Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

As a B2B marketer, you are often caught trying to serve two masters: the need to drive engagement for specific campaigns or periods relative to the business vs. the overall goal to drive persistent ROI throughout the year. In any scenario, it’s becoming more clear that the “campaign” mentality no longer serves.

Even marketing’s cousin, advertising, has evolved. In the age of programmatic and audience-based, data-driven marketing, advertisers have already moved away from the campaign a
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Hear how Lotame’s data management platform (DMP) has helped leading media companies increase CPMs, sell more media, and improve ROI. Learn more about how Lotame works with publishers around the globe at https://www.lotame.com/solutions/publishers/
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2017 was the biggest year in media and marketing since 2016. Whether it was the duopoly increasingly controlling the digital ad market, digital publishers and traditional media companies fighting back against the duopoly, advertisers pressuring the duopoly to improve its advertising and measurement products or things that had nothing to with the duopoly, the duopoly reigned supreme. But Google and Facebook weren’t winners on all fronts. Here are Digiday’s biggest media and marketing winners and losers of 2017:.

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Here’s our daily recap of what happened in marketing technology, as reported on MarTech Today, Marketing Land and other places across the web.
From MarTech Today:

Lotame’s prep for GDPR highlights big changes in data management
Dec 19, 2017 by Barry Levine
There’s tracking consent, providing data access and minimizing liability. Plus there’s the pending ePrivacy Regulation.
Equifax and beyond: How data breaches shaped 2017
Dec 19, 2017 by Robin Kurzer
Could this be a turn
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Check out some of the key highlights from our must-attend conference for Data Management Platform clients! Lotame Spark Client Summit 2017, March 7th in NYC. #LotameSpark
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For the past year and a half, Theresa Moore, vp of platform partnerships at Pixability, has been trying to buy video ads on Amazon to no avail. A few months ago, Moore — who said trying to build a relationship with the e-commerce giant has been an “interesting journey” — thought she finally had an in.

Amazon’s user-experience team responded to an email she sent, but instead of giving her the direction she needed to buy, it offered her a $100 Amazon card to learn about her experience trying to contact the company. Moore was flabbergasted: “I told them, keep your $100 and give me the contact information of someone at the company who can help me make progress.” She said she didn’t get a contact, but she kept the $100.

Moore is one of many ad buyers trying to work with Amazon but finding it difficult to secure an Amazon rep and then start the process of advertising through Amazon’s suite of ad offerings, including its in-house team Amazon Media Group, self-serve marketing suite Amazon Marketing Services and programmatic solution Amazon Advertising Platform.

“It’s at a level where you can only develop a relationship with Amazon if you know someone,” said one ad buyer at a large agency who asked for anonymity.

Another ad buyer, who wishes to remain anonymous, said their large agency has begun forming a relationship with Amazon after a year of “stalking,” but only because of a major client’s spend.

Digital agency PMG had a similar experience. PMG started reaching out to Amazon about two years ago and didn’t gain traction with the company until a year in, when its client, retailer Cole Haan, expressed interest in spending with Amazon, according to Price Glomski, evp of digital strategy at PMG. That led the agency to acquire eight contacts at Amazon and start building its own internal Amazon practice. In the past year, the agency has spent well into seven figures on the platform, working on campaigns for large clients like Beats By Dre, Glomski said.

But even when ad buyers have an Amazon rep and footing within Amazon, they don’t necessarily get the answers they need quickly.

The makeup of Amazon’s internal client services teams is murky. None of the five ad buyers Digiday spoke with for this story know how Amazon’s client services teams are structured or how many people each has. There is a general understanding that AMG, AMS and AAP all have their own teams, and one ad buyer, who prefers anonymity, believes Amazon has teams structured around specific brands rather than agencies. Still, this person said, “You never have a holistic idea of what’s going on.” An Amazon spokesperson said the company does not reveal how many people work in each division or how many teams fall under client services.

Moore said after months of pestering Amazon, she finally secured her own rep who directs her to other groups within the company that might be able to assist her. But that’s where the help stops.

“It’s such a black box,” said Moore. “They’ve been really nice, but the groups at Amazon don’t know who does exactly what I want, which is to run video ads.”

Even PMG, with its eight contacts and several Amazon campaigns under its belt, has trouble navigating Amazon’s internal client services teams.

“The teams have really focused expertise, so when you ask a question about another ad product or product road map, it tends to get lost in translation, and you have to be directed to another product team,” Glomski said. “Fortunately, the Amazon team we work with is really good, but even they come back to us and say, ‘Sorry, it’s a development in progress.’”

Ad buyers said Amazon is following the playbooks of other ad platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, which were slow to make their client services teams available to agencies and ad tech providers while developing ad offerings. Rather, they initially focused on building relationships with large brands.

“Amazon definitely gives more interest and more resources to the larger brands,” said one ad buyer. For instance, one brand this person works with has its own assigned Amazon contact.

Moore is not surprised that Amazon would take this approach. “At the end of the day, brands are the ones that have the creative and the customers,” she said. “Amazon can get the information they desire straight from the brands without having too many chefs in the kitchen.”

“Everything Amazon does is to benefit Amazon,” said another ad buyer. “Everything they’ve built, from their tech stacks to their ad units to their content pages is all to benefit them, so why wouldn’t they go to brands with the big budgets first?”

But this might not be the best tactic for Amazon, as ad buyers at agencies and brands with smaller budgets get antsy about spending on the platform. PMG’s smaller clients, for instance, are eager to spend more on Amazon. Glomski said PMG estimates another $20 million to $25 million is on the table for Amazon from the agency’s midsize brands.

“You can tell [Amazon] is continuing to grow, so for some of our smaller clients, which are still good brands, they just don’t have as much mind share for them,” said Glomski. “What needs to happen quickly in order for advertisers to not get frustrated with Amazon is for Amazon to start building out their strategic group to help grow and train advertisers that will be in the system.”

Amazon has made strides in the past year, like bringing training teams to select agencies and making client service hires. The fact that Amazon’s user-experience team is reaching out to ad buyers like Moore also shows the company is considering ad buyers’ efforts to advertise with the behemoth.

“Agency relationships are very important to us,” said Seth Dallaire, vp of worldwide sales and marketing for Amazon Media Group. “We’ve made investments in both agency development and services as our advertising business grows, and this will continue to be the case.”

Some agencies are seeing the effects of these investments. “They’ve gotten much better in terms of having contacts you can work through, and they’ve made themselves more available to agencies,” said Kevin Packler, vp and director of Amazon services at independent agency The Tombras Group.

But Glomski warned that until the majority of ad agencies and smaller brands feel they are getting the attention they need from Amazon, other platforms with robust client services teams like Google and Facebook will continue to retain more market share. This is especially true, he said, when it comes to transparency and data, another area in which Amazon is known for being a black box.

“With Google and Facebook, any CMO can go in and pick apart different aspects of their marketing strategy,” said Glomski. “If Amazon can provide optics to performance on a daily and hourly level, which is what most marketers today need, that will create a sense of trust and willingness to spend $10,000 dollars a day on Amazon.”

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Publishers are bending to the will of advertisers to make their ads more viewable, but some publishers are finding the payoff isn’t as great as they anticipated.

Over the past year and a half, advertisers have continually pounded their fists, demanding that they’ll only buy ads that are guaranteed to be seen by a user. The push for viewability gave the impression that advertisers would spend branding campaign dollars with publishers that had highly viewable ads, said Erik Requidan, vp of programmatic strategy at Intermarkets, which helps publishers including Drudge Report and The Political Insider market their ad inventory to buyers.

Instead, the sites Requidan works with continue to be relegated to getting performance-based ads, he said. Those sites might see a few dollars increase in their CPMs if they boost their viewability, but big-brand dollars haven’t materialized.

“If something is 90 percent viewable, shouldn’t that unlock a whole lot more money or a bigger price point?” he asked.

When listicle publisher Ranker tweaked its site layout last year, page-load time went down 60 percent and average viewability rates doubled from 35 percent to 70 percent. Those factors helped Ranker increase its average CPMs by about 75 percent, but the prices of its least and most viewable ads don’t differ much.

Ranker’s ad viewability ranges from 62 to 82 percent. But there’s only a 13 percent difference in the CPMs for these ad units, said Ranker CEO Clark Benson. Given how much advertisers and their tech vendors emphasize that campaigns perform better when ads are 80 percent viewable, Benson expected Ranker’s most viewable ad units to command a higher price.

“So far, the promise of viewability quickly filtering out bad actors and improving yields for the good ones seems to be only a half-kept one,” he said.

It’s a similar story elsewhere. Stephanie Layser, vp of ad tech and operations at News Corp, said there’s no significant difference in price between the publisher’s least and most viewable ads. Remedy Health Media, the publisher of health sites like HealthCentral and TheBody.com, has seen little lift in its ad rates since increasing its viewability, said Aryeh Lebeau, evp of client operations there.

Some publishers said they’re satisfied with the pricing lift they’re getting for highly viewable ads, which is a function of their expectations of their advertisers.

Lebeau wasn’t bothered by the lack of lift in ad rates because advertisers never promised Remedy higher rates in exchange for higher viewability.

A programmatic specialist at a comScore 200 entertainment publisher, requesting anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to share financial details, said a 30 percentage-point lift in viewability at his company’s websites tends to increase CPMs by about 20 percent. This person emphasized that it’s difficult to isolate viewability’s impact on ad rates, so these figures are rough estimates. The source still felt his company was being compensated fairly for its highly viewable ad placements.

Another source, Danny Khatib, CEO of 100 percent programmatic publisher Granite Media, said high viewability rates can boost Granite’s CPMs by a few dollars, which he saw as significant.

“We never expected new branding budgets to come online solely because of viewability improvements,” he said. “That seems like wishful thinking.”

In an Integral Ad Science survey of more than 1,000 advertisers, 68 percent of respondents said they transact on viewability and another 25 percent said they wanted to do so. Although buyers are regularly transacting on viewable metrics, viewability is less likely to influence ad rates if it isn’t a primary KPI.

The reason rates haven’t risen right along with viewability has to do with how programmatic buying works. David Lee, programmatic lead at media-buying agency The Richards Group, said that even in a private marketplace setup, most buyers don’t place bids on individual publishers but place bids across hundreds, if not thousands, of sites at a time.

So if viewability is being used as a secondary KPI, then buyers’ bids will be restricted to the publishers that meet a certain viewability threshold. But since buyers aren’t bidding on individual publishers, they’re not intentionally setting out to pay specific publishers more based on their viewability gains. And since viewability rates are rising across the industry, publisher improvements in viewability are less likely to increase publishers’ CPMs than they were a year ago.

Another issue with rising viewability is that in an effort to appease advertisers, many publishers are doing whatever they can to make sure their ads are viewed just long enough to be counted as viewable. Most viewable ads are in view for just one second, according to IAS data. That amount of time happens to be the standard the Media Rating Council uses to define viewability.

As publishers increased their volume of viewable ads by refreshing pages, sticking ads in photo galleries and using interstitials, users got turned off and buyers caught on. IAS found that the average time that a desktop display impression was in view declined from 9.8 seconds in May 2016 to 7.7 seconds in May 2017.

“We’ve seen some publishers game the system in using ad placements that provide a less than optimal consumer experience but have higher rates of viewability,” said Stephani Estes, svp of media strategy at ad agency Cramer-Krasselt. “In those instances, we’re not willing to pay more for higher viewability.”

It’s understandable that publishers get miffed by low returns on highly viewable ads. But in programmatic environments, the highest CPMs come from programmatic direct deals, not the open exchange. And to entice ad buyers to set these deals up, publishers need to have viewability rates above 65 percent, according to three publisher sources.

Viewability isn’t necessarily a way to lift rates, said Mort Greenberg, svp of ad sales at Sightline Media Group, which owns government-focused sites like Federal Times and Military Times. “However,” he added, “high viewability will keep you on a plan.”

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Hear from panelists Patrick Dolan, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, IAB; Kim Riedell, Senior Vice President of Partnerships and Business Development, Advantage Media Solutions; Grant Whitmore, Executive Vice President, Digital, New York Daily News; and Tyler Paxton, Founder & CTO, Are You A Human. Moderated by Jason Downie, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Data Solutions, Lotame. Lotame Spark Client Summit 2017, March 7th in NYC. #LotameSpark
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Alcohol brands like Heineken and William Grant & Sons have concerns about using Snapchat as a marketing platform because they don’t think the app’s age-filtering feature is effective. But that’s not a hurdle for Moët.

The luxury champagne company, which is more than 250 years old, is launching a Snapchat game this week called “Moët & Chandon Tower Toss” as part of its holiday campaign “The Greatest Entertainer.” To play the game, two people take turns swiping up to shoot a champagne cork at a four-layer Moët champagne tower on a table. Each player has 10 seconds to toss as many corks as they want, receiving points based on precision and which tier they target. Moët placed paid ads on Snapchat Discover to direct users to play the game.

“We don’t want to just buy people’s attention through media — we want to get their attention naturally in a customized way,” said Christine Ngo Isaac, marketing director and head of U.S. consumer engagement for Moët & Chandon. “Snapchat is an open ecosystem and has done a good job in building a customer experience outside of traditional advertising.”

Agency Attention helped Moët develop the game, which the brand claimed is Snapchat’s first two-player game. While the game was designed for Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook users can also play a web version through special links.

But one big question for alcohol brands marketing on Snapchat is how to ensure they accurately target people of legal drinking age, which is 21 in the U.S. After all, marketers from Heineken and William Grant & Sons have said it was hard to verify the ages of recipients of ads on Snapchat. But Ngo Isaac disagrees.

“The statement that Snapchat has an age-gating problem is not completely true. I think the problem is many alcohol brands just take a piece of content from other platforms and amplify it through Snapchat,” she said. “For this specific game, our paid ads on Discover target people over 25, even older than the legal drinking age.”

In addition to Snapchat’s own ad-targeting capacities, Moët also asks players to enter their birthdates before playing the game. “We use double verification to ensure that we are not presenting alcohol content to minors,” said Tom Buontempo, president of Attention. “Targeting in general has become more sophisticated on Snapchat. It is working with many third-party vendors to make sure that their ads reach the right audience.”

But that’s not saying alcohol brands face no limitations in marketing on Snapchat. Moët and Attention originally designed the game differently: Winners would have a chance to unlock an exclusive geofilter and then share it with their Snapchat friends after completing the game. But Moët ended up dropping the geofilter idea because it was extremely difficult to prevent Snapchat users from sharing the geofilter with people under 21 on the platform, according to Ngo Isaac.

“We thought of all the possible scenarios that could damage the Moët brand,” she said. “We take the age issue very seriously, which is why we don’t have a company account on Snapchat. We are still experimenting with the platform.”

A Snapchat blog post said 44 percent of Snapchat users in the U.S. look to friends and family for recommendations on alcohol purchases, compared to 19 percent of non-Snapchatters. Bud Light, Shock Top, Smirnoff and Jameson have all used Snapchat’s ad products like Snap Ads, holiday filters and lenses, according to the company blog.

“We use the same type of age registration as similar ad platforms. All new Snapchat [users] enter their date of birth when they sign up for the app, and we then age-gate,” said a Snapchat spokesperson. “We also don’t serve alcohol ads to users with improbable ages that fall at the upper end of the age ranges on our platform.”

The spokesperson said around 80 percent of Snapchat users are above 18 but declined to specify how many are over 21. But Ngo Isaac said Moët has found “the next generation of drinkers” on Snapchat, older millennials around 30-34, whom Moët wants to target.

“Snapchat is no longer just a teenager app,” she said. “It is becoming a more general advertising platform.”

Image courtesy of Attention

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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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