Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

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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What’s the Story? is a storytelling video series dedicated to learning what truly makes a great story, told through the lens of the world’s talent and practitioners of the craft in entertainment, marketing and beyond.

Gary Shenk, chief executive officer at Branded Entertainment Network (BEN), has been on the forefront of brand integration for a number of years — and is clearly bullish on its effectiveness for brands.

In the early days, brands dabbled in brand integration. But fast forward to the current state of advertising affairs and it’s clear that brands can find effective, game-changing opportunities in entertainment. In fact, integrations placed by BEN represented nearly $1bn in media value in 2017.

On average, BEN places about 14 integrations per day across streaming, TV and influencers — and in looking at the BEN roster, there are heavy hitters across the board. Dyson, Hyundai, Zillow, Microsoft and General Motors have been matched up with all manner of top-tier content, films and shows including House of Cards, Ghost in the Shell, Grace and Frankie, Portlandia, The Bachelor and more.

One of BEN’s signature integrations was Heineken for the James Bond franchise which, Shenk says, was a big moment of change — switching from a martini to beer.

What’s telling is that, in 2017, about 20% of BEN’s integrations were on streaming shows, further signaling the growth and opportunities in the space. In Shenk’s mind, part of this lies with traditional advertising losing relevance — and being in the content itself is a strong proposition for brands.

“People are spending more time watching entertainment than ever before, but they’re spending less time watching ads,” he says. “For brands, the only way to be noticed by contemporary audiences is to be inside the content itself.”

Additionally, the evolution of binge watching heralds another opportunity for brands to be more deeply engaged with audiences that are paying close attention.

“When you binge, you’re more engaged with the content. You watch two, three, four or more episodes at a time,” says Shenk. “A brand being not only in the place where they know people are watching, but where they know that the people are watching [and] are incredibly engaged and getting more engaged — that is invaluable. That’s why we think this category is only going to continue to grow.”

Though the caché of being attached to creative projects and entertainment is enticing, the fact is the brands, and especially CMOs, need to see the real value of brand integration. To BEN, marrying the art and science is critical.

“Showing the data is the most important thing,” notes Shenk. “Showing how authenticity really, really matters. We measure every integration that we do and show how that relates in a change in awareness, or brand affinity, [or] purchase intent.”

Authenticity is an important consideration. According to Shenk, when brands trust the creative process and BEN’s expertise, it goes beyond just making people aware of a brand or product.

“The reality is that if you give a producer or a creator the leeway to show your brand in a way that is going to emotionally connect with the audience, it is almost always a win for the brand,” he says.

Having been in the entertainment industry for a number of years, Shenk also has strong opinions on what makes a great story. In his mind, it’s all about the character. A rabid reader, he believes that motivations and imperfections make a great character and help drive a strong story.

His favorite story of all-time, The Great Gatsby, certainly fits the bill.

“You have this rich, incredibly good-looking guy who has it all,” says Shenk. “What does he want? He wants love and he wants love of specifically of one individual. He has it all, yet, he has this incredible Achilles heel of this need for affection that is elusive to him. So, that’s a good example of the type of story that I love. One with a character that’s motivated to do something in an incredibly strong way that you sympathize with because of his flaws.”

What’s the Story? is sponsored by Branded Entertainment Network (BEN), the first global network for branded product integration in the entertainment industry, across all media, including the influencer space.

If you would like to pitch someone for “What’s the Story?“, please complete the linked form. 

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AdExchanger |

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Sprechen Sie Data? Germany’s top antitrust enforcer is going after Facebook with a new interpretation of competition law. According to German officials, Facebook is abusing its power as the dominant social media platform in the region, where it has more than 90% market share,… Continue reading »

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While publishers rushed to embrace distributed media models on platforms, Bloomberg CEO Justin Smith has sounded a note of caution. Ignoring platforms outright isn’t an option, but publishers should instead use platforms selectively.

For Bloomberg, Twitter has emerged as a critical platform relationship, with the Dec. 18 launch of TicToc by Bloomberg, an ambitious 24-hour live video news channel that will draw on reporting from Bloomberg Media’s 2,700 journalists scattered around the world as well as a dedicated TicToc team. The effort is an example, Smith said, of a “big idea” at a time when too many publishers are content to grouse about the chokehold Google and Facebook have on the industry.

“The answer to the duopoly for media owners is not to adopt a defensive stance and assume the situation is a permanent obstacle to growth, and we’re in permanent crisis, but to innovate,” Smith said. “I know it sounds cliche, but the only way out of this predicament is for media companies to do new things and that are really compelling to consumers and advertisers.”

Below are excerpts from a conversation with Smith, lightly edited for clarity.

Is digital media in crisis, as BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said last week, or are bad business models in crisis?
I don’t think digital media is in crisis writ large. The standalone digital advertising model of digital media is in crisis. The advertising-dependent business model is definitely in a difficult spot. It’s not a permanent existential crisis that can’t be resolved with new thinking, innovation, better strategy and better execution. I’m hopeful these issues can be overcome. You’re seeing tons of interesting opportunities for significant growth despite the challenges.

Does the duopoly get blamed too much?
You’ve got to deal with the environment you’re in. The duopoly’s increasing share of digital ad spend is a total reality and one everyone needs to reckon with. Where the fears are overstated are in two dimensions. One, if you look at Google and Facebook’s aggregate ad revenue totals, I would say the vast majority of that is direct-response advertising that’s transitioned to digital. The brand piece of it is still in traditional media. The battle over that has begun, but it’s not been decisively won by Google and Facebook. What’s also overstated is the assumption Google and Facebook are going to dominate forever. It’s a fluid situation — fluid in terms of consumer behavior, advertiser behavior and the regulatory environment. There are many potential cracks in the facade of these companies. They may be invisible to many now, but in all likelihood, these businesses don’t last forever. Fifteen years ago, we had another duopoly: Yahoo and AOL.

How does that point of view translate to strategy?
What we say to our teams is, let’s not let the platforms solely enjoy the spoils of this incredible moment of change. Let’s find the areas where we can also benefit tremendously and not assume a defensive position and begin attacking parts of the ecosystem ourselves.

Is media too defensive?
Yes. When people think about managing a media business in this environment, media operators tend to think about revenue diversification. Jonah mentioned it in his memo. We think about revenue diversification also in product diversification. Another way to diversify is create new products that are related to your core business but are new things. Not enough media owners are thinking that way. They’re transitioning revenue from bucket one to buckets two, three and four.

So TicToc is a product diversification.
It’s an example of that. We have been thrilled with our digital growth. We’re looking at 25 percent digital advertising growth and potentially up to 30 percent this year. The opportunity we see in TicToc is product diversification. We began streaming video on Twitter and came to understand Twitter had a large and engaged audience for news. That led us to think of Twitter differently from how many do. We think of it as potentially the largest news media company in the world. We saw a news-hungry audience living on Twitter. We thought of how can we marry the assets of Bloomberg with this audience to create a new product that can live on Twitter, and in effect, provides the best of what a journalism company can do merged with the best of what a social media network can do.

But why not Facebook? It has much more scale.
The Twitter audience is the most scaled for breaking news. I don’t think anyone goes to Facebook for breaking news. News there is more of a passive general-interest experience rather than breaking news. Twitter was the natural partner from that perspective. One of the things I said in March [at the Digiday Publishing Summit] was be picky about your platform relationships. We’re truly collaborated with Twitter on this. They’re providing access to insights and data; we’re sharing with them our different ways of creating content and video. And the economics are far more equitable than anything I’ve seen with the duopoly. An idealistic view is Bloomberg is taking its 3,000 journalists to improve the quality of breaking news information for the world. That’s a big idea.

When we spoke in March, you said paywalls have mostly failed. But there are signs of success there.
At the very premium end of the market with established and premium brands, you’ve seen a handful of success stories. The truth is, across the much broader swath of the market, paid content has not worked at all. The numbers are pretty decisive. But it’s not a permanent situation. I believe consumer behavior is shifting. The user experience has become more frictionless. Up until now, it’s been only a few companies that have succeeded. On the niche business-to-business side, that’s clearly a place where subscriptions have been solid and growing. Businessweek would fall into that business category, particularly when professionals can put it on their corporate card.

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Welcome to DMNotes, the relaunched DMN blog that covers everything from marketing strategy to politics to data to social media. If it’s happening and we have a point-of-view on it, we’ll cover it here. Also, we will use this space to update our recent stories and let you know about the interesting virtual and real-life events we’re creating.
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AdExchanger |

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Jonathan Suarez-Davis will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 17-18. In the wake of several big acquisitions, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue. In this week’s episode we talk with its chief strategy officer, Jon Suarez-Davis, who joined the… Continue reading »

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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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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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Poor data quality and integration can cause a marketing mess.
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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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