Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

The President wants to dole out some awards to his favorite industry — but not the positive kind, of course. Wonder if TV advertisers would support a Trump award TV show bashing the media?

While CES becomes a bigger spotlight for television each year, the industry’s premier January event continues to be the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour, which begins today at the Langham Huntington in Pasadena, Calif. More than 200 television journalists and critics are gathering for the TCA’s semiannual event (there’s also summer press tour each…

Doug Jones’ upset victory in Alabama gives that state its first split Senate delegation in more than two decades. But delegations with two senators of different parties still are much less common than they used to be: With 14 split delegations, the current Senate is tied for the fewest in the past 50 years.

AdExchanger |

Two years ago, lift tests weren’t something OLX Group even talked about. Today, lift tests, which measure the incrementality of a marketing channel or advertising tactic, are in heavy rotation at the Argentinian web company, which owns and operates 17 classified apps and sites around the world, including Craigslist competitor Letgo in the US. Performance… Continue reading »

The post Performance Advertisers Are Turning To Lift Tests To Defend The Spend appeared first on AdExchanger.

AdExchanger |

Although cable operators used to be the primary keepers of TV’s distribution and data pipes, the pendulum is swinging toward programmers and smart-TV providers. Addressable inventory is increasing, driven by a surge in smart-TV OEMs licensing their data directly and local TV companies adding data and automation to their sales mixes. Sorenson Media, which is… Continue reading »

The post Sorenson Media CEO: Addressable TV Will Put More Power Into Programmers’ Hands appeared first on AdExchanger.

AdExchanger |

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. “Alexa, I’m Out Of Bleach” Amazon is working with top-spending CPG brands on marketing deals for its Alexa voice-activated devices, reports CNBC. “For example, Alexa may suggest to a shopper who previously bought Clorox’s Pine-Sol to consider buying its disinfecting wipes.” Amazon is also… Continue reading »

The post Amazon Sells CPGs On Alexa Tie-Ins; Checking In On Ad Tech Headcounts appeared first on AdExchanger.

For better or worse, preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation is a do-it-yourself exercise for advertisers in the absence of stronger direction from regulators.

Unclear guidance on the finer GDPR points, like when and how consent must be obtained and updated, kept advertisers in a holding pattern for much of 2017. Marketers, publishers and ad tech companies expected the latest round of guidelines, a draft of which was released in early December, to shed further light on how to plan for obtaining consent under the regulation, only to be disappointed with more vagueness. The ad industry won’t get those answers until sometime after Jan. 17, when feedback to the latest version of the guidelines is gathered and then adopted by the regulator.

Ad execs spent much of 2017 flitting between panic and confusion over when they need to get consent to process personal data and when they have legitimate business interests to process data without permission under the wide-ranging regulation. Understanding changes to what consent is required is the biggest issue, agreed several data privacy experts interviewed for this article. Confusion also exists around when legitimate interests can be claimed when consent is otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain. There is no guidance on how strict the legalities of legitimate interests will be, which makes it tough to determine how to build watertight data protection processes into a business, according to Jonathan Clough, data compliance specialist at Intermarketing Agency.

Until more guidance emerges, the pressure is on advertisers to lean on their own internal expertise. L’Oréal ended 2017 with a data privacy officer in all its Western Europe markets, including the U.K., France and Germany, while other businesses like Warner Bros., McDonald’s, The New York Times and Snap have made GDPR expertise a key requirement for data privacy experts they’re recruiting. That influx of expertise is already helping advertisers clarify what they can and can’t do with consent and privacy preferences, areas that Stéphane Bérubé, L’Oréal’s CMO for Western Europe, believes should be key objectives for the ad industry in 2018.

“I don’t think the [ad industry] has done a good enough job convincing and explaining to the consumer why sharing their data can be good for them,” Bérubé said. “GDPR is a good thing if we explain to the consumer that their data will lead to personalization and relevancy without intruding on their privacy.”

Now that larger advertisers like L’Oréal, Panasonic and Lloyds Bank have a firmer grip on how their data is collected and managed, their marketing teams are focused on communicating the value people get in return for sharing their data.

Due to the amount of publicity the GDPR will get in May, consumers will pay more attention to the consent notices they read from businesses. If the notices are not trustworthy and explicit, then those businesses risk losing customers’ data, warned Adam Rubach, the U.K. managing director for mobile data platform Ogury. On the flip side, Rubach reasoned that if notices are written “in plain English” and are “very transparent about the data that is being requested and not hidden away in pages of legal text,” then that will likely make the end user feel more comfortable.

Creating that “consent experience” is new territory for many marketers because historically that experience was not as transparent and simple as it must be in a few months, said Ian Woolley, chief revenue officer at Ensighten, a data and tag management provider, which works with TUI Group, Nestle, United Airlines and other global brands. Some of Ensighten’s clients are considering testing different ways of asking for consent, tweaking the wording on video messages and other privacy notices, in order to see which combinations deliver the consent needed to process data lawfully.

Some advertisers are identifying which players in the supply chain will be responsible for certain data under the GDPR. Todd Ruback, Evidon’s chief privacy officer and vp of legal affairs, believes certain players in the system will struggle, as advertisers and publishers push liability for certain data further downstream to other ad tech vendors.

“If advertisers and publishers use contract revisions [with ad tech players] to push liability downstream, then there’s going to be a knock-on cost,” he said. “If you [as a vendor] want to continue being on a publisher site, then your company is going to have to agree to new levels of indemnification, which could cause consolidation in the market when the smaller players can’t take on that level of risk.”

The post With GDPR looming, key compliance questions still remain appeared first on Digiday.

Header bidding isn’t getting left behind anytime soon.

Although publishers are increasingly adopting server-to-server connections, the presumed successor to header bidding, very few go all-in on this method of programmatic selling. However, publishers are increasingly using both techniques to sell their inventory, as the number of publishers using on-page header bidding and server-side bidding in tandem has increased by 50 percent over the past four months, according to ServerBid.

While going server-to-server speeds up page-load times since ad calls are hosted on publishers’ servers and not on people’s browsers, it is still in its infancy and has low user match rates and inventory fill rates. For these reasons, most publishers that are moving their ad calls to servers keep their vendors for on-page header bidding — where publishers simultaneously offer inventory to multiple exchanges before making calls to their ad servers — to make sure they don’t lose revenue when they switch to newer technology.

Among the top 1,000 sites on Alexa that sell inventory programmatically, 21 percent use both server-side and browser-side header bidding to sell their inventory, up from 14 percent in September, according to ServerBid. Publishers that use both strategies include Vox Media, Meredith Corp., Ranker, Chegg, Granite Media, Thought Catalog, Intermarkets, CafeMedia and Bauer Xcel Media.

By contrast, 6 percent of the top 1,000 programmatic sites solely rely on server-side bidding, which is the same number of sites that used the technique back in September. Purch — the publisher of sites such as Tom’s Guide and Top Ten Reviews — and the 25 publishers that license its ad tech are examples of sites that only use server-to-server connections to sell programmatic inventory.

A downside of server-to-server connections is it is tougher for the supply-side platforms and demand-side platforms to match their user IDs. With on-page header bidding, each SSP has access to the user’s browser, which means they gather and use their own matching data to sync with the DSP’s matching data.

But with server-to-server wrappers — where one vendor aggregates the bids from all the other vendors in a cloud-based product — only the vendor collecting the bids has access to the user’s browser, which means the other vendors have to sync their data to the aggregator’s data. This additional step can reduce matches.

For example, Ranker included the code of one of its SSPs on its webpage as well as inside a server-to-server wrapper. When Ranker removed the SSP’s code from its page, the revenue coming in from that SSP dropped by 25 percent, said Ranker CTO Premesh Purayil. This is because the SSP could not successfully match user IDs within the server-side wrapper without having code on the publisher’s page.

Likewise, CafeMedia ran a test for one week where it only sold its programmatic inventory through server-to-server connections for a few of its websites. This boosted page speed by about 40 percent on average, but the revenue coming in from programmatic auctions declined by nearly 30 percent, said CafeMedia evp Paul Bannister.

With the ad tech and digital publishing industries building ID consortiums, the revenue-generating ability of server-to-server connections should improve in the next few years, Bannister said. Theoretically, if more vendors and publishers start sharing user ID data, then the match rates will improve and programmatic platforms will fill more inventory.

But those days aren’t here yet. Danny Khatib, CEO of Granite Media, said his company’s sites “will likely stay on the hybrid model until server-to-server performance improves considerably.”

The post Server-to-server bidding doesn’t end up replacing header bidding appeared first on Digiday.

CNN made waves when it said last month it would throw in the towel on its Snapchat show after just four months. But rival NBC News says it’s satisfied with the traction “Stay Tuned,” its 5-month-old daily news show for Snapchat, is getting on the app.

“Stay Tuned,” which airs twice every weekday and once per day on the weekends, is getting tens of millions of unique viewers every month, NBC News said. (In its first month, “Stay Tuned” attracted 29 million unique viewers.) The show has also attracted a loyal audience, accumulating 4 million subscribers since launch, according to a source, with more than two-thirds of its audience under the age of 25. More than half of the “Stay Tuned” audience watches three or more episodes per week, NBC News added.

“One of the reasons we were excited to launch ‘Stay Tuned’ in partnership with Snap was to reach an audience that was not engaging with NBC News content on more traditional platforms,” said Nick Ascheim, svp of digital at NBC News. “Given that we are seeing such strong results among a younger demographic, we feel that we’ve achieved that goal.”

“Stay Tuned” was launched by NBC News in July as a twice-daily show bringing the latest in U.S. and world news, politics, pop culture, weather and other important current events. Each episode runs for roughly two minutes, features four different news segments and includes both studio and field pieces.

NBC News didn’t skimp on the investment: “Stay Tuned” executive producer Andrew Springer leads a crew of 30 full-time producers, writers, editors and graphics people devoted to the program, which only runs on Snapchat. The show is hosted by NBC News and MSNBC correspondents Gadi Schwartz and Savannah Sellers.

NBC News didn’t comment on whether “Stay Tuned” is profitable, but the show is part of a broader and ongoing business relationship between Snap and NBCUniversal, which invested $500 million into Snap during the company’s IPO last March. Over the past year, NBCUniversal has produced several shows for Snapchat based on its TV properties, including “The Voice” and “Saturday Night Live.” A few months ago, NBCU also formed a digital studio joint venture with Snap to develop scripted shows for Snapchat. As part of the relationship, NBCU and Snap combine to sell ad space within “Stay Tuned” and other shows.

This works for NBCUniversal, but not necessarily for everyone else. Recently, rival CNN decided to pull the plug on its daily news show for Snapchat called “The Update,” which had 10 people working on it. According to The Wall Street Journal, the decision to axe the show was driven by difficulties in turning a profit on the program. Other Snapchat show partners have previously told Digiday about difficulties they faced in filling ad space inside Snapchat shows, which prompted Snap to bring in more programmatic advertising within its shows.

NBC News would not comment on the record about Snap’s relationship with other media partners. But a source, speaking anonymously, stressed NBC News’ commitment to “Stay Tuned,” pointing to the larger NBCUniversal-Snap relationship.

“NBCUniversal, in general, is very invested in this show working,” this source said. “There are no plans for this show to go away.”

It helps that the show seems to be attracting an audience. Getting users to start new episodes and stick around took some tinkering, Springer said. For instance, “Stay Tuned” viewers don’t mind politics, but they’re less likely to start an episode if the lead story is related to politics. Instead, the audience prefers coverage of breaking news and current events, the weather, and internet and pop culture. Generally, the topics that seem to generate the most chatter among younger users on other social media platforms translate well as lead stories on Snapchat, Springer said. Audiences also don’t mind if “Stay Tuned” devotes multiple days of lead story coverage to these types of news items — for instance, the Las Vegas shooting in October was the lead story for four days on “Stay Tuned,” and NBC News saw no dip in viewership.

“When we started the show, we would start with stories on Jared Kushner; this audience is not interested with hard political news right off the bat,” said Springer. “We started putting those types of stories as middle segments in the show, and we saw people sticking through and completing the show.”

Today, more than half of the “Stay Tuned” audience completes the full episode without skipping any of the segments, NBC News said.

Among other takeaways, NBC News found pictures of people and colorful images tend to perform better as the cover photo for the show. “Weather graphics do well, too,” Springer said. “If you had a picture of a tree blowing during a hurricane or one of those red-yellow-green images of a hurricane, the hurricane image would always outperform.”

The length of the episodes was one thing NBC News changed following the show’s launch. Initially, episodes of “Stay Tuned” would run for two or three minutes with five segments per episode. The sweet spot for “Stay Tuned” is two-minute episodes and four segments, Springer said.

“If you went back and watched our older episodes, I don’t think we had the pacing right,” Springer said. “Holding a phone in front of your face for three minutes feels like a very long time.”

The post NBC News got 4 million subscribers in 5 months to its Snapchat show appeared first on Digiday.

Many of the publishers that spent 2016 and 2017 investing in Facebook products like Instant Articles and news feed videos enter the new year with new perspective on the relationship they have with the world’s largest social platform. For the latest installment of our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for candor, we spoke to an audience development head at a midsize digital publisher that resisted the temptation to go all-in on those products. The conversation has been condensed.

You don’t put a lot of resources into news feed video, Instant Articles or any of Facebook’s other products. Why?
We don’t use Instant Articles, and we didn’t pivot to video, but Facebook has encouraged us not to pivot to video, very candidly so. The opportunities for monetization there are basically nil. The ROI for the kind of investment required to put out the amount of video some folks are putting out there isn’t there. And with Instant Articles, being a first candidate for alpha and beta testing is predicated on being there, but the dev lift would be such a heavy lift for not much return.

Facebook actually told you not to pivot to video?
It wasn’t an explicit “don’t do this.” But it was a candid conversation about publishers pivoting to video and crashing and failing. Look at Mic or the BuzzFeed video series that used to take off and just don’t anymore. It was in the context of other publishers taking this step, and it didn’t yield the results they wanted.

Investing time in news feed video seems like a dubious decision. How is Facebook responding to that?
The way they responded to it was enlightening for me. It was one of the first conversations I’d had where it was clear that the publishers were testing a product. A lot of these decisions are made by the product team — not the audience or even the engineers. With video specifically, they were looking at it as an experiment.

So, not a lot of contrition there.
Not at all. It was almost like, “It’s not us, it’s the product team.” When you’re a publisher, you don’t think of yourself as part of a test, but really, we’re all at the behest of Facebook and their constant experimentation. That’s all going to go away in 2018.

Why do you say that?
They are going to completely deprioritize publishers. They very candidly said to me, “If I were you, I would probably not rely on Facebook as much as you are.” So a big strategy for publishers needs to be diversification. The people at Facebook I’ve spoken to have confirmed this. Their efforts are going to be elsewhere.

Did hearing that change the way you interact with them?
Maybe. I’m seeing the relationship we have as a fruitful one, as opposed to a functional one. I know what to turn to them for now. [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg changed the mission statement a couple months ago, and this is what the reps keep coming back to. For a while, it became all about publishers. Now, they’re going back to making it about individuals, communities, groups and membership. I think now, if I were to go to them, it will be for completely different reasons than I did last year.

How will you focus your energy differently?
We need to see how we’re going to elevate our journalists on Facebook the way they elevate themselves on Twitter. Our journalists have huge social capital there. Groups are going to be interest-oriented hubs, and it’s going to be important to watch that. It’s very much going to be the year of the individual brand.

With all the effort you put into building a good relationship with Facebook, how did it feel to hear that publishers are going to be less important to the platform?
I guess it would be an annoying, possibly devastating thing for publishers, especially the ones that rely on it so much. We don’t get the bulk of our traffic from Facebook. We have a loyal user base. That’s going to behoove us going forward. We’re not going to be dead or anything. It’s going to be a challenge, but the only thing we can do is be creative. There are new platforms to be discovered on and new ways we can stay afloat.

The post Facebook will ‘completely deprioritize publishers’: Confessions of a publisher audience development head appeared first on Digiday.