Author: rssmasher

Twitter is exploring how it can overhaul the path to the almighty blue check mark. According to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the San Francisco-based social media platform is developing a process to allow users to become verified in order to better distinguish real people from Russian trolls and bots. According to Dorsey, the move could…

In HBO’s Westworld, people come from all over to experience what it’s like to “live without limits.” This weekend at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, attendees can give that a try at a recreation of Sweetwater, the world within Westworld. After meeting at a tavern and finding out whether you’ll wear a white hat…

Univision Communications has laid off 20 employees across various business units after the Spanish-language broadcaster decided to cancel its IPO plans.

Some of the layoffs affect Fusion Media Group, the business unit inside Univision that contains the Fusion TV network as well as digital publishing businesses including The Onion, Gizmodo Media Group and The Root. Fusion Media Group’s CEO Felipe Holguin and president and chief content officer Daniel Eilemberg are leaving the company, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Other key executives within Fusion Media Group may also leave the company as a result of these cuts.

In a statement, Univision did not specify which specific roles were being cut, but said, “As the media industry rapidly evolves, we are focused on continuing to transform [Univision Communications Inc.] for the future. As part of this process, we have recently taken steps to realign parts of our operations and reallocate resources to invest in growth that will best serve our audiences, community and partners.”

The layoffs come as Univision is looking to cut costs — and search for a new CEO — after canceling plans to go public, according to The Wall Street Journal. Last month, Fusion reportedly laid off employees who worked on “The Naked Truth” documentary series. Univision’s news division also underwent a round of layoffs around the same time.

Univision is a privately held company with investors that include billionaire Haim Saban. The company’s decision to not pursue its long-planned IPO led to the departure of CFO Frank Lopez-Balboa, the Journal reported earlier this week.

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PopSugar has spent years trying to show advertisers that it can help them drive purchases. Now it’s about to see if it can get its readers to buy its own product.

PopSugar’s first line of beauty products and cosmetics, Beauty by PopSugar, will go on sale March 11. By the end of the month, the products, which will range in price from $18 to $42 and include face scrub and lip balm, will be available in some 250 Ulta Beauty stores, more than a quarter of its locations. In some stores, PopSugar’s products will be merchandised in free-standing displays.

The launch is a big deal for PopSugar, which has put commerce at the center of many different initiatives. It also sees it as a validation of its branded content business, now more than 60 percent of its total revenue, which will power most of the marketing of the new product line.

“We’ve always wanted to figure out other ways to have money come into the company,” said Lisa Sugar, PopSugar’s co-founder and president. “This has been a long, patient road.”

Historically, publishers have been reluctant to do brand licensing lest it compete with their existing advertisers. PopSugar chief revenue officer Geoff Schiller insisted the move into products would be “completely non-cannibalistic.” He wouldn’t say how much revenue he expected to earn from the sale of the product line.

The publisher isn’t worried about losing out on other advertisers’ business, in part, because of the sheer volume of brands floating around in the beauty space. “There’s so much space for it,” Lisa Sugar said. “There’s new beauty brands being launched every day, and people interested in makeup and product will buy all of them.”

Ulta Beauty is paying PopSugar wholesale for product up front, Schiller said. PopSugar will promote the line with ads on its own site. Neither company would say if there were advances or revenue guarantees in place for the products.

PopSugar has a senior creative services manager overseeing the creative and editorial support. That staffer reports to a three-person brand development team, which works with Ulta’s media buying arm.

Ulta Beauty’s history of advertising with PopSugar helped pave the way for the retail arrangement. Shelley Haus, Ulta Beauty’s svp of brand marketing, came aboard in late 2014 and sought to overhaul the makeup company with a focus on branded content with a handful of publishers. Ulta has used PopSugar since 2015 for everything from display to branded content to influencer programs to experiential marketing at Coachella.

Haus said PopSugar’s campaigns performed well, she said, routinely delivering one and a half to two times the results both sides had targeted. That track record also helped convince Ulta Beauty to give PopSugar products an unusually wide distribution. Typically, when Ulta Beauty puts new products in stores, it will test things out in a couple dozen locations, sometimes as many as 50.

“We know that their content is hugely influential,” Haus said. “We look at how their branded content drives clicks.”

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As the speakers at Adweek’s Elevate: AI conference grappled with the big picture, conceptual possibilities of AI now and in the future, we wondered what the on-the-ground realities looked like for organizations actively working on incorporating machine learning into their practices. We asked some of the sold-out crowd of attendees about the challenges they are…

In an attempt to get the entire digital advertising industry to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe has released a new framework aimed at standardizing the process of gaining consent to collect and use consumer data.

In a nutshell, participating publishers would get to select which ad tech vendors they wish to continue working with for programmatic trading from a centralized list of global vendors that have applied — and paid a nominal fee — to appear on the list. Once publishers have chosen vendors from the list, they must then get consent from the consumer on those vendors’ behalf.

The framework’s purpose
Getting consumers to consent to their data being used under the GDPR will be a challenge for everyone, but it will be far harder for companies that don’t have a direct relationship with them — and therefore aren’t brands that consumers recognize — such as ad tech intermediaries and agency trading desks.

Publishers, on the other hand, are in a strong position to ask consumers for consent. The IAB Europe hopes with this framework that if publishers help gain consent on behalf of third-party vendors, programmatic revenues won’t be choked, as suppliers will be able to continue trading on their supply.

The theory is that a unified approach means users can give consent to multiple vendors at the same time, which would drastically simplify the process. It would also help some ad tech vendors keep their businesses afloat.

A love-hate situation
The industry has had a mixed response to the framework. While the benefits are clear for the some 5,000 ad tech vendors in the Lumascape, which will struggle to gain explicit consent, the benefits for publishers are less obvious. Some believe the framework requires publishers once again to assume the legal risk in order to maintain ad tech’s status quo, while potentially annoying or overwhelming their users with messages asking for consent for dozens of ad tech partners.

For now, vendors aren’t strictly vetted for the list, although they must be a member of a trade body or organization to be on it. In the future, should the industry request it, the IAB Europe can help set up a certification process to validate that each vendor is as GDPR-compliant as it claims, according to Matthias Matthiesen, IAB Europe’s senior manager of privacy and public policy. Matthiesen stressed that participating vendors will also need to demonstrate their own GDPR compliance and privacy policies; they can’t just sit back and allow publishers to take responsibility for that.

But publishers can choose the vendors for which they want to gain consent and if they wish, ignore the rest. “Just as non-authorized resellers fell away with the introduction of ads.txt, vendors who have to this point maintained a parasitic existence, syncing users through non-direct relationships and in the absence of any value exchange, are suddenly looking very exposed,” said a publisher executive. “We saw with ads.txt when suspect vendors tried to get themselves erroneously listed in publishers’ ads.txt files — you can expect to see those under threat to try and persuade the publisher to legitimize their existence via consent, which you can safely assume few publishers are going to allow to happen.”

The idea is that the framework provides the transparency required under the GDPR and creates an audit trail, so everyone can keep abreast of all parties’ compliance status. If the law is violated, there is essentially visibility of who is at fault, added Matthiesen.

The framework needs publisher buy-in
Ultimately, the framework needs publishers to get on board for it to work. So far, publisher response has been lukewarm.

“The current proposal is aimed at maintaining the status quo of an ecosystem which is not sustainable as it is today due to its unbalanced nature,” said Alessandro De Zanche, publisher consultant and former News UK executive. “GDPR is an opportunity for publishers to regain control of the relationship with their user, and through that, [be] given consent for the use of data. This would make publishers much stronger versus the rest of the ecosystem.”

The proposed framework is open for the industry’s feedback, and a final version will be released in mid-April. Until then, the IAB Europe plans to get feedback on it from publishers across Europe.

For some, however, full publisher cooperation on the framework is a long shot. “I don’t see publishers embracing it without significant changes,” said Jason Kint, CEO of publisher trade body Digital Content Next. “It’s designed to attempt to protect the broad interests of the many IAB ad tech companies who designed it.”

The GDPR will have long-lasting effects on how all companies collect and use data. Download Digiday’s primer on all you need to know. 

The post IAB Europe’s GDPR guidelines, explained appeared first on Digiday.

Great Big Story, the streaming video storytelling brand owned by CNN, will kick off the campaign with an interactive activation at the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, this weekend.

With three months of the TV season remaining, NBC leads all TV broadcast networks in two major metrics — both higher than a year ago.

Over the past five years, programmatic advertising has become one of the most common buzzwords in our industry. Reams of articles, white papers, industry conference panels, et. al., have been devoted to positioning programmatic as the savior of digital advertising. A few years back, it was even dubbed the “Word of the Year” in some…

LinkedIn announced several changes to its terms of service, saying that many of them were driven by the General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect in Europe in May. Vice president of legal intellectual property, product and privacy Sara Harrington detailed the changes in a blog post, highlighting the following: The professional network added more…