The number of American deaths at work from unintentional drug and alcohol overdoses jumped more than 30% in 2016, new government data shows, showing that the U.S. struggle with a deadly opioid epidemic is migrating to the workplace.
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Lotame’s prep for GDPR highlights big changes in data management
As data management platform (DMP) Lotame gears up for compliance with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), some of the far-reaching changes are coming into focus.
First, there’s the matter of tracking consent by users across what General Counsel and VP of Global Privacy Tiffany Morris calls “the chain of custody.” This reaches from the time the user’s data is generated or collected at, say, a publisher’s website, through the various ways in which the data is use
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Equifax and beyond: How data breaches shaped 2017
With so much data being collected, stored and used, it was inevitable that breaches would be on the rise. The year 2017 saw more personally identifiable information (PII) exposed through malicious intent than ever than before.
Equifax and Yahoo led in the headlines, but there were many other notable breaches. As we look back, let’s see what we can learn from them.
Equifax makes all the headlines
Attackers hit more than 145 million Equifax customers this September. They stole names,
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‘Always On’ is at the heart of every ABM strategy — here’s why
As a B2B marketer, you are often caught trying to serve two masters: the need to drive engagement for specific campaigns or periods relative to the business vs. the overall goal to drive persistent ROI throughout the year. In any scenario, it’s becoming more clear that the “campaign” mentality no longer serves.
Even marketing’s cousin, advertising, has evolved. In the age of programmatic and audience-based, data-driven marketing, advertisers have already moved away from the campaign a
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MarTech Today: Lotame’s GDPR prep, data breaches of 2017 & planning a CRM stack upgrade
Here’s our daily recap of what happened in marketing technology, as reported on MarTech Today, Marketing Land and other places across the web.
From MarTech Today:
Lotame’s prep for GDPR highlights big changes in data management
Dec 19, 2017 by Barry Levine
There’s tracking consent, providing data access and minimizing liability. Plus there’s the pending ePrivacy Regulation.
Equifax and beyond: How data breaches shaped 2017
Dec 19, 2017 by Robin Kurzer
Could this be a turn
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Publishers are underwhelmed by the payoff from hitting viewability standards
Publishers are bending to the will of advertisers to make their ads more viewable, but some publishers are finding the payoff isn’t as great as they anticipated.
Over the past year and a half, advertisers have continually pounded their fists, demanding that they’ll only buy ads that are guaranteed to be seen by a user. The push for viewability gave the impression that advertisers would spend branding campaign dollars with publishers that had highly viewable ads, said Erik Requidan, vp of programmatic strategy at Intermarkets, which helps publishers including Drudge Report and The Political Insider market their ad inventory to buyers.
Instead, the sites Requidan works with continue to be relegated to getting performance-based ads, he said. Those sites might see a few dollars increase in their CPMs if they boost their viewability, but big-brand dollars haven’t materialized.
“If something is 90 percent viewable, shouldn’t that unlock a whole lot more money or a bigger price point?” he asked.
When listicle publisher Ranker tweaked its site layout last year, page-load time went down 60 percent and average viewability rates doubled from 35 percent to 70 percent. Those factors helped Ranker increase its average CPMs by about 75 percent, but the prices of its least and most viewable ads don’t differ much.
Ranker’s ad viewability ranges from 62 to 82 percent. But there’s only a 13 percent difference in the CPMs for these ad units, said Ranker CEO Clark Benson. Given how much advertisers and their tech vendors emphasize that campaigns perform better when ads are 80 percent viewable, Benson expected Ranker’s most viewable ad units to command a higher price.
“So far, the promise of viewability quickly filtering out bad actors and improving yields for the good ones seems to be only a half-kept one,” he said.
It’s a similar story elsewhere. Stephanie Layser, vp of ad tech and operations at News Corp, said there’s no significant difference in price between the publisher’s least and most viewable ads. Remedy Health Media, the publisher of health sites like HealthCentral and TheBody.com, has seen little lift in its ad rates since increasing its viewability, said Aryeh Lebeau, evp of client operations there.
Some publishers said they’re satisfied with the pricing lift they’re getting for highly viewable ads, which is a function of their expectations of their advertisers.
Lebeau wasn’t bothered by the lack of lift in ad rates because advertisers never promised Remedy higher rates in exchange for higher viewability.
A programmatic specialist at a comScore 200 entertainment publisher, requesting anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to share financial details, said a 30 percentage-point lift in viewability at his company’s websites tends to increase CPMs by about 20 percent. This person emphasized that it’s difficult to isolate viewability’s impact on ad rates, so these figures are rough estimates. The source still felt his company was being compensated fairly for its highly viewable ad placements.
Another source, Danny Khatib, CEO of 100 percent programmatic publisher Granite Media, said high viewability rates can boost Granite’s CPMs by a few dollars, which he saw as significant.
“We never expected new branding budgets to come online solely because of viewability improvements,” he said. “That seems like wishful thinking.”
In an Integral Ad Science survey of more than 1,000 advertisers, 68 percent of respondents said they transact on viewability and another 25 percent said they wanted to do so. Although buyers are regularly transacting on viewable metrics, viewability is less likely to influence ad rates if it isn’t a primary KPI.
The reason rates haven’t risen right along with viewability has to do with how programmatic buying works. David Lee, programmatic lead at media-buying agency The Richards Group, said that even in a private marketplace setup, most buyers don’t place bids on individual publishers but place bids across hundreds, if not thousands, of sites at a time.
So if viewability is being used as a secondary KPI, then buyers’ bids will be restricted to the publishers that meet a certain viewability threshold. But since buyers aren’t bidding on individual publishers, they’re not intentionally setting out to pay specific publishers more based on their viewability gains. And since viewability rates are rising across the industry, publisher improvements in viewability are less likely to increase publishers’ CPMs than they were a year ago.
Another issue with rising viewability is that in an effort to appease advertisers, many publishers are doing whatever they can to make sure their ads are viewed just long enough to be counted as viewable. Most viewable ads are in view for just one second, according to IAS data. That amount of time happens to be the standard the Media Rating Council uses to define viewability.
As publishers increased their volume of viewable ads by refreshing pages, sticking ads in photo galleries and using interstitials, users got turned off and buyers caught on. IAS found that the average time that a desktop display impression was in view declined from 9.8 seconds in May 2016 to 7.7 seconds in May 2017.
“We’ve seen some publishers game the system in using ad placements that provide a less than optimal consumer experience but have higher rates of viewability,” said Stephani Estes, svp of media strategy at ad agency Cramer-Krasselt. “In those instances, we’re not willing to pay more for higher viewability.”
It’s understandable that publishers get miffed by low returns on highly viewable ads. But in programmatic environments, the highest CPMs come from programmatic direct deals, not the open exchange. And to entice ad buyers to set these deals up, publishers need to have viewability rates above 65 percent, according to three publisher sources.
Viewability isn’t necessarily a way to lift rates, said Mort Greenberg, svp of ad sales at Sightline Media Group, which owns government-focused sites like Federal Times and Military Times. “However,” he added, “high viewability will keep you on a plan.”
As GDPR Looms, Privacy Tech Is On The Rise
AdExchanger |
The May deadline to comply with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is swiftly approaching, and ad tech and security startups are forming a new industry: privacy tech. Companies like PageFair, Evidon, Prifender, Tealium and Segment hope to capitalize with GDPR compliance solutions for brands, publishers and even other ad tech vendors. The International Association… Continue reading »
57 startups became unicorns this year and seven lost their horns
2017 is the third-busiest year for companies reaching $1 billion valuation.
The unicorn club gets new members by the week. This year alone, 57 startups around the world attained unicorn status with a valuation of $1 billion or more, according to data from venture capital tracker PitchBook.
Seven companies that were once considered unicorns have seen their valuation dip below $1 billion so far this year, either through down rounds or down exits. Last year there were only three down rounds or exits. The Honest Company and Prosper both saw their valuation shrink below $1 billion in subsequent funding rounds, according to PitchBook. Down exits this year included Souq.com, which was acquired by Amazon for $650 million, and Shazam, which Apple purchased for $400 million.
Overall 2017 wasn’t the biggest year for unicorns — that award goes to 2015, which boasted 81 new unicorns — but it certainly has been busy.
Social platform Reddit, bitcoin marketplace Coinbase and ride-hail company Careem are among the notable entrants this year. Synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks is the latest inductee into the group, thanks to a $275 million funding round last week.
Altogether there are now a total of 227 active unicorns, according to PitchBook.
Here’s a look at the companies that have attained unicorn status this year, by their valuation and how much venture capital they’ve raised. Revenue data is available from the few private companies that made that information public. Click on a company to see its industry category.
A few notable stats from this year’s unicorns:
- Content recommendation platform Toutiao had the highest valuation, VC raised and revenue of all the unicorns this year.
- Four startups — Outcome Health, SenseTime, VIPKid and Mobike — had at least one female founder.
- About half of this year’s startups focus primarily on information technology and software.
The PitchBook data included goes through Dec. 14.
Recode Daily: A final vote is imminent on Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax bill after House approval
Plus, Facebook is expanding facial recognition across its products, Stitch Fix releases its first earnings report since going public, and the best seats on Broadway.
Republicans in the House and Senate approved a sweeping $1.5 trillion tax plan. Trump is expected to sign it within days. Andrew Ross Sorkin: “The tax bill soaks some … rich Americans — but it does not soak the richest.” [The New York Times]
Facebook knows when someone uploads your picture to Facebook — now it will alert you about the photo, even if you aren’t tagged in it.The company is improving privacy settings and expanding its use of facial-recognition technology “to prevent people from impersonating other people” on the service. Users will now be asked to grant Facebook permission to use facial recognition broadly across its products. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
Stitch Fix released its first-ever earnings report, and its shares fell by 12 percent. The online personal styling service is spending more on advertising and attracting new customers that want more less-expensive clothing, so CEO Katrina Lake said the company will increase lower-price-point sales this year. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
Bitcoin prices are moving around a lot. Because bitcoin. Something called Bitcoin Cash is way up. Plain old bitcoin fell dramatically and is climbing back up again.
Ziff Davis executives addressed their new employees at Mashable, who promptly leaked the comments to the press. Reasonable advice from Ziff Davis COO Steve Horowitz to the company, which he bought at a fire sale price: “You guys are a Coke brand. Never forget that. Let’s make sure that we’re doing everything we can to stay at that level and not get down into Tab village.” [David Uberti / Splinter]
Top stories from Recode
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are just getting started, says Spark Capital’s Megan Quinn. An investor in the crypto trading platform Coinbase, Quinn says “the toothpaste is out of the tube,” on the latest episode of Recode Decode.
This is cool
The Procter & Gamble toilet paper brand Charmin has opened a pop-up space near Times Square in New York City to offer 14 clean and free public bathrooms through Christmas Eve. Of course, this is a marketing stunt called an “out-of-home (OOH) activation,” a way to create a more personal touch with audiences as digital channels are dominating marketing strategies.
Germany Says Facebook Abuses Market Dominance to Collect Data
Germany’s top antitrust enforcer opened a new front against big tech firms when it said the way Facebook harvests user data constitutes an abuse of dominance.
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