Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

Thanks to digital skullduggery, brand safety remains hotter than the devil’s anvil.

From the stump speeches of Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard to the role of ad tech in funding misleading content to YouTube’s multiple ad scandals, the perils of digital media buying were on full display throughout 2017. Here are five charts that summarize the state of brand safety.

Brands claim responsibility
Whether you’re examining brand safety, fraud or data leakage, there’s plenty of blame to go around the complex ad-supply chain whenever a snafu arises. But brands have more to lose than others if their ads appear next to questionable content.

A survey of 30 brand marketers by Digiday+ showed that brands place more responsibility on themselves than on agencies, vendors or publishers, when it comes to maintaining brand safety. Marc Goldberg, CEO of anti-ad fraud vendor Trust Metrics, said brand advertisers should be leading the conversation on brand safety because if they don’t care about it, nobody else will.

YouTube’s brand pullouts
In March, brands like AT&T and Verizon took their ads off YouTube after The Times of London published an exposé that showed brand ads appearing in videos that promoted terrorism. Although most of the brands that pulled their ads from YouTube were back on the platform within a few months, posturing surrounding this event catapulted brand safety into elite buzzword territory.

The concept of brand safety has been around for years, but as seen in the Google Trends graph below, searches for brand safety peaked in March.

Violent content is widespread
From drugs to piracy to sex, there is a lot of content on the internet that advertisers try to distance themselves from. Violence is the category that ad-verification company Integral Ad Science blocks, most often for brand-safety reasons, for its advertiser clients.

Travis Lusk, vp of global sales strategy at IAS, said advertisers aren’t necessarily more sensitive to violence in content than they are to sex content or illegal downloads. Compared to other touchy topics, there just happens to be more content across the web that gets categorized as violent.

Brand-safety tactics
In November, video ad platform Teads surveyed 100 CMOs and vps at large brands about brand safety. Nearly 80 percent of them said they are more concerned about brand safety than ever before.

About half of the survey respondents said they had reviewed their agency and vendor contracts over the past year. More than a third said they layered on more third-party ad measurement to their campaigns.

“Marketers are stepping up to take control over the way their money is spent,” said Forrester analyst Susan Bidel.

Programmatic perils
IAS found that across display and video for both mobile and desktop, programmatic buys have a greater likelihood of exposing brands to unsafe content than direct buys. This makes sense, given that with direct deals, brands know who they are working with. Programmatic platforms, on the other hand, are engineered to bring ads to thousands of publishers simultaneously, and the long-tail sites featured on these platforms offer cheap scale at the price of appearing next to low-quality or sensational content.

As Pritchard noted in a recent interview with Digiday: “We’ve still got to do work on brand safety.”

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2017 might be remembered as the year that publishers got more serious about things like commerce, events and other lines of non-advertising revenue. But everybody who took their first step into those waters will have a long way to go to catch up to PopSugar, which has had commerce at the heart of its operation almost since its founding 11 years ago.

The company’s co-founder and president, Lisa Sugar, hopped on the phone with Digiday to discuss the evolution of content and commerce, how branded content will change in 2018 and what it means that Amazon is now more engaged in media and marketing. The conversation has been condensed for brevity.

Give me two things we’ll see more of in media in 2018.
Experiential and offline media extensions are going to continue to explode. I would also say licensing and brand extensions, going back to the days of Martha Stewart.

Give me two things we’ll see less of in 2018.
Less display. That’ll continue to go away. Also, there will be less companies. I think some of these places will not make it another year.

The easiest way for a lifestyle publisher to diversify its revenues in 2018 will be ______.
Partnerships. We’re seeing more collaborations among publishers, so they can double up. I’ve been seeing that more and more.

What’s the biggest challenge that lifestyle publishers will face in 2018?
Continued differentiation.

Lot of publishers took steps toward diversifying revenue away from advertising. You’ve been doing this for a while. What does it say that people are moving in this direction, and what do you think about the prospect of more competition?
I think it’s fine that more people are playing. It’s going to be about staying ahead. One of the things we’re going to be doing next year is launching a beauty line through Ulta. It takes the brand from a marketing perspective into 300 stores in our top DMAs. It’s one thing to send off clicks and get affiliate links. Anyone can do that now. Anyone can start their own page and do that. It’s how you continue to stay ahead of everybody else.

Do the publishers that are just moving in have what it takes to do that?
I think what’s important to our brand is that they really trust us. Just having the right angle of knowing what we’re asking them to spend money on is something we’d take very seriously. A lot of other places might just be rushing after the trend or the hot topic, not caring what they’re putting out there.

What’s your big takeaway from branded content this year that will inform what you do next year?
I love that we’re working with brands that are really becoming more partners. It’s less transactional. For good or bad, we really get to understand each other, sharing data and building a better product. That to me is very exciting. Getting to that point takes a while. There’s always learnings when you grow departments really quickly and scaling. But when it works, it really works.

Both marketers and publishers say they want to do more with fewer partners next year. What gets you on an advertiser’s short list?
People are going to look at scale and reach. They’re going to look at engagements. Just to get that RFP in the first place, you need to hit some numbers to show that we check that box for the client. I feel for our sales and creative teams. All day long, they have to come up with the biggest and best idea that’s never been brought to them before. It’s not an easy job. I don’t envy what those guys do, but we do have fun really diving into what needs to get done.

Facebook and Google are being more proactive and offering more assistance in creating content for their platforms. Is 2018 going to be the year when you have to think of them as competitors?
Yes. They’ll definitely be competitors. But they’re still very much a marketer and a partner of ours. We’re selling shows to Facebook Watch. From a marketing perspective and a content perspective, we’ve been able to grow so much because of social.

[Read More …]

2017 might be remembered as the year that publishers got more serious about things like commerce, events and other lines of non-advertising revenue. But everybody who took their first step into those waters will have a long way to go to catch up to PopSugar, which has had commerce at the heart of its operation almost since its founding 11 years ago.

The company’s co-founder and president, Lisa Sugar, hopped on the phone with Digiday to discuss the evolution of content and commerce, how branded content will change in 2018 and what it means that Amazon is now more engaged in media and marketing. The conversation has been condensed for brevity.

Give me two things we’ll see more of in media in 2018.
Experiential and offline media extensions are going to continue to explode. I would also say licensing and brand extensions, going back to the days of Martha Stewart.

Give me two things we’ll see less of in 2018.
Less display. That’ll continue to go away. Also, there will be less companies. I think some of these places will not make it another year.

The easiest way for a lifestyle publisher to diversify its revenues in 2018 will be ______.
Partnerships. We’re seeing more collaborations among publishers, so they can double up. I’ve been seeing that more and more.

What’s the biggest challenge that lifestyle publishers will face in 2018?
Continued differentiation.

Lot of publishers took steps toward diversifying revenue away from advertising. You’ve been doing this for a while. What does it say that people are moving in this direction, and what do you think about the prospect of more competition?
I think it’s fine that more people are playing. It’s going to be about staying ahead. One of the things we’re going to be doing next year is launching a beauty line through Ulta. It takes the brand from a marketing perspective into 300 stores in our top DMAs. It’s one thing to send off clicks and get affiliate links. Anyone can do that now. Anyone can start their own page and do that. It’s how you continue to stay ahead of everybody else.

Do the publishers that are just moving in have what it takes to do that?
I think what’s important to our brand is that they really trust us. Just having the right angle of knowing what we’re asking them to spend money on is something we’d take very seriously. A lot of other places might just be rushing after the trend or the hot topic, not caring what they’re putting out there.

What’s your big takeaway from branded content this year that will inform what you do next year?
I love that we’re working with brands that are really becoming more partners. It’s less transactional. For good or bad, we really get to understand each other, sharing data and building a better product. That to me is very exciting. Getting to that point takes a while. There’s always learnings when you grow departments really quickly and scaling. But when it works, it really works.

Both marketers and publishers say they want to do more with fewer partners next year. What gets you on an advertiser’s short list?
People are going to look at scale and reach. They’re going to look at engagements. Just to get that RFP in the first place, you need to hit some numbers to show that we check that box for the client. I feel for our sales and creative teams. All day long, they have to come up with the biggest and best idea that’s never been brought to them before. It’s not an easy job. I don’t envy what those guys do, but we do have fun really diving into what needs to get done.

Facebook and Google are being more proactive and offering more assistance in creating content for their platforms. Is 2018 going to be the year when you have to think of them as competitors?
Yes. They’ll definitely be competitors. But they’re still very much a marketer and a partner of ours. We’re selling shows to Facebook Watch. From a marketing perspective and a content perspective, we’ve been able to grow so much because of social.

[Read More …]

Alphabet has announced that Eric Schmidt will step down as executive chairman and will take on the role of technical adviser on the company’s board at the end of 2017.

Schmidt served as Google’s chief executive in 2001 and became its executive chairman a decade later, retaining his position when the tech giant restructured to form Alphabet Inc.

Alphabet’s board will now most likely appoint a new, non-executive chairman at its next meeting in January.

“Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition,” said Schmidt.

“The Alphabet structure is working well, and Google and the Other Bets are thriving. In recent years, I’ve been spending a lot of my time on science and technology issues, and philanthropy, and I plan to expand that work.”

 

In his new role, he is tipped to advise the company’s urban development arm, Sidewalk Labs with its deep learning efforts, as well as its healthcare startups Verily and Calico.

 

 

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Alphabet has announced that Eric Schmidt will step down as executive chairman and will take on the role of technical adviser on the company’s board at the end of 2017.

Schmidt served as Google’s chief executive in 2001 and became its executive chairman a decade later, retaining his position when the tech giant restructured to form Alphabet Inc.

Alphabet’s board will now most likely appoint a new, non-executive chairman at its next meeting in January.

“Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition,” said Schmidt.

“The Alphabet structure is working well, and Google and the Other Bets are thriving. In recent years, I’ve been spending a lot of my time on science and technology issues, and philanthropy, and I plan to expand that work.”

 

In his new role, he is tipped to advise the company’s urban development arm, Sidewalk Labs with its deep learning efforts, as well as its healthcare startups Verily and Calico.

 

 

[Read More …]

Thanks to digital skullduggery, brand safety remains hotter than the devil’s anvil.

From the stump speeches of Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard to the role of ad tech in funding misleading content to YouTube’s multiple ad scandals, the perils of digital media buying were on full display throughout 2017. Here are five charts that summarize the state of brand safety.

Brands claim responsibility
Whether you’re examining brand safety, fraud or data leakage, there’s plenty of blame to go around the complex ad-supply chain whenever a snafu arises. But brands have more to lose than others if their ads appear next to questionable content.

A survey of 30 brand marketers by Digiday+ showed that brands place more responsibility on themselves than on agencies, vendors or publishers, when it comes to maintaining brand safety. Marc Goldberg, CEO of anti-ad fraud vendor Trust Metrics, said brand advertisers should be leading the conversation on brand safety because if they don’t care about it, nobody else will.

YouTube’s brand pullouts
In March, brands like AT&T and Verizon took their ads off YouTube after The Times of London published an exposé that showed brand ads appearing in videos that promoted terrorism. Although most of the brands that pulled their ads from YouTube were back on the platform within a few months, posturing surrounding this event catapulted brand safety into elite buzzword territory.

The concept of brand safety has been around for years, but as seen in the Google Trends graph below, searches for brand safety peaked in March.

Violent content is widespread
From drugs to piracy to sex, there is a lot of content on the internet that advertisers try to distance themselves from. Violence is the category that ad-verification company Integral Ad Science blocks, most often for brand-safety reasons, for its advertiser clients.

Travis Lusk, vp of global sales strategy at IAS, said advertisers aren’t necessarily more sensitive to violence in content than they are to sex content or illegal downloads. Compared to other touchy topics, there just happens to be more content across the web that gets categorized as violent.

Brand-safety tactics
In November, video ad platform Teads surveyed 100 CMOs and vps at large brands about brand safety. Nearly 80 percent of them said they are more concerned about brand safety than ever before.

About half of the survey respondents said they had reviewed their agency and vendor contracts over the past year. More than a third said they layered on more third-party ad measurement to their campaigns.

“Marketers are stepping up to take control over the way their money is spent,” said Forrester analyst Susan Bidel.

Programmatic perils
IAS found that across display and video for both mobile and desktop, programmatic buys have a greater likelihood of exposing brands to unsafe content than direct buys. This makes sense, given that with direct deals, brands know who they are working with. Programmatic platforms, on the other hand, are engineered to bring ads to thousands of publishers simultaneously, and the long-tail sites featured on these platforms offer cheap scale at the price of appearing next to low-quality or sensational content.

As Pritchard noted in a recent interview with Digiday: “We’ve still got to do work on brand safety.”

[Read More …]

Diageo’s voice strategy is becoming clearer with the launch of a service for the Amazon Echo Show that shows people how to make cocktails with the drink maker’s brands.

It is the company’s first app in Europe for Amazon’s latest voice-controlled speaker, which launched last month with support from a handful of brands and publishers. Diageo was among the early adopters, intrigued by the addition of a screen to Amazon’s range of smart speakers, a feature Diageo believes makes the device perfect for the kitchen.

Rather than adapt an existing skill, the name for apps on Amazon’s voice-controlled devices, Diageo has created a new one for the Echo Show. The advertiser took the concept behind thebar.com, a site it launched in 2013 to tap into the trend of mixing drinks at home, and built a voice-controlled version called “The Bar.” The skill gives people three options: People can ask for a recipe and then be talked through the recipe; it offers cocktail suggestions based on user preferences such as sweet or sour; and it teaches people mixology techniques.

Ingredients for the cocktails can be saved to shopping lists that are then sent to the Alexa mobile app, where the user can buy the ingredients. The skill also gives users the option to purchase certain ingredients and 12 of Diageo’s brands, including Smirnoff, Captain Morgan and Johnnie Walker, by directing them to Amazon.

“Technology is changing the way we socialize in and outside of the home,” said Periklies Antoniou, new technology and media innovation manager at Diageo. “With the new The Bar skill, we’re tapping into the growing number of adults using voice-enabled devices to take them on a journey toward mastering mixology.”

Antoniou’s enthusiasm for the new skill reflects how quickly and aggressively Amazon has flooded the market with its range of smart speakers. Forty percent of U.K. households will own an Echo by next year, according to the Radiocentre. Wise to the possibilities that scale could bring, Diageo has cozied up to the online behemoth’s voice-controlled offering, so much that the advertiser was wheeled out during Amazon’s first upfronts to the U.K. advertising industry earlier this year.

Should the Echo device become ubiquitous in households, then it could potentially become a sales channel for Diageo, which has struggled with direct selling for years like most consumer goods companies. While Diageo’s latest Echo skill is focused more on brand awareness than e-commerce, the brand has previously talked up the latter’s potential on voice-controlled devices. A recent report in the U.K. from Accenture found that 60 percent of people want to use the Echo to help them shop, and 7 percent already do so.

Search will be fundamental to any full-fledged strategy Diageo concocts for voice-controlled devices.

There will come a time when many search queries won’t be “mai tai” in text form; instead, it will be “how to make a mai tai” as a verbal query, the company’s head of digital innovation, Benjamin Lickfett, has said. When that time comes, brands that exploit the most relevant conversational, long-tail search terms will be able to monetize voice searches, which is why Diageo is trying to have a plan in place before its rival brands.

Image courtesy of Diageo

Diageo’s voice strategy is becoming clearer with the launch of a service for the Amazon Echo Show that shows people how to make cocktails with the drink maker’s brands.

It is the company’s first app in Europe for Amazon’s latest voice-controlled speaker, which launched last month with support from a handful of brands and publishers. Diageo was among the early adopters, intrigued by the addition of a screen to Amazon’s range of smart speakers, a feature Diageo believes makes the device perfect for the kitchen.

Rather than adapt an existing skill, the name for apps on Amazon’s voice-controlled devices, Diageo has created a new one for the Echo Show. The advertiser took the concept behind thebar.com, a site it launched in 2013 to tap into the trend of mixing drinks at home, and built a voice-controlled version called “The Bar.” The skill gives people three options: People can ask for a recipe and then be talked through the recipe; it offers cocktail suggestions based on user preferences such as sweet or sour; and it teaches people mixology techniques.

Ingredients for the cocktails can be saved to shopping lists that are then sent to the Alexa mobile app, where the user can buy the ingredients. The skill also gives users the option to purchase certain ingredients and 12 of Diageo’s brands, including Smirnoff, Captain Morgan and Johnnie Walker, by directing them to Amazon.

“Technology is changing the way we socialize in and outside of the home,” said Periklies Antoniou, new technology and media innovation manager at Diageo. “With the new The Bar skill, we’re tapping into the growing number of adults using voice-enabled devices to take them on a journey toward mastering mixology.”

Antoniou’s enthusiasm for the new skill reflects how quickly and aggressively Amazon has flooded the market with its range of smart speakers. Forty percent of U.K. households will own an Echo by next year, according to the Radiocentre. Wise to the possibilities that scale could bring, Diageo has cozied up to the online behemoth’s voice-controlled offering, so much that the advertiser was wheeled out during Amazon’s first upfronts to the U.K. advertising industry earlier this year.

Should the Echo device become ubiquitous in households, then it could potentially become a sales channel for Diageo, which has struggled with direct selling for years like most consumer goods companies. While Diageo’s latest Echo skill is focused more on brand awareness than e-commerce, the brand has previously talked up the latter’s potential on voice-controlled devices. A recent report in the U.K. from Accenture found that 60 percent of people want to use the Echo to help them shop, and 7 percent already do so.

Search will be fundamental to any full-fledged strategy Diageo concocts for voice-controlled devices.

There will come a time when many search queries won’t be “mai tai” in text form; instead, it will be “how to make a mai tai” as a verbal query, the company’s head of digital innovation, Benjamin Lickfett, has said. When that time comes, brands that exploit the most relevant conversational, long-tail search terms will be able to monetize voice searches, which is why Diageo is trying to have a plan in place before its rival brands.

Image courtesy of Diageo

SoftBank and Mubadala are in the round.

Chinese ride-hail behemoth Didi Chuxing just raised $4 billion, the company announced on Wednesday. Before this round, the company had raised upward of $15 billion.

Participants in this round included SoftBank and Mubadala. Didi would not disclose the current total funding. This round valued the company at around $56 billion; the company most recently was valued at $50 billion.

After Didi acquired Uber’s China operations in August of 2016, it expanded its international footprint through investments in companies like Brazil’s 99.

The company expects to continue that expansion. Part of the funding will also be dedicated to the development of AI, according to the announcement. Earlier this year, the company launched an AI lab in the U.S. to focus on the platform as well as self-driving.

Didi also has dipped its toe in dockless biking by participating in a recent $700 million round investment in Ofo, which recently expanded into the U.S.

This is developing …

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