Data-Labor-Technology

PopSugar has spent years trying to show advertisers that it can help them drive purchases. Now it’s about to see if it can get its readers to buy its own product.

PopSugar’s first line of beauty products and cosmetics, Beauty by PopSugar, will go on sale March 11. By the end of the month, the products, which will range in price from $18 to $42 and include face scrub and lip balm, will be available in some 250 Ulta Beauty stores, more than a quarter of its locations. In some stores, PopSugar’s products will be merchandised in free-standing displays.

The launch is a big deal for PopSugar, which has put commerce at the center of many different initiatives. It also sees it as a validation of its branded content business, now more than 60 percent of its total revenue, which will power most of the marketing of the new product line.

“We’ve always wanted to figure out other ways to have money come into the company,” said Lisa Sugar, PopSugar’s co-founder and president. “This has been a long, patient road.”

Historically, publishers have been reluctant to do brand licensing lest it compete with their existing advertisers. PopSugar chief revenue officer Geoff Schiller insisted the move into products would be “completely non-cannibalistic.” He wouldn’t say how much revenue he expected to earn from the sale of the product line.

The publisher isn’t worried about losing out on other advertisers’ business, in part, because of the sheer volume of brands floating around in the beauty space. “There’s so much space for it,” Lisa Sugar said. “There’s new beauty brands being launched every day, and people interested in makeup and product will buy all of them.”

Ulta Beauty is paying PopSugar wholesale for product up front, Schiller said. PopSugar will promote the line with ads on its own site. Neither company would say if there were advances or revenue guarantees in place for the products.

PopSugar has a senior creative services manager overseeing the creative and editorial support. That staffer reports to a three-person brand development team, which works with Ulta’s media buying arm.

Ulta Beauty’s history of advertising with PopSugar helped pave the way for the retail arrangement. Shelley Haus, Ulta Beauty’s svp of brand marketing, came aboard in late 2014 and sought to overhaul the makeup company with a focus on branded content with a handful of publishers. Ulta has used PopSugar since 2015 for everything from display to branded content to influencer programs to experiential marketing at Coachella.

Haus said PopSugar’s campaigns performed well, she said, routinely delivering one and a half to two times the results both sides had targeted. That track record also helped convince Ulta Beauty to give PopSugar products an unusually wide distribution. Typically, when Ulta Beauty puts new products in stores, it will test things out in a couple dozen locations, sometimes as many as 50.

“We know that their content is hugely influential,” Haus said. “We look at how their branded content drives clicks.”

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As the speakers at Adweek’s Elevate: AI conference grappled with the big picture, conceptual possibilities of AI now and in the future, we wondered what the on-the-ground realities looked like for organizations actively working on incorporating machine learning into their practices. We asked some of the sold-out crowd of attendees about the challenges they are…

In an attempt to get the entire digital advertising industry to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe has released a new framework aimed at standardizing the process of gaining consent to collect and use consumer data.

In a nutshell, participating publishers would get to select which ad tech vendors they wish to continue working with for programmatic trading from a centralized list of global vendors that have applied — and paid a nominal fee — to appear on the list. Once publishers have chosen vendors from the list, they must then get consent from the consumer on those vendors’ behalf.

The framework’s purpose
Getting consumers to consent to their data being used under the GDPR will be a challenge for everyone, but it will be far harder for companies that don’t have a direct relationship with them — and therefore aren’t brands that consumers recognize — such as ad tech intermediaries and agency trading desks.

Publishers, on the other hand, are in a strong position to ask consumers for consent. The IAB Europe hopes with this framework that if publishers help gain consent on behalf of third-party vendors, programmatic revenues won’t be choked, as suppliers will be able to continue trading on their supply.

The theory is that a unified approach means users can give consent to multiple vendors at the same time, which would drastically simplify the process. It would also help some ad tech vendors keep their businesses afloat.

A love-hate situation
The industry has had a mixed response to the framework. While the benefits are clear for the some 5,000 ad tech vendors in the Lumascape, which will struggle to gain explicit consent, the benefits for publishers are less obvious. Some believe the framework requires publishers once again to assume the legal risk in order to maintain ad tech’s status quo, while potentially annoying or overwhelming their users with messages asking for consent for dozens of ad tech partners.

For now, vendors aren’t strictly vetted for the list, although they must be a member of a trade body or organization to be on it. In the future, should the industry request it, the IAB Europe can help set up a certification process to validate that each vendor is as GDPR-compliant as it claims, according to Matthias Matthiesen, IAB Europe’s senior manager of privacy and public policy. Matthiesen stressed that participating vendors will also need to demonstrate their own GDPR compliance and privacy policies; they can’t just sit back and allow publishers to take responsibility for that.

But publishers can choose the vendors for which they want to gain consent and if they wish, ignore the rest. “Just as non-authorized resellers fell away with the introduction of ads.txt, vendors who have to this point maintained a parasitic existence, syncing users through non-direct relationships and in the absence of any value exchange, are suddenly looking very exposed,” said a publisher executive. “We saw with ads.txt when suspect vendors tried to get themselves erroneously listed in publishers’ ads.txt files — you can expect to see those under threat to try and persuade the publisher to legitimize their existence via consent, which you can safely assume few publishers are going to allow to happen.”

The idea is that the framework provides the transparency required under the GDPR and creates an audit trail, so everyone can keep abreast of all parties’ compliance status. If the law is violated, there is essentially visibility of who is at fault, added Matthiesen.

The framework needs publisher buy-in
Ultimately, the framework needs publishers to get on board for it to work. So far, publisher response has been lukewarm.

“The current proposal is aimed at maintaining the status quo of an ecosystem which is not sustainable as it is today due to its unbalanced nature,” said Alessandro De Zanche, publisher consultant and former News UK executive. “GDPR is an opportunity for publishers to regain control of the relationship with their user, and through that, [be] given consent for the use of data. This would make publishers much stronger versus the rest of the ecosystem.”

The proposed framework is open for the industry’s feedback, and a final version will be released in mid-April. Until then, the IAB Europe plans to get feedback on it from publishers across Europe.

For some, however, full publisher cooperation on the framework is a long shot. “I don’t see publishers embracing it without significant changes,” said Jason Kint, CEO of publisher trade body Digital Content Next. “It’s designed to attempt to protect the broad interests of the many IAB ad tech companies who designed it.”

The GDPR will have long-lasting effects on how all companies collect and use data. Download Digiday’s primer on all you need to know. 

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Great Big Story, the streaming video storytelling brand owned by CNN, will kick off the campaign with an interactive activation at the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, this weekend.

With three months of the TV season remaining, NBC leads all TV broadcast networks in two major metrics — both higher than a year ago.

Over the past five years, programmatic advertising has become one of the most common buzzwords in our industry. Reams of articles, white papers, industry conference panels, et. al., have been devoted to positioning programmatic as the savior of digital advertising. A few years back, it was even dubbed the “Word of the Year” in some…

LinkedIn announced several changes to its terms of service, saying that many of them were driven by the General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect in Europe in May. Vice president of legal intellectual property, product and privacy Sara Harrington detailed the changes in a blog post, highlighting the following: The professional network added more…

Capital One unveiled a new security feature at SXSW on March 9 designed to remove some of the inevitable hassle that comes with using plastic credit cards, and help retailers cut down on potential fraud issues.

A Google Chrome plug-in that keeps customers connected with Eno, the bank’s digital assistant, now creates “virtual numbers” in real time so customers don’t have to enter their actual credit card information at checkout. Eno detects merchant checkout pages and automatically serves up the virtual card — completely different 16-digit credit card numbers, three-digit security codes and expiration dates — and customers decide whether to use, save or dismiss it. The bank plans to make the feature available on all browsers eventually, said Tom Poole, svp of digital payments and identity at Capital One.

Capital One designed Eno virtual numbers to give customers “the ability to set rules about how you want payments to be treated,” Poole said. “You can tell us that. Today, we give you one number on a plastic card, and there are no rules around it — it’s usable for anything, and if you give it to someone, you give access to your entire credit line definitionally.”

Virtual cards are unique for the users’ different merchant relationships, and customers can store a portfolio of the different numbers, with the option to block a card from making unauthorized charges or delete relationships they no longer care to keep. The feature should help customers avoid fraud, which made up 1.58 percent of retailers’ revenues as of December, compared to 1.47 percent the year before. If an online retailer suffers a data breach and a customer’s virtual card number is compromised, their data remains safe because they never handed over their real card information in the first place.

But company executives maintain the feature, a form of tokenization, is a play on hassle, rather than fraud, the loop background music of payments innovation.

People store their true credit card information everywhere — Amazon, Spotify, phone carriers, gym memberships — and are bound to replace their credit card numbers at every website when they get a new card, which could be for a variety of reasons, whether they lost a card or replaced an expired one. When the bank issues customers new credit cards, Eno maps all of their virtual relationships saved in their portfolio of virtual numbers to the new card information, so it’s automatically updated without the customer having to do it manually.

Looking beyond security and fraud, Eno virtual numbers could be a small but significant card abandonment play that helps online retailers and validates the notion that banks make natural partners for them, rather than compete with them. Capital One already has a credit card relationship with Amazon, for example, and is in talks with the e-commerce giant about partnering on Amazon customer checking accounts.

The rate of cart abandonment was 69.2 percent in 2017, a 16 percent increase over the last 11 years. Among the many contributors, 18 percent of shoppers didn’t make it through the checkout process because they didn’t trust the site with their credit card information, according to a 2017 Baymard Institute study, but another 28 percent said the checkout process was too long or complicated, and 37 percent dreaded having to create an account in order to move forward.

“Security is great, but if it’s not convenient, you’re not doing it,” Poole said. “Here, it just pops up, the convenience factor is so high customers can stay on their couch. … A lot of people told us they abandon shopping because they don’t feel like getting up to find their payment card.”

Ubiquity is key to that convenience, though. Poole said there are many good existing solutions — some of which come from Capital One’s retail “partners” — but they are only present on some websites.

“Making sure you didn’t have to work for any of that benefit was important” during the yearlong development process, he said. “If it’s not everywhere, customers stop using it, our experience tells us. Nobody shops at certain places just because there’s a certain checkout button on that site — that’s a convenience you discover after you’ve already decided you want to shop there. We’re not asking you to remember that we offer a service like this.”

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How do you, the cost-conscious consumer, feel when you’ve just saved a bunch of money by using a price comparison website? Is it anything like meeting Mr. Right, the man of your dreams? Might you even call him … an Epic Action Man? Mother London’s latest 60-second romp for MoneySuperMarket, which helps British consumers find…

From some of the country’s best BBQ to tacos and margaritas, Austin, Texas has a serious restaurant scene that’s an added treat for South by Southwest attendees. The festival also makes Austin’s top places nearly impossible to get into, with people waiting hours to get into locations like Franklin’s BBQ and Torchy’s Tacos. To find…