Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

In 2017, Silicon Valley did some soul-searching about tech’s role in spreading fake news that exacerbated social divisions in the U.S. Chinese tech firms should do some soul-searching too, given they work with an authoritarian government skilled in using technologies to try to control society.
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Workplaces are tearing down walls and with them any sense of decorum. A guide to tuning it out and focusing in.
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Workplaces are tearing down walls and with them any sense of decorum. A guide to tuning it out and focusing in.
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The path forward for Apotex is uncertain following the sudden death of founder and chairman Barry Sherman, who was the architect of the generic drugmaker’s litigation-heavy strategy.
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Tony Haile is making two big bets in 2018, and both of them are both shorts.

The first is that average revenues per user for publishers won’t improve. The second is that digital advertising will remain unpleasant enough that people continue to try and avoid it.

Those bets will have a big impact on how next year goes for Haile, when the founder and former CEO of Chartbeat unveils Scroll, a startup aiming to solve publishers’ problems with ad blocking and intense competition for ad revenue simultaneously, with a paid service that removes ads from users’ browsers.

Haile discussed publishers’ challenges over the phone with us. The conversation has been edited and condensed for brevity.

2017 was a horror show for ad-supported digital media, and many publishers are trying to diversify away from it. Is the era of free, purely ad-supported content over?
The platforms, with their dominance of traffic, are going toward what I call a platform tipping point. At a certain point, so much of ad spend is concentrated with two players that actually the economic costs of maintaining the infrastructure to buy elsewhere becomes increasingly inexcusable for an advertiser. I don’t think you’re going to see ad-supported media disappear tomorrow. I do wonder whether we’re going to start seeing those premiums start to shrink and disappear over time.

Ad blocking loomed larger when you started thinking about Scroll in 2015. Why do you think ad blocking was a less urgent topic of conversation this year?
Ad-blocking rates have mostly stabilized, around 12-15 percent. Then, you look at sell-through rate. There’s relatively few publishers out there that are at 100 percent sell-through rate; for direct-sold, nowhere close. So while we can talk about the projected loss, in reality you haven’t seen publisher revenues affected by it too much. Ad blocking shouldn’t be seen as this Chicken Little problem to defeat. It’s a consumer signal: You have 236 million people saying they don’t want this experience anymore. That’s the shift in thinking from “Ad blocking is the end of the world!” to something that will stabilize.

Next year, browsers will start exerting more control over the ads that sites can display. Are you worried that the browsers will compete with Scroll, with the advantage of being free?
The challenge you tend to get is you’re not going to get publishers that say, “I was making a $30 CPM on this page, and now I’m making a $5 CPM, and I guess that’s just life.” Instead, you get a game of whack-a-mole. If they don’t get the autoplay video ad, I don’t expect publishers to just go, “I guess we’ll just run that one 300 x 250 banner.”

You wrote about the lousy job Facebook has done monetizing video for publishers. Is 2018 the year publishers start distancing themselves from Facebook?
I don’t think they’re going to start distancing from Facebook because it’s still way too powerful. What’s interesting is whether Facebook can make a go of its big bet, which is Watch. Facebook has had a tough time instantiating new behaviors on their platform, outside of news feed and Messenger. If you believe Watch is make-or-break, then they will continue to throw a tremendous amount of money at that for the next year or two. Publishers are going to be attracted to that like moths to flame.

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Mark Duffy has written the Copyranter blog for 12 years and is a freelancing copywriter with 25-plus years of experience. His hockey wrist shot is better than yours.

Despite many loud headlines this year about gender diversity and female empowerment, there has been no progress with gender bias in ads in the last 10 years. Why’s that, you think?

Maybe it’s because the percentage of female creative directors remains ridiculously low — about 11 percent. And maybe too many members of the Creative Directors Boys Club don’t view women as equal to men, both in the workplace and out in the world. Earlier this year, a researcher spent significant time embedded in four major agencies and found that their creative departments “protect the status of men through the organized subordination of women.”

Sounds like the creative department of Sterling Cooper. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Now, take a gander at some recent examples of casual, and not so casual, ad sexism.

Carl’s Jr./Hardee’s
This year, CKE Restaurants, the fast feeders’ owner, dramatically dropped their awful “bikini babe” TV ads by introducing the world to their new mascot Carl Hardee Sr. — an obvious and lame co-opting of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World.” Senior’s idiotic Millennial son, Carl Hardee Jr., was wholly blamed for all the T&A commercials (Actually, it was former CKE CEO Andrew Puzder’s doing.)

This unfunny chicken sandwich spot is part of the new image campaign. No bikinis! But there is a women in the spot. She’s either Senior’s much younger wife/girlfriend or just some random beach babe enthralled by Senior’s inane brush-with-death tale.

Either way, she’s unimportant. She says nothing; we don’t even see her face. She’s arm/bar candy. This is still blatant sexism. At least the bikini babes got to say some words to a camera.

Bianco shoes

This 2017 spot via the Dutch footwear company boldly, violently enters the equal pay debate. Good for them! But wait. Bianco is telling you women you need that extra money to pay for more expensive haircuts, more expensive clothes and of course, more expensive shoes (compared to men). Because womenfolk need to do lots of shoppin’ and primpin’, otherwise they get very angry (watch the spot). Capitalism usurping Feminism. Bianco isn’t the first brand to do it, but it may be the worst.

Audi

To sell used cars in China, Audi produced this video of a soon-to-be mother-in-law “kicking the tires” (metaphorically) of her son’s soon-to-be wife. Sure, wifey is used, but is she overused? Mom gives son her OK — until she notices the bride’s small headlights. The spot ends with the line: “An important decision must be made carefully.” Yes, like the decision to piss off thousands of potential buyers. Back in July, an Audi spokesman said the ad was being investigated, but passed the buck by blaming its local Chinese joint venture partner. This is maybe not-so-casual sexism.

Santo Mezquila
Don’t be alarmed, bros, there were still plenty of intentionally sexist ads this year — like the below American print executions for Santo Mezquila, “the world’s first” mezcal-tequila combo. Headline: “There are still places your tongue hasn’t been.”

See also: an Australian butcher’s naked woman meat display case “ambient activation” and this ill-timed holiday lingerie commercial featuring an office party scene straight out of “Eyes Wide Shut.”

Let’s finish with another male creative anecdote, this one from Cannes in June. Outdoor Lion jury member Bruno Bertelli, Publicis’ worldwide CCO, said this to a full room of women and men.

(I) enjoyed judging with women because of “their more emotional and less rational approach” — because as we all know, women have their brain’s left hemisphere carved out at birth.

We apparently have not moved very far forward from the “Mad Men” era.

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Ads.txt became 2017’s hottest ad tech buzzword, despite its awkward name. The IAB-backed tool helps ad buyers avoid arbitraged inventory and spoofed domains, and ad tech die-hards can’t stop talking about it. Here are five things we learned about ads.txt in 2017.

Adoption was initially slow
In the first 100 days of ads.txt’s release, only 13 percent of the 10,000 most popular websites on the internet adopted it, according to Ad Ops Insider. Few publishers adopted ads.txt early on because their tech teams were overcommitted to other projects, they didn’t understand how ads.txt would benefit them or they didn’t want ad buyers to know the publishers used unauthorized resellers to help sell their inventory.

Adoption began to increase once publishers began to better understand the benefits of ads.txt, buyers started telling pubs to adopt it or be blocked and Google threw its weight behind the initiative.

“As programmatic platforms began to show support and explain the direct impact [of ads.txt] on inventory rates to publishers, publishers began to adopt quickly,” said Rachael Churchill, vp of quality and operations at ad tech firm Conversant.

It reflects Google’s power over publishers
The percentage of the 10,000 most popular websites using ads.txt jumped from 13 percent to 44 percent within a month after Google announced in September that its most popular ad products would begin filtering for ads.txt. Other platforms were adopting ads.txt filters during this time, so this increase can’t solely be attributed to the search giant. However, Google clearly had a large role in popularizing ads.txt.

Google pressured publishers to get on board with ads.txt by saying its DoubleClick Ad Exchange, AdSense network and demand-side platform DoubleClick Bid Manager would use ads.txt to filter out unauthorized sellers. In the background, Google added an ads.txt management tab to its ad server’s dashboard and sent emails to publishers using its DoubleClick exchange that said their ads.txt files should be updated “in order to prevent impact to your earnings.”

“Google is definitely the force to get ads.txt up and running,” said Murat Deligoz, CEO of ad tech company Advelvet, which helps publishers set price floors in Google’s ad exchange.

It gets contentious
Advertisers adopting ads.txt to avoid unauthorized sellers is bad news for vendors that resell inventory without a publisher’s permission. After ads.txt started getting traction, third-party resellers began asking publishers to list them on their ads.txt files, even though the publishers had no direct relationships with these companies.

The reseller vendors said they were just trying to make direct connections with publishers whose inventory they were already selling. But other ad tech companies disagreed. OpenX even emailed its publisher clients that the tactic was a “scam.”

“Any time a company uses a standard for ill, it becomes contentious,” said Alanna Gombert, CRO of MetaX, a blockchain company that built a product that tracks updates to publishers’ ads.txt files.

Prices are rising
Inventory prices in Google’s ad exchange are rising, and the company attributes the increases to ads.txt.

As more publishers adopt ads.txt and buyers start using it to filter inventory, the price of premium publishers’ inventory will continue to increase as the money spent on spoofed domains instead goes to legitimate publishers, said Jeremy Hlavacek, head of global automated monetization at IBM Watson Advertising. Hlavacek believes ad buyers and their vendors are not prepared for these price changes, though.

It’s not foolproof
Marketers and publishers love to gush over how ads.txt will help them cut out shady ad tech vendors. But ads.txt has limits as a fraud-fighting tool.

Rory Edwards, vp of marketplace and strategy at demand-side platform Dataxu, said that although ads.txt is gaining traction, a lot of quality publishers have yet to adopt it. Ads.txt can be used to filter out domain spoofers if a site has an ads.txt file publicly posted. But if buyers limit their campaigns to only run on sites with ads.txt, then they’ll restrict their ability to reach targeted audiences at scale.

Publishers are prone to misspelling the supply-side platforms listed in their ads.txt files. Misspellings are problematic because they cause DSPs to pass by the mislabeled vendors, resulting in lower revenue for the publisher and its SSPs. About 15 percent of the top 1,000 Alexa sites have formatting errors in their ads.txt files, according to FirstImpression’s ads.txt dashboard.

“It seems really rickety for millions of dollars to be spent on,” said Jay Friedman, COO of programmatic agency Goodway Group.

Most ads.txt files also fail to specify the type of inventory an authorized seller can represent. Some publishers like Hearst and Turner state in their ads.txt files if a vendor’s access is limited to a particular type of inventory. But most publishers don’t make it clear if a vendor’s access is limited to display, video or native. Without this clarity, authorized vendors can still repackage display inventory as video and make money by arbitraging the difference between display and video CPMs.

“Things will get ironed out,” Gombert said. “Software development is a process, and you have to start from point zero and improve and iterate.”

 

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AdExchanger |

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Manny Puentes, founder and CEO at Rebel AI. Every time we shop, we make the decision to purchase either a brand item or its generic equivalent. We assume generic laundry… Continue reading »

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We asked Digiday readers to vote on their favorite stories of 2017, and they selected stories defined by a great reckoning occurring in media and marketing — from the harsh realities of reporting sexual harassment in advertising to the future of media enterprises.

The top 10 stories — five about media and five about marketing — appear below, plus a write-in winner.

Top 5 media stories

1. Pivot to pennies: Facebook’s key video ad program isn’t delivering much money to publishers
Our readers’ favorite media story of 2017 centered on the biggest platform frenemy of them all: Facebook. Five major publishers that get hundreds of millions of views per month on Facebook told us Facebook’s test of mid-roll ad breaks in live and on-demand videos wasn’t generating much money, with CPMs ranging from 15 cents to 75 cents. One publisher even responded to a request for comment with the lyrics to Flo Rida’s “Low.”

2. The pivot to reality for digital media
In 2017, publishers had to get real about revenue after years of relying too heavily on advertising revenue. But the pivot is more of a correction than an upheaval, co-executive editor Lucia Moses writes, pointing to Mashable, which was valued at $250 million in 2016 but sold for $50 million to Ziff Davis this year: “Selling for a fifth of that price a mere 12 months later says more about the expectations venture-funded digital media eagerly embraced when capital was cheap and plentiful.”

3. ‘The model can’t hold’: Publishers face content studio growing pains
Content studios were hailed as the saviors of publishers’ revenue models. But as this story shows, publishers can’t bank on editorial prestige alone to attract reader attention. Hiring a crack team of editors, writers and photographers to create branded content that looks and feels like journalism costs money. “If you look at the real challenge of native advertising, it’s really more about the margin than the revenue,” said Paul Rossi, president of The Economist Group.

4. ‘Jack-of-all-trades, master of none’: Why Mashable flamed out
After Mashable’s sale to Ziff Davis was announced in November, many wondered where Mashable went wrong. This piece identifies three reasons: too much attention to competitors, big expenses and a lack of editorial focus. “Too often, publishers take for granted that if they created the news, the audience and the buyers would follow,” said Doug Rozen, chief digital and innovation officer at OMD.

5. ‘I just wanted to organize this mess’: An oral history of the Lumascape
The Lumascape, a series of charts that organize the ad tech industry, started as a PowerPoint presentation. Seven years after Luma Partners founder Terence Kawaja presented it at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Networks and Exchanges Conference in May 2010, some of the people who helped popularize the Lumascape told us how it came to be.

Top 5 marketing stories

1. ‘I left and I shut up’: Why women in advertising won’t speak publicly about harassment
Our readers’ favorite marketing story of 2017 was borne out of revelations of sexual harassment and assault by powerful men in media, marketing, music and entertainment. This story examined how women have a unique disadvantage when they try to report harassment at agencies.

2. What influencer marketing really costs
We dug into how influencer marketing is priced and found that agencies are pricing per hundreds of followers and based on platform, leading to a mixed bag of models that could bear further scrutiny going into 2018.

3. Why e-commerce brands are flipping the script and opening brick-and-mortar stores
After years of doing business online, e-commerce brands such as Allbirds, Away and ModCloth started opening retail stores in 2017 to establish a sense of permanence. “Pretty much anybody can sell something online these days, but to have a physical location, there is definitely a brand legitimacy in that,” said Jill Dvorak, senior director for digital retail at the National Retail Federation.

4. Brands are now blacklisting mainstream news sites, including Fox News
The summer of 2017 was testy for brands online. In August, we found that brands were not only pulling ads from obviously problematic sites such as Breitbart, but also requesting they be pulled from news sites altogether, including as Fox News. “I think the definition of ‘mainstream’ is changing,” said a president of a New York-based media agency. “Because of the news proliferation, we have more content to monitor and determine what is appropriate for the client.”

5. Will it blend? Oath will combine disparate AOL-Yahoo ad tech assets
When Verizon announced in April it would merge AOL and Yahoo, we explored what it would take to combine their ad tech assets. Key among the obstacles: Certain assets directly compete with another, and none are first-in-class solutions. “Verizon cannot just mash them together,” said a vp of advertising at a technology firm. “The integration would be years in the making … if ever.”

Write-in winner:
‘We’re competing against crap’: The race is on to provide influencer marketing analytics
As brands pay more attention to the messiness of digital media, they are looking for tools to help them measure influencer campaigns, which are particularly vulnerable to hacks to make them appear more effective than they really are. “We just want a level playing field to compete on,” said Bob Gilbreath, CEO of Ahalogy, a firm offering third-party verified metrics.

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