Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

Amazon has a growing ad business, but its ad infrastructure doesn’t seem to be as developed as Google’s or Facebook’s. For instance, ad buyers think Amazon Marketing Services — a self-serve paid search marketing tool that is supposed to help advertisers efficiently run search campaigns on Amazon — requires lots of manual work, and its reporting is inefficient.

For now, AMS offers three ad formats: sponsored products that appear below search results on Amazon, headline search ads that show up above search results and product display ads that are located on corresponding product detail pages. Four media buyers interviewed for this story think that while AMS is critical to advertising on Amazon, the self-serve search marketing tool is not as handy as they expected.

“AMS is a growing business that is extending to both first-party sellers and third-party sellers, and AMS is becoming a competitive search engine to Google,” said Nich Weinheimer, marketing director for Amazon consultancy Buy Box Experts. “But Amazon doesn’t have the DNA of Google, whose business is built upon search ads. Amazon’s core business is still e-commerce, so it is playing catch-up in advertising to become an equal player to Google and Facebook.”

Google and Facebook have a big head start on Amazon when it comes to building easy-to-use ad systems. That make a difference.

“Setting up AMS campaigns is laborious, and budget control remains manual,” said Todd Silverstein, U.S. head of performance marketing for Edelman. “The auto-pausing of ads for out-of-stock products has its pros and its cons.”

A New York-based ad buyer, who prefers anonymity, echoes Silverstein’s sentiment. This person said “speed is the biggest limitation” with AMS because compared to Google AdWords, it takes longer to set up and manage campaigns, as well as get campaign results.

“AMS is a manual tool. It didn’t come with automation until now because AMS is built as it is used,” said the New York-based executive. “Automation of AMS is Amazon’s priority. I believe most third-party tools that were initially designed for Google AdWords will adapt to AMS in the first half of 2018.”

AMS doesn’t allow advertisers schedule and download campaign reporting in a granular and efficient manner, forcing ad buyers to manually click into each campaign in the AMS dashboard to get performance data, according to Weinheimer. This is cumbersome for advertisers, especially those with a large range of products, because one AMS campaign is typically geared toward one product. (The only AMS ad unit that lets companies group multiple products into one campaign is headline search ads). As a company’s catalog grows, its AMS campaign list lengthens, making it laborious to pull performance data per campaign and update campaigns on a daily basis, said Weinheimer.

In addition to inefficient campaign reporting, Weinheimer believes the creation of product display ads and headline search ads is clunky. This is because AMS doesn’t function the same way as Google AdWords — AMS goes beyond keyword targeting. For instance, with product display ads, advertisers must manually set up their targeting with shopper interests (fashion or microfiber towels, for instance) or target a list of Amazon standard identification numbers (an identification number that Amazon gives to each product).

“Headline search ads is a keyword-based ad unit, but you need to create a headline and decide which landing page the ad should direct shoppers to,” Weinheimer added.

Meanwhile, agency executives said although advertisers can see if their keywords in an ad campaign are low-, medium- or high-volume keywords on AMS, they can’t see their actual share of that volume, which could lead to wasted ad spend on Amazon search marketing. On Google, however, advertisers can research the volume number of a given keyword and compare that to the clicks the advertiser gets to determine how much market share they can go after, said Weinheimer.

At the same time, agency executives think it’s unfair to compare AMS to Google AdWords because they have different algorithms: Google AdWords is more focused on page information and relevancy of keywords, while Amazon ranks search ads based on product sales, product reviews on the platform and then keywords, according to media buyers. Both Google AdWords and AMS run second-price auctions.

Amazon is aware of advertisers’ struggles and working to improve its advertising tools so they can support high-volume campaign management and execution. “It’s definitely still early days,” said an Amazon spokesperson. “Agencies and advertisers have shared a lot of valuable feedback with us as we work to increase the efficiency of our tools. It’s an area on which we’ve been very focused, and that will continue to be the case.”

Despite the challenges with AMS, retailers are spending more on AMS before the holidays, and performance marketers think automation will come to AMS next year. “Amazon is already working with companies like Kenshoo on automation, and I believe more data API [application programming interface] integrations [with AMS] will go live in 2018,” said Weinheimer. “We should give Amazon credit — the company is putting amazing effort in agency support and ad product development.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said that AMS ran a first-price auction. It has been corrected to say AMS employs a second-price auction model. Digiday regrets the error.

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NFL ratings are down this season, but in-game ad revenue continues to grow year-over-year this season, according to new data from Standard Media Index. This season’s NFL revenue, from September to the end of November, is up 2 percent among all networks. There was one additional nationally aired linear TV game than in the same…
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Proving the effectiveness of branded content has been an industry fixation in 2017, BBC StoryWorks, the branded-content arm of the broadcaster’s commercial division BBC Global News, is offering clients facial-coding and eye-tracking tools to show its branded content works, the fruits of two years of research.

Chinese phone maker Huawei is the first client to use these tools for its four-part video campaign “The Explorers.” One of the two-minute videos features an interview with former NASA astronaut Ron Garan. The content is viewed by a sample of the BBC’s global panel of 12,000 members — for Huawei, the sample was 400 — with facial-recognition and eye-tracking software activated through their desktop webcams. Facial movements are recorded on a second-by-second basis and then divided into six possible emotions: sadness, puzzlement, happiness, fear, rejection and surprise. Eye-tracking software indicates which part of the content, which could also be text-based, triggers the emotion.

After the campaign, StoryWorks offers analysis on how the content delivered against brand metrics. Compared to a control group, those who saw the Huawei campaign recorded a 216 percent increase in brand awareness, a 23 percent uptick in brand association and a 19 percent increase in purchase intent, according to the BBC insights team, which couldn’t share exact numbers.

“We want to use science to ascertain the emotional impact of content,” said Richard Pattinson, svp of BBC StoryWorks. “We see a clear correlation between audience engagement and brand impact; we want to use this when we commission with our partners. My focus in 2018 is to understand engagement better. We’re long past engagement [for content] being dwell times and pageviews.”

BBC Global News’ insights team has been researching how emotion relates to brand metrics for the last two years. Its “Science of Engagement” study, in partnership with facial-coding company CrowdEmotion, has won awards.

“We see a strong correlation between serious emotions like fear and positive uplifts in brand awareness,” said Pattinson. “Eliciting more challenging emotions is legitimate. It demonstrates empathy and understanding as a brand.”

Understanding which part of content elicits an emotional response can play into a brand’s distribution strategy. For instance, audiences might feel puzzled during a certain section of a two-minute video, which could then be cut and distributed on social media with the idea that more people will share it.

As with most data-related decisions, these tools are more likely to reinforce hunches rather than break new ground. Pattinson notes that they are not used to create ideas but achieve better cut-through in a crowded content market. “This is the science that helps the art show its full potential,” he said. “It demonstrates why it has been effective for the brand.”

Pattinson also said the tools could help brands understand what content relates to which part of the purchase funnel, which could inform distribution cycles, depending on the campaign objectives. For Huawei, the campaign objectives were more about driving awareness than driving purchase. Four other brands are using StoryWorks’ tools to help demonstrate brand outcomes as a result of emotional engagement, although StoryWorks couldn’t disclose their names. With this added research, the hope is clients are more likely to renew contracts with StoryWorks. Media companies like Vice and The Telegraph are increasingly beefing up the information they can give to clients to prove the effectiveness of their ads.

Since April, StoryWorks has closed over a hundred branded-content deals globally. In early 2016, Pattinson said revenue from branded content was roughly 30 percent of overall ad sales; now, he said it’s closer to 45 percent. StoryWorks has offices in London, New York, Singapore and Sydney with roughly 36 employees, including strategists, project managers, writers, developers and social media managers, among others.

As StoryWorks offers the tools to more clients as planned, it will need to hire more staffers, particularly because post-campaign analysis is bespoke, depending on campaign objectives. “This can only be valuable with the right degree of attention,” said Pattinson, “but bits of it are very scalable.”

Image courtesy of BBC StoryWorks

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Data protection appears to be many companies’ Achilles’ heel.
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Consultancies aren’t just parking their yachts off the French Riviera at Cannes. They’re setting their sights on major marketing budgets, and 2018 will be the year they start their conquest to remake the industry.

The CMO budget is the last line item on the balance sheet that companies like Accenture, IBM, and Deloitte haven’t touched. In the agency world, many are shrugging off consultancies’ maneuvering as irrelevant to their business and clients. While market inertia may slow down consultancies in the near term, they are playing a much different game than agencies — and the largest agencies should be particularly worried. Consultancies are integrating the entire digital marketing environment, of which paid media is just one facet, to tell a broader story about ROI — and they have the data to prove it. They aren’t simply selling ads, they’re helping the brand sell products and services with holistic solutions that cover the entire value chain.

Traditionally, Accenture, IBM and other consultancies have been system integrators and technical infrastructure companies. They implement large scale IT solutions and operate data centers for corporations — about as far from advertising creativity as a company can get. But as their core services expanded — and there was a clear need from the market — they bridged into marketing-related activities, such as building interactive and e-commerce websites. Now, they’re consolidating their role in marketing and design, with the CMO budget being the last untapped pot of money. This shift is predominantly driven at the CEO or CFO level, while ad agencies typically connect with CMOs at brands.

These companies have adopted a standard playbook as they remake advertising in their own image: acquire new capabilities, or enter client accounts through audits. Accenture recently purchased the French digital commerce agency Altima, the company’s 17th acquisition since 2013 as it expands its move into marketing and advertising. Altima joined Accenture’s roster of previous acquisitions, including US-based marketing and design agencies Wire Stone and Matter. They’re also acquiring people: Accenture recently hired OMD‘s EMEA president Nikki Mendonça to be the global president of intelligent marketing operations. Rigorous audits will also win consultancies the CMO budget: they’ll look for a pain point within a brand’s marketing strategy, provide a deep analysis of why that’s a problem, and offer a technical solution that integrates a number of third party solutions. The consultancies’ deep experience in building complex solutions out of many building blocks provided by independent vendors is the key enabler for these complex, transformational projects.

Market forces are pushing businesses to become more digitally-integrated. Brands must go all in to digitize themselves if they want to survive this tidal shift — they’ll be called on to better connect with consumers online, tell a broader story about the digital buying journey, and measure the impact of their marketing efforts. For example, lightweight direct-to-consumer CPG brands are upending the beauty industry with influencer-led marketing and slashed prices due to a lack of overhead. As major advertisers go digital, they’ll also face significant challenges in bringing all facets of their business into compliance with data privacy regulations around the globe. Consultancies are demonstrably better positioned here — for example, IBM recently showcased its capabilities to help brands weather the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU.

Traditional ad agencies don’t currently have the staff, expertise, or infrastructure to build out and support this deep digital integration — and they face a considerable amount of resistance from their brand clients as they wage a cold war over marketing data. As a result, they’ll continue to lose market share to consultancies that can build systems and integrations for advertisers, and offer both efficiency and tighter control over their data.

In 2018, consultancies will test the waters in the advertising space by auditing major brand marketing budgets — and it will likely be a bloodbath. Consultancies will come for high-value targets like brand and creative strategy first, and if agencies can’t prove their value, they’ll be left out in the cold. Major agencies are right to be worried — consultancies will likely move fully into the space in 2019 and 2020, once they’ve hammered out the details of adapting their business model to the marketing industry.

There is a silver lining for agencies, though — for the moment, these consultancies will likely steer clear of the execution layer, and leave media buying to agencies. Instead, they’ll continue to expand their creative efforts: building interactive experiences, setting up e-commerce sites, and optimizing and integrating technical solutions. Media buying requires a heavy investment in working capital with a comparably low rate of return to what consultancies are used to. In fact, this will likely prove to be a major boon to small shops and medium-sized agencies — following an audit of a major brand’s marketing budget, independent agencies will be on an even playing field with major agencies. If they can integrate with the consultancies’ technical solutions, and make the right pitch, they could win unprecedented budgets. But is there a motivation for consultancies to move into media buying? Yes — and they will move into media buying aggressively once they’ve isolated a vastly different media buying model than the traditional paradigm.

For the CMOs of major brands, the future of their marketing spend will depend on the outcome of a mandated consultancy audit. Long-time agencies of record could fall by the wayside — unless agencies and brands agree to a mutually beneficial, more transparent deal. Barring this, consultancies will help CMOs manage their budgets, soliciting bids from creative shops, media agencies, tech vendors, and platforms on the CMO’s behalf — and building the technical solution that integrates all the pieces.

To defend against consultancies, agencies must provide greater value, get leaner, and become more transparent. Smarter agencies — such as WPP — are already building out or buying IT infrastructure to integrate their digital marketing capabilities. But as these holding companies move from a verticalized to a horizontal approach, there’s still a challenge in connecting the disparate pieces for clients at scale — when each client wants a bespoke solution — while receiving fair compensation for their work.

Moving into 2018, agencies should lean on their bona fides: relationships, creative expertise, and organizational DNA that consultancies can’t easily access. The competition from consultancies should also be seen as an opportunity for agencies: to tell a holistic marketing story, built on deep ROI, across the nonlinear consumer journey.

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So Stitch Fix is giving it to them.

Online personal styling service Stitch Fix stepped up its advertising spending by 84 percent in the first quarter of its 2018 fiscal year, with TV campaigns playing a big role in trying to attract new customers.

But the new customers attracted by the mass-market commercials had one common piece of feedback: Stitch Fix needs to offer a bigger selection of less-expensive clothing. CEO Katrina Lake told Recode in an interview following today’s release of Q1 results — its first earnings report as a public company — that these consumers want more options in the $20 to $50 price range.

So Stitch Fix plans to give these new customers more of what they want.

“In the last year, lower price point product has grown to represent a double-digit percentage of our total unit sales,” the company said in a letter to shareholders announcing the financial results. “Given the success of this offering, we plan to increase lower price point sales as a percentage of overall sales over the course of this fiscal year.”

In its first few years of existence, Stitch Fix’s selection of clothing items skewed mid-tier — higher than the range mentioned above, but lower than those of premium brands. But in the past year, the company has started to sell name-brands at premium price points, in addition to beefing up the selection in the $20 to $50 range.

On the company’s earnings call with analysts, Lake was asked what the lower-price push would mean for profit margins. She did not offer specifics on the profitability makeup of the different price points, but said Stitch Fix “can serve very profitably” these value shoppers.

Average order values, on the other hand, would be lower for these customers, but would be largely offset by new sales of high-price premium brands, she said.

For the quarter, Stitch Fix reported revenue earnings and profits that were generally in line with analyst estimates. First-quarter revenue grew 25 percent to $296 million year over year, while the company netted $13.5 million in net income.

But Stitch Fix’s stock was trading down as much as 12 percent in the after-hours market, perhaps over concerns that the company did not provide a forecast for net income.

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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 Trey Stephens, director of audience monetization at Acxiom. As 2017 comes to a close, it’s a great time for brands to assess ways to improve marketing strategy and better capitalize… Continue reading »

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