Author: rssmasher

Artificial intelligence is one of the marketing industry’s principal buzzwords right now. Like many en vogue terms, definitions can range all over the map. We asked eight agency executives to give a clear and concise definition of AI.

Jason Goldberg, svp of commerce and content, SapientRazorfish
AI are computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. Machine learning is a subset of AI, and deep learning is a subset of machine learning. Essentially in deep learning, instead of writing a set of programmatic rules, a model can be developed that can be trained with a data set that allows the model “to learn.” For example, I can train a model with consumer behaviors to learn what offerings and services a new shopper is most likely to want.

Robbee Minicola, president of Wunderman Seattle and global lead of Wunderman AI Services
AI are the insights derived from autonomous machine learning algorithms. Most people interchange Machine Learning and AI thinking they are the same thing. You can have machine learning without AI, but you cannot have AI without machine learning. Machine Learning is not entirely self-learning; it is very much bootstrapped to human control. AI has a degree of autonomy that allows the machine learning algorithm more freedom as it cascades over the data. This allows for the discovery of unknown unknowns – and that is where the magic happens. So, where the insights are applicable to business decisions, the result is really just machine learning.

Jenna Niven, creative director, RGA
AI is a bunch of algorithms that are leveraging neural nets to process a huge amount of data. They may be simple like creating word clusters or complex like autonomous cars, but all leverage multiple layers of a network to produce probabilities of a certain outcome.

Jason Beckerman, CEO of Unified
I would define AI as the end outcome. AI takes the data processed from machine learning and makes ongoing decisions about what to do to achieve specific goals. Often when marketers refer to AI, they’re actually talking about machine learning, which is a subset of AI. Machine learning is especially top of mind for marketers, because it enables computers to efficiently analyze data without any manual human assistance, and can automatically dig deeper into insights based on what it learns.

Winston Binch, chief digital officer of Deutsch North America 
AI is anything that has the ability to fully replace human intelligence. Most of what exists today are really examples of augmented intelligence as opposed to pure AI. Augmented Intelligence is like lane assist. It’s a partial AI experience. Experiences that are not fully automated and still require some level of human interaction and involvement, but self-driving cars would be AI.

Alexander Rea, creative technology officer of DDB New York
AI is a theory often used to refer to a computer that performs a task usually performed by human intelligence. AI has become a clickbait buzzword that drives impressions. It’s easier to say what AI is not, instead of what it is. Because what it is, is something that not quite known yet. So far, we only have very good pattern recognition, learning from sequences, and machine learning. We do not have any system that is truly intelligent. And if you want to talk about AI and autonomous vehicles, that’s not AI either. That’s simply a computer that knows how to do what it’s programmed to do. It’s not going to know that what you really need is some comfort food and want to go through the drive-thru even though it will make you late for work.

Marc Maleh, global director at Havas Cognitive
AI is a series of APIs that agencies and brands can utilize to create more personalized experiences and content to a hyper-targeted set of consumers. But, if you talk to a university data science professor or someone at Amazon or the NSA, they would say we as an industry are not even scratching the surface of what can be done with this technology and because of this I truly believe that everyone is going to have a different version of the definition.

Jason Herndon, director of technology innovation at Rain
AI is anytime we use technology to solve human problems that in the past, only humans could have solved. The litmus test for AI should include, at some point, a measure of the amount of our lives it’s given back to us.

The post From neural nets to autonomous machine learning algorithms: The many different ways marketers define AI appeared first on Digiday.

Media buyers gathered in New Orleans Monday for the Digiday Media Buying Summit. Over closed-door town hall sessions and working groups, they discussed everything from the waning relevance of the agency to clients increasingly caring about where their ad dollars were going. Here are highlights, edited for clarity.

Clients are getting smarter
“Clients are getting more educated. The worst is when a client is just educated enough to be dangerous. If they know too little, that’s fine. If they know too much, also OK because we have high-level discussions.”

“The silver lining to anything going in-house is they still keep us around for part of the buying process like inventory management. The nice thing is we now have someone on the client side who knows what it’s like.”

“We are at the bottom of the dredges of the ocean when it comes to what really impacts our business. We don’t have enough high-level conversations. We need to ask ‘what are we fighting for?’ with clients. If you want to do this yourself, fine, go, take it.”

“It’s also related to more scrutiny over digital as a channel. Clients are back to ‘why am I putting X amount of my budget into this when TV for instance, you know what you’re getting.’ With fraud, it opens up a Pandora’s Box. It’s not new, but there is more sensitivity around clients’ part with digital as a channel.”

“What I’ve seen is, because of digital, we have all these analytics they love to talk about, they dive even deeper into this. Before it was them saying, ‘These numbers look right.’ Now it’s, ‘I gave you metrics for digital campaigns,’ and they ask, ‘Are you sure?’ Because we gave them a little bit, they want to take a mile, and that’s accelerated the conversation to ‘ad fraud is real, can I even believe the impressions you’re telling me?’”

“We’re being scrutinized as a space because we’re giving a little bit more data now because we have more analytics. It’s broadly a blessing and a curse of digital.”

“If you’re asking agencies to do disparate separate parts of what’s driving business outcomes, you’re never going to get best performance. You’re always looking at numbers in a vacuum.”

“The in-house thing isn’t really happening. What is happening is that clients are trying to take media buying in-house, then flaming out.”

Vendor bashing
“One of the things we’ve done with vendors is we ask a series of questions to them like who is in their site list, transparency, what percentage of CPM is going toward the buy and how much is going to the tech. And we ask what is your testing threshold from a budget perspective? What is your minimum? We always lowball. If they balk at it, we say ‘thank you’ and continue on.”

“The minimum-spend thing is a fake. I don’t want to start spending $30,000 or $40,000 on a test that doesn’t work. And they’re not even real.”

“We basically say, ‘Sorry we can’t buy that’ to Facebook if we can’t see who is in their network. They know the answer is going to be ‘no’ unless they work on this stuff.”

Publishers don’t care
“Publisher lack of concern over viewability and fraud. With the whole fraud and viewability conversation, it’s laughable to me that publishers come back to me and say we hit 70 percent viewable, but only 13 percent of the time. You are off my plan. We tried the GroupM 100 percent viewability thing, and people literally turned away. They don’t even care. There’s this lack of concern from publishers.”

“I think that ads.txt is in preliminary stages, and a lot of partners aren’t even fully integrated at this point. A lot of them are getting there. It’s on the pub side to make that integration, and so patience is the only thing to have.”

“GDPR was set up as a trap for Google and Facebook, but instead what it’s done has made it really hard for publishers to sell advertising.”

“I always want cool buzzworthy stuff. Our planners will go to publishers, and they’ll just give us more standard things. They never want to brainstorm with us. When we’re giving pubs free license to go crazy and push the envelope, we just get pushback.”

Fraud is still real
“It’s a mess out there. Most people have good intentions, but there are so many instances of getting spoofed, or running outside where it was agreed to run.”

“Even with some of the best things in place, campaigns are still crap.”

The post The candid thoughts of media buyers: ‘We’re being scrutinized’ appeared first on Digiday.

On March 1 at Attn, a social video news startup, a couple dozen staffers in the L.A. headquarters got an email summoning them to a meeting. The all-caps subject line: “February views emergency meeting.” The month had just ended, and Facebook’s January news-feed change to prioritize user posts had taken its toll on viral publishers.

Attn has become a top video producer on Facebook with 222 million views in January, per Tubular Labs, being named the No. 1 social publisher in 2016 by Newswhip for its highly shared posts, and seemed to weather algorithm changes with breezy confidence in the past. But views and engagements had dropped sharply in the past three months, per CrowdTangle, and this meeting took a dark tone, one exec referring to the “chaos” with the algorithm and saying the company has to care about views “to stay afloat as a company.”

Producers and editors went back to their desks with orders to focus on tactics that had reliably generated the high engagement that Facebook said it was now prioritizing. But not everyone was convinced these moves would work given Facebook seemed to be changing the rules.

The Facebook change is a defining moment for publishers like Attn that built their businesses on the social media platform, but now find themselves scrambling now that Facebook has changed the rules of what it wants. The collapse of LittleThings last week is a stark reminder that depending on Facebook is, to put it mildly, a risky proposition. A parlor game has sprung up around what fast-growth Facebook-dependent publisher is next to melt down.

Attn co-founder Matthew Segal said in an interview that the company was not caught off guard by the recent algorithm change — Facebook’s been inching away from publisher content for over a year — and that the meeting was just aimed at discussing how to improve the quality of Attn’s videos. He said its interaction rate on videos, which has always been most important to Attn, is still better than its peers. “We’ve never been in the raw views business. We’ve always been in the engagement business.”

Segal and co-founder Jarrett Moreno, with whom he started a voting empowerment nonprofit in 2011, created Attn in 2014 to engage millennials with politics and social issues in an approachable style — an origins tale not that dissimilar to Upworthy’s. The company has raised $25 million in funding from investors including Ryan Seacrest and Bill Maher, enabling it to grow to 130 employees.

Attn has done stories about America’s teacher shortage and kids speaking out against gun violence and aren’t above leveraging celebrities like Zooey Deschanel and Jessica Alba to maximize attention to Facebook shows. The content veers to serious topics — you won’t find weird product videos or hands-and-pans food clips. Last year, the company laid off four writers to focus entirely on video views, the vast majority of which take place on Facebook.

“We were almost entirely dependent on Facebook,” said a former staffer at Attn, of the company in 2017. “There was almost no effort to drive people to the main Attn website. We really had very little presence on Twitter or any other social network. It was Facebook or bust.”

Segal stressed that Attn is on its way to diversifying into originals and series for TV and Facebook Watch, having just renewed a show, “We Need to Talk,” selling a news documentary pilot to Showtime and announcing a series with Paramount Television based on an Attn show, “America Versus.” Those efforts all together contribute 30 percent of the company revenue, Segal said. Another 30 percent comes from consulting, and 40 percent comes from branded content. Segal wouldn’t get into specifics about the company’s finances but said it’s “getting very close to profitability.”

“As long as Facebook emphasizes getting people back to the platform, Attn’s performance on news feed will continue to be good,” said Jake McGraw, Attn’s CTO. “We’re using our success on Facebook to move into other areas.”

Still, if successful engagement on Facebook is the selling point for publishers like Attn that are trying to sell their video content to other platforms, it’s going to be hard to keep that business model going if Facebook chokes off Attn’s reach along with other publishers.

The problem is, Facebook hasn’t been a reliable monetization partner for publishers, and it can take a long time to make real money by developing shows with other platforms. Facebook Watch video revenue is often slow to grow on other platforms.

Attn has taken steps to diversify its audience, but it’s hard for social publishers to kick the Facebook habit, given its vast user base. As Segal said on the Digiday Podcast last November, trying to direct audiences back to your own website is a “losing strategy.” Relying on access to Facebook’s audience is looking like not much of a winner, either.

Attn has other issues of concern. Seacrest is fighting sexual harassment claims. Closer to home, Maher is the subject of a lawsuit filed by a former employee who alleges that she was fired after complaining about Maher using the “N” word in his series. (Attn said she was let go as part of a shift in strategy.) At a companywide meeting March 2, executives said they were monitoring the Seacrest situation, according to those present. “Ryan Seacrest and Bill Maher are two of many shareholders and have nothing to do with Attn’s day-to-day operations,” a spokesperson said.

So for the foreseeable future, Attn is far from giving up on Facebook. “We’ve always been conscious of the fact that we need to take a diversified approach,” Segal said. “Still,” he said, “the best place to build an audience from scratch is Facebook, and Facebook wants meaningful interactions. We’re still leaning into Facebook as a place to win.”

The post ‘Facebook or bust’: Facebook publisher Attn stands its ground after news-feed change appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers like to talk about the value of user experience, but not all are willing to take the short-term revenue hit necessary to improve it. Le Monde took the leap and lived to tell about it.

The leading French newspaper shed 40 percent of its ad inventory last September, and after losing €800,000 ($985,000) over the following four months, it has recouped the revenue.

Along with reducing its ad inventory, Le Monde also shed 12 ad tech vendor partners, including Teads, Advideum, Mobvalue and Sublime Skinz, an action it took alongside fellow national Le Figaro as part of their alliance, Skyline. The Skyline initiative, aimed at providing bigger reach to compete for ad spending with Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, generates 35 million unique users, according to Médiamétrie, an audience measurement and survey company. After shedding the vendors, both Le Figaro and Le Monde saw video revenue increase by 50 percent. Le Monde is now getting video ad CPMs of up to €15 ($18), up from around €7 ($9) it was getting before dropping the partners, according to the publisher.

“Our CPMs had been decreasing over time, and we didn’t even know what advertisers were on our sites,” said Laurence Bonicalzi Bridier, president of Le Monde’s ad business, MPublicité.

The ad inventory culling and the dropping of vendors are two steps Le Monde has taken lately to retake control of its digital ad business and improving the ad formats it sells, while guaranteeing clients brand-safe, high-viewability environments. Le Monde stopped running a mix of video and display ad formats including intrusive ones like interstitials that fill the screen.

Like many publishers that have embraced programmatic advertising over the past few years, Le Monde had increased the number of ad tech vendors that could plug into its site to sell inventory. As a result, the newspaper lost visibility and control of what ads were appearing on its own pages. With around 40 percent of the publisher’s ads being supplied via third-party exchanges, it also became impossible to forecast monthly revenue, according to Bonicalzi Bridier.

“Some vendors were aggregators,” said Bonicalzi Bridier, “so only a small percentage [of a brand’s campaign] was on our site; about 80 percent would be on less premium sites. The user experience was a nightmare and not as premium as we want it at Le Monde, so we had to take action.”

The post Le Monde’s culling of vendors and ad slots doubles video ad CPMs appeared first on Digiday.

Trinity Mirror’s latest earnings call March 5 revealed another news publisher facing the structural challenges of falling print revenues and platforms like Google and Facebook sucking up the majority of digital ad growth.

The group cut costs of £20 million ($28 million) as revenue declined 12.6 percent in 2017 from the year before, to £632 million ($876 million). The earnings call was the company’s first since its long-expected acquisition of the Northern & Shell’s Express newspapers for £126.7 million ($176 million). Consolidation is a way to cut further costs and grow audience, but whether it’s enough to help a legacy publishing group thrive remains to be seen.

Here are four challenges that the acquisition highlights about the shrinking newspaper industry.

The need to diversify
Publishers are wary of being too reliant on too few revenue streams. While Trinity Mirror is a top 10 U.K. news site, according to comScore, it’s been hard to effectively monetize this digital audience, with digital ads — which include revenue from video, programmatic and digital marketing services — making up 10 percent of the group’s total revenue. According to Alex DeGroote, media analyst at Cenkos Securities, Trinity Mirror’s acquisition of classified companies like TotallyLegal.com and TotallyFinancial.com, have not helped grow the publisher’s classified revenue, which is just 2 percent of total revenue. The publisher hasn’t responded to requests for comment. More events, content verticals and ticketing services are in the pipeline for 2018, however.

Publishers are no match for the duopoly’s reach
The merger puts Trinity Mirror on a more even playing field with other publishing groups. Trinity Mirror is changing its name to Reach, lest anyone miss the point, but name changes, often forgotten or mocked (see Tronc, Tegna) are rarely a huge success, and reach isn’t a point of differentiation in the duopoly’s shadow.

“It’s a misnomer that doesn’t reflect the origins of Fleet Street’s papers,” said DeGroote. “While Trinity Mirror has a valuable, sizeable audience, the biggest advertisers are moving toward more measurable media models, and newspapers don’t stack up there.”

The threat of homogenization
Managing three national titles — The Daily Mirror, the Express and Star — with different demographics and histories will be a challenge in allocating resource while cutting costs. On the earnings call March 5, chief executive Simon Fox said each paper’s front pages and politics will remain distinct, but content production for sections like sports will be centralized.

“This is the thin end of the wedge before centralizing more aspects,” said DeGroote. “Each title could end up losing its distinction for advertisers and readers.”

Collaboration has its limitations
Facing strong headwinds, some publishers agree that by working together, they are stronger than alone when up against Facebook and Google. Unfortunately, fiefdoms exist within ad sales, and publisher consortiums face recurring challenges, even if this does make buying at scale more convenient for advertisers. When Trinity Mirror acquired Local World it pulled the publisher out of 1XL, a regional newspaper programmatic ad sales alliance.

“The paradox is that it’s known it’s a dying industry,” said DeGroote. “Yet The Mirror could still compete with The Sun rather than working together as a consortium, leading to downward ad pressure.”

The post What Trinity Mirror’s consolidation signals about the UK news industry appeared first on Digiday.

As a sports league that both produces a ton of its own content and needs to market its brand to younger and newer fans, NASCAR exists as both a publisher and a marketer. It’s forced the league to restructure how it approaches its editorial and marketing content internally.

Last summer, NASCAR created a new 40-person content strategy group to oversee the league’s editorial and content marketing operations. Previously, NASCAR had separate teams dedicated to its website, social pages, video production, creative design, advertising partners and entertainment marketing efforts. These were individual business units, with their own, often overlapping goals, which created natural inefficiencies with how NASCAR created and distributed videos and other content across platforms.

“Entertainment marketing would come up with a project that they thought was good for entertainment marketing, and then they would tell the social team to share the video, but there were no conversations about whether that video even made sense for our social audience,” said Evan Parker, managing director of content strategy for NASCAR. “Even if it was something as simple as getting referrals back to the website — the social team is trying to build as big a following on social platforms as they can, and sometimes referring people back to the website doesn’t make sense.”

The new group, which is overseen by Parker, was created to oversee all of NASCR’s digital and social content and marketing efforts. It consists of the previous teams as well as six new digital content producers with backgrounds in writing and video production and editing. NASCAR’s TV production team and entertainment marketing team still exist as separate units, but have several staffers embedded within the content strategy group and participate in the group’s daily meetings every morning, Parker said.

A big focus for the content strategy group is to develop new projects that help bring the sport closer to new and younger fans across different platforms, according to Jill Gregory, CMO of NASCAR.

“Content strategy plays a major role and now we’re able to be smarter about it and funnel resources into channels like Snapchat’s Our Stories that expose our brand to [younger] audiences,” she said.

In addition to a deal with Snap to produce and curate four public stories during NASCAR races this year, NASCAR recently sold a show for Facebook Watch, which aired on the platform last month. The docu-series, called “Behind the Wall: Bubba Wallace,” which chronicled the racer’s preparation for and performance at his first Daytona 500. The series collected nearly 5.3 million video views on Facebook Watch across its eight episodes.

Other projects the content strategy group is involved with include the “Glass Case of Emotion” podcast hosted by driver Ryan Blaney and a YouTube talk show with driver Austin Dillon.

As Parker described it, the Facebook Watch show is a direct byproduct of the entertainment marketing team, which is routinely pitching TV and digital video series in the market, collaborating with the NASCAR productions unit and NASCAR’s social team, which oversees the relationship with Facebook.

“Bring those three together and we now have knowledge on how to sell a show, how to create content for social platforms and the ability to actually create high-quality content,” said Parker. “It’s not something that would have been easy to do in the old model because those three teams would not be talking to each other as they are doing every day today.”

Up next for NASCAR: ramping up its ability to create even more digital and social videos. The league is currently building a new digital and social studio space at its Charlotte headquarters.

It’s a necessary move for NASCAR. Just like with other American sports and linear TV in general, the league’s TV ratings are down. This year’s Daytona 500 drew 5.6 million TV viewers, down 15 percent from the previous year.

“People are getting their info elsewhere; they’re streaming content or following along on Facebook and Twitter, instead of being parked in front of a TV,” Parker said. “It’s a trend that’s probably going to continue. If we didn’t adapt, we would be left behind.”

The post NASCAR revamps its content group to meld edit and content marketing appeared first on Digiday.

Spike Jonze has long been deeply embedded in the dance world. He explored movement in everything from the Fatboy Slim videos he helped to choreograph in the late ’90s, to Levi’s “Crazy Legs” commercial a few years later, all the way up to the famous 2016 Kenzo film he directed starring Margaret Qualley–which was a…

Sure, children are the future, but perhaps even more so, parents are the future. Now that Gen Z is growing up, how can brands access the ever-changing demo and target them as parents? Pregnancy and parenting organization BabyCenter teamed up with insights and strategy company Collage Group on a study analyzing the future of families…

In the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, movie buffs were surprised to find IMDb pages popping up online and unexpected trailers dropping for what appeared to be a reboot of Crocodile Dundee. The trailers for Dundee looked expertly shot, with a dazzling cast of Danny McBride and Chris Hemsworth to match. Viewers soon…

Bette Nesmith Graham was in a terrible fix. It was 1954, and the Texas Bank and Trust, where she worked as a secretary, had just replaced its old manual typewriters with new IBM electrics. Graham had never been a great typist in the first place, and the IBM machines’ feather-touch keys caused her to make…