Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
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A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem… AdExchanger: Origins AdExchanger: Crisis In Ad City (Part I) AdExchanger: Crisis In Ad City (Part II) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part I) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part II) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (Part III) AdExchanger: Enter Malware (The Conclusion) AdExchanger: Angels And Startups AdExchanger: Rumble In Arbitrage Plaza… Continue reading »
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Programmatic Pushback The news company Quartz released a memo on Thursday laying out an anti-programmatic stance on advertising. “In a bygone era, advertisers wished to align with and support what they perceived as quality content,” writes Quartz publisher Jay Lauf. “That idea has eroded… Continue reading »
Every year, a number of things die in media and marketing. This year, we thought we’d switch up the year-end prediction tradition, and ask people in those industries to tell us what they think will kick the bucket in the coming year. We granted sources anonymity so they could speak freely. Here are their responses.
Referral traffic: “In the short term, Facebook will be a worse partner before they’re a better partner. They’re confused right now. They had a shitty year. When you’re confused and scared, you go back to your comfort zone, and that’s peer to peer. I think they’re going to go, ‘This news thing is harder than it looks.’ But fundamentally, Facebook is a way less interesting place without premium content.” — Digital publisher
The 30-second digital video ad: “We’ll see ad length decrease to meet the demands of short-form video viewers. Six- to 15-second ads will dominate by the end of 2018.” — Video platform vendor
Facebook Watch: “Facebook will abandon the Watch strategy and reinvent a digital product yet again. They’ve literally abandoned every single video strategy in the past three years. None of the Watch shows are making money. People asked to produce content for Watch are not going to see enough ROI for it, and this mid-roll experiment is going to be a massive failure because users aren’t going to engage with mid-roll advertising. Getting people to consume video is the easy part. Getting people to stick around when you’re jamming in a mid-roll ad isn’t.” — Digital publishing exec
Fake influencers: “Bullshit poseurs who have built up their followers by buying them and baiting them, and then rip off the brands who pay them for influencer campaigns that don’t generate any results. The brands are getting too smart for this shit.” — Influencer marketer
BuzzFeed’s commitment to news: “BuzzFeed will divest one of its business to a legacy media company, most likely BuzzFeed News. Running a news organization is expensive and they have always struggled with monetizing it versus their lighter content, and the recent layoffs have refocused the company into building fast, efficient businesses like Tasty. BuzzFeed News would be a bounty to a legacy organization looking to jump-start their journalistic footprint against younger audiences. The most likely buyer will be NBCU because of the existing relationships, but what about the soon-to-be-merged Disney/Fox or even the eventually merged AT&T?” — Publishing sales exec
The independent media company: “That can’t last. Everyone will figure out a way to partner up with someone to get through the tough times, or bigger companies will snap them them up. Maybe NowThis picks up Mic. All these digital media companies raised so much money, they have amazing cost structures. It’s a downside to all the VCs and people who get laid off, but it’s necessary for the vitality of the space.” — Digital media operator
The cold war between Facebook and Google: “In the way Facebook came after YouTube, YouTube will hit back, along with Google, with things like better products, better monetization for publishers. Publishers had 45 percent referral traffic from Facebook and 34 percent from Google, and now that’s reversed. Google is the friend to publishers, and Google is going to keep on it and hit back. Zuck is in for a bit of a fight.” — Platform partnerships exec
AdExchanger |
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Erik Requidan, vice president of programmatic strategy at Intermarkets. In September, I wrote a column that introduced the idea of demand-path optimization, the process by which publishers optimize the path from supply-side platforms (SSPs),… Continue reading »
Papa John’s founder and chief executive officer John Schnatter announced that he will step down from his role in January 2018.
The news comes two months after openly criticizing NFL players for protests against police brutality during the national anthem. The pizza chain, an NFL sponsor and advertiser, had seen its quarterly revenues fall since the football season started, with “significant decline” in TV ratings being blamed for the losses.
According to the Associated Press (AP), Schnatter’s post as chairman (he is also the largest shareholder of the chain) remains intact. Steve Ritchie, the brand’s chief operating officer, will replace Schnatter in the top role. Ritchie said there is no word on whether Schnatter will remain the brand’s spokesperson.
Papa John’s recently underwent a creative review that saw the likes of Grey, BBDO New York, and Laundry Service competing for the business. Chief marketing officer Brandon Rhoten announced the winner of the pitch, Laundry Service via Twitter:
Excited to announce we have chosen @247LS as @PapaJohns Creative AOR. Watch your 6, cheap pizza guys. 😉
— Brandon Rhoten (@brhoten) October 31, 2017
Ritchie, who began his career at Papa John’s making pizzas and answering customer phone calls 21 years ago, said that the brand looks to compete with Domino’s, as well as other fast food brands by making it easier for customers to order a pizza from multiple platforms. The brand currently allows customers to order from Facebook and Apple TV.
Christmas is not an official holiday in Japan, nor a widely observed religious holiday, but it is celebrated nonetheless in its own unique way. Here’s some data that highlights Christmas in Japan.
Christmas is not an official holiday in Japan, nor a widely observed religious holiday, but it is celebrated nonetheless in its own unique way. Here’s some data that highlights Christmas in Japan.
Thanks to digital skullduggery, brand safety remains hotter than the devil’s anvil.
From the stump speeches of Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard to the role of ad tech in funding misleading content to YouTube’s multiple ad scandals, the perils of digital media buying were on full display throughout 2017. Here are five charts that summarize the state of brand safety.
Brands claim responsibility
Whether you’re examining brand safety, fraud or data leakage, there’s plenty of blame to go around the complex ad-supply chain whenever a snafu arises. But brands have more to lose than others if their ads appear next to questionable content.
A survey of 30 brand marketers by Digiday+ showed that brands place more responsibility on themselves than on agencies, vendors or publishers, when it comes to maintaining brand safety. Marc Goldberg, CEO of anti-ad fraud vendor Trust Metrics, said brand advertisers should be leading the conversation on brand safety because if they don’t care about it, nobody else will.
YouTube’s brand pullouts
In March, brands like AT&T and Verizon took their ads off YouTube after The Times of London published an exposé that showed brand ads appearing in videos that promoted terrorism. Although most of the brands that pulled their ads from YouTube were back on the platform within a few months, posturing surrounding this event catapulted brand safety into elite buzzword territory.
The concept of brand safety has been around for years, but as seen in the Google Trends graph below, searches for brand safety peaked in March.
Violent content is widespread
From drugs to piracy to sex, there is a lot of content on the internet that advertisers try to distance themselves from. Violence is the category that ad-verification company Integral Ad Science blocks, most often for brand-safety reasons, for its advertiser clients.
Travis Lusk, vp of global sales strategy at IAS, said advertisers aren’t necessarily more sensitive to violence in content than they are to sex content or illegal downloads. Compared to other touchy topics, there just happens to be more content across the web that gets categorized as violent.
Brand-safety tactics
In November, video ad platform Teads surveyed 100 CMOs and vps at large brands about brand safety. Nearly 80 percent of them said they are more concerned about brand safety than ever before.
About half of the survey respondents said they had reviewed their agency and vendor contracts over the past year. More than a third said they layered on more third-party ad measurement to their campaigns.
“Marketers are stepping up to take control over the way their money is spent,” said Forrester analyst Susan Bidel.
Programmatic perils
IAS found that across display and video for both mobile and desktop, programmatic buys have a greater likelihood of exposing brands to unsafe content than direct buys. This makes sense, given that with direct deals, brands know who they are working with. Programmatic platforms, on the other hand, are engineered to bring ads to thousands of publishers simultaneously, and the long-tail sites featured on these platforms offer cheap scale at the price of appearing next to low-quality or sensational content.
As Pritchard noted in a recent interview with Digiday: “We’ve still got to do work on brand safety.”
2017 might be remembered as the year that publishers got more serious about things like commerce, events and other lines of non-advertising revenue. But everybody who took their first step into those waters will have a long way to go to catch up to PopSugar, which has had commerce at the heart of its operation almost since its founding 11 years ago.
The company’s co-founder and president, Lisa Sugar, hopped on the phone with Digiday to discuss the evolution of content and commerce, how branded content will change in 2018 and what it means that Amazon is now more engaged in media and marketing. The conversation has been condensed for brevity.
Give me two things we’ll see more of in media in 2018.
Experiential and offline media extensions are going to continue to explode. I would also say licensing and brand extensions, going back to the days of Martha Stewart.
Give me two things we’ll see less of in 2018.
Less display. That’ll continue to go away. Also, there will be less companies. I think some of these places will not make it another year.
The easiest way for a lifestyle publisher to diversify its revenues in 2018 will be ______.
Partnerships. We’re seeing more collaborations among publishers, so they can double up. I’ve been seeing that more and more.
What’s the biggest challenge that lifestyle publishers will face in 2018?
Continued differentiation.
Lot of publishers took steps toward diversifying revenue away from advertising. You’ve been doing this for a while. What does it say that people are moving in this direction, and what do you think about the prospect of more competition?
I think it’s fine that more people are playing. It’s going to be about staying ahead. One of the things we’re going to be doing next year is launching a beauty line through Ulta. It takes the brand from a marketing perspective into 300 stores in our top DMAs. It’s one thing to send off clicks and get affiliate links. Anyone can do that now. Anyone can start their own page and do that. It’s how you continue to stay ahead of everybody else.
Do the publishers that are just moving in have what it takes to do that?
I think what’s important to our brand is that they really trust us. Just having the right angle of knowing what we’re asking them to spend money on is something we’d take very seriously. A lot of other places might just be rushing after the trend or the hot topic, not caring what they’re putting out there.
What’s your big takeaway from branded content this year that will inform what you do next year?
I love that we’re working with brands that are really becoming more partners. It’s less transactional. For good or bad, we really get to understand each other, sharing data and building a better product. That to me is very exciting. Getting to that point takes a while. There’s always learnings when you grow departments really quickly and scaling. But when it works, it really works.
Both marketers and publishers say they want to do more with fewer partners next year. What gets you on an advertiser’s short list?
People are going to look at scale and reach. They’re going to look at engagements. Just to get that RFP in the first place, you need to hit some numbers to show that we check that box for the client. I feel for our sales and creative teams. All day long, they have to come up with the biggest and best idea that’s never been brought to them before. It’s not an easy job. I don’t envy what those guys do, but we do have fun really diving into what needs to get done.
Facebook and Google are being more proactive and offering more assistance in creating content for their platforms. Is 2018 going to be the year when you have to think of them as competitors?
Yes. They’ll definitely be competitors. But they’re still very much a marketer and a partner of ours. We’re selling shows to Facebook Watch. From a marketing perspective and a content perspective, we’ve been able to grow so much because of social.
2017 might be remembered as the year that publishers got more serious about things like commerce, events and other lines of non-advertising revenue. But everybody who took their first step into those waters will have a long way to go to catch up to PopSugar, which has had commerce at the heart of its operation almost since its founding 11 years ago.
The company’s co-founder and president, Lisa Sugar, hopped on the phone with Digiday to discuss the evolution of content and commerce, how branded content will change in 2018 and what it means that Amazon is now more engaged in media and marketing. The conversation has been condensed for brevity.
Give me two things we’ll see more of in media in 2018.
Experiential and offline media extensions are going to continue to explode. I would also say licensing and brand extensions, going back to the days of Martha Stewart.
Give me two things we’ll see less of in 2018.
Less display. That’ll continue to go away. Also, there will be less companies. I think some of these places will not make it another year.
The easiest way for a lifestyle publisher to diversify its revenues in 2018 will be ______.
Partnerships. We’re seeing more collaborations among publishers, so they can double up. I’ve been seeing that more and more.
What’s the biggest challenge that lifestyle publishers will face in 2018?
Continued differentiation.
Lot of publishers took steps toward diversifying revenue away from advertising. You’ve been doing this for a while. What does it say that people are moving in this direction, and what do you think about the prospect of more competition?
I think it’s fine that more people are playing. It’s going to be about staying ahead. One of the things we’re going to be doing next year is launching a beauty line through Ulta. It takes the brand from a marketing perspective into 300 stores in our top DMAs. It’s one thing to send off clicks and get affiliate links. Anyone can do that now. Anyone can start their own page and do that. It’s how you continue to stay ahead of everybody else.
Do the publishers that are just moving in have what it takes to do that?
I think what’s important to our brand is that they really trust us. Just having the right angle of knowing what we’re asking them to spend money on is something we’d take very seriously. A lot of other places might just be rushing after the trend or the hot topic, not caring what they’re putting out there.
What’s your big takeaway from branded content this year that will inform what you do next year?
I love that we’re working with brands that are really becoming more partners. It’s less transactional. For good or bad, we really get to understand each other, sharing data and building a better product. That to me is very exciting. Getting to that point takes a while. There’s always learnings when you grow departments really quickly and scaling. But when it works, it really works.
Both marketers and publishers say they want to do more with fewer partners next year. What gets you on an advertiser’s short list?
People are going to look at scale and reach. They’re going to look at engagements. Just to get that RFP in the first place, you need to hit some numbers to show that we check that box for the client. I feel for our sales and creative teams. All day long, they have to come up with the biggest and best idea that’s never been brought to them before. It’s not an easy job. I don’t envy what those guys do, but we do have fun really diving into what needs to get done.
Facebook and Google are being more proactive and offering more assistance in creating content for their platforms. Is 2018 going to be the year when you have to think of them as competitors?
Yes. They’ll definitely be competitors. But they’re still very much a marketer and a partner of ours. We’re selling shows to Facebook Watch. From a marketing perspective and a content perspective, we’ve been able to grow so much because of social.