Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

Publishers are nervously fretting about what will make up for anticipated declines in Facebook traffic. Apple News is unlikely to do that on its own, but some publishers are seeing promising returns. Women-focused title Stylist has only published to Apple News for a week, but it’s turning into the publisher’s most engaged platform. Readers of Stylist’s Apple News content spend on average 40 seconds with each article, the same dwell time as on Stylist’s own mobile site, according to the publisher.

News brands tend to fare better on Apple News than lifestyle publishers, partly because Apple News tends to surface stories about what’s happening in the world today. But after seeing engagement with the limited content Stylist originally published to Apple News, the platform approached the title’s parent company, Shortlist Media, last month to deepen the partnership and publish all Stylist content to Apple News.

Since then, Stylist’s Apple News content has had 150,000 unique users, a small but engaged group. A story on the claims against Aziz Ansari had an average read time of 1 minute and 56 seconds, and a piece on Chrissy Teigen’s response to Ivanka Trump’s #TimesUp tweet had 70,000 uniques.

“Apple was proactive and determined to make sure we had a voice on the platform,” said Owen Wyatt, managing director at Shortlist Media. “They were keen to reach women and saw Stylist as a vehicle to do that.”

Publishers are wary of relying on one platform for audience, even if referral traffic is seductive. Working with Apple News has been easier than working with other platforms, according to Stylist.

Media companies can publish content to Apple News with relatively little effort. To be a fully integrated partner — what Apple calls an Apple News Format partner — requires a couple weeks of development work from the publisher. As an Apple News Format partner, Stylist says it has broader customization options for typography and layout, but, more important, it gets access to more audience data. Stylist receives data from Apple News on shares, follows, reader demographics, article likes, saves, total views, reach, unique visitors and average read time.

“I’m not looking at the data and wanting more,” said Wyatt. “There’s a resource cost for Apple, but they make it easy to [access data] on its platform.” Of course, whether Apple News will be able to continue this level of service as it grows its partners is a key question.

Apple seems to have an interest Stylist’s cover stories, too. In February, to mark the centenary of women’s suffrage in the U.K., the publisher will style its site in sepia, giving it an aged look; Apple is exploring how to reflect this in Apple News.

“We’ve had very human conversations with Apple,” said Lisa Smosarski, editor for Stylist. “On Apple News, we can embrace our brand, rather than dilute it.”

While publishers have generally found Apple News useful for driving traffic, monetization through ads on the platform has been underwhelming. Apple’s commitment to ad-driven media models has been questioned, and it’s handed over Apple News ad sales to NBCUniversal in the U.S. and The Telegraph in the U.K. Wyatt said Stylist is having encouraging and open conversations with Apple News about branded content on the platform, but it’s not yet making money from the platform.

“They have absolute clarity on ad-funded media; that makes conversations more straightforward,” said Wyatt. “It feels like a tech platform is empowering us. Sometimes with tech platforms it feels like you’re screaming in the dark.”

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Artificial intelligence is touted as the future of media buying, allowing for automated analysis of several sources immediately.

“AI capabilities are making ad-spend decisions simpler, more efficient and cost-effective,” said Caroline Klatt, CEO of chatbot technology company Headliner Labs. “It’s a new age, and it will only be a matter of time until digital marketers across the board will be leveraging AI strategically to streamline their workflow.”

But while interest and adoption of AI for media buying is growing, the industry is still grappling with roadblocks.

These five charts illustrate the push and pull when it comes to using AI in media buying.

AI is long on potential
According to a Salesforce study from July, about half of the 3,500 marketing leaders surveyed are already using AI, and more than a quarter of these leaders are planning to pilot AI programs in the next two years.

Using AI for media buying is one of the strongest use cases for AI. Marketers believe AI can improve targeting and personalization when it comes to media placements. According to Salesforce’s report, 60 percent of marketers believe AI will have a “substantial or transformational” impact on their business’ programmatic and media buying in the next five years.

As AI automates workflows, it will free up marketing teams to concentrate on strategy
Right now, marketers have a lot of resource-intensive processes to complete before serving the right ad to their ideal audience. The promise of AI is to make time-consuming steps, like data integration and algorithm optimization, simpler so marketers can instead concentrate on other areas like customer experience.

A Forrester study from July, commissioned by marketing automation platform Emarsys, surveyed 717 marketers and found that 79 percent of those surveyed think AI will allow marketers to move toward more strategic work. The report also found that 78 percent of these marketers said their spend on AI marketing technologies will increase by at least 5 percent over the next 12 months.

“The rapid evolution of AI in media will enable our people to focus on innovation and intelligence rather than repetition and reports,” said Norm Johnston, global CEO and chief digital officer of Mindshare.

AI boosts sales
Brands like Volkswagen and lingerie brand Cosabella are finding that AI is proving to be more effective than their media agencies. Consultancy Capgemini surveyed nearly 1,000 execs and found that companies that implemented AI systems have increased their sales and inbound customer leads.

AI spend is steadily growing
AI spending is still rather small now. But eMarketer forecasts a booming market over the next several years, reaching nearly $29 billion.

Lack of AI skills is limiting the speed of adoption
A World Federation of Advertisers study found a big shortcoming in AI skills like predictive modeling — outstripping other in-demand areas like augmented reality and virtual reality.

The post The state of AI in marketing in 5 charts appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook’s recent decision to deprioritize news has many publishers re-evaluating their commitment to the platform. But the HuffPost is plowing ahead with its vertical strategy. It launched two more in December, Nurses, I See You, for nurses; and Not Alone, for friends and family of those struggling with opioid addiction, as part of a push into enterprise health reporting.

Ethan Klapper, HuffPost’s global social media editor, said HuffPost decided to launch pages for these communities because pages still offer a better way to build a scaled, monetizable audience than the Facebook groups many publishers have been flocking to. (It’s also using groups, for other communities.)

“I think we all agree that it’s really early to tell what those changes mean exactly,” he said of Facebook’s news-feed change. “We’re one of the leading publishers on Facebook, and it will still be an important platform for us.”

Huff Post’s broader experiment to create niche communities on Facebook has yielded mixed results. Canceled Plans and Tomorrow, Inshallah are considered successes internally. In the past year, Canceled Plans, for introverts, has nearly tripled the number of people who “like” the page to 225,000; Tomorrow, Inshallah, for millennial Muslims, has more than doubled to 55,000.

They’re tiny compared to the 9.8 million fans of HuffPost’s core Facebook page but are are within the general vicinity of HuffPost Queer Voices (428,000 likes), HuffPost Latino Voices (187,000 likes).

Growth on other pages launched during that experiment has been more modest. A travel page, Pack Light, Go Far, for example, has amassed fewer than 15,000 fans in the same time period. Growth of health page The Scope was flat in 2017, and the page hasn’t shared any new content since November. “Some topics lend themselves to more growth and engagement than others,” Klapper said.

Canceled Plans and Tomorrow, Inshallah each publish three or four pieces of content per day, but they source only a small slice of that content from HuffPost. The rest comes from other Facebook pages aimed at similar communities. The idea is to serve each audience with content that will keep them most engaged, whether it’s sourced from HuffPost or not.

HuffPost will use paid promotion to build audiences for Nurses and Not Alone. It’ll also post identity-focused content aimed at generating comments, which Facebook said it’s looking for, as it did with Canceled Plans and Tomorrow, Inshallah, two Facebook pages it launched at the end of 2016.

“These are not side projects for us,” said Klapper. “We’re looking at those pages as an experiment with using Facebook advertising tools to reach people we currently don’t reach.”

 

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The see-now-buy-now runway model has found a fitting audience — not in the U.S. or Europe, but in China.

NYFW: China Day, a new initiative formed in partnership between Alibaba’s e-commerce marketplace Tmall and industry trade association the Council of Fashion Designers of America, will launch this February during the men’s fall 2018 runway shows. Four Chinese designers and brands — Peacebird, Li-Ning, Chen Peng and CLOT — were chosen by the CFDA to host runways and showrooms during the official New York Fashion Week schedule.

The shows that take place on NYFW: China Day will be entirely shoppable, making use of the see-now-buy-now model that failed to launch in the U.S. What was categorized as a revolutionary change for the fashion industry has since been abandoned, as designers question the need for New York Fashion Week all together.

The CFDA, which owns the rights to the New York Fashion Week calendar, is looking to broaden the event’s reach. According to CFDA president Steven Kolb, the goal of the partnership is to expand globally by roping in an international audience.

“In any of the programs we do, we’re measuring impact,” said Kolb. “This is a time of great experiment for designers, and we’re exploring, as well. For us, that means we’re expanding our scope.”

The shop model for NYFW: China Day mirrors that of Alibaba’s Singles’ Day see-now-buy-now event: Show attendees and viewers (the China Day shows will be streamed online on Tmall’s and CFDA’s websites) will be equipped with buy buttons in the Tmall app. As items appear on the runway, they’ll simultaneously appear on users’ phones in the Tmall app. With a tap of the button, items can be added to cart and placed on pre-order. Orders will then be fulfilled by Tmall.

The streamlined selling process comes to NYFW at a time when the see-now-buy-now model, as it’s been tested in the U.S., is in need of a serious revamp. Designers who have tested the in-season runway show and selling model, including Thakoon and Tom Ford, have since abandoned it. Hangers-on include Tommy Hilfiger, who’s turned his runway shows into consumer-centric spectacles, switching location backdrops from New York to L.A. to London with every new season. See-now-buy-now dissenters have claimed that shoppers are used to, and fine with, waiting a period of time for items that are considered luxury.

Putting the model in front of Tmall’s 500 million active users, however, brings the need for immediacy back to the forefront. Customer behavior in China is highly concentrated on mobile, and shoppers are conditioned to buy in the moment, regardless of price. During November’s most recent see-now-buy-now Singles’ Day event, a few Lexuses were purchased.

“As Chinese consumers become more fashion-forward and technology-savvy, they want to purchase what they see, when they see it,” said Jessica Liu, president of Tmall Fashion. “As online and offline shopping merges, it is imperative that we continue to innovate and deliver the most interesting content and seamless shopping experience for consumers.”

The announced lineup for China Day follows the announcement of the CFDA’s partnership with production platform Nineteenth Amendment, a company that specializes in on-demand manufacturing for brands. With the support of a platform like Tmall, a ready and willing customer, and a production cycle that’s viable for an in-season model, brands — particularly those looking to launch in China — are getting the necessary leg-up to launch a see-now-buy-now runway show. That logistical support has, so far, been missing in the so-called in-season revolution, and the only brands that remain on board the new model, like Tommy Hilfiger and Burberry, are massive brands with the resources to pull off an overhaul.

“It’s extremely hard to disrupt any industry, and fashion is one of the oldest,” said Kimmy Scotti, partner at VC firm 8vc. “You can’t change an engine while a car is in motion. What the first run of see-now-buy-now has shown is that designers need support industry-wide to pull off major change.”

Bringing Chinese designers to New York by way of NYFW: China Day is the latest step in the partnership between Alibaba and the CFDA. During the see-now-buy-now event in November, Jason Wu and Opening Ceremony showed collections that were instantly shoppable. Overall, U.S. designers are plotting strategies to reach China’s high-spending and fast-growing luxury customers, either on their own or through partnerships with Alibaba’s Luxury Pavilion, JD.com’s Toplife.

“We are promoting a common exchange between Chinese and American fashion industries.  We want to help outstanding Chinese designers gain more recognition in the international fashion community, while also supporting commercial labels to build their brand and expand globally,” said Liu. “We also like to attract quality U.S. fashion brands and designers to the China market and use Tmall’s assets to help them succeed. Tmall is not just a place for merchants to sell their products, but a platform to grow their brand. We are excited about this partnership with NYFW and we will continue to work with more international fashion and luxury brands to bring about creative collaborations and innovations.”

Image via CLOT

The post Why see-now-buy-now makes sense for China’s luxury customers appeared first on Digiday.

Reuters is experimenting with how it presents news on its site as it continues to expand and evolve its consumer news brand.

The news giant, which has 250 staffers dedicated to consumer publishing globally, wants to modernize how it presents content on all 17 of its editions. So far, that has involved reorganizing thousands of articles into new topic channels such as The Future of Money, The Trump Effect, North Korea and Investigations. The publisher is testing this on the U.S. edition and plans to extend it internationally in the next six months.

In conjunction with these changes, the six-person London-based mobile team is developing a new mobile app. The plan is for the mobile app to launch first in the spring, with the remaining 16 international editions, including the U.K., to be updated in the next six months.

With these updates, Reuters hopes to give its users the chance to personalize their news feeds by selecting the most relevant topic channels for them. This method has worked well for the Reuters TV app — the first of its consumer products to feature personalized video news feeds.

The TV app has doubled its monthly viewers in the last year, with 2 million people now watching per month, according to the publisher. The growth has been attributed to the personalized five- to 30-minute news broadcasts that pull together different video clips based on factors like a user’s location, their viewing history and how much time they have to watch a video.

The TV app was borne out of investments Reuters has made in machine learning and personalization over the last few years, according to Isaac Showman, managing director of Reuters TV. Now, the publisher wants to apply the same algorithm used to personalize video news for Reuters TV to text articles on its other consumer products.

“We are expanding Reuters’ consumer presence, which isn’t always as well-known in various markets as other publications might be,” said Showman. “We’re doing so by focusing on being a utility: How we can be the most useful, relevant source of information to professionals in a way that helps them do their jobs better? Then, we’ll work hard with clients to take that lean-forward engagement to layer on commercial messages.”

Reuters has a way to go before its consumer presence matches that of its legacy business, providing thousands of publishers around the world with raw news content. It has faced setbacks in getting its consumer brand off the ground, abandoning a website redesign in 2013 after two years of investment. But Showman is confident these new changes will help assert Reuters as a must-have news utility among its target audience of business professionals.

“There’s a certain type of consumer for whom Reuters is a highly trusted news brand, so there could be an opportunity there,” said Enders analyst Joseph Evans. “I can also understand the desire to diversify their business in the face of the financial pressures their B2B customers are under, but going further into consumer news provision is not the best way to escape a reliance on declining consumer news providers.”

That said, Showman said client demand is growing for branded-content campaigns that involve its own audiences. For example, for financial services company Synchrony Financial, Reuters TV app users were asked to be part of a video series about entrepreneurs called “Working Forward.” The videos, which featured the entrepreneurs talking about their ambitions and businesses, were produced in four 15-second segments that ran separately in sequential ad breaks during Reuters TV programs. Reuters said the campaign delivered a 27 percent lift in brand awareness, 14 percent lift in brand advocacy and 100 percent completion rates.

The post How Reuters is expanding its consumer business appeared first on Digiday.

Football clubs are anxiously waiting to see if Facebook’s news-feed purge stunts their efforts to get sponsors to pay more for the reach and engagement they generate online.

European clubs such as Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City and Southampton FC monetize their social media inventory. Some, like Real Madrid, try to monetize video they post on social networks like Facebook, while others, like PSG, use algorithms to put a value on the reach and subsequent engagement they generate. In both instances, the reach generated is used to help boost the value of commercial deals with sponsors. Facebook likes are central to clubs’ claims for social engagement and factor into sponsorship valuations, said Jim Dowling, managing director at Cake, the Havas Sports & Entertainment agency.

“The club tells sponsors that on Facebook, for example, we can reach a certain amount of people with each post,” said a commercial exec at one club. “We then tell them it’s worth €10,000 [$12,000] per post. Those paid posts are usually capped because we want to retain a good experience across all our social feeds. Therefore, we tell the sponsor that you can have a maximum of six posts on our Facebook page per year, which will cost €10,000.”

For clubs that have linked higher reach with higher value, Facebook’s revamped news feed threatens to upset that arrangement.

“If either of those [reach or engagement] go down as a result of Facebook’s news-feed change, then the club could be getting revenue based on reaching previous levels of inventory,” said Daniel Ayers, consulting partner at sports marketing agency Seven League. “They could get in trouble for not being able to hit those numbers anymore.”

Sustaining reach is of even more concern for teams trying to foster fan bases beyond their home turf. Teams have spent big on regional Facebook pages to boost their reach and are now reassessing that approach. Any business — football clubs included — that bases its distribution strategy on third-party platforms leaves itself vulnerable when algorithms change. “When you break that decrease in global [Facebook] reach down to different page structures, it means that individual reach for each of those is going to be decimated ever more, which makes hitting those regional fans harder,” said one marketing executive at a football club, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity.

If clubs can’t reach those regional fans organically, they may consider paying to guarantee the reach they’ve promised sponsors. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for some commercial bosses accustomed to the money they’ve generated from content that has cost virtually nothing to distribute.

Impressions, views and reach may be enough to market to potential sponsors and bring in new revenue. However, the trend in sponsorship is toward meaningful partnerships between brands and rights holders where results are measured beyond traditional awareness and reach metrics. Premier League club West Ham, for example, uses a tool to attribute value to its reach on social media and other platforms, which will adjust accordingly, should Facebook’s algorithm change affect performance for its social content. Amar Singh, West Ham’s head of content, said this is a more “nuanced” way of using social reach to provide value and engagement opportunities for commercial partners.

Unlike some of his peers, Singh doesn’t believe Facebook’s news-feed changes will threaten the club’s commercial model. Since joining West Ham last May, Singh has devised a strategy that “isn’t about driving cold hard numbers, coming from gimmicky posts that create engagement for the sake of it.” The risk for clubs like West Ham, as with any publisher, is that if they publish passive content that does not drive engagement, they will have decreased visibility in the feed. Singh is trying to improve the quality of content so people will want to discuss and share it with their friends organically. He is mindful of the expected drop in dwell time on Facebook, which West Ham’s content team will monitor as the algorithm rolls out.

As more clubs follow West Ham’s lead to determine the value of their social media based on how many fans interact with the content rather than how many people it reaches, strategies will shift to direct users to sites, over-the-top platforms or e-commerce stores to drive ticket sales and merchandising.

Gareth Capon, CEO at video technology platform Grabyo, believes this is the direction branded content is going. “Content should be less about how many people the content reached and more about how many people interacted [with] and took action from the content — video is the key driver for this,” he said. “Football clubs have built meaningful global fan bases on social platforms, and these users expect a volume of content and conversation with the clubs and players that they follow.”

Image courtesy of the Premier League

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I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who said three things that really surprised me about Facebook: 1) He was no longer on it and didn’t plan to go back. 2) His teenagers are never on it
(kind of like mine, they stay pretty much within the confines of Instagram and Snapchat). 3) His elderly mother just joined Facebook.

This is a real offer: Try a healthy snack that tastes like some combination of hyena crap, garbage, resentment and sawdust. Bring it on, you say? The marketer Kind feels confident that its new protein-packed bar is considerably more palatable than that. But you–the first 10,000 consumers to step up, that is–can be the judge….

Publishers still reeling from the Facebook news feed-pocalypse might find comfort in Snapchat. The disappearing messages app is stepping up efforts to curry favor with publishers.

On Jan. 18, Snapchat’s new platform content head Mike Su emailed publishers to introduce Snapchat longtimer Josh Stone as its new manager of media partnerships, a new role overseeing day-to-day work with Discover publishers. Su, a former exec at Snapchat Discover partner Mitú, also announced a first-time publisher summit and affirmed the platform’s strong interest in helping publishers be successful on the platform, multiple publishers confirmed. There were no details about the summit or a date set.

“As Evan [Spiegel, CEO of Snap,] mentioned on our previous earnings call, content is one of our top three priorities in 2018, and your success on Snapchat is at the heart of that. So we’re going to push harder and be more proactive with helping you succeed on Snapchat. This means finding more ways we can work together, more ways to support your business goals, and being more proactive with sharing insights and best practices to help your teams improve content quality and reach more of your audience, while continuing the support the team has already been providing,” Su wrote.

The email comes as publishers have had reason to be unsure about Snapchat. User time spent on the app has stagnated. The app just laid off about 24 people from its content division. (A source familiar with the matter said the layoffs were the result of a recent reorganization and that the company is still growing its content team.)

It’s been three years since Snapchat created the Discover section that features curated sections by a several dozen hand-picked media companies, including CNN, People and BuzzFeed. But CNN and Comedy Central have pulled back in recent months, with CNN saying the revenue wasn’t big enough, and one view is that Snapchat is worried that more publishers will flee the platform. Separate from Discover, Snapchat recently announced a redesign that would separate user content from media publishers’ and brands’ content, which could diminish those companies’ visibility in the app.

Snapchat has changed the terms of some of its Discover partnerships in a way that could limit the amount of revenue publishers can make on their Discover editions by selling ads into them. Snapchat has been steering media companies to make TV-like shows, causing text-based publishers to wonder what the future holds for them on the platform.

Snapchat wouldn’t comment on the record for this story.

Su joined Snapchat in December, so the media partnerships team has been in the works well before the Facebook news last week. But with Facebook saying it’ll deprioritize news in its news feed, publishers are looking for good news wherever they can get it.

“They’re definitely out courting publishers,” said one publisher that got the heads-up. “I think it’s a wonderful coincidence.”

Here’s the text of the email in full:

Discover Publishers!

I want to reach out and introduce myself and give you a quick update on some exciting things we have to kick off 2018!

My Role
I’ve joined [Snap vp of content] Nick Bell’s team to lead Platform Content, which includes Publisher Stories, as well as Product. As Evan mentioned on our previous earnings call, content is one of our top three priorities in 2018, and your success on Snapchat is at the heart of that.

So we’re going to push harder and be more proactive with helping you succeed on Snapchat. This means finding more ways we can work together, more ways to support your business goals, and being more proactive with sharing insights and best practices to help your teams improve content quality and reach more of your audience, while continuing the support the team has already been providing.

Josh Stone
As part of this effort, I’m also excited to share that Josh Stone, whom many of you have worked with in the past, will be taking on a newly created role as Manager of Media Partnerships. This role was specifically created to work with our partners to deepen our strategic relationships, understand your needs and concerns, and figure out ways we can expand our partnership. As you know, Josh has been here since the early days of Snap and was integral in launching the Discover platform, so his deep knowledge and relationships across the company, his insights into the platform, and his understanding of the publishing landscape makes him uniquely suited for this role.

Publisher Summit
I’m also excited to let you know that we will soon announce our first ever Publisher Summit. While specific dates and details will follow, the goal of the summit is to provide updates on our product and platform, share best practices, hear feedback, as well as provide a networking opportunity among our publishing partners. We’ll be shaping the agenda in the coming weeks, so if there are specific things you’d like to see to get the most out of it, I would love to hear your ideas!

These moves are designed to double down on our commitment to all of you, and we believe will set us up well to help make 2018 a great year for content on Snapchat. Really excited to get to know you all and find ways we can better support you. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, and stay tuned for more details on the summit!

Best,
Mike

Sahil Patel contributed reporting

The post As Facebook retreats from publishers, Snapchat is rolling out a publisher charm offensive appeared first on Digiday.

A majority of Americans say 2018 will be a better year than 2017, a shift from a year ago when public expectations were far less positive.