Data-Labor-Technology

Condé Nast has appointed the company’s first chief data officer as it doubles down on data and tech across its business groups. Karthic Bala, most recently Condé’s head of data strategy, is also responsible for creating new data-driven revenue streams and expanding ad-supported products. Its acquisition of data solutions company Lighthouse Datalab in late January… Continue reading »

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“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 Eric Berry, CEO at TripleLift. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is going into force in late May and could either devastate the programmatic ecosystem in Europe, along with the… Continue reading »

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“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Susan Panico, senior vice president of strategic solutions at Pandora. Unilever CMO Keith Weed made headlines at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting when he threatened to pull advertising investment from online platforms that create… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Eat Your RFPs Media RFPs are falling out of fashion as more direct channels develop between buyers and sellers. The traditional RFP process is rushed and, with a focus on audience and ad specs, doesn’t account for the nuances in publisher strategies. As media… Continue reading »

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Despite industry initiatives to address it, ad fraud is still a massive issue.

Juniper Research estimates that advertisers will lose $51 million (£36.5 million) per day on ad fraud in 2018, totaling $19 billion (£13.6 billion) over the year. Publishers like News UK and the Financial Times have cracked down on fraud after investigations into their ad tech stacks revealed they were losing revenue to the tune of millions a month. Meanwhile, marketers like Procter & Gamble, Unilever and the Royal Bank of Scotland have been paying more attention to how their budgets are spent, bringing more marketing in-house.

Here are four charts that illustrate the state of ad fraud.

OTT has a big ad fraud problem
As Digiday has reported, video is where the money is, so it’s the most attractive for fraudsters. OTT — the environment set for the largest increase in video ad spend over the next five years — is a hotbed for nonhuman or invalid traffic, according to fraud prevention ad tech firm Pixalate. More than one in five (20.4 percent) of programmatically sold connected TV or OTT video ads were measured as invalid during October 2017.

As reported by BuzzFeed News, platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube can be used to “scrub” traffic, using pop-under ads and redirects on invalid traffic to make it look more legitimate, adding to the long list of ad fraud tactics that platforms have to take responsibility for.

Google is on the defensive
Facing mounting pressure, Google has directed more resources into tackling what it calls “bad” ads: ads that violate its policies. The platform has introduced new technology like page-level enforcement, which helps prevent publishers from losing revenue due to bad ads, and it has added 28 new advertiser policies and 20 new publisher policies to better reflect the digital ad ecosystem and protect against fraud. Google has also dedicated thousands of people to work on removing bad ads, leading the platform to remove or block 3.2 billion ads in 2017, up from 700 million in 2015.

Trade bodies step up
Who’s to blame for ad fraud is up for debate, but brands and publishers want trade organizations to take more action. Eighty-five percent of brands surveyed by performance marketing agency QueryClick said it would be beneficial for trade bodies such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau to have more authority to punish bad actors.

Trade bodies have made positive moves, with the IAB’s ads.txt initiative being widely adopted, although it has its limits. In January, the U.K. and Ireland’s Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards and U.S. body Trustworthy Accountability Group announced they are merging their strategies to help clean up digital advertising.

Early signs are encouraging. In December, a study conducted by The 614 Group on behalf of TAG found that TAG Certified channels — used by companies that abide by TAG’s guidelines to combat fraud — had a measured invalid traffic rate of 1.48 percent across video and display inventory, an 83 percent reduction in invalid traffic compared to general industry fraud rates.

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When House of Highlights decided to expand beyond its popular Instagram account, the Bleacher Report-owned sports and culture publication didn’t even consider Facebook.

First, Facebook isn’t a top destination for House of Highlights’ main audience of 12- to 24-year-olds, said Doug Bernstein, gm of House of Highlights. Second, the platform wasn’t just looking for scale for scale’s sake. “We want to be deeper with our community,” he said.

So House of Highlights turned to YouTube, joining a growing number of publishers and even famous athletes that see the Google-owned video service as the preferred platform to reach their core audience and reap some revenue in return.

A year ago, NBA star Kevin Durant was looking to reconnect with fans after switching teams. Durant and Rich Kleiman, his manager and co-founder of Thirty Five Media, sidestepped the other big platforms and met with YouTube’s top brass, including CEO Susan Wojcicki, chief business officer Robert Kyncl and chief product officer Neal Mohan. Kleiman already knew how big an audience YouTube had, but he came away from the meeting understanding how big YouTube stars had become and seeing that other athletes had not taken advantage of the platform.

“We just felt like, ‘Well, we spend all our time on YouTube consuming sports content, but none of it is original content or first-person content or docu-style content that we would normally create for another platform,” Kleiman said.

Durant’s YouTube channel launched in April 2017 — Kleiman likened it to Derek Jeter’s Player’s Tribune or LeBron James’ Uninterrupted — and after a strong reception from fans, Durant and Kleiman are trying to bring other athletes onto the platform. In January, Thirty Five Media announced a deal with YouTube to create YouTube channels for athletes, including NFL star Richard Sherman and NBA star Karl-Anthony Towns.

Safe harbor for publishers
While Facebook Watch hasn’t taken off as a revenue source for publishers and the social network has deprioritized publisher content, YouTube offers something of a safe harbor for publishers that want to get into the video business. For example, publishers can direct-sell into their video on YouTube, said Kai Hsing, svp of marketing and operations at Bustle, which recently rekindled its interest in YouTube. YouTube was the most lucrative platform for publishers after Facebook, according to a Digital Content Next report.

Publishers also recognize that people are going to YouTube specifically to watch videos. That’s a reason parenting publication Fatherly recently resurrected its YouTube channel. In January, Fatherly hired Adam Banicki, a former video producer at Vice, as its first vp of video. In February, it began uploading videos to its YouTube channel for the first time since June 2017.

“We all had the sense that the gross tonnage of views on Facebook was hitting a certain peak, and also, as a platform, Facebook didn’t have the same degree of intentional viewership that a platform like YouTube did,” said Fatherly CEO Mike Rothman.

Intentional viewing
Producing serialized shows for YouTube also gives publishers a way to try out programs that TV networks or streaming services may want to develop into long-form programming. Both Comedy Central’s “Broad City” and HBO’s “Insecure” originated as YouTube channels. Publishers that are new to YouTube are looking hopefully to this opportunity.

“Because we’re dealing with more intentional viewers, [YouTube] serves as a better test bed than Facebook for launching teasers for longer-form programming, where the monetization strategy can be taking a pilot concept that’s worked over a couple episodes on YouTube and then pitch to OTT or some other off-platform partner that can help us monetize through production financing and some kind of revenue split beyond that,” said Rothman.

House of Highlights’ YouTube channel has only been up for a little more than a month, but the publisher is already exploring original, scripted shows as an alternative to the highlight reels it has primarily been uploading.

“YouTube is a place that favors long-form viewing,” Bernstein said. “It’s also more appointment viewing. On Facebook or other platforms, you scroll by, and it’s the surprise element.”

Thirty Five Media has also been producing shows for Durant’s YouTube channel, including “Parking Lot Chronicles” starring Durant’s teammate JaVale McGee and a comedy series featuring actor Michael Rapaport. And Kleiman has been meeting with YouTube about producing episodic shows for YouTube Red, the platform’s subscription service.

“Instead of always having to sell a project, we can put something out on our YouTube channel and start to build a fan base and almost upstream it to YouTube Red or anywhere else on YouTube if the show takes off, or it could get picked up by major networks,” said Kleiman.

But for all the value that media companies are seeing in YouTube, they have to be wary of overinvesting in it, as with any one platform, or expecting the money to come overnight.

Refinery29 began putting a bigger focus on YouTube a year and a half ago, and in the second half of 2017, the publisher began focusing more on series to cultivate regular viewership. But Amy Emmerich, chief content officer at Refinery29, expressed caution about the platform.

“You cannot grow YouTube overnight unless you’re buying [ads to promote a channel],” she said, “but even then, YouTube would say that’s not a good long-term plan.”

For more on the future of TV and video, subscribe to Digiday’s weekly Video Briefing email. 

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To Pete Spande, publisher and CRO of Insider (formerly Business Insider), a typical ad sales meeting looks like this: “I had a meeting today where for part of the meeting, I had editors in the room talking about what they’re planning on the next couple of quarters,” he said. “Then, I had people from my content studio talking about how we could create content for a customer. Then, we gave them a tour of our video and podcast studios. There were agency people, client people and a consultant in the room. This is a three-dimensional chess relationship.”

So it goes for media sellers today. Selling advertising used to be suited to the lone wolf; now, only team players need apply. That’s a function of the product being sold becoming more complicated and involving multiple parts of the media organization. Even the nomenclature is different; salespeople are “client partners” or “engagement directors” because no one wants to feel like they’re just being sold to anymore.

The message can take time to get through. Some sellers still want to just “update me,” said Tom Morrissy, president of the agency Noble People and a former publisher. (“Tell me you have an original idea; don’t update me.”) The transition is hardest at digital-only media companies that have fallen back on scale as their selling point and are now realizing they have to compete on more than scale now that the ad pie isn’t growing, he said.

Publishers have done a good job organizing their sales teams by industry, but the biggest challenge is in execution, said Emma Witkowski, digital investment lead, West Coast & Atlanta, for Mindshare North America. So once the campaign has been sold, it gets handed off to a post-sales team that fails to deliver basics, like impressions and the deadline for going live, she said.

Sellers also have more demands on them as there are that many more things to sell, from ad formats to platforms like apps and events. They have to be data strategists who can make sure the campaign delivers results at the end of the day.

“You have programmatic and private marketplaces; you’ve got branded content, live events, custom solutions,” said Eddie Koller, managing partner of executive search firm Koller Search Partners, who estimates he handles 10 to 15 CRO searches a year. “Think of all the products sellers have in their toolkit. People’s time is more precious. The days of just coming in with a 50-page deck are over. So it’s a mix between someone who can think like a marketer and consultant but can close an order.”

While media sellers are all looking for the perfect salesperson who may or may not exist, it’s harder to find them because they’re in demand by companies that have more cachet than traditional media companies. All the while, there are far more publishers than there are dollars to go around.

“It’s harder to find the right people,” said Avi Zimak, CRO and publisher of New York Media. “The talent pool has been diminished because those same people are hungry to work at that cool startup.”

For some publishers, native advertising is now the biggest source of their ad revenue and comes with its own challenges. It requires people with a hybrid journalism-advertising background that can write in the publication’s voice but sell the client, and there is a limited pool of people who can do that.

It’s hard to find people who come from marketing and can sell a creative idea that will excite the publication’s audience, while journalists often don’t know how to sell, said Annie Granatstein, head of The Washington Post’s WP BrandStudio. She recently took her team on a field trip to see “The Post” to inspire them, and she talks a lot about a campaign’s “story angle.”

Publishers are trying to change the profile of their sellers. The New York Times recently let go several ad sales directors while creating a new partnerships team to chase the elaborate partnerships that it sees fueling its growth, along with agency-like products and services. Bloomberg Media is looking for people with skills found in strategists, creative directors and engineers in launching a new sales model around consulting services.

“Identifying the right type of talent is the real challenge as it is not something that previously existed within the publisher ecosystem en masse,” said Keith Grossman, global CRO of Bloomberg Media. “Moreover, if the answer is always ‘your brand,’ you are not thinking like a consultancy. That was a shift in thinking we had to get comfortable with in order to go from selling media to selling creative solutions for our clients.”

The expectations for consultants are greater than most publishers are used to delivering. “Media partners have become more strategic partners to us,” said Jeremy Tate, Boston gm of the agency DWA. “If a publisher wants to come in and be more consultative and connect more to business results, that’s great, but they only see one part of the consumer journey. They need end-to-end data to understand what their impact [on sales] has been. A consultant tends to get deeper into a client’s business, their technology stack, their customer segmentation. I’m not sure a single publisher is in a position to serve that role.”

Making media sellers’ job harder is the rise of Facebook and Google as competitors for digital advertising with unmatched scale and audience targeting. Salespeople used to fall back on having a good relationship with the client as a key to winning business, but today, to recycle an old catch phrase, no one ever got fired for buying Facebook.

“We’re all looking for unicorns, and many things are making it harder to find that unicorn,” Spande said.

The post ‘Three-dimensional chess’: The messy modernization of the media seller appeared first on Digiday.

Back in February, when Google’s general counsel, Kent Walker, said Google is “doubling down” on news, the evidence had already begun appearing on publishers’ analytics dashboards.

Google News’ share of overall referral traffic to publishers has grown 50 percent since January 2017 and now represents 1.5 percent of that referral traffic, with an especially sharp increase in the last three months, according to Parsely data.

“Consumers have realized that relying on accidental discovery through the Facebook news feed isn’t enough when it comes to learning about the world around them,” said Andrew Montalenti, Parsely’s CTO.

The increase on Google News hasn’t touched every publisher. For example, CNN, a top beneficiary of Google News, according to News Dashboard, hasn’t detected much change in the referral traffic it gets from there. But a variety of publishers have seen increases. CNBC said that during January and February, it had its best two months ever of referral traffic from Google News, an increase of 75 percent over its fourth-quarter average; Inc. said referral traffic from Google News has picked up “noticeably” during the past three months. The sites wouldn’t provide raw traffic numbers.

Google did not respond to a request for comment before press time, but the uptick in share comes as the tech giant is making changes to increase the referral traffic it drives to publishers from non-search products including Google News, Google Play Newsstand and Google Now. Referral traffic from those products nearly doubled from January 2017 to January 2018, according to Parsely.

“The thing that seems to be the real catalyst [for being added to Google News] is potential virality,” said Kurt Tietjen, the founder of search consultancy High Peak Media. “These were things you’d likely see getting traction on Twitter or getting traction on Facebook.”

Publishers that have detected this growth have noticed a similar pattern: Google will insert a news publisher’s story into its Top Stories widget, a kind of carousel that appears at the top of its search results. If that story attracts a lot of reader clicks, Google News would then add the story to its clusters on that specific topic.

Jim Robinson, CEO of search engine optimization consultancy ClickSeed, said the change in referral traffic from news could be a sign that Google News is now taking into account factors like click-through rate on Google search.

The growth in these referrals appears to be separate from the growth powered by Accelerated Mobile Pages, the fast-loading mobile page format whose influence Google has been trying to expand. CNBC, for example, has not changed the amount of news content it publishes using AMP over the past year; Inc. doesn’t use AMP at all, though it plans to start, said Allison Fass, the editorial director for Inc.’s site.

Dan Petty, the digital director of audience development at Digital First Media, which owns the Denver Post among other news outlets, said he has seen noticeable growth in Google News referral traffic on the Denver Post’s site, though that site does not have AMP enabled.

Petty speculated that a busy news cycle was a contributor. “We’re seeing increases in Google news traffic, but we’re also seeing increase in Google traffic, period,” Petty said.

For years, Google News has been a steady but unspectacular source of traffic for some publishers. It reliably ranks among the top 10 referral traffic sources for publishers, even though it only accounts for around 1 percent of global referral traffic, according to Parsely.

Yet in the past three months, Google News’ share of global referral traffic has risen sharply, Parsely data shows.

Still, until more data rolls in, publishers may be reluctant to make any meaningful changes to their distribution strategies.

“I always tell my clients to be careful,” Tietjen said. “The Google gods giveth, and the Google gods taketh away.”

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