Author: rssmasher

Vince McMahon, the wrestling impresario/CEO of WWE, is trying again — with the XFL, which ran for one season in 2001. Why will it work this time? Well, for one thing, he says TV ratings don’t matter
that much.

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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Guillaume Marcerou, global privacy director at Criteo. When General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect on May 25, it will unify the various data privacy laws that exist across… Continue reading »

The post An Evolution, Not A Revolution: Underscoring The Nuances Of GDPR appeared first on AdExchanger.

Other than NFL playoff games, there’s no bigger annual spotlight for CBS than the Grammy Awards, which airs Sunday. Last year’s show was 2017’s No. 9 most-watched single telecast by Nielsen, with 27.6 million viewers in Nielsen’s live-plus-seven ratings. It was the only non-sports entry on the top 10 list (other than The Oscars on…

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While most agencies are still trying to wrap their heads around programmatic, digital agency Essence is expanding into the linear world. When it launched as a digital agency in 2005, Essence didn’t bother investing in traditional media, said Global CEO Christian Juhl. Instead, it would wait until traditional media became digitized and the market naturally… Continue reading »

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A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. You The User Google announced major changes to its advertising control features. Users can now see brands that are targeting them for retargeting campaigns – what Google calls “reminder ads” – and decide whether to shut them down. Next it will expand the tool… Continue reading »

The post Google Adds Retargeting Controls; Ebiquity Joins Marketing Tech Fray appeared first on AdExchanger.

Bloomberg is seeing early signs of success one month after launching TicToc, the business publisher’s 24/7 news network exclusive to Twitter.

The channel broadcasts breaking news reported by its own staff around the world, mixed with video, images and polls taken from Twitter users. According to Bloomberg, TicToc averages 750,000 daily views and plans to reach 2 million a day within the next few months. Since it launched Dec. 18, TicToc has had 50 million tweet impressions. But the publisher said the metric it’s most interested in monitoring is followers of its Twitter account, which currently stand at 119,000.

“Twitter is such a fragmented platform; there are so many voices and publishers on it,” said Scott Havens, global head of digital at Bloomberg Media. “As we build our relationship with users, our ability to connect with them is vastly improved if they are following us. The core goal is to drive that number up.”

The average person spends less than two minutes on Twitter per visit but will return frequently during the day. As such, time spent is not yet a crucial metric. Bloomberg would divulge neither how frequently people return nor the financial terms of its partnership with Twitter.

TicToc’s coverage is broader than Bloomberg’s usual wheelhouse of markets and finance news and targeted to a younger audience of 25- to 35-year-olds. Popular features include red-carpet events, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch and the Winter Olympics. Half of TicToc’s audience comes from outside the U.S., so it tends not to focus on the latest U.S. politics news.

TicToc has three coverage formats: a five-minute segment on global news at the top of each hour, contextual videos that could break down a conversation around a series of events and live coverage. During live coverage, producers pull in live contextual information, showing related tweets or polls, for instance. Live coverage of British Prime Minister Theresa May at Davos could be paired with tweets from foreign secretary Boris Johnson, for example. Because of the small size of mobile screens, TicToc avoids talking heads.

Twitter has struck deals with media companies like BuzzFeed, Cheddar and Global. BuzzFeed’s hourlong morning news show, “AM to DM,” launched last September and averaged 1 million daily views by October, according to the publisher. Meanwhile, Cheddar claims 200 million to 250 million monthly views across all platforms and counts Twitter as its most important social network live partner. Bloomberg’s TicToc Twitter account has more followers than both the “AM to DM” and Cheddar accounts, but Havens acknowledges Bloomberg has spent a lot on marketing the channel across its own properties, Twitter and elsewhere.

Along with platforms like Snapchat and Apple News, Twitter has an opportunity to cozy up to publishers where Facebook has disappointed them. “Publishers are almost uniformly disappointed with platform relations, but we’ve only been positively surprised,” said Havens. “For successful platform partnerships, the financial arrangement has to be symbiotic.”

TicToc launched with seven brand sponsors, including AT&T, Infiniti and Goldman Sachs, for a range of custom integrations, like messaging integrated into the TicToc Twitter feed, sponsored segments and end cards showing the sponsor name. Sponsors also buy ads through Twitter Amplify for TicToc video clips. The ad buys range from $1.5 million to $3 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Based on the numbers to date, Havens said TicToc will likely break even or make a profit within its first year.

TicToc has scope beyond an ad-driven model, said Havens, explaining that the channel will expand beyond Twitter. “We’re creating the next-generation news network, not just on Twitter but in the world,” he said. “We’ll evolve the product to have a program that feels linear but is modern in its approach to the linear flow.”

By the end of April, Bloomberg plans to hire around 10 more people for TicToc across its New York City, London and Hong Kong offices to fill production, editing, audience development and social media roles, bringing the number of people dedicated to TicToc to around 50. Bloomberg’s global reporters already contribute to TicToc, but London and Hong Kong will shoulder more of the programming within their respective time zones. Bloomberg has hired people from BuzzFeed, Vice, CBS Interactive, Cheddar and NowThis for the team.

The post Bloomberg’s Twitter network TicToc is getting 750,000 daily views appeared first on Digiday.

The reader contribution model is paying off for the Guardian US. After years of bleeding red ink, the 10-year-old U.S. outpost of the British newspaper is about to get in the black after having surpassed 300,000 supporters that account for one-third of its revenue.

“It is a textbook turnaround,” said Evelyn Webster, who became CEO of the Guardian’s US and Australia operations in December after serving as interim US CEO since January 2017.

The US is tracking the performance of the parent company, where reader revenue now surpasses that of ad revenue and which expects to break even by 2019 as part of a three-year cost-cutting plan. Overall, the Guardian had 800,000 global contributors as of last October, which includes print and web subscribers in the U.K. The move into the black was helped, of course, by cost cutting; Guardian US is down to around 80 employees from 140, and it abandoned plans to decamp to Brooklyn’s Dumbo for a WeWork space near New York City’s unfashionable Herald Square.

When Webster arrived, Guardian US was primarily ad-driven; philosophically, the Guardian has eschewed the more common paywall model because it believes its journalism should be as widely accessible as possible. Now, half the revenue comes from advertising, one-third from individual contributions and the rest from philanthropic donations that are earmarked for U.S. editorial coverage. Advertising continues to grow, driven by programmatic and native ads, but at this pace, Webster believes reader revenue will surpass advertising in 18 months.

The strong U.S. contribution to the Guardian’s reader revenue — more than half of the Guardian’s global revenue from one-off contributions came from the U.S. — reflects a cultural difference that the Guardian is eager to exploit.

“Americans are more inclined to give,” Webster said. “The cultural act of giving isn’t necessarily transactional. People tend to give without any expectation of anything in return.”

Guardian US has benefited from the Trump bump that’s driven readership and subscriptions for The New York Times, The New Yorker and others. But while that support has leveled off elsewhere, reader support for Guardian US has continued, as the publisher has launched editorial series on the threat to public lands, environmental threats and other subjects it considers to be undercovered, to test people’s willingness to support specific coverage areas. (The benefits go beyond reader revenue; the public lands series ended up attracting advertising and grant money, too, Webster said.)

“Trump is not the only reason. Our desire to cover those subjects marries with what the readers are looking for and are proving themselves more inclined to support,” she said.

The challenge with one-off contributions is replenishing them. Most of the 300,000 US supporters (230,000) are one-off contributions; the rest are recurring subscribers. The reader support is mostly one-offs because the ability to make recurring contributions was just added a few months ago. The plan is to move people toward recurring contributions, which creates a more predictable revenue stream.

To that end, Guardian US has two people dedicated to reader revenue, which it plans to double to four in the next fiscal year starting in April. They’re identifying topics U.S. readers care about and are more inclined to support with their wallets, and they’re testing everything about the way it solicits contributions, from the color to placement to language of the message, which is typically British in its politeness, from a U.S. audience.

“We could be a little bit more assertive in the way we canvass,” Webster, a U.K. native, acknowledged.

Every publisher seeking reader revenue has to face the question of where the ceiling is. Webster believes Guardian US has a lot of growth ahead as it finds more progressive readers and gets better at moving people to recurring contributions. “At some point we may max out, but I think we’re far, far away from that right now.”

The post How the Guardian US got profitable: pivoting from ads to reader revenue (and cutting costs) appeared first on Digiday.

Of all agency jobs, community managers — those that manage a brand’s presence on social media — often find themselves at the bottom of the totem pole, saddled with mundane tasks like sharing pre-written posts on social media and responding to user complaints or Twitter trolls.

The community manager toils in the content mines with little fanfare. Community managers, which Glassdoor says earn less than $50,000 on average, are often not highly valued, with many agencies hiring them as part-timers or adding responsibilities outside of social media to their role, like copywriting or distribution planning. But now, community managers are in the spotlight, following Facebook’s announcement that its news feed will favor user updates and content that elicits comments and “engagement.”

Facebook’s change to its news-feed algorithm effectively means that posts that receive more comments carry more weight than ever, reducing likes and shares to vanity metrics. The change has made agencies realize they must devote more resources to cultivating conversations within comment threads.

“Brands and media outlets that acclimate to Facebook’s new focus on ‘meaningful social interactions’ will have an even greater need for community management, as users tend to comment more on content that sparks emotional reaction — good, bad or otherwise,” said Brad Wellen, group director of social media at Huge.

Leah Voskuil is one of six community managers at Brooklyn-based marketing agency AGW whose roles are evolving to be more substantial. Overall, Voskuil said the community manager role is becoming “a lot less junior” and much more than simply “putting up a post and walking away.”

For instance, before Facebook announced the news-feed change on Jan. 11, Voskuil’s day consisted of communicating with users across the agency’s social channels — mostly by sharing posts on topics such as a brand’s history or product issues and starting one-on-one conversations with users that addressed their concerns or compliments. After finishing those tasks, she would work with the agency in other areas like strategy and copywriting. Now, her job involves a lot more responsibilities.

Specifically for Facebook, instead of concentrating on responding to users’ remarks, she actively works to generate conversation within Facebook comment threads, where engagement can truly happen. Voskuil’s job is also expanding into crisis management. She now acts as a liaison between the agency’s integrations department and the public relations team to come up with possible scenarios to ensure only positive engagement positions brands at the top of the news feed.

“It’s no longer enough just to respond to a user’s tweet who has a question and say, ‘please DM us,’ and put that discussion off to the side,” said Voskuil, who wouldn’t say how much she earns or whether she will receive a raise. “It requires a lot more attention to detail. Everything I do is public, and I need to be anticipating any direction when a comment thread might be going sideways. I’m designated as a community manager, but I’m really talking to everyone because this is an all-hands-on-deck change.”

Agencies that don’t have full-time community managers will struggle with Facebook’s changes, said Adam Gorode, CEO at AGW. “In today’s agency landscape, you end up with a lot of companies that see social management and PR as auxiliary services,” he said. “The roles have to be full-time. If somebody is doing this part time as part of an agency, they probably aren’t doing the job well.”

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