Author: rssmasher

It’s been a quarter century since cable TV pioneer John Malone coined the concept of a “500-channel universe,” but new data suggests 2018 could be the year we look back on when we entered the “500
scripted TV series universe.”

Radio network Westwood One wanted to get a sense of the return its advertisers were getting on their investments–it promised as much last fall, when it established ROI guarantees–so it partnered with Nielsen Catalina Solutions to determine how a product in the consumer-packaged-goods realm performed and found that radio delivered $12 in sales for every…

Marriott International has handed its global media buying and planning account to Publicis Groupe. The appointment concludes a review launched last October. MEC had handled media buying and planning for Marriott International since 2011. Publicis Groupe will create a dedicated Marriott One Media unit from its SapientRazorfish and Spark Foundry agencies, which will partner with…

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On May 25th, when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect, media agencies will be subject to a new set of laws around targeting European consumers. The GDPR, which makes it illegal for businesses to use EU citizens’ data without proper basis or consent, will limit media agencies’ ability to target… Continue reading »

The post The Media Agency’s Guide To GDPR And EPrivacy appeared first on AdExchanger.

Travel advertisers on Facebook no longer have to wait until vacationers have chosen a destination to begin the courtship process, as the social network introduced new ad product trip consideration, which enables brands to target users before they have even started planning their journeys. “Trip Consideration”–a separate product from Facebook’s dynamic ads for travel–supports the…

AdExchanger |

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Passing Review Google’s Zagat saga came to an end on Monday when the tech giant agreed to sell the restaurant reviewer to startup restaurant guide The Infatuation, reports The New York Times. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Google bought Zagat for $150 million… Continue reading »

The post Google Sells Zagat; Twitter Hearts RTB appeared first on AdExchanger.

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.

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.