Author: rssmasher

Whether you’re on the left, endlessly digging into how the Russians “hacked” the last election, or on the right, persistently pushing the idea that Seth Rich leaked DNC emails and got killed for it,
we’ve got a paradoxical, polarizing, paranoid conspiracy theory for you!

AdExchanger |

You probably don’t think of Mars Petcare as a center for startup incubation. It owns a lot of brands you can buy at a local grocery store, including Pedigree and Whiskas. But in 2000, it bought Royal Canin, a pet food brand focused on health care, and, more recently, a string of veterinary clinics. So,… Continue reading »

The post How Mars Petcare Uses Data To Connect The Dogs appeared first on AdExchanger.

Simple is re-introducing itself through an ad campaign its been running on billboards and subway ads in various U.S. cities.

The ads pair everyday concepts most familiar and tangible to the seven-year-old neobank’s target millennial customer base, like binge watching and sweatpants, to convey how enjoyable and sensible its own offering — banking and budgeting, the latter of which major banking institutions are only now building into their experiences — can and should be. The company also wants to show it’s not “just an anonymous organization that doesn’t have a point of view,” said Valarie Hamm Carlson, Simple’s vp of brand. It’s a group of people that share the view of everyday consumers that banking shouldn’t be complicated.

“Every once in a while we need to jump back out there and say, ‘here’s who we are and if you don’t know us we we want introduce ourselves’ so people get a sense of our personality,” Carlson said. “Ideally we want that to come from the product but it’s always good to have a little bit of air cover and we haven’t done a lot of that in the past.”

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

The post ‘The biggest challenge is overcoming people’s apathy’: Inside Simple’s marketing strategy appeared first on Digiday.

AdExchanger |

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Andreas Goeldi, chief technology officer at Pixability. The digital advertising industry needs to move away from the incendiary headlines toward a more nuanced perspective of brand safety. Marketers should not view the issue as… Continue reading »

The post Brand Appropriateness: Marketers Need A Deeper Understanding of Context And Impact appeared first on AdExchanger.

A year ago, a team of creatives came to a head of talent at a major agency saying that they felt like their boss, a creative, was creating a hostile work environment. Pressed for details, this group said that they felt there was “excessive” feedback that went beyond criticism, which they dubbed as “bullying.” The head of talent decided to make some adjustments and move the team to a different account.

A few months later, a handful of the same people came back, claiming similar issues with their new boss.

“I didn’t know what to do,” said this head of talent. “In a way, I felt like I was now unable to do my job. But I had to take it seriously. Because we have to take all of this very seriously now.”

As harassment takes center stage in the national conversation, there is another part of modern work that seems to be gaining more attention: workplace bullying.

Last week, the agency trade group 4A’s launched an “enlightened workplace” certification program. Driven mostly by the current conversation around sexual harassment, the program also aims to support agencies to eliminate, among other things, bullying and intimidation in the workplace. The program will provide self-evaluation tools and training for execs and HR leaders on covering difficult conversations and issues with power, status, gender and race relations.

Over in the U.K., NABS, an employee support organization for advertising and media has an “advice” line that, according to internal figures, has seen a 25 percent uptick in people calling about work bullying.

“I firmly believe there are two camps of creatives,” said the head of talent. “There are ones who love and appreciate feedback and there are others who can’t stand that anything they’re doing is being judged. In this case, I think it was mostly the latter. If someone is calling you an ‘idiot,’ of course it’s bullying. But otherwise, we are getting to the point where we’re just teaching people to be victims.”

It’s tough to make the distinction between bullying and harassment. For many, they’re part of the same bucket. But bullying can be tougher to identify, and also harder to solve for. Harassment is targeted, based on attributes like sexual orientation, gender or race. But bullying isn’t. Secondly, harassment is illegal, which means in many cases those being harassed have the option to go to an external agency — governmental, for example. Bullying is a little more of a gray area, and victims often find HR is the only place to turn. And there seem to be certain things unique and peculiar to agencies that make bullying more commonplace.

Bullying can include excessive name-calling, humiliation beyond feedback when it comes to giving critiques of work or even, in some cases, swearing or using foul language. It can also mean gossip, creating feelings of isolation by banding together against someone else, insults or arbitrary criticism. There are also non-verbal cues like the silent treatment. It can also include stealing credit or plagiarism, something that is common in creative industries, especially at agencies. Unlike in harassment cases, bullies don’t have to be in a position of power.

One agency employee who asked not to be named said that bullying in creatively driven industries often manifests itself through ego. Ego is a critical part of the industry. In an industry fueled by awards, those awards provide very important — and critical — validation that your work is good and is matters. For this employee, she’s often found that she’s talked over or not taken seriously, by both men and women. To her, that comes close to bullying, especially when it’s done simply to make the bully feel more important.

It’s hard to measure creativity, especially in advertising, so the number of awards you get is important. And usually, said this agency employee, those with the most awards tend to be the biggest bullies.

That means there is a lot of internal competition within agencies. “You’re trying to make sure your ideas win and that you’re attached to a winning piece of business,” she said. “So people can get aggressive, especially those at big agencies with those big personalities.”

“The approach we have taken is not a quick solve but one to address the underlying issues that enable these behaviors,” said Keesha Jean-Baptiste, 4A’s svp of talent engagement and inclusion, in a statement. (The 4A’s couldn’t make an executive available for comment on bullying specifically.) While the spotlight has been on sexual harassment, we know racism, ageism, ableism and homophobia are just as pervasive. We need work cultures where everyone is socially conscious, culturally competent and empathetic to one another’s experiences.”

Gerry Graf, chief creative officer and founder at Barton F. Graf, said that rejection is the most common thread in the industry — and especially among creatives. “Ninety percent of a creative’s life is rejection,” he said. Graf said that between having ideas killed by creative partners, creative directors, group creative directors and, eventually, clients, rejection is a common and necessary part of the business.

The issue is to identify bullying — one person’s bullying is often just another person’s candid feedback. “There are instances where someone might feel like their higher-ups don’t like their ideas or think they’re not good and feeling like they’re being bullied if their ideas are being killed,” said one agency employee, who said she often has people mimicking her accent.

Writing in Campaign, Quiet Storm founder Trevor Robinson said that agencies in a way particularly have created structures where “backstabbing” is rewarded, and there is an undercurrent that actually rewards bullying.

Bullying can more readily happen in high-pressure environments — and agencies are one of those. “I often feel I’m only as good as my last piece of work or campaign,” said one junior creative. That means, said this person, that he has to do what he can to advance. For him, that often results in his feeling that he’s being bullied when he’s being rejected.

Another agency employee said bullying is a generational issue. “There’s some degree of, ‘well I put up with it when I was younger’ kind of stuff that I’ve personally had people say to me in my career,” said this person. “Like, it sucked then and it sucks now. And I’m like, ‘well, maybe it doesn’t have to suck.’”

“At the end of the day, programs and announcements and initiatives are great, but it comes down from the top about what is enforced and what is not,” said an executive who is signed on to the 4A’s training program. “Often there is no real action or real consequences to bad behavior. You’re usually just marked as a difficult person.”

Digiday spoke to 10 agency millennials for this story to ask if they’d ever felt bullied at work. All of them requested anonymity. Two female millennials said they felt bullied by other women in a high school, “clique-ish” way. “It’s one thing to give feedback in a blunt way,” said another. “It’s another to get it in an open office environment in front of your colleagues.” One person said that when he went to HR, he was told to talk to the person bullying him directly, which made the situation worse.

“Bullying is definitely present, and it’s in a very high school-like way.” he said. “The schoolyard has been replaced by the office.”

The post ‘The schoolyard has been replaced by the office’: The bullying problem at agencies appeared first on Digiday.

At the Digiday Hot Topic UK: Future of TV event last week in New York City, we sat down with over 60 media, television, and advertising executives from major companies to better understand the over-the-top TV landscape. Check out our earlier research on Facebook Watch’s potential to overcome YouTube here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Quick Takeaways:

• HBO leads all TV networks in OTT according to 52 percent of respondents
• YouTube TV edges out Hulu TV as the online TV service with the most promise

As Over-the-top, or OTT, viewing has become mainstream with major players Netflix and Amazon acquiring millions of subscribers, the race is on for TV networks to establish their own OTT products before it’s too late. According to respondents of a Digiday survey, over half of all respondents believe that HBO Now is the TV network performing best in the OTT space.

The post Digiday Research: HBO Now tops TV Networks with OTT services appeared first on Digiday.

Just a month after Facebook said it’d show less news in its news feed, news publishers are already feeling the brunt, multiple data sources show.

Chartbeat data showed Facebook traffic to publishers declined 6 percent since the beginning of January, said Josh Schwartz, chief of product, engineering and data at Chartbeat. Facebook had already been sending less traffic to publishers, with referrals down 15 percent in 2017, according to Chartbeat, which measures traffic to around 50,000 publishers globally, with a skew towards news publishers. (All told, Facebook now makes up about 30 percent of Chartbeat publishers’ referral traffic to Google’s 40 percent.)

The declines are not a surprise. Facebook has said as much, warning that news as a percentage of news feed content will go from 5 percent to 4 percent. That would imply publishers can broadly expect a 20 percent drop.

Women’s lifestyle publisher PopSugar has an in-house tool called TrendRank that monitors social activity across 700 publishers in 17 categories. Overall, Facebook traffic to publishers has been flat, but traffic in the news category, which includes major news publishers The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and BuzzFeed, was down 14 percent after a sharper drop in the months prior, according to the tool, said Chris George, evp of product marketing and sales strategy at PopSugar.

Other categories that saw declines were tech and fitness, which could be seasonal (interest in them tends to spike during CES and New Year’s resolution season and then decline). But the news decline seems to fulfill Facebook’s pledge to deprioritize content that doesn’t share well.

A third source, True Anthem, a social media analytics company that serves several hundred publishers, mostly U.S., looked at its client base over the past 90 days and found that overall reach has increased since Facebook’s January announcement. But all categories aren’t performing equally. Digital-only publishers, a category that includes BuzzFeed and Upworthy, were down 11.3 percent while local news grew 25.8 percent and magazines grew 3.6 percent, said Chris Hart, CEO of True Anthem.

Facebook hasn’t responded to a request for comment; we’ll update this story when they do.

A breakdown of True Anthem’s numbers shows that the main driver of overall reach is an increase in viral reach — reflecting posts that have been commented on or shared. That suggests two things: Facebook is favoring posts that get a lot of interaction and publishers have responded in kind, posting stories that they know will get a lot of shares and comments, Hart said.

Engagement is playing an increasingly important role in driving organic reach, agreed Jennifer Lindenauer, chief marketing officer at Upworthy, which she said had its highest average page views per post per month in January than it’s seen in a long time.

“We’re seeing a lot of our values-aligned content rise to the top — stories that reflect where our audience stands on an important, topical issue, but can also spark interesting conversations and dialogue in the comments,” she said. At the end of the day, though, publishers get paid on traffic, not engagement.

Some news publishers said they took the brunt of the decline in Facebook traffic last year and that recent trends may be flat or down but aren’t alarming. But they’re still holding their breath. One major publisher described the past few weeks of Facebook referral levels as “business as usual. There hasn’t been a major impact on us to date. But we are watching closely.”

Another, Nick Ascheim, svp of digital for NBC News and MSNBC, said that last year, the publisher saw quarter-on-quarter declines in Facebook traffic of 20-25 percent, during which the publisher also was posting less to Facebook. (That’s across NBC News, MSNBC and Today.) So far this year, he said, the decline is closer to 10 percent.

Ascheim said the silver lining is that traffic from other sources like Google and Apple News is on the rise and the number of loyal visitors are up, whereas Facebook traffic tended to be one-and-done. “But it’s hard to know if it’s anything,” he said of the easing in Facebook traffic declines, “because they say they’re not finished rolling out the changes.”

The post As promised, Facebook traffic to news publishers declines again, post news-feed change appeared first on Digiday.

News UK has come up with a novel way to compete with Facebook: Encourage advertisers to run Facebook ads on News properties like The Sun and The Times.

It’s doing this through a tool that lets advertisers upload the creative assets they would typically post to social platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Once uploaded into the tool’s dashboard, an exact replica of the creative will automatically resize to fit the dimensions of the top ad slot on the Times’ mobile site and The Sun’s desktop and mobile sites. The height of the post will vary depending on the type of social post: whether it is video, photo or text tweet.

Two advertisers have started using the tool: a fashion retailer and a broadcaster client, though News UK wouldn’t name them. Up to 80 million impressions are available for advertisers across the new main news brand’s digital properties, along with the Dream Team fantasy football brand and its TalkSport properties, according to the publisher. People can follow or like the posts as they show on the sites.

Brands using the tool can also choose to have their creative assets for social repurposed as endorsed posts on News UK’s Twitter and Instagram feeds for additional reach. That won’t extend to Facebook due to the platform’s recent changes to its branded-content guidelines.

“With all the concerns around brand safety, the hoaxes and fake news that brands expose themselves to when they pick a user-generated content platform, this can be a solution to that where they can amplify and endorse their posts in brand-safe environments,”said Rebecca Reeve-Kendall, social partnerships lead at News UK.

Brands can also push campaigns live within 24 hours by using the tool, instead of facing the lengthy signoffs usually involved when multiple agency partners must approve social campaign assets, according to Reeve-Kendall. For now, News UK will offer Social Amp as a managed service, but in time, it will consider providing it as a self-serve option for advertisers.

Advertisers have been more sharply focused on brand safety after the YouTube boycott last year brought the issue back into the mainstream spotlight. That concern, plus the market frustration at Facebook’s ever-changing algorithm, which has seen both publishers’ and advertisers’ reach drop, was inspiration for introducing the tool, which is powered by tech solutions provider Polar, according to Ben Walmsley, News UK’s digital commercial director.

“The timing of this is very important,” said Walmsley. “We’re at this juncture with Facebook where brands and publishers have built up large audiences, which are suddenly getting harder to reach because Facebook is aggressively turning the dial against them. That’s [the constant algorithm changes] not sitting well with clients or publishers, and we want to offer an alternative, differentiated channel,” Walmsley said.

The latest Facebook algorithm change, which deprioritzes publishers’ and brands’ posts in favor of those from family and friends, has caused anguish among publishers that rely on Facebook for referral traffic. Advertisers have become accustomed to seeing their organic reach fall on Facebook due to algorithm changes, since as early as 2012, according to agencies. As a result, they’ve been working on ways to diversify their strategies for a while.

Aydin Moghaddam, head of paid search at performance agency Roast, said the agency won’t likely steer away major paid-social budgets in the short term because most brands haven’t seen a significant drop in organic reach or jump in paid-social costs since Facebook announced its latest news-feed changes in January. However, that could change. “For the long term, this is a smart play by News UK,” he said.

Agencies have welcomed News UK’s efforts to provide an offer that enables them to reuse existing creative assets rather than having to create new ones. Given the uncertainty around the constant algorithm changes, having more alternatives in the market is a benefit, according to Paul Greenwood, head of research and innovation at digital agency We Are Social. But for some, the granularity of targeting on Facebook to such a wide audience makes paying for social ads on Facebook a no-brainer.

“We’ll always advise [clients] to use a range of distribution options that will involve publishers, and I like that News UK is doing something different. But if they [News UK] could expand this out across multiple publishers, it would be much more powerful in terms of pulling social budgets,” said Greenwood.

The post News UK to advertisers: Run your Facebook ads on our sites appeared first on Digiday.