Data-Labor-Technology

While there are many reasons that Americans get science news, the most common driver of attention to science news is curiosity, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study. But people are also motivated to seek out science news for different reasons depending on the issues they care about most, with the environment being a prime example.

In 2017, voice was coined as “the technology to watch.” At this year’s CES, voice stole the show. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Samsung all made voice or AI announcements that will fundamentally change
how we experience some of their products.

YouTube is ordering workers to review thousands of hours of its most popular content and setting new limits on which videos can run ads, in moves to ease advertisers’ worries that their brands are showing up alongside offensive or controversial videos.

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“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by David Kohl, president and CEO at TrustX. The industry has been doing the math wrong. For years media buyers have tolerated the waste everyone knew was part of cheap CPM media buys because, well,… Continue reading »

The post The High Cost Of Low CPMs appeared first on AdExchanger.

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Spotify was an early mover in programmatic audio, and it’s taking that momentum into 2018. “Marketers are moving so much money to programmatic. We’ve seen that channel explode,” said Brian Benedik, global head of ads monetization at Spotify. “We’ve seen brands [come to Spotify] that have never invested in audio because we’ve made it programmatic-enabled.”… Continue reading »

The post Spotify Will Turn Up The Volume On Programmatic And Podcasting In 2018 appeared first on AdExchanger.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. PE Strikes Again Private equity firm Diversis Capital has scooped up Marketron, a revenue and marketing software provider used mostly by television and radio stations. “We are excited to see Marketron’s commitment to growing new technologies as well as developing unique opportunities that are… Continue reading »

The post Pubs Seek Alternatives To Facebook Referrals; PE Firm Diversis Capital Buys Marketron appeared first on AdExchanger.

There’s a short history of publishers fancying themselves as technology companies and building a business selling their tech to other publishers. Publishers realized that building a whole new side business around licensing their tech is a headache and that they needed to focus on what they’re good at, and leave the tech to others.

New York magazine is trying out a different approach. It built its own content management system (publishers like to give their homegrown CMSes cute names; this one is called Clay, for the magazine’s founder Clay Felker) in 2015 and then licensed the software to the online magazine Slate. Slate started using Clay a year ago and was set to fully migrate its site to Clay this week. But instead of New York charging Slate a licensing fee, Slate is paying New York in the form of code. The CMS is open-source, and developers from both titles contribute to it.

This works for New York because it doesn’t have to devote precious staff to support a client, said Daniel Hallac, the magazine’s chief product officer. Sharing code benefits both parties, too. Slate developed a plug-in so it can access Getty Images, and New York also plans to use the plug-in, for example.

For Slate, the open-source nature of the Clay CMS made sense because Slate has a development team that is comfortable operating without the outside support that a big tech company could supply, said Greg Lavallee, Slate’s director of technology.

He said he likes Clay because it turns all editorial elements such as taglines and pull quotes into their own building blocks, which makes it easier to meet the growing need to publish to distributed platforms like Facebook and Apple News. “It takes a firm stance on trying to componentize everything. It makes most of the distributed platforms much easier because all the platforms work that way,” he said.

Clay also doesn’t force its users to adopt every update; the publisher can pick and choose. And with Clay, Slate can control access to all its audience data.

It’s too early to say where New York magazine will take Clay, but it’s casually marketing it to others to see if there’s interest, especially small publishers that have some tech resources and want to build some tech on their own, but can’t afford to do everything in-house.

Slate and New York magazine have similarities, as independent, midsize publishers focused on politics and culture. Some publishers might be leery of sharing their technology with a competitor. Hallac sees the advantages outweighing any risk, adding that the two aren’t sharing things like editorial content, ad models and user experience, which he considers more important differentiators.

“By partnering with Slate, we’ve been able to increase the amount of people working on this because we’re pooling our resources,” he said. Plus, New York covers such a wide range of topics editorially, from food to fashion to politics, its potential competitive set is limitless.

“If we were to say we won’t talk to our competition, we wouldn’t be able to talk to anybody,” Hallac said. “But we’re also confident in our abilities. We’ll talk to anybody.”

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The Facebook algorithm change that has publishers panicking may be good news for a certain group inside the industry: influencers and their followers.

As Facebook decides to favor content from friends and family over posts from (certain) publishers, agency buyers are telling clients to focus more on influencer content.

“By prioritizing [user-generated content], Facebook is giving brands an opportunity to double down on influencers that maintain authentic relationships with their audiences,” said Corey Martin, who heads influencer marketing at 360i.

Martin said he takes Facebook’s explanation of the news-feed change at face value — that it wants to clean up a cluttered news feed and potentially cut down on fake news. Facebook is telling agencies they won’t see any major changes for paid promotion, although ad rates might increase.

But influencer marketing seems poised to benefit the most from the change: When done on its own, influencer content essentially mimics content from friends and family.

“I would tell clients to do more influencer content,” said Martin. “Facebook has more control over influencers and they have less control over media partners. I don’t think it’ll negatively impact buying ads within the Facebook environment.”

Marco Hansell, CEO at Speakr, said his company found that influencer content performs between five and 10 times better in terms of engagement when an influencer rather than a brand posts it. And if Facebook is already removing brands from the feed, it increases engagement among accounts with organic engagement.

“It’s now this awesome dynamic where brands show up less in the feed,” said Hansell, “and what’s showing up is content coming from public-figure pages, friends and family.”

The “handshakes” — how Facebook shows customers that content was created by influencers for brands — in this case wouldn’t punish the brands. Instead, brands might get some overflow likes from people clicking through to the brand page, too.

Boosting influencer content could be great for Facebook, which has long asked brands and agencies to create a paid strategy for influencer content. By doing that, it can get more ad dollars while getting credit for “cleaning up the feed.”

Noah Mallin, managing partner and head of experience, content and sponsorship at Wavemaker, said he expects Facebook to explore ways to make influencers a bigger part of the platform. While Facebook has plenty of influencer activity, it’s not as popular with influencers as Instagram or YouTube. But Mallin said that the same brand-safety issues that have impacted news also exist around influencers. “What are the safeguards around that?”

Organically speaking, influencers rank better than brands in the news feed, and deprioritizing news can be favorable for influencers. And the new algorithm is expected to mostly punish clickbait-style language, which means brands will need to make meaningful and “authentic” content, which creates room for more influencer partnerships.

In a note sent to its clients this week, agency RPA said as much: “With this new directive at the platform level of making Facebook a place for facilitating and rewarding meaningful social connections, brands who haven’t already made that a fundamental filter for their creative will absolutely need to do so — not only to appease the algorithms, but to ensure that they have a natural, authentic role in what could be the newly characterized Facebook experience.”

Justin Moore, founder at Trending Family, sees one potential glitch, though. Facebook last year pushed many influencers on both Facebook and Instagram to convert to “business” pages. (Most were previously categorized as “public figures.”) There wasn’t any access to full analytics on Instagram without being a business profile, and for larger influencers, brand campaigns required whitelisting and paid media access to an influencer handle. And under the new algorithm, business pages would be punished.

“At at first blush, it does not seem like good news,” said blogger Grace Atwood, who has a business profile.

The post ‘Awesome dynamic’: Influencer marketing gets a boost with Facebook changes appeared first on Digiday.

Amazon a week ago rolled out its cloud-based server-side bidding product that it delivers via Transparent Ad Marketplace, or TAM, to European countries including the U.K., Germany, France, Spain and Italy. So far, U.K. publishers haven’t rushed to jump on board.

Many major national publishers are eyeing TAM, but several said they aren’t convinced it’s worth their while, fearing they would leave themselves vulnerable to yet another tech platform with a different agenda than their own. Others have opted out due to unanswered questions about how agnostic Amazon will be with its demand.

“The verdict is still out,” said a publishing executive that is testing the service.

Several publishers said they found TAM quicker and simpler to implement than other header-bidding partners. But more important, site speed — the feature anticipated to be a differentiator for Amazon’s offering — has improved since implementation due to TAM’s ad call speeds. TAM’s default speed for ad calls is 200 milliseconds, according to sources.

The Telegraph and Trinity Mirror were among the early partners of TAM, both having pursued header bidding and server-side bidding strategies. Bauer Xcel Media, the U.S. offshoot of European women’s magazine publisher Bauer Media, recently revealed that its average page-load time across devices dropped from 12 seconds in January 2017 to between 4 and 5 seconds as a direct result of implementing TAM. Bauer’s U.K. team is now eager to implement TAM, hoping to see similar results.

Other publishers with advanced header-bidding strategies are keen to test the Amazon server-side product to see if it helps drive up revenues. They also want to understand more about the transparent auction mechanics the platform offers, such as publishers’ and SSPs’ access to auction-level reporting, to maximize rate for their inventory via TAM. Publisher reporting includes metrics such as earnings, eCPM, bid rate, win rate and timeout rate by SSP.

One publisher, which tested TAM ahead of its official rollout last week, said display revenue from TAM has been “encouraging,” increasing threefold over a two-month period. Given the implementation occurred in the last few months of 2017, the publisher will assess if those numbers are representative of the average revenue to be expected or skewed by seasonal shifts.

Others are waiting for Amazon to increase the number of demand partners it has integrated before jumping on board. All are interested to see if TAM can offer an alternative or even incremental value to Google’s header-bidding version, exchange bidding dynamic allocation, or EBDA.

“We use dynamic allocation but have no interest in testing EBDA. The mechanics around the Google auction are still too opaque when I compare them with others in the market, including Amazon,” said a publishing executive at a magazine group. “TAM is not quite the full package yet. That will come when Amazon allows publishers to sell PMPs to buyers using Amazon data and transact this via TAM, but as a first pass, the offering is a step in the right direction.”

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The post Amazon’s server-side bidding product gets off to slow start in UK appeared first on Digiday.

No longer the realm of outdated cosmetics companies, the peer-to-peer selling model is witnessing a renaissance in beauty.

Remade for a world of digitally savvy consumers, brands including Beautycounter, Ever Skin, Juara Skincare and Rodan & Fields are reliant on the model, while others, like Glossier, have built it into their direct-to-consumer playbook in recent years. Even Coty wants a piece of the pie: Last year, it paid $600 million for a 60 percent stake in Younique, a cosmetics company bent on social selling that reports over 80,000 reps.

The new crop of beauty brands that use the peer-to-peer selling tactic have given the business model new life since pioneering companies like Mary Kay and Avon have fallen off the map. Although both of the early adopters are still around today, they’ve struggled over the years to connect with modern shoppers. Avon’s seller community has continuously declined since 2012, and its stock market value is down to $1.3 billion, while Mary Kay has been riddled with bad press about its exploitative business model.

In their wake, newer brands have thrived, thanks to building up their selling communities on social media, tweaking their models to increase reach and emphasizing the results and ingredients-focused imagery that today’s customers crave.

The perfect timing
“Many of the older options hadn’t quite caught up to the times, but now it’s about leveraging different social platforms like Facebook and Instagram to make the model more digital and doable,” said Ani Hadjinian, general manager of Ever Skin, which is the beauty offshoot of Stella & Dot, the social-selling accessories brand launched by Jessica Herrin in 2003.

Herrin grew that brand to profitability; it’s generated more than $300 million in revenue, reportedly paying that same number in commissions to more than 50,000 stylists, who receive 35 percent of their sales. Three years ago, she saw an opportunity to do the same in beauty.

“There weren’t many modern players in the space,” said Hadjinian, adding that, on top of that, the rising popularity of the side-hustle made timing feel especially ripe.

“In this day and age, where you can choose to rely on things like Uber or Lyft for work, instead of committing to the 9-to-5, it can be such an incredible model for people — especially for women,” she said, hinting at their potential need for flexibility and their desire to continue working while raising families, a common theme among Ever Skin’s “specialists.”

Indeed, according to a study last year from the software company Intuit, the gig economy makes up about 34 percent of the U.S. workforce and is slated to reach 43 percent by 2020 — none of which would be possible, of course, without technology.

New opportunities in e-commerce
Ever Skin, for its part, gives its sellers — now numbered into the thousands — the option to sell not just at special in-person events, like its forebears, but online, as well. It sets up each seller with a personal e-commerce site and provides them with digital marketing guidance for promoting its products on Instagram and Facebook.

Beautycounter, Rodan & Fields and Younique follow the same dual model, although the latter is also bridging the two worlds by offering virtual selling parties.

Glossier’s rep program, which launched early last year, is similar in that sellers are given their own landing page on the Glossier website, complete with their favorite products and a video introduction — but, in keeping with the brand’s origins, it’s promoted as online-only. The company now reports around 500 sellers.

The model’s limitations
Not everyone was pleased with Glossier’s rep launch: In July, one representative told Racked that it felt the program might be negatively affecting Glossier’s cool girl image. “A lot of the girls are really off-brand,” she told the site. “They wear a shit-ton of makeup and I don’t even know how they use Glossier.”

Reddit threads filled with similar complaints followed.

“I think that came from the fact that it wasn’t integral to Glossier’s launch. They grew out of social media and then layered this in as a selling mechanism, which might be off-putting to someone who was so used to experiencing Glossier directly from the brand,” said Chelsea Gross, an associate director of client strategy at L2. Ultimately, though, the sales reps are just another form of influencer, she said.

The peer-to-peer sales model has been met with skepticism before, occasionally being likened to a pyramid scheme that may rip off its sellers. However, Joyce Lee, a beauty consultant and the former beauty buyer for Opening Ceremony, believes this is less of a problem today.

“Trust and transparency have more value in the beauty market than ever before,” she said.

As such, all of these newer entrants aim to be transparent about sales commissions on their websites, with most averaging between 20 to 35 percent. Some, like Beautycounter and Ever Skin, also market their products as safer than most, posting thorough ingredients directories and FAQs about how their products are made.

The social (media) effect
But the online community and its endorsements have had the greatest impact on the category, Lee said. Social platforms facilitate speedier connections, plus they allow these companies to drive home a message of authenticity.

“Yes, those who participate in these rep programs get paid to do so, but they are usually customers who love the products they’re promoting,” said Lee.

Gross agreed: “A lot of the case studies we bring to our clients focus on the power of social media that these companies, in particular, have doubled down on,” she said. “They use their consultants as home-grown influencers, whose content they then leverage for marketing purposes.”

Rodan & Fields, for example, often posts before-and-after imagery from its sellers to promote specific products. According to research by L2, in 2017, 1 percent of the brand’s social media posts were these images, but they drove 13 percent of its overall engagement. Ever Skin does the same on its website.

Casting a wider net
Rodan & Fields and Younique are now valued at $1 billion, they’re followed by Beautycounter, worth a reported $225 million, and Juara and Ever, estimated to be more in the low millions.

For these companies to continue to grow, they may need to look past the influence of their consultants.

Although previous iterations of the model relied solely on peer-to-peer sales to drive revenue, today’s brands are finding that to be a roadblock to success. “It creates a friction that consumers ultimately are not looking for, [as not everyone will have connections to a consultant],” said Gross.

As a result, they’re pushing their products direct-to-consumer from the start, as well. The one exception in the group, Rodan & Fields, finally began selling its products directly online in recent months, though only in packages that retail for upward of $200.

Acquiring these customers outside of the consultant-sphere is crucial because, as Hadjinian put it, it’s a form of insurance. “Not everybody wants to be a seller, but you always need customers,” she said.

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