A Chinese tech company pulled offline a virtual-reality avatar depicted as a flirtatious secretary in revealing clothes, hours after The Wall Street Journal asked whether such depictions encourage a view of women as sexual objects in the workplace.
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Google Changes Game Plan in India to Accommodate Soaring Demand
An explosion of smartphone usage in India is changing the way Alphabet’s Google sees the future of the internet.
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Shell, Barclays Detail Billions in Tax-Linked Charges
Royal Dutch Shell and Barclays Bank said they would take large charges attributable to the U.S. tax overhaul—joining a parade of global firms in recent days disclosing how American tax-bill changes will affect their bottom line.
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We’re already seeing the fallout from Apple’s war on cookies
The predictions are now a stark reality. With its Q3 earnings release in early November, Criteo confirmed what until then had been only speculation: Apple’s new Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature, rolled out with the latest version of its Safari browser in September, is taking a heavy toll on retargeters and industry players that rely on third-party cookies to track and place advertisements.
Criteo said during its earnings call that the feature negatively affected its third-quarter r
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5 things we learned about Facebook and fake news this year
This year, Facebook faced a backlash over enabling fake news and racist ads, got hauled in front of Congress for spreading Russian propaganda and found itself under the attack from European regulators. And that’s not to say anything of advertisers and publishers standing up to the tech giant over its measurement screw-ups and dominance of their content distribution. Here are five things we learned from Facebook’s annus horribilis:
Tech has too much faith in tech
A deeply seated belief running through Silicon Valley is the idea that tech will make the world a better place. Facebook may help people stay in touch with loved ones, spread democratic movements and help the marginalized find community, but the now-unavoidable truth is, humans can use tech for ill just as much as they can for good, as Facebook’s past year made abundantly clear. This belief caught Facebook flat-footed when it realized how much its platform was being abused.
Facebook’s strength is also a liability
Facebook’s stated goal has been to connect the world. But the scale that made Facebook an advertising powerhouse also works against it. Russian propagandists, racists and fake-news peddlers wouldn’t use it if it weren’t reaching nearly 1.4 billion daily active users to begin with. With that kind of scale, policing all the garbage that runs through the platform is unwieldy (or at least runs counter to profits). Facebook’s decision to reward sharing on the platform inadvertently fed the spread of fake news as well. Its size also makes it a bigger target for criticism. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Fake news underscores Facebook’s role as a news source
The fake-news problem made us aware that more people are getting their news from Facebook and other social media platforms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, up from 62 percent a year earlier, according to Pew Research Center. Facebook is the biggest pathway to news, with 45 percent saying they get news there, followed by 18 percent saying they get news on YouTube and 11 percent on Twitter. And people’s confidence about their ability to spot fake news is misplaced. The more they use Facebook, the more they’re likely to get fooled by fake news on the social network, according to BuzzFeed.
Facebook’s PR efforts haven’t been matched by the results
Facebook has been on a PR offensive this year, allowing users to flag fake news and hiring fact-checkers from organizations including ABC News and The Associated Press to verify suspected false stories. But whatever goodwill that won it with journalists was short-lived. A year in, some of those fact-checkers complain that Facebook exploits them for its own PR and that a lack of transparency on Facebook’s part hinders their work, the Guardian found. Meanwhile, fake news is still being shared on the platform.
Fake news isn’t just political propaganda
A lot of the attention on Facebook was understandably focused on Russian-sourced ads that attempted to influence the U.S. election and cause havoc all around the globe, but there were plenty of other efforts to exploit Facebook’s size to spread falsehoods. As The New York Times reported, anti-abortion site LifeNews.com, with 1 million followers on Facebook, has been one of the more prolific spreaders of fake news and misinformation. Facebook’s definition of fake news and its approach of going after the profit motive don’t necessarily work in the case of sites like this that don’t conform to other fake-news sites and are not motivated by profits but ideology, the Times reported.
Lyft Gives Year-End Love to Its Drivers Who’ve Truly Changed People’s Lives
There’s a lot to be said about whether the so-called “sharing economy” actually makes people’s lives better or worse. Maybe it’s both. But it’s compelling, even magical, that everyday people can just pick up a gig that puts them in contact with so many others. What meaningful things happen in those exchanges? For the holidays,…
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Digital advertising’s true impact on in-store sales
Inaccurate Segments May Be Costing Advertisers Billions
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 Chris Kelly, founder and CEO at Survata. We’ve all read the doom-and-gloom news about programmatic problems, from YouTube’s brand safety issues to brand advertisers culling their spending and companies like… Continue reading »
Tips for Livestreaming Social Media Content
Over the past year or two, you may have noticed that most of the major social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, have been promoting new features and products that revolve around livestreaming. This is a good way for the social media companies to drive revenue and engage more with users, and there’s now more…
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Amazon threatens the duopoly and problems with private marketplaces: Digiday Research highlights from 2017
Digiday Research surveys executive-level decision-makers who are in the know about critical issues facing the digital media industry. Here are some of our favorite insights from the past year. Check out Digiday+ for the latest research, exclusive content and member events.
Only 14 percent of agency execs believe brands are responsible for ad misplacement
Consumers are quick to judge, tweeting their displeasure the instant they find something they disagree with. But consumers have little to no idea how advertising works, believing, for instance, that every brand’s advertisement on Breitbart is a ringing endorsement of the so-called alt-right. Brands, however, often have little knowledge of or influence over where their ads end up. In this Digiday report, only 14 percent of agency executives believed the brand is responsible for the location of their ad placements. Instead of brands, agency respondents thought that either the brand’s agency (41 percent) or the tech vendor placing the ad (40 percent) should take the fall for inappropriate placement of ads.
90 percent of media execs think Amazon can threaten the duopoly
The Facebook-Google duopoly remains strong, but the days of the duopoly earning 99 percent of all new digital ad spending could be short-lived. With an ad business that now surpasses $1 billion, nine out of 10 media execs think Amazon has the potential to shift the power in the digital advertising world. Amazon has worked tirelessly to invest in the ad tech infrastructure to compete on a global stage. Amazon’s server-to-server wrapper is the most popular, and its header bidding solution is No. 3 among the Header Bidding Index Top 100 sites. Amazon also launched an application programming interface for Amazon Marketing Services, which will provide better data tools for its more nascent ad services.
72 percent of brands conduct most of their marketing in-house
2017 has been a trying year for agencies. Organic growth was virtually nonexistent for major agency groups Publicis and Omnicom. Consumer packaged goods companies slashing their marketing spend hurt WPP. Brands are finding that sometimes it’s easier and often faster to go it alone, with 72 percent of brands conducting over 50 percent of their marketing efforts in-house. As one anonymous executive put it: “Agencies and vendors are battling against each other, and I don’t know whose fault it is. I just want to get the work done. For instance, when we integrated a new tool recently, our agencies said that our vendors’ coding was wrong, while our vendors said that our agencies made the mistake. It took ages for us to finish the integration.”
Almost half of all publishers are deploying chatbots
The growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning has spurred publishers and marketers to create chatbots. The vast majority of them — 88 percent — work within Facebook Messenger, where their primary function is to provide information services and customer support. Digiday’s research found that publishers and marketers alike are eager for chatbots to help them interact with consumers at scale, but they acknowledge chatbots’ limitations. Chatbots aren’t technically sophisticated enough to resolve the bulk of customer interactions, with 91 percent of marketers saying chatbots conduct less than 20 percent of consumer interactions and pass the conversations off to human support when things go off-script.
51 percent of marketers think private marketplaces’ biggest issue is lack of inventory
Private marketplaces appeal to publishers fatigued by ad fraud and nontransparent exchanges because they allow publishers to create special pools of premium inventory for select advertisers to buy from. Publishers can oversee the bidding process for their inventory and are less likely to be affected by ad fraud. Marketers are happy to play along because it secures brand-safe environments for their ad placements. Unfortunately, PMPs are difficult to scale because they’re cobbled together on a publisher-by-publisher basis. More than half of the respondents to Digiday’s survey said their biggest complaint with PMPs is insufficient inventory, with just 16 percent of respondents saying they purchased more than 40 percent of their inventory from PMPs. After brands apply their targeting data to the pool of data and impressions publishers make available, they often find just a handful of users worth advertising to.