procurement comes in?
Always. Procurement needs constant client education on why certain vendors cost more, why certain publishers cost more. I love brands who want brand safe and premium, and want everything to be viewable and then not pay. The client has to intervene.

How have the changes affected people?
We find it hard to hire, and we pay people badly. So that means a lot of people are incentivized to go with vendors who, frankly, give them free stuff. Parties still happen. Jeans parties. Concert tickets. Going to the Oscars. SoulCycle classes. A Peloton bike. A three-day vacation where you’re taught how to snowboard. I have to tell these young buyers: This is your reputation at stake. The rep is that you can be bought. And you don’t want that reputation.

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Television networks and providers are racing to combine traditional, content-based ad buys with digital-style, audience-based targeting. But YouTube would like to beat them to it.

YouTube began letting brands target their ads based on anonymized information Google collects on people outside of YouTube, such as people’s Google search histories, a year ago. Now, the Google-owned video service is adding the search-based targeting option to its Google Preferred ad-buying program, which packages the most popular 5 percent of YouTube channels into category-specific bundles that brands can advertise against.

With the new targeting option, a brand buying Google Preferred’s lineup of music channels, for example, could reach people who are watching those channels and have also searched for consumer electronics products.

“Five years ago when we launched Google Preferred, [advertisers] wanted to navigate the entire body of YouTube a little bit more easily with more of a content lens and buying more similar to television,” said Tara Walpert Levy, Google vp of agency and media solutions. “The ability to overlay that audience interest in order to get the right messages to the right people against that most attractive content is something the market seems finally ready for.”

“Google is taking the best of what they do with search, with maps, with some of their apps, and they’re taking that data and applying it to their TV-like object, which is Google Preferred. It’s smart,” said Susan Schiekofer, GroupM chief digital investment officer. The agency’s clients have increased their spending on Google Preferred year over year, especially those clients targeting younger viewers, she said.

By infusing its TV-style ad-buying program with audience-based targeting, YouTube could pre-empt its TV rivals who themselves want to use TV and audience targeting to overtake the digital media companies like Google and YouTube that had cut into their share of the advertising market. It could also undermine Facebook, which has recently begun pitching advertisers on its own version of Google Preferred.

Last month at Recode’s Code Media conference, 21st Century Fox President Peter Rice said that once all TV becomes streamed over the internet, TV ads will be able to be targeted in the same way that digital ads are. And after that happens, TV companies “will be able to take back share” of the advertising market from digital media companies, he said.

Schiekofer said she’d like to see addressable advertising come to TV, but doesn’t think that’ll drain the lifeblood from digital. “It’s not that I think it’s going to slow digital, but I think it will help reverse any decline in ad dollars on television,” she said.

Whether or not YouTube will undercut TV’s eventual addressable advertising sales pitch, YouTube seems to be trying to subvert the notion that TV ads are the only way to capitalize on people’s attention.

People in the U.S. are three times more likely to pay attention to online video ads than TV ads and twice as likely to pay attention to ads on YouTube as those on other social networks, said Walpert Levy, citing YouTube-commissioned research from Ipsos.

While YouTube tries to get better at targeting its ads, it is still wrestling with concerns over what video a user sees next. A year ago, YouTube came under fire after ads were shown to be attached to controversial content, leading many top brands to pull their ads.

After that boycott, YouTube has sought to make its platform more palatable to context-conscious advertisers. In January, following almost a year of brand-safety flare-ups, YouTube said it would manually vet each video from Google Preferred channels before ads are attached. It has also started working with companies like Integral Ad Science to independently verify that brands’ ads are only attached to brand-safe videos.

“The majority of folks who [had stopped advertising on YouTube] are now either back or are making plans to come back based on these changes,” said Walpert Levy.

GroupM had a “couple clients” that paused [their spending on YouTube], but most have come back, said Schiekofer. GroupM made its own effort to address brand safety by working with OpenSlate to check where clients’ ads appeared on YouTube.

The post With an eye on TV ad budgets, YouTube debuts search-based video ad targeting appeared first on Digiday.

Business Insider’s high international traffic and its overseas audience’s early interest in subscriptions have prompted a new global editorial focus for the publisher.

In 2017, U.S.-born Business Insider’s international audience accounted for half its overall traffic, a milestone that triggered restructuring to connect its many newsrooms and better capitalize on resources across different time zones. In time, that could also help drive up subscriptions.

BI, now owned by German digital media publishing house Axel Springer, has 16 international editions. But like most publishers that expanded quickly overseas, BI’s offices worked in silos, often resulting in content replication.

“The London office would write a story, and five hours later, the New York office would wake up and write a similar story. Then, San Francisco, then, the Australian office would do a version,” said Jim Edwards, BI UK and international editor-in-chief. “There was some coordination and we took each other’s stories, but internally, it wasn’t satisfying. It was like trying to reinvent the wheel each time around breaking news.”

Writers also didn’t tailor their articles to global audiences in the previous arrangement. Ensuring BI stories can be understood beyond where they were written has become more critical. “No matter what country you’re [BI reporters] in, the majority of people reading it are foreign to the person writing the story,” Edwards said.

Connecting a sea of disparate bureaus and editorial teams that speak and write in a range of languages is no small task, one that has required BI to get its 500 global staffers on the same page and encourage reporters not to compete across different markets, Edwards added. Edwards has worked closely with Paul Colgan, BI Australia editor-in-chief, assigning seven people across the London, New York and Australia offices a global remit. These individuals must ensure their teams coordinate which content should be shared and translated, while also speaking with offices in other time zones. Administrative tasks such as homepage maintenance that U.K. staffers previously took care of late at night, for example, are now handled in San Francisco, in order to reduce strain on editorial teams working outside standard hours.

A more collaborative approach has allowed the different offices to leverage popular pieces that have global interest. For example, BI’s Netherlands office published a story about a man who gambled his savings on bitcoin. The story was translated into English, Spanish, Italian and French, and it was published in all other BI territories. The article generated 284,000 views in the U.S., 218,000 in Italy and over 150,000 in Spain, according to the publisher.

In theory, translating articles should help advertisers that want to advertise in local languages as well. “When you go to a foreign country, the ads aren’t in English but in the local language, and clients want that seamless local focus,” Edwards said.

BI has also been surprised at how many international subscriptions have been sold, though Edwards wouldn’t reveal the number. BI has a fledgling subscriptions strategy, putting around 10 percent of its content behind a paywall last November. Since then, it has placed more specialized, in-depth content in areas like finance, stock markets and technology behind the paywall. Some of its most experienced writers are becoming “subscriptions stars,” according to Edwards. Although the paywall is being tested just in the U.S., U.K. writers are also generating a large number of subscriptions.

A yearly BI subscription costs £71 ($99), and a monthlong trial costs 75 pence ($1). It’s early, but initial results show paid subscriptions are well into the thousands globally, according to Edwards. “Subscriptions are coming from outside the U.S. also, with the U.K. and Europe the second-biggest interested [regions],” he said.

Often, stories that haven’t performed that well when made open access generate a high number of subscriptions, such as a story on the delay in AppNexus’ initial public offering and a list of the top headhunters on Wall Street. “The fact we only just started doing subscriptions and immediately saw them immediately bought from foreign countries made us realize we have to take this global news aspect much more seriously because our readers are global, and our brand is global,” Edwards said. “Eventually, you’ll see us have a subscriptions aspect everywhere.”

The post Business Insider revamps its editorial focus to cater to a global audience appeared first on Digiday.

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In a Q&A, Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, sees Facebook returning to its roots — and thinks that’s not a bad thing for BuzzFeed. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited.

As a media company that’s grown on Facebook’s back, you surprised some by taking a shot at the company. How should Facebook help publishers?
My big criticism of the strategy so far is all their revenue is generated in the news feed, and they only share revenue for new surfaces — Instant Articles or Watch — but don’t share any of the revenue from their main source of revenue, the news feed. There’s no way to influence what’s in the news feed if the algorithm is only about distribution. You’re not getting to the economics of the traffic production. So it’s in Facebook’s interest to share news feed revenue, not because it’s good for the world, but it allows Facebook to have some control of what’s showing up in the news feed. If they say they want local or trusted news, they say that will get more distribution and more revenue, so companies can produce more of it. It doesn’t need to be some carriage fee or a thing where the amount of traffic is directly related to the revenue. It could be that they have a metric for time well-spent, and you’re paid 2 cents per minute of time well-spent. Now, they don’t really have levers to influence it.

How do you think Facebook’s stronger focus on sharing will affect BuzzFeed?
Facebook is going back to their roots, and that got us excited. A lot of the stuff we make has a high level of comments. You post a Tasty video, and people post their own versions and use it as an excuse to get together with friends. So this shift is encouraging for companies that make content with a deep social DNA in it.

The pivot to video has seen a backlash this past year. What’s your view?
There’s a secular shift toward video, and I see that continuing. It’s the majority of our content views and revenue. I think sometimes people overplayed it a little bit. I don’t think text is going away. But video’s really important. What we realized is, video isn’t a discipline, it’s a way of communicating. We’ve cracked a lot of the formats. Tasty videos are short, sped up, have a lot of power, drive real-world activity, are very social. Then, we have shows like “Worth It” and “Unsolved” that are TV-like and air on YouTube. They’re appointment viewing. That’s replacing what basic cable was, with the added benefit of building community. We’ve started to develop longer stuff for subscription video-on-demand type of platforms.

BuzzFeed missed its growth target last year and ended up laying off people. What would you do over if you could?
The big thing would be staying more true to our social DNA and pushing with clients to make video that fits with what we know works with our audience. Having some clarity on formats, and give an advertiser something that works on social even if it takes longer to convince them. One of the things that happened was there was pressure to make video that looks like commercials that look like TV, and it’d be hard to do business and deliver. Sometimes, brands say [they] want a different format that we know doesn’t work.

Was going all-in on native a mistake in retrospect?
Not initially, but there was a point where it made sense to shift. We could have done it a little earlier. When we started, programmatic was a lot worse — ads loaded more slowly; companies doing it were startups and making ads that had lots of latency and often didn’t have good data privacy. When we did testing with a small percentage of our users, we found no negative impact and lots of revenue. We also saw positives in coordinating native and programmatic and the overhead of having lots of communication back and forth.

Are you still committed to news, and why?
I love our news business, and it’s very important to our strategy. It’s incredible, the year they’ve had, with the [Steele] dossier and Kevin Spacey story, and our U.K. team just broke a Brexit story. Their contribution to the company is manyfold. News does provide prestige and charisma to a company that has benefits. I think news is increasingly going to be important to the platforms; Facebook is saying it doesn’t want fake news on the platform.

But news is expensive, many advertisers don’t want to be around it, and it doesn’t share well on Facebook.
I think news is a better business than people think. In the short term, news is more expensive, and it takes time to build trust. But if you look at our cost structure compared to The New York Times or Washington Post, we have a lean cost structure and reach a large audience for the team we have. If you want to bet on the future of news, you want to bet on people doing quality news, digital-only, reaching a lot of people. There will be more models for news. I think Google and Facebook are going to do more to support news. If they don’t, they’ll be regulated.

Is there a subscription model in BuzzFeed News’ future?
It’s possible. A partial paywall could make sense. But it’s also important we educate and inform the broad public. If every news organization puts the majority of their content behind paywalls, it’s hard to have an informed electorate.

Did VCs have unrealistic expectations for digital publishing companies?
I take a long-term view, and companies like BuzzFeed are always going to set aggressive goals, and sometimes you hit them, and sometimes you don’t. In terms of the value of the company, if that’s your focus, you lose track of the actual business. The market cap shouldn’t matter that much if you continue to grow every year.

The post BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti: Platforms need to pay publishers or risk regulation appeared first on Digiday.

Extra-extra, the robots are coming.

Two dozen Reuters journalists have tested the tool Reuters calls Lynx Insight that can write two-thirds of a story based on company earnings reports. But at least for now, robots aren’t replacing journalists. Lynx alerts reporters through email, messenger service or via reporters’ data terminals when it recognizes trends and anomalies in data. Reporters can also input a company or search term into the tool to surface insights. Market data is the focus for now, but in time, Reuters will roll the tool out to other sectors.

“We’ve recognized that the key thing is not to make a machine write in-depth stories, but to marry the strength of machines with the strengths of humans,” said Reg Chua, executive editor of editorial operations, data and innovation for Reuters. “Machines are tireless at sifting through data and detecting patterns; humans exercise judgment, provide context and gather quotes.”

According to Chua, Reuters has another dozen people on the technology side setting up the platform, analyzing the data and generating the language recognition.

Reuters has 2,500 reporters, and while not all of them will need to use Lynx Insight, saving short periods of time at this scale will have an impact. The tool’s purpose is to uncover insights that would otherwise take a long time to surface, while improving accuracy and efficiency.

Elsewhere, The Associated Press estimates that it’s freed up 20 percent of reporters’ time spent covering corporate earnings through automation. According to Reuters’ annual survey of digital leaders, which included nearly 200 publishing executives, 91 percent of respondents cited production efficiency as a very or quite important priority this year. The Washington Post, meanwhile, found new audiences through its homegrown artificial intelligence technology.

But measuring the impact of automation in newsrooms is difficult. In the future, Reuters will develop a feedback loop so that the tool knows which of its insights the reporter used and improves their value.

“We’re not looking at the volume of stories as a success metric,” Chua said. “Telling you what information you can dismiss quickly is already valuable. We’re in a speed race to make sure we can monitor company results and economic indicators.”

A financial benefit will be using Lynx Insight to unlock potential products to sell to other news sources so that a standard weekly football report for a Manchester, England, news publisher, for instance, always leads with stories about Manchester United, he said.

“Reuters is known for being early on stories,” said Dr. Janet Bastiman, chief science officer at AI platform StoryStream. “In the rush to get there first, it will only become more important to uncover stories faster. Being able to personalize it for paying clients will be absolutely critical.”

“Machines are only as good as you train them. Incorporating a feedback loop will improve it,” she added, “but ensuring there are no biases built in takes a lot of careful testing.”

Another tool, Reuters News Tracer, which surfaces and assigns a value to content on Twitter based on how likely it is to be true, gives reporters a head start on breaking news. It has helped break 50 major news stories and given journalists anywhere between an eight- and 60-minute head start, according to the company.

To encourage time-poor reporters to use Lynx Insight, it needs to be as easy as possible to use. “I don’t want to have to train people to use the telephone,” Chua said. “It should be able to understand that you are already writing about a company like Microsoft to avoid culture clash in the long term.”

Image courtesy of Reuters

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