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In intervening this week in a major technology takeover battle, the U.S. government is acting on concerns over a Chinese company many Americans have never heard of: Huawei Technologies Co.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Cut Through The Noise Fox Networks wants to trim two minutes per hour from its TV ad time by 2020. That’s a deep cut, considering that in 2017, broadcasters averaged over 13 minutes of ads per hour, according to Nielsen. To stave off a… Continue reading »

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The line between programmatic and other types of advertising has blurred to the point that The New York Times has erased the one between its programmatic and direct sales teams.

The New York Times quietly folded its programmatic sales team into its overall sales organization in December as part of a broader, publicly announced reorganization, a company spokesperson confirmed. The Times had originally formed its programmatic sales team in April 2013 and intended it to be united with the rest of the sales organization, but some time after that, the company split it into a separate team. Coinciding with the latest reorganization, the Times had its core sales team members receive training on programmatic advertising so that they would be able to sell any of the Times’ ad products to any type of advertiser.

“Programmatic continues to be an important element of our business — important enough that we integrated the selling of programmatic into our overall sales organization and organized around a programmatic operations team to support the sellers and our programmatic advertisers,” said the Times spokesperson in an email.

One industry exec described the reorg as coinciding with media agencies looking to consolidate their sales contacts at publishers. Advertisers are shifting their programmatic spend to going through media agencies as opposed to agency trading desks, according to Omnicom’s most recent earnings call. WPP-owned GroupM’s mPlatform similarly enables advertisers to go through their media agencies to conduct their programmatic buys. As a result of this shift, media agencies’ buyers are seeking a single sales rep at publishers who can handle any type of ad buy, this person said. This pressure from ad buyers may have caused friction between the Times’ programmatic and direct sales teams, with the direct team winning because it brings in more revenue, the person added.

Some members of the Times’ programmatic sales staff have left since the December reorg, including Sara Badler, who was its director of programmatic advertising and considered the most senior employee on the programmatic sales team at the time of the reorganization. Badler joined Dotdash this month as head of programmatic revenue and strategy; she did not respond to a request for comment.

“The industry is moving in the direction of consolidation and focusing on supply-chain transparency. It makes sense to streamline sales teams on both the buy and sell side and maximize the value they provide,” said Alanna Gombert, global chief revenue officer at ad tech firm MetaX and former co-chair of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s programmatic council.

The Times spokesperson confirmed that some members of the programmatic sales team accepted a voluntary buyout and left the company as a result of the reorg, but declined to say how many. One source outside the Times said a majority left, with the remainder joining the newly combined sales team.

The fusing of the Times’ programmatic and direct sales staffs also seems to signal how important programmatic has become as a sales channel for publishers in general and the Times specifically. According to estimates from research firm eMarketer, 82 percent of the $39.1 billion that advertisers will spend this year on digital display ads in the U.S. will be spent programmatically.

In 2017, the Times turned to programmatic to bolster its ad business abroad, and it began selling some of its custom ad units programmatically. But the newspaper publisher isn’t the only major media company ramping up its programmatic sales. Last year, Vox Media began selling its high-end ads programmatically, and longtime programmatic holdout BuzzFeed relented and adopted automated banners on its site.

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After gaining traction with its Musical.ly channel for Seventeen, Hearst Magazines Digital Media has brought Cosmopolitan to the mobile video and lip-syncing app.

Cosmopolitan launched March 6 on Musical.ly with a new vertical video show called “Cosmo Queens,” which shows new how-to tutorials and makeup transformations every week. It’s the fourth show Hearst has produced for Musical.ly, following “Fashion to DIY For,” “The Look” and “Seventeen and the City” for Seventeen. The shows have helped Seventeen amass more than 2.2 million followers in less than a year on Musical.ly, which is double the number of followers the magazine brand has on Instagram.

“To have double the follower amount on a new and emerging platform is great,” said Sheel Shah, executive director for growth and innovation at Hearst Magazines Digital Media. “Our main goal is to be in front of our consumers where they are and in a way where the content is resonating.”

Musical.ly allows users to post lip-syncing videos. More recently, the app has also partnered with companies including NBCUniversal and digital media company Sweety High to deliver short-form vertical-video shows. Last fall, Musical.ly reportedly sold to a Chinese media startup for more than $800 million. At the time, the app said it had 60 million users. In 2017, Musical.ly had nearly 92 million downloads across both iOS and Android, with the U.S. accounting for 20 percent of those downloads, according to App Annie.

Most of the Musical.ly’s users are young: 75 percent of Musical.ly’s iPhone user base in February was female, and 50 percent was aged 13 to 24; on Android, those percentages are 70 percent female and 60 percent aged 13 to 24, according to App Annie. This made the app particularly suited for Seventeen’s core audience. With Cosmopolitan, the idea is to home in on the edgier aspects of the brand and reach new and existing younger viewers that already spend a great deal of time on Musical.ly.

One thing that Hearst has already found to resonate with Musical.ly users is makeup and beauty tutorials. For instance, it aired “Seventeen and the City,” a travel show, last year on Seventeen’s Musical.ly channel. The publisher quickly found that the format wasn’t as popular as another show, the how-to series “Fashion to DIY For,” on Musical.ly. Hearst quickly regrouped and launched “The Look,” which performed far better on the platform. Both “Fashion to DIY For” and “The Look” have combined to reach 20 million views on Musical.ly, according to Hearst.

“Looking at the data even more, we’re seeing that beauty how-to content is even outperforming fashion,” said Shah.

Hearst’s Musical.ly shows are produced in-house by the publisher. With the Cosmopolitan show, the series will be produced in collaboration between Cosmopolitan and a Hearst Originals team dedicated to developing and selling shows to different platforms.

Musical.ly doesn’t cover any costs but promotes new episodes of the shows at the top of the “trending” section of the app for 24 to 48 hours, after which the shows can be accessed through the publisher’s Musical.ly account pages.

With the Cosmopolitan channel, Hearst is taking a measured approach, Shah said.

“We’re not coming out with four or five shows and then seeing how it goes,” he said. “We’re taking a step-by-step approach, and as we see more followers and make more money on it, we’ll do more.”

With the Seventeen channel, Hearst was able to bring Converse on board as a sponsor for 10 episodes of “Fashion to DIY For.” Since Musical.ly doesn’t have interruptive ad products, this was a sponsorship and integration deal that included using Converse sneakers in various tutorials.

Musical.ly is an intriguing platform for advertisers. But with no traditional ad products within media content, advertisers’ main options are influencer marketing or sponsorship and integration deals with publishing partners.

“A lot of brands don’t really play with Musical.ly,” said Greg Manago, co-president of Content+ at Mindshare North America. “First of all, the age groups that Musical.ly targets makes it difficult for a vast majority of brands, and since users specifically go to Musical.ly to listen to their favorite song, you as a brand don’t want to be interruptive to that experience.”

In this context, working with a trusted publisher that can also bring in some valuable data and insights on what the Musical.ly audience likes proves to be valuable, Manago said.

“Partners can give you guarantees that you can feel comfortable with,” he said. “If Musical.ly is an experiment, then this makes it a safe experiment because you’ll have a better idea on how it’s going to perform based on [the publishing partners’] past history on the platform.”

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Facebook’s news-feed changes have already killed LittleThings and Cox Media-owned publisher Rare and are threatening other viral ones. But their knock-on effects are expected to reverberate past the publishers themselves to the companies that supported and enabled Facebook strategies that are ending.

These include companies such as Jukin Media, which provided the raw material that fueled many publishers’ news-feed video operations; The Social Edge, one of the companies that provided paid Facebook distribution; and talent-management companies that made money sharing publisher content through their Facebook pages.

“I don’t know what I’ll do for income on the platform, but I’m done trying to find out,” said Enrico Taylor, the owner of a Facebook page called I Discover Stars, who said he sued LittleThings, alleging the publisher owes him $50,000 for unpaid fees, fraud and further damages sharing its content. “I give it till April, or I’m gone as well.”

I Discover Stars is far from the only Facebook page LittleThings relied on to distribute its content. Until it closed, LittleThings had a distribution network of over 100 Facebook publishers, according to LittleThings president and COO Gretchen Tibbits. LittleThings was meting out over $500,000 per month to those partners in exchange for Facebook distribution, according to a separate LittleThings source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The Facebook changes, along with updates the platform made to its branded-content policy in late January, could erase not just an income stream for many of these pages but the jobs of seeding and managing them that some talent agencies created.

“Some of this talent, in their heyday, they were making [$50k to $100k-plus] a month posting links,” said Karl House, chief revenue officer of StackCommerce. “If you’re running a [talent-] management company that aggregates influencers who post content to Facebook, these changes mean there’s probably a team you can no longer afford to employ.”

The Facebook changes may also dent companies like Jukin Media and Storyful, which provided raw material for publishers looking to build distributed video operations. The two companies find user-generated content — think Pizza Rat or Chewbacca Mom — license it from creators, then sell the rights to third parties, including publishers, television broadcasters and ad agencies. Storyful declined to comment.

“I think Storyful and Jukin are really good at what they do, and they’ll continue to do it,” said Eric Gonon, a senior executive producer at NY1 News. “But they may lose business from the companies that were overly reliant on [Facebook news-feed video].”

Licensing videos is the largest individual source of Jukin’s revenue, though along with digital publishers, Jukin also has broadcasters and advertising agencies as customers, according to Mike Skogmo, Jukin Media’s vp of communications. It also makes money by selling original series to TV broadcasters and platforms like Facebook Watch, and by selling branded content and other ads on its own sites.

That branded-content business, like those of other Facebook publishers, could be susceptible to margin pressure, according to one media agency source, mostly because the organic reach of many of Jukin’s owned Facebook pages has been declining.

While Jukin posted a year-over-year gain in monthly Facebook video views in February, according to the company, Facebook video views on a number of Jukin’s core properties have declined over the past 12 months, according to CrowdTangle. Skogmo noted that some of those declines were offset by growth of spinoff pages related to those core publisher brands.

“When a [Facebook] announcement’s made, we’re listening closely, but we haven’t seen any significant drop-off in performance,” Skogmo said. “There’s no reason to change yet.”

The post Collateral damage from Facebook’s news-feed changes begins to pile up appeared first on Digiday.

In order to grow its global readership, The Economist is targeting an underrepresented demographic in its audience: women. Less than 30 percent of its 1.4 million print and digital subscribers are women, according to the publisher.

Tying in with International Women’s Day on March 8, the publisher has launched in front of its paywall a content hub featuring 10 previously published profiles of inspiring women such as activist Betty Friedan. It’s driving readers to the hub through targeted social media marketing on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Posts on architect Zaha Hadid and mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani are performing three times better than The Economist’s median reach on Facebook, although the publisher wouldn’t share specific figures. Readers can also download the profiles as a package in exchange for registering with an email address.

People who visit the site have generally the same content preferences — international politics, education, health care, the environment — so the editorial tone and topics are not overly suited to one gender. But The Economist has a perception problem. People believe it only covers political and economic topics, when its scope is much broader, spanning topics like society and pop culture through an Economist lens.

“In the past, The Economist has taken a didactic and authoritative approach,” said Marina Haydn, evp of circulation and retail marketing at The Economist. “We want to be more open, inviting and welcoming when engaging with prospects in general.”

As part of its effort to grow its female readership, the publisher started conducting research with semiotics and language analysis research firm Ipsos Connect last June. This research, led by a global team of 16 women across The Economist’s marketing, advertising, product and editorial departments, informs the marketing copy for its ad campaigns. Eleven staffers within the marketing department ensure marketing campaigns incorporate the research findings — and Economist coverage. For example, an article on the gender pay gap informed the copy for its outdoor ad campaign launching this week that advertises International Women’s Day.

“We’re talking about nuance here,” Haydn said. “There are societal elements that people have that mean they perceive communications differently, and we’re adjusting that to improve our relevance among female prospects.”

A more even gender split in The Economist’s audience would appeal to advertisers, according to John Thomson, head of media at 360i Europe. The Economist said it’s having ongoing conversations with ad clients, but this push to target women hasn’t yet helped to win new business. “The world of business changed beyond all belief over the last 25 years; however, many publications look and feel like an old boys’ club,” Thomson said. “There is a big untapped audience here.”

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The media world, seemingly perpetually in flux, is in the midst of what appears a more significant period of upheaval, with tech giants sucking up the majority of ad dollars, digital advertising plagued by a lack of transparency and controversial content, companies taking a hard look at their role when it comes to workplace fairness and cultural impact, and the need to stake out a global claim taking on new urgency.

For our cover of the new issue of Digiday magazine, we turned to early video games and Donkey Kong. We wanted to show, in a tongue in cheek way, the current mood of publishers as Facebook continues to shift its often awkward and overbearing relationship with media. We carried the theme throughout the issue: Look for tributes to Frogger, Qbert, Pac-Man and Punch-Out, among other classics.

Of course, fixing massive industries isn’t as simple as hitting a button and starting the game over. But as we show in our ninth issue, media and marketing are in ways large and starting anew from an era where scale trumped loyalty, reach obscured impact and the short term dominated the long term. We see the media and marketing world becoming less reliant on Facebook, more transparent, increasingly globalized, and belatedly more inclusive and representative. These themes run throughout the issue, with a “Master Mechanics” section highlighting those in the trenches mastering the tactical expertise that will define what comes next.

In media, our focus is on how publishers are attempting to cobble together a sustainable, independent future, free, as much as possible, from the whims of the duopoly. As the recent demise of LittleThings shows, very little in digital media has proved lasting. One day, LittleThings was boasting how it shot to 50 million users; months later, it was winding down operations. Nothing speaks to this more than Jonah Peretti, once Facebook’s biggest booster, pleading publicly for more money for publishers from the sprawling platform. Peretti and other media executives are finding their voices in vocally opposing platforms like Facebook, a turnabout from their recent acquiescence to the whims of Facebook. (See video, pivot to.) Joanna Coles, head of content at Hearst Magazines, takes the long view, telling us the recent travails of fake news only prove the necessity and power of editing.

We also profile the unsung heroes of the modernization of the media, from the newsletter editor to the subscription czar to the head of data protection.

But for change to happen, it must follow the money, and in media, that means the marketers. Shareen Pathak spent time with Norman de Greve of CVS Health, who is at the forefront of the trend of chief marketer as politician, intent on making purpose-driven marketing not just a gimmick. Change will also come externally, as detailed in the shadowy pressure groups springing up to force marketers to clean up their acts. For agencies, change is always afoot, with the current disruptors coming in the guise of the big consulting firms.

For our part, at Digiday, we’re embracing change by building out our premium membership program, Digiday+, which includes exclusive benefits like this magazine, research, Slack town halls and live events. If you’re a member, the digital version of your magazine will arrive via email later today. We will be publishing the digital version of articles throughout the next two weeks. If you’re not a Digiday+ member, please consider joining. It’s $395 a year — and if you don’t like it after the first 30 days, you’ll get a full refund. If you join before Friday, we’ll send you a print copy of the 68-page issue of Digiday magazine.

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Just under eight weeks since Facebook’s algorithm change, which many expected would hike ad prices, things are mostly business as usual. That’s according to a group of top media buyers who gathered in New Orleans this week for the Digiday Media Buying Summit.

“We’ve literally had no changes happen because of this,” said Merkle CMO Adam Lavelle.

Prices were expected to rise after the change. Agency buyers Digiday spoke to said they expected brands would have to pay more for advertising in order to get the same number of views. The idea was that there would be less “inventory” available, raising prices. But agencies say this hasn’t happened — yet. “We aren’t seeing any significant pricing differences for standard brand advertising,” said Noah Mallin, head of social at WPP’s Wavemaker.

Kerry Perse, who heads social at OMD, said the biggest difference to her has been “as a user” — she sees fewer publishers. Prices haven’t gone up, she speculated, because for now, publishers are paying more money to be on Facebook, which still lines Facebook pockets. Ad revenue is up, but CPMs haven’t increased.

In some cases, Facebook ad prices have gone down. Epic Signal founder Brendan Gahan said that might be because brands had already reallocated social budgets in anticipation of CPMs increasing, which means there’s less demand, and prices are relatively low as a result.

The other big change buyers expected was “authentic” content — from friends and family, but also influencers — to become more important. When done on its own, influencer content essentially mimics content from friends and family. But the problem is that the news-feed change came on the heels of Facebook demanding that brands use the handshake tool to label influencer posts and “link” them with the brands sponsoring them. Since the news-feed change, organic reach of posts has decreased, as Facebook creates a pay-to-play scenario with influencer content because it’s now more easily identifiable, thanks to the handshake tool, said Perse.

Buyers, however, also said the news-feed changes have shifted their strategies away from publishers like LittleThings that use Facebook as a distribution channel. Those publishing partners have to either diversify platforms or, like in the case of NowThis, re-establish a website.

“I don’t think Facebook becomes a no man’s land for publishers, but there will be a steeper slope from publishers who do well on the platform and the mediocre middle who didn’t necessarily design content specific to Facebook’s environment,” said Mallin. “It also means that the cost of branded content may go up as organic contributes a smaller share of views. Some publishers may choose to absorb this cost for the time being.” 

The biggest effect, of course, is in organic reach. Epic Signal, which crunched numbers across its client base, found brands are seeing organic reach on Facebook decline about 60-70 percent since the changes.

Even in cases where CPMs are slightly higher because of organic reach dropping, things are still business as usual because “dark posts” — those that don’t appear in the news feed — aren’t affected. Michael Dobson, who heads social media at Crossmedia, said Facebook’s updates did not impact bid delivery or audience targeting, which is why none of these changes are having much of an impact.

“This change was made to re-engage users who are disconnecting from the platform to allow people to connect with ‘friends and family’ content being priority, what Facebook feels users are most interested in seeing,” said Dobson. “The delivery of ads remains the same.”

The post Media buyers aren’t seeing ad prices rise after Facebook news-feed changes appeared first on Digiday.

Marketers are finding their voice in publicly sharing their frustrations with digital media, in particular with its biggest players: Facebook and Google.

At the British advertiser trade body ISBA’s annual conference in London this week, marketers took several pot shots at digital media for being opaque, lax on brand safeguards and slow on stamping out fraud. The message: Thanks for being upfront about the issues, but get moving on fixing them.

In sign of the general unease with the normal happy-happy-joy-joy talk from tech platforms, Geoff Seeley, Airbnb’s director of global connections and media activation, drew applause when he said Facebook “lived in a bubble” after Facebook vp of Northern Europe extolled Facebook’s efforts at being responsible platform. Another executive, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity at the event, expanded on those frustrations with issues closer to his wallet: “To be frank, I’m far more concerned by Facebook’s attitude and commitment to cross-industry initiatives, from verification to audience measurement.”

Royal Bank of Scotland’s CMO David Wheldon said Google’s and Facebook’s fixes “hadn’t been good enough, but were better than nothing.” While marketers may not always get it right — one senior marketer conflated ad fraud and brand safety onstage — they’re more willing to express frustration digital media isn’t solving problems it created.

“We’re here to run businesses, not to create nirvanas of imperfect measurement,” said Zaid Al-Qassab, BT’s chief brand and marketing officer, who prefers the U.K. adopt its own viewability standard rather than rely on an eventual global standard. “I’d love to get to where Unilever wants [with a global viewability standard], but I feel that’s being used as an excuse by publishers to kick the can down the road.”

Al-Qassab is working on implementing BT’s own viewability standards, though he won’t rule out having higher thresholds for brand campaigns versus slightly lower ones for direct-response ads.

Kudos were given to early efforts byProcter & Gamble’s top marketer Marc Pritchard praised the so-called walled gardens for their attempts to provide greater transparency over data and metrics a year after he lambasted them. He pointed to how quickly P&G’s brand Tide was protected by online media’s power brokers earlier this year amidst the detergent’s involvement in a dangerous series of video dares. Within a matter of hours YouTube had swept the entire platform free of those videos, revealed Pritchard, and had tweaked the algorithm to show a safety video in place of the controversial viral post. Both Facebook and Snapchat did the same, he added.

At the same time, actions speak louder than words. P&G reduced waste by 20 percent last year and actually increased reach by 10 percent. There’s still work to do, particularly for VOD measurement and MRC accreditation, concluded Pritchard, but P&G “has the objective third party data that we need to make good media spending decisions.”

Marketers often shy away from publicly discussing how agencies spend their money. Based on what he’s heard as president of the World Federation of Advertisers, Wheldon suggested this may be due in part to concerns about those strategies reflecting poorly on them. At the event, however, two examples illustrated what a transparent relationship between advertiser and agency might look like. Both Barclays and the U.K. government outlined their new agency models, which pay closer attention to audits, contracts, talent, process, remuneration and performance incentives.

Barclays’ media strategy with agency Aperto One isn’t just about understanding the return on investment of its media, said Tom Corbett, group head of sponsorship and media at Barclays. It’s about the “value of your media agency partnership,” he said. Until you understand that value, he added, “you can’t put a price on what it’s worth,” which is why for Barclays, “certain remuneration models that are out there in the marketplace simply don’t work.”

For all the talk of taking responsibility of media at the conference, few marketers openly discussed their programmatic strategy. When Nigel Gilbert, vp of strategic development at AppNexus, asked marketers at the event how many of them had a direct relationship with their demand-side platform, just three hands went up. Advertisers in the U.K., it seems, would rather scrutinize the devil they know — agencies. Ad tech companies almost get a “free pass” from senior marketers, Gilbert said. AppNexus has been to “see some very large brands who you would argue do not put us in the same position that they would their agency.”

 

The post At London ad conference, marketers continue digital media critiques appeared first on Digiday.

Tough Mudder is one brand that is seeing its Facebook Watch investment pay off.

In October, Tough Mudder’s first Watch show — in which an instructor taught a live workout class — saw 37,000 views. Now, Tough Mudder is seeing hundreds of thousands of views on every video, with its latest video of another workout class generating 684,000 views. Tough Mudder’s most viewed show occurred in November when 1.2 million people watched the final moments of Tough Mudder’s Toughest Mudder race in Las Vegas.

The fitness brand has seen an average of 477,000 views on its 18 Watch shows. In total, the shows have generated more than 8 million views, according to Jerome Hiquet, CMO of Tough Mudder.

Hiquet calls the shows a “success” and said the number of views on Watch reaffirms Tough Mudder’s decision to put more focus on delivering its message of teamwork. “It’s videos consumers are seeking out,” he said. “The new generation wants to be connected to brands through emotion.”

Tough Mudder’s two Watch series cater to two types of audiences. “Tough Mudder Championship” livestreamed four events in which runners tackled Tough Mudder’s most difficult 10-mile obstacle courses. Tough Mudder used head cams, aerial drones and backstage commentary to capture the action.

The other series, “Tough Mudder Bootcamp,” is tailored to active lifestyle enthusiasts, who might feel more comfortable doing workouts from their own homes. In these weekly 45-minute live fitness classes, instructors walk viewers through different workouts.

The fitness classes are also meant as previews to Tough Mudder’s new boot camp studios. In February, Tough Mudder announced it would open its own line of workout studios in Massachusetts, Nevada and Texas in the fourth quarter.

Tough Mudder began in 2010 primarily as an events company that hosted military-style obstacle courses where people run through fire, ice, electric fences and, of course, plenty of mud. Since then, it has evolved into a lifestyle and media brand that is not just for the hardcore athlete. Tough Mudder claims 3 million people have finished its races. To diversify its audiences, it had to diversify its messaging.

“The main point is to become more accessible,” said Hiquet.

Tough Mudder began building an in-house content team in its early days, but started to put more emphasis on doing so in 2015, said Hiquet, when the company realized this would help it be more cost-efficient. Today, Hiquet said the in-house content team is made up of 50 people between its New York and London offices. Out of those 50, 18 people focus on content and social media, and three people focus entirely on video. Hiquet added that Tough Mudder also hires several freelancers at one time to work on video content.

“We have a broad content marketing ecosystem from social media to TV, to ensure we can reach our existing and potential customers in multiple ways,” said Hiquet.

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