Author: rssmasher

The New York Times is continuing to build upon the momentum of its “Truth is Hard” campaign with a new video advertisement designed for broadcast television, print and digital media in honor of International Women’s Day.

The video — which will air across The New York Times platforms, as well as in paid media spots on the major morning and evening network news shows starting Thursday — includes text of the opening lines from a smattering of recent stories related to international women’s rights. The excerpts come directly from pieces written by Times reporters around the world, with datelines ranging from Nigeria and Afghanistan to Lansing, Michigan.

Like the ads that came before it, “The Truth Has a Voice” maintains the simple, aesthetic black text juxtaposed against a white background, ending with imagery of an article about women running for public office as seen from a mobile phone. It also complements an ad that aired during the Golden Globes in January, which made a pointed statement about the role of The New York Times in accelerating national discussion around sexual assault and harassment following its explosive exposé of Harvey Weinstein. Since the Times broke the story in October, there has been a floodgate of victims speaking out against abusers in an array of industries.

The commercial is the creative brainchild of advertising agency Droga5, which the Times maintained a relationship with after the firing of chief creative officer Ted Royer in February for alleged workplace misconduct. While specifics around his termination have not been released, the company said the decision was made as part of a commitment to “maintaining a safe and inclusive environment for all our employees.” (According to a spokesperson for the Times, the International Women’s Day commercial was led by Tim Gordon, executive creative director at Droga5.)

The campaign first started during last year’s Academy Awards in response to an increasingly tense political climate and a barrage of insults against the media industry by President Donald Trump. The New York Times has since aired several other ads focused on exposing truths, including an ad that aired during the Super Bowl spotlighting the publication’s efforts around the impact of football on brain damage and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.

“We really want the journalism to be the hero and to be the story at the center of the advertisements and the video,” said Amy Weisenbach, vp of brand marketing at the New York Times. “We tried to highlight different parts of the stories — for the CTE ad, for example, we used a headline in a storytelling kind of way. Now we’re using the ledes of stories, which we thought was a really nice way to tell the richness of this, but also a nice nod to our journalists who take the time to do these pieces that are a differentiator for us.”

A print advertisement that ran in Thursday’s print version of The New York Times.

While Weisenbach said there is no concrete data to show that the advertising campaign has translated directly to an increase in subscriptions, The New York Times has seen a significant lift in print and digital memberships. In early February, it reported that it added 157,000 digital subscriptions in the fourth quarter of last year and that revenue surpassed $1 billion in 2017, comprising 60 percent of total revenue at The New York Times.

“We know from our consumer research that not enough people understand what it takes to do quality original reporting and once they do, they’re more likely to pay for it,” Weisenbach said. “We have 3.5 million subscriptions, and we have to help our readers understand why it’s worth it.”

As part of the latest ad, the Times is also launching a series called “Overlooked,” which will featured posthumous obituaries for notable women that the publication failed to honor in the past as part of its effort to better hold itself accountable. “The campaign is about shining a light on our journalism that holds power to account,” Weisenbach said.

The post The New York Times has a new ‘Truth’ ad for women’s equality appeared first on Digiday.

According to a survey by video advertising technology company Clinch, Facebook’s platform is home to some 46% of all branded video campaigns, topping YouTube, which has 41% of campaigns.

AdExchanger |

Verizon Connect, the telco’s telematics business unit that helps companies keep track of their truck fleets, has been around for almost a decade. But after acquiring two smaller companies in 2016, it was time to relaunch its brand and its value prop. On Tuesday, it launched a digital campaign that targets automakers and businesses that… Continue reading »

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by Braze

For those who work in data, GDPR compliance is nothing new. But in case you’re out of the loop, GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation, and it codifies EU consumers’ rights to digital privacy. It goes into effect May 25th, and carries severe penalties for non-compliance. However, the means of compliance is left up to the companies.

This ambiguity may at first seem daunting and confusing. But GDPR’s method of “outsourcing” decisions about compliance processes — that is, of effectively forcing companies to self-educate — is consistent with cutting-edge methodology from the education sector. Considering then that GDPR applies to EU citizens, no matter where they are in the world, the regulations must make sense across many cultural and linguistic barriers. So it’s only fitting that GDPR would make use of one of the most important ideas in modern language-education theory: the information gap.

Linguists consider the information gap to be a tool used to develop communicative competence; it teaches people to communicate in ways that may have previously not occurred to them. By using information gaps, GDPR launches companies on a journey that educators call guided discovery, helping data companies to help themselves.

In an information-gap activity, the educator presents learners with a situation in which something is incomplete. The learners are then left to figure out the missing information. To do this, they will have to use the target language: a set of tools useful for collaboratively identifying what’s been left out.

Let’s look at some of the most basic information-gap activities, and how they apply to GDPR.

Spot the difference

In this activity, two students are each given copies of what appears to be the same image, however the copies differ from each other in subtle ways. The students must then describe their materials to each other, and determine (in a language not native to either) what the differences are.

With GDPR, ‘spot the difference’ occurs between controllers and processors that share user data with each other. Consider this checklist for any two-partner companies:

• How do their methodologies for gathering data, and obtaining user consent, differ?
• What is the significance of those differences in light of the GDPR?
• What must be considered in their partnership, in order to make them both compliant, while also preserving their autonomy and business goals?

Initially, the answers to all these questions are unknown. The process of answering them is the process of learning to communicate in a new way, and to learn to use the target language of GDPR compliance.

Share your family tree

One learner describes her extended family to another student, who maps the relationships as a diagram.

With GDPR, this activity is about tracing relationships between organizations, and how those relationships affect shared data. Each enterprise must map out the path that its customers’ data takes throughout its lifecycle. Then it’s time to send questionnaires to each partner, checking the TOMs (technical and organizational measures) that are being taken. Are you buying data from someone who should be GDPR compliant? Are you selling data to someone who expects you to be doing so? No one organization can ever see the entire landscape of interconnections. But working together, they can go leaps and bounds beyond where they started, getting as close as possible to telling complete stories about each piece of data.

Describe the picture

In this activity, one student is given a picture to look at. The other student is given a blank piece of paper and a pencil. The first describes the image, and the second tries to recreate the drawing based on the description.

With GDPR, ‘describe the picture’ happens when two companies look at the contract they signed together. Each tries to determine how the other is interpreting its own compliance obligations and exposure risks. Will the second-hand “drawing” be completely accurate? No — but it doesn’t have to be, initially, either. Through negotiation, the contracting companies work through their shared responsibilities to create a picture of collaborative GDPR compliance.

Are you ready for GDPR? With partners Mailjet and mParticle, Braze presents GDPR: Beyond Borders, featuring panels of lawmakers, lawyers, and technology and marketing experts from Europe and the U.S. to help you decide. Together, they explain GDPR, what it means for your business, what steps your teams need to take, and more. Watch now.

 

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AdExchanger |

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Blurred Lines Do publishers need to have distinct programmatic and non-programmatic ad sales teams? The New York Times thinks those days have passed, and it has disbanded or absorbed its programmatic team, Digiday reports. The move was part of a larger reorg in December… Continue reading »

The post NYT Merges Programmatic And Direct Sales; Facebook Rates Spike As Impression Growth Slows appeared first on AdExchanger.

At the Digiday Publishing Summit event last month in Monaco, we sat down with over 80 European publishing executives to learn more about how publishers are adapting their video strategies to the changes to Facebook’s news-feed algorithm. Check out our earlier research on what platforms publishers are eyeing to replace Facebook here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick takeaways:

• Ninety-two percent of publishers in a Digiday survey conducted at the event are planning to produce more video content in 2018.
• The amount of video that publishers expect to produce has fallen over the past five months.
• Nearly 4 out of 5 publishers expect to use YouTube in 2018.

Publishers plan to produce more video, but less than initially expected
Last year was characterized by the pivot to video, which saw a number of publishers focus their strategies on viral videos in order to chase more lucrative CPMs from video ads. Headlines have declared the pivot to video is over, given the digital video market has largely deteriorated. However, Digiday’s most recent survey found that publishers’ pivot to video continues in Europe, but how much more video they expect to produce is decreasing.

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Digital platforms are behind the growing trend in the TV industry to reduce commercial time.

Fox Networks Group said it wants to cut advertising on its networks to two minutes per hour by 2020. NBCUniversal said it plans to reduce the number of ads in its commercial pods by 20 percent and the total ad time by 10 percent on more than 50 original prime-time programs across its networks. Turner’s TruTV has already been reducing ad loads on its original programs and plans to expand the offering over the next three years, and its sister networks TBS and TNT will soon reduce ad loads by as much as 50 percent, according to Turner.

These moves are the exception right now, as overall TV commercial loads overall are still increasing. According to an analysis by Pivotal Research’s Brian Wieser, national ad loads rose 3.9 percent year over year in January to 11 minutes per hour.

“We’ve been stuffing content with ads for way too long, and across the landscape, you can see the negative impact it’s had,” said Chris Linn, president of TruTV. “For too long, everyone has been leaning into what has worked in the past, but that’s not what is going to work moving forward. The bottom falls out quickly if you don’t meet the changing needs of your audience.”

The reductions in ad loads come as viewing shifts to digital and video-on-demand platforms. And with the duopoly battling brand-safety issues, TV networks have an opportunity to capture ad dollars from Google and Facebook.

A TV experience that’s closer to digital
TV viewing is increasingly happening on connected TVs — 75 percent of NBCUniversal’s digital ad impressions are delivered that way — where the ad load is lower, said Mark Marshall, evp of entertainment ad sales for NBCUniversal.

The average episode of NBC’s “The Voice” is watched for 35 minutes on live, linear TV. That jumps to 43 minutes on connected TV devices and 48 minutes on digital video recorders. With video on demand, time spent is at an average 51 minutes, he said.

“It’s the same show, it’s the same piece of glass, so why are they watching longer on digital properties? Part of it is because there’s a lower ad load on that side,” said Marshall, who leads sales for NBC’s broadcast network, USA Network and Syfy. “The whole goal is to make TV look more like digital TV.”

Then, there’s the Netflix, Amazon and Hulu effect. Netflix and Amazon have no commercials, which can make it jarring to binge hours on those platforms and then switch over to ad-supported cable TV, said Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst for consulting firm TVRev. On Hulu, roughly 70 percent of its 54 million monthly unique viewers subscribe to Hulu’s ad-supported tier, where commercial breaks are limited.

“Because Hulu keeps their ad loads light, people don’t mind it,” said Wolk.

The duopoly’s brand-safety issues give networks an opening
TV networks are also eager to pounce on Facebook’s and Google’s ongoing issues with brand safety. At the upfronts and other industry events, NBCU’s ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino frequently took swipes at the duopoly by pointing out how a view can’t buy products or a like has never walked into a store. TV, meanwhile, has viewers — and viewers that spend more than a few seconds with their programming.

“When you’re in the marketplace and you hear a lot about how these special platforms are pitching and selling video against television, they will try and tell you that 1.7 seconds with the audio off is a good example of a delivered impression,” Marshall said. “Now, compare that to where we have shows that people are watching 35 to 50 minutes straight. TV has arguably never been more valuable to an advertiser; it’s already the best in terms of ad effectiveness, and these initiatives are incremental steps on top to improve it.”

Along with reducing ad clutter and commercial time, NBCU is pitching a new ad product called “prime pods.” Essentially, it’s a new 60-second slot in the first or last commercial break of a show with just one or two advertisers, depending on the buy. Ads within this pod are meant to be contextually aligned with the show and its audience, which could include custom pieces NBCU itself produces.

“What the research tells you is that an advertiser really gets the biggest bump when half of the ad load is removed,” Marshall said. “Obviously, we can’t take half of the ads out of the entire portfolio, but it led us to the idea that we can make the first pod something that works for both the consumer and the advertiser. If, in an hourlong drama, you’re 25 minutes in and you’ve only seen one minute of ads, you’re going to remember it.”

Of course, it’s also an opportunity for TV networks to charge more for these placements. NBCU’s prime pods will come at a premium, Marshall said. Fox, too, reportedly admitted it will charge more for the reduced inventory and sell ads based on time spent versus the number of viewers the content gets.

Reduced ad loads can equal more ad dollars
Networks have experimented with reduced ad loads for some time, and there’s some evidence that advertisers are willing to pay more.

In 2016, Turner’s TruTV reduced commercial time against its original half-hour shows by three and a half minutes. TruTV produces its programming in-house, which required that producers make shows that run for around 26 minutes instead of the traditional 22 minutes and 30 seconds, the network said.

“This is not for everyone,” said Linn. “You have to make a full commitment to go all-in and stick with it for the long haul; at TruTV, we had a unique opportunity because we own all of our content — there are not acquisitions. So we have the ability to flip a switch and say all of our content going forward is going to be longer and more premium.”

The move has worked out so far. TruTV said it saw double-digit CPM increases in 2017, the first full year it made its “limited commercial interruption” ad product available to marketers. One media buyer said Turner’s prime-time CPM is between $35 and $40, noting that the network is up in viewership and that increased viewership and a decreased ad load results in [TruTV] increasing CPMs. TruTV also said it saw a nearly 100 percent renewal rate among marketers that bought its LCI product in last year’s upfront market.

According to Nielsen, TruTV’s ratings were up 2 percent among adults 18 to 49 — the coveted demographic among TV marketers — since it introduced the LCI product. It’s one of only three of the top 30 networks to grow for two consecutive years, according to Nielsen.

Not all of TruTV’s ratings increases can be attributed to reduced ad loads, as the network is also producing more high-end original comedy programs. But with the ratings growth, TruTV plans to reduce ad loads across all of its programming over the next three years. (Right now, the LCI product hits about 15 percent of the network’s programming lineup.)

“The overall mission of TruTV has been to take the reality TV network it once was, and turn it into something that is more premium and appeals to a younger, more affluent audience,” said Linn. “We know we’re competing for those eyeballs with Netflix and Hulu; the worst thing we can do is degrade the experience by offering longer and longer commercials and too much messaging.”

For more on the future of TV and video, subscribe to Digiday’s weekly Video Briefing email. 

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After nearly a decade of indifference, Reddit is cozying up to publishers.

Over the past year, a media partnerships team of four has ramped up efforts to bind publisher content and Reddit users closer together. It has rolled out new features, including profile pages and native video hosting. It has also stepped up efforts to work with publishers on content-focused initiatives both on and off Reddit’s platform, including its editorial collaboration with Time magazine and a WBUR-produced podcast, “Endless Thread,” which started in January.

These efforts come at a moment when publishers are looking for new ways to connect more directly with their readers.

“I’m starting to feel like we’re making inroads,” said Alexandra Riccomini, Reddit’s first director of business development and media partnerships, who oversees Reddit’s publisher relationships. “How we function, necessarily, is with third parties. I’d love to see our continued march toward becoming one of those platforms that’s top of mind for publishers.”

For years, Reddit has intrigued and confounded publishers. Those that tried to promote their content too hard wound up getting accounts suspended; others found themselves feuding with the site’s community, who felt publishers were mining the site for story ideas without properly crediting Reddit users themselves.

And any publishers that tried to start a dialogue with Reddit got nowhere, mostly because there was nobody to start a dialogue with. Prior to 2016, Reddit did not have any employees dedicated to publisher or advertiser relations.

“Everyone who came up in the early social media for news days, one of the first things you learned was: Reddit is anti-publisher,” said Amanda Zamora, chief audience officer of the Texas Tribune. “It’s been a remarkable shift, I think.”

Riccomini’s earliest moves were designed to smooth relations between Reddit’s users and publishers. Tools were launched in May 2016 to encourage publishers to source and credit Reddit users in their pieces. In February 2017 came an integration with CrowdTangle, which let publishers monitor how their content was being shared inside Reddit.

Other product changes made over the past year were meant to encourage publishers to use Reddit more. In years past, publishers trying to share their content on Reddit could be warned or banned if they violated the platform’s “1 in 10” rule, which required that no more than 10 percent of the content that accounts shared be promotional. That rule was relaxed last spring. In December 2017, Reddit rolled out profile pages that let publishers post content directly to their followers, without fear of getting banned for spamming.

Reddit remains an influential source of story ideas for publishers. But the changes made to the platform this past year have allowed for more exchanges between Reddit’s audience and publishers. “It’s a place where our fans flag content for us and highlight things we should be covering,” said Kate Coughlin, the director of audience development at National Geographic Partners.

Overall, Reddit’s referral traffic to publishers is less than 1 percent of all social traffic and declined 45 percent in the past year, according to Shareaholic. But the effect has been noticeable, if modest, for publishers that have put in time. “Traffic from the profile page has been nice and steady,” said Gene Park, a social media editor at The Washington Post.

Park said he still sees the work he does on Reddit as experimental and wouldn’t say how much referral traffic Reddit drives to the Post. And while he thinks Reddit can become a powerful source of referral traffic, traffic in and of itself is not the end goal of the work he does on the platform. Park said Reddit’s product changes let publishers communicate with Reddit’s user base, in line with a Post mandate that its journalists should be more transparent about their work.

To some publishers, that is especially important as they try to diversify their audience away from Facebook and Google. “With everything that’s going on with Facebook, we’re trying to figure out some other places where we can grow our audience and interact with them in smart ways,” said Connor Finnegan, senior audience development manager at Inverse, which launched an Inverse profile page on Reddit in January.

Finnegan said Reddit has become a better place to show his site’s content to a new audience. “On other platforms, like Facebook or Twitter, it’s hard to stand out,” Finnegan said. “And we find the feedback we get on [Reddit] is a little more sophisticated than the average Facebook comment.”

As the year rolls on, Reddit also plans to do more original content with publishers such as original video, applying the playbook it used on the Time and WBUR collaborations, Riccomini said. Reddit will also add more content programming to the platform that publishers can participate in regularly. She wouldn’t say which publishers or platforms would be involved; she said both were developed to help all the involved parties. “I don’t believe in one person taking from the other,” Riccomini said. “It’s got to be a mutual value-add.”

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