Less BS, More Facts, Some Opinions
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Pod People NBCUniversal is cutting its TV ad load, reducing the number of prime-time ads by 20% and total ad time by 10%, Alex Bruell reports for The Wall Street Journal. It hopes this strategy will appease consumers who are increasingly impatient with advertising… Continue reading »
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It was two years ago at the Cannes advertising spectacular, a week of peacocking, drinking and schmoozing on the French Riviera. And on a corner of the Daily Mail yacht, there was LittleThings, hosting a late-afternoon pick-me-up with hand massages and nail touch-ups, and, of course, rosé. It was a modest affair by Cannes standards, but it showed the aspirations of the then 2-year-old media company.
LittleThings, which started as a pet supplies e-commerce site, became a poster child for astonishing audience growth, topping 50 million uniques in three years by sharing inspirational stories on Facebook about people and animals doing heroic things, among other inspirational content aimed squarely at Facebook’s sweet spot: middle-aged women. The formula thrived for a while as long as Facebook rewarded it and other clicky content sites with referral traffic. Facebook even touted the company in its case studies.
CEO and founder Joe Speiser brushed aside comparisons to fast-growth Facebook publishers like Upworthy and ViralNova. This time it was different, since LittleThings was an original content publisher — and Facebook needed publishers like LittleThings that drove engagement on the platform. As Facebook changed — emphasizing video, in particular — so too would LittleThings. “As long as you constantly pivot within the Facebook ecosystem, you’ll be fine,” Speiser said on the Digiday Podcast in May 2016.
That turned out not to be the case for LittleThings. When Facebook decided earlier this year it wanted less publisher content in the news feed, LittleThings’ traffic and engagement plunged. Speiser and Gretchen Tibbits, the company’s president and COO, announced Feb. 27 to their 100 employees that after attempts to sell fell through, the company would close.
The publisher is now a cautionary case study in relying too much on a giant distribution partner whose priorities might not line up with yours. Speiser and Tibbits have fans, both within LittleThings and in the broader industry. They were known as levelheaded media operators who focused on the details of the business and gave the internet a counterpoint to the often negative news of the day. Yet it was not enough.
The business model was intrinsically risky. LittleThings decided early on to ride a tiger, in its case Facebook, only to have the tiger turn around and eat it. LittleThings only grew as big as it did because of Facebook — but it couldn’t find that audience elsewhere when Facebook choked off its reach.
“We would never have reached this scale without a platform,” Tibbits said. “If you look at this target, women over 30 in Middle America, it’s on Facebook. And we did explore OTT and SEO and Instagram and Pinterest, but we haven’t been able to monetize those materially.”
“Joe is a smart guy, and the fact that he couldn’t adjust the business away from its reliance on Facebook speaks to how difficult that transition will be for other social publishers,” said Chris McLoughlin, LittleThings’ former CRO. “Facebook can be a terrific partner, but when a publisher rents all of its audience, it puts itself in a terribly vulnerable position.”
For a while, LittleThings weathered Facebook’s changes. In the summer of 2016 when Facebook rooted out clickbait, LittleThings evolved its curiosity gap headlines to include more information. It ruthlessly A/B tested posts to make sure they’d perform well on Facebook. With dark posts, LittleThings could get the benefit of showing highly engaging posts to only certain parts of its Facebook audience, out of sight of advertisers who might think posts about, say, medical issues were less than wholesome. Mastering those tactics ironically might have led to a false sense of security — and all those tactics would eventually fall out of favor on Facebook.
“I think people were a little wary of being so tied to Facebook and its whims and about the potential of that being the main source of our traffic and revenue,” said Meghan Holmgren, the former managing editor. “But everything I heard from Joe or Gretchen was, we have a great relationship with them.”
In 2016, that confidence led Speiser to move the company out of cramped offices near New York City’s Herald Square to a sprawling space in the newly built Hudson Yards development complex, complete with digital startup trappings like a pingpong table, video games and organic coffee. LittleThings didn’t take VC funding, so it may not have made the mistakes other media companies have in spending way beyond their means, but LittleThings also operated in anticipation of a big digital video payday. The new space had one studio just for Facebook Live, chasing that latest Facebook initiative, doubling its budget in 2017 to create 13 shows.
Among them were daily talk shows like “The Daily Glow” that aspired to be like “The View” and weekly programs such as “Slice,” “The Hostess Next Door” and “Oh, Baby!”
Some of that production level, ironically, was meant to help LittleThings diversify off Facebook. It started distributing those live shows on OTT platforms like Amazon, Apple TV and Roku. The money would come from advertising sold by those distributors. But the scale of those audiences is still nascent, so the money wasn’t material, Tibbits said.
LittleThings also wasn’t quick enough to diversify its ad revenue. It started to sell direct and branded content to supplement its programmatic base, hiring 30 people, and got some praise from the market.
“I think the algorithm change is 100 percent the reason they are shutting down — they were a great partner, and we always saw success with their campaigns,” said Kerry Perse, U.S. director of social at OMD. Brian Rifkin, co-founder of digital video player company JW Player, which licensed its tech to LittleThings, said the site was good at testing posts for engagement and creating a clean environment on the site to better compete for video dollars. “They started to understand there’s so much revenue in video, it’s better to have a pared-down site,” he said.
But LittleThings faced a lot of competition from other, better-established lifestyle titles. “Their bigger challenge was just a lot a sameness in a product in a very competitive space,” said Steve Carbone, chief digital and investment officer at MediaCom North America. “I had a lot of heart for LittleThings, but the category they were in was fierce with more mature competition.” Last year, its non-programmatic business was just in the single digits as a percentage of total revenue, and then, when LittleThings’ audience declined this year, programmatic revenue fell along with it.
“Every day we’d be having meetings saying, ‘What was Facebook’s algorithm change today, and what can we do?’ It was always an issue,” said Jessica Rotkiewicz, who worked as a news and branded content producer at LittleThings until she was laid off last April. “At the end of the day, the company was relying on another party they couldn’t control.”
The post Live by the algorithm, die by the algorithm: How LittleThings went from social publishing darling to shutting down appeared first on Digiday.
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Many publishers are faced with a math problem. All the new “incremental” revenue lines — commerce, licensing, micropayments, events — don’t add up to more than their declining ad businesses as Google and Facebook suck up ad budgets.
“No single stream of alternative revenue will make up for the declines that we’re seeing in advertising,” said Jim Norton, the former chief business officer at Condé Nast. “There’s no silver bullet. You can’t say, ‘If we’re down 10 percent on advertising, we can make it up through subscriptions.’”
That reality likely means more consolidation for legacy publishers. But in an era where publishers need to keep looking for ways to build and monetize direct relationships with their audiences, these new streams will remain vital.
“We’re essentially a storytelling company that uses data and distribution to acquire an audience,” said Pete Spande, the chief revenue officer of Insider Inc. “We’re looking for new businesses that can monetize our core strengths.”
Publishers have talked about diversifying their revenue for years. And some of them, particularly those that have focused on it for a while, have managed to achieve real successes. Meredith-licensed products, for example, accounted for $22 billion in retail sales in 2016, second only to Disney.
The New York Times, after years of effort, turned consumer revenue into its largest revenue source in 2017. Though that was mostly due to sales of digital news subscriptions, the Times has had so much success with Crossword and Cooking subscriptions that it breaks them out in quarterly earnings reports; Cooking and Crossword combined to generate over $14 million in revenue this past year, a 53 percent increase year over year.
The average publisher now lists six different revenue streams, including branded content, subscriptions, events, membership and affiliate commerce as at least “important” to their business, according to a survey the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism conducted.
Publishers have broadened their focus out of necessity. Even though the digital advertising market is growing healthily — U.S. revenues rose 22.6 percent in the first half of 2017 to $40.1 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau — an overwhelming majority of that growth is going to Google and Facebook. The duopoly’s share of global advertising has more than doubled over the past four years, growing from just over 10 percent ($45.6 billion) in 2013 to more than 22 percent ($113.6 billion) in 2017, according to Bloomberg analysis.
Those unfavorable market dynamics have made publishers a lot more open-minded. “There was a time when the publishers said, ‘Unless it’s 20 percent of my revenue, I don’t have time to talk to you,’” said Oliver Roup, the CEO of affiliate commerce tool VigLink, who noted he’s seen an uptick in interest among publishers in the last two years. “That attitude has largely gone away.”
It’s not that publishers will glom onto anything to make a quick buck. “We’re not interested in businesses that don’t have a trajectory to become eight- or nine-figure [revenue sources] very soon,” Spande said.
But finding the discipline, resources and patience to focus on something unfamiliar is difficult. “It’s really hard, if you’re a TV broadcasting company, for example, to focus on this really promising million-dollar business [that] requires more care and feeding than the billion-dollar businesses,” Spande said. “You have to get to the place where you’re able to spin many plates at the same time.”
Often, publishers still end up with advertising as the main thrust of their business, no matter the additional lines. Roup, for example, noted that he is fielding more and more requests from publisher clients asking to combine data about their affiliate commerce conversions into VigLink’s digital marketing platform to create audience segments for advertising.
These new businesses have marketing costs, too. Hearst Digital Media President Troy Young said he wants branded content, commerce and licensing to represent two-thirds of his business. He said it is sometimes difficult at the beginning to remind colleagues that every ad slot used to promote one of those new sorts of businesses comes at the expense of money it could earn from selling that inventory to someone else — often at a higher margin.
“A lot of people see those assets as being freely available,” Young said. “It creates hard conversations internally.”
Transforming from an industry mainly focused on selling ads to a business that sells lots of different things will take time. But it’s a shift publishers need to make.
“It’s a fool’s errand to think you’ll be able to turn the tide on advertising trends,” Norton said. “Everybody has to be committed to alternative streams of revenue, even at the expense of short-term revenue loss. That’s the beam every publisher and media owner needs to balance on.”
The post ‘No silver bullet’: Publishing’s ‘incremental’ revenue often doesn’t replace lost ad dollars appeared first on Digiday.
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The Outnet’s Facebook messenger chatbot starts off predictably. The tool first asks if you’re looking for wardrobe ideas or customer service help. If you’re looking for ideas, it then asks if you’re shopping for a certain event or category, like vacation outfits or desk-to-dinner, or for more general style inspiration. (If you’re in need of customer service, you’ll be connected to a real person).
Depending on how you answer changes the course of the conversation. If you’re indeed looking for vacation outfits, the prompt will take you out of the chat and to The Outnet’s vacation trends shop on its site. But those shopping with less direction are introduced to The Outnet’s “stylish friends”: editors and influencers who have worked with The Outnet on one of its video series. The bot takes users through a series of more whimsical prompts that range from standard (“Is your style more ‘laid-back L.A.’ or ‘East Coast elegance’?”) to borderline absurd (“Would you ever leave the house without underwear?”).
Each response conjures up a content hook featuring an influencer, like a 15-second video clip that auto-plays in the chat or an excerpt from a Q&A, followed by a prompt to shop a featured brand or category.
“This is a new channel for us to broadcast the content that lives on our site and help customers navigate our assortment,” said said Andres Sosa, evp of sales, marketing and creative at The Outnet.
With the bot, The Outnet wants to make the most of both its in-house content and its Facebook followers, while avoiding expensive paid posts and promoted videos. The competitive landscape for e-commerce marketplaces has made the cost of customer acquisition skyrocket, and as social media marketing shifts from organic to paid reach, pulling in customers through editorial POV-derived inspiration is critical in controlling marketing spend. Bots aren’t free — The Outnet worked with an external partner to build its version over the course of eight months — but they’re easier to maintain than constant promotions. They also act as data vehicles.
“The goal is to trace customer behavior from social media. All of our social channels have sales targets,” said Sosa. “Facebook, for us, has been very profitable. Instagram, we’re getting there. It’s about connecting the dots and making sure every piece of content she sees is engaging, and also has a commercial element attached.”
Chatbots, which have fared better for the beauty industry than fashion, are still in early phases of adoption as brands try to figure out what approach works best. In January, Facebook Messenger disabled its M platform, a virtual personal assistant that powered customer service inquiries with AI. So brands are warming up to content-driven chatbots, as companies like Tommy Hilfiger and Burberry ping those who subscribe with news, like the start of a live-streamed fashion show or new product arrivals. For The Outnet, the first thing it asks those who visit it on Messenger is whether or not they’d like regular style news delivered through the bot.
“The customer service bot has failed to catch on. But it’s not the death knell for the entire channel. What The Outnet has made has potential because it’s scalable, easy to personalize, and can drive customer insight and purchases,” said Maya Mikhailov, the CMO of mobile commerce platform GPShopper. “But the opt-in hurdle still exists.”
With the chatbot, The Outnet plans to track the type of content that drives customers back to the site most frequently. With evergreen content backdrops, it can swap out the shoppable elements, like brands and trends, according to what’s popular or driving the most traffic. The editorial team works with the merchandising team to plan what products will be promoted through the bot, which rolled out in February.
It also put together a 10,000-person panel of “Outnet Insiders,” sourced from a customer pool, to find out what type of articles and videos from The Outnet they would be interested in. From that panel, The Outnet found that its customers care about influencer style, which inspired its three recurring series: “Dropped Pins,” a video series around how to dress for different cities; “Speed Dial,” a video interview series; and “Cheat the Week,” a written week-in-the-life Q&A.
The bot is also a guinea pig for YNAP to see how much stickiness the channel has as a social content vehicle. YNAP, which opened a 500-person tech hub last year, is testing the different ways AI and virtual commerce can make the customer journey easier, and keep customers returning for a more personalized experience.
“Mobile is the future of shopping, so everything we do supports that belief,” said Frederico Marchetti, YNAP’s CEO, during the announcement of the tech hub. “I don’t believe in the super automation of everything, but AI can understand customers on a personal level, and we plan to take advantage of that and understand its potential first.”
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Condé Nast Britain’s fashion title Glamour has revamped its content and commercial strategy to align with its new future as an almost entirely digital brand.
The publisher, which announced its plan last October to produce only two print issues a year, has spent the months since making radical strategic changes, which involved downsizing from 55 people to 40, creating a five-person video team and redefining its editorial direction and distribution.
Moving away from news
Editorial focus is shifting from quick-fire news updates, text-based product and beauty reviews and how-to videos to more in-depth articles that explore grittier subjects the title has previously shied away from, such as plastic surgery, ovarian cancer and prison life for women, according to Deborah Joseph, Glamour UK’s newly appointed chief content officer. The goal: Cultivate a loyal, engaged audience and a strong brand identity on all digital platforms.
Beauty, culture and fashion will remain key editorial areas. Stories that spotlight celebrities trying new products are a news sweet spot for Glamour, and those will remain. But now the goal will be to create in-depth pieces based on them. “We’re not just going for news content but quality content,” Joseph said. “Quick news is a win for driving traffic, but for building loyalty, it’s the intelligent in-depth content that works better.”
The Glamour site and mobile app have been redesigned to reflect its shift away from being a news-based site to one that exudes the brand’s specific tone and style. Previously, the site geared toward prioritizing the latest news, but the new site focuses more on creating visual impact against a millennial pink background.
“It’s smart not to focus on the quick, high-volume disposable content in favor of longer-form [content],” said Charlie Cottrell, head of editorial at social agency We Are Social. “When publishers’ ad revenues have dropped, they have typically gone after volume of pages. But the investment in quality over quantity is encouraging and gives more credibility to their audience.”
Articles and videos that relate to mental health, beauty science and culture will be major areas of focus. Glamour UK will increase the amount of video it creates by five times its previous output, according to the publisher. A new five-person video team has been created, and a new studio has been built within Condé Nast’s London office, to be shared among the titles.
The aim is to create episodic, long-form series that run on Glamour UK’s site and YouTube. Former print feature formats such as “Hey It’s OK,” which later evolved into a podcast, will shift to video. It will either live as long-form series on YouTube or be recut for social platforms like Instagram.
Prioritizing loyalty over reach
Creating episodic video for social platforms to keep people engaged will be a bigger focus, especially for Instagram Stories, which has driven 25 percent of Glamour UK’s referral traffic since Jan. 1, according to the publisher. The team has created two weekly Instagram Stories: “The Glam Drop,” which runs every Monday and features a beauty writer telling readers what products have arrived for her to sample that week, and “The Weekly Edit,” which details editorial highlights of the week.
Instagram is a platform the title has previously underused, according to Camilla Newman, Glamour UK publishing director. “We’re focused on creating these regular episodic franchises to capitalize more on the platform,” she said.
Glamour UK’s Facebook referral traffic has remained steady since the platform’s algorithm change, according to Joseph, but the publisher has altered its strategy for posting to Facebook as a result. Next week, Glamour UK will launch a Facebook Group specifically to cultivate engagement with readers around content. “We want to own the beauty conversation on Facebook,” Joseph said.
Glamour UK can also drive interest in the Facebook Group around its products such as the Glamour Beauty Club, a membership program that sends those that register product samples that brands pay to promote. The club has grown to 100,000 members in the last six months, and the publisher is speaking with an online retail brand about how to tie in e-commerce links so people can purchase its products.
However, Newman stressed that e-commerce will never be a major part of the publisher’s revenue mix. “The idea with the Beauty Club is to create a loyal user base and community, providing them with a full service,” she said.
One of the biggest changes for the publisher has been merging its editorial and commercial teams completely. From now on, editors will pitch content ideas directly to brands and agencies. Sixty percent of Glamour UK’s revenue comes from branded content, but the aim is to direct all editorial resources on growing that now that the team will be almost totally focused on creating digital content.
“A lightbulb has turned on at Condé Nast over the last year, particularly at Vogue,” said Laura Wade, vp of content and innovation for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at GroupM agency Essence. “Their brands have prestige, but when it comes to who we work with for branded content, there are many hungry digital players that have long made their editorial teams available to us. It’s like they have understood that there needs to be more than that [brand prestige and heritage] and be more willing to try out new formats with us.”
Images courtesy of Condé Nast
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Nissan is making big changes to how it uses social media and data to better reflect women in Saudi Arabia who have recently gained new rights.
Over the last year, Saudi women have gotten the go-ahead to join the military, start businesses without the permission of a male guardian, fight sexual harassment and drive. These societal changes present an opportunity for Nissan in a sputtering economy, according to Hussein Dajani, the company’s gm for digital marketing and customer experience.
“Saudi women are no longer secondary audiences,” he said. “They’re equally important to males, and if not, then they are more important than them.”
Saudi women have undoubtedly made gains, but the headline-grabbing announcements obscure other cultural obstacles they face. To reflect those nuances, the Japanese car brand is making changes to what Dajani called the “tonality” of its posts. For example, Arabic words are either masculine or feminine, and, until now, Nissan has only used masculine words. Moving forward, the “choice of words” Nissan’s marketers post to the likes of Facebook and Instagram will be “extremely important,” said Dajani, whose team is working through reams of product data to identify what cars and language in ads will likely resonate with women. In the past, no one was interested in that data, said Dajani, so he said it’s like they’re “starting from scratch.”
Some of that audience data is from Nissan’s dealerships, while other insights are from audience segments on Facebook and Instagram. Regarding data, Dajani admitted Nissan is still in the “initial phases” of making sense of what it owns in the region. Unlike other data-heavy advertisers, the data that automotive brands like Nissan want is tangled in either their own legacy systems or those of their dealers.
Nissan’s transition began in earnest last September when Saudi Arabia announced it would let women drive. Within two hours of the announcement, Dajani’s team, which had been fine-tuning its real-time marketing processes, pulled together a Twitter post congratulating all Saudi women with a license plate bearing the registration “2018 GRL.” The post kicked off the #SheDrives campaign two weeks later, in which Nissan arranged driving lessons for Saudi women hesitant to learn to drive because of family opposition. Those lessons had unexpected instructors, who were the fathers, husbands and brothers of the women.
In a market where that style of women-focused marketing is new, Dajani opted to put no spend behind the posts. Nevertheless, major news outlets such as the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera picked up the ads during the final months of 2017.
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Snapchat has chosen to take a flexible approach to how Snapchat shows make money. In some cases, that means partners taking the lead in sales; in others, Snapchat does.
Snap’s content and advertising deals with major media companies including NBCUniversal (an investor in Snap), Turner and Viacom give the show producers the first rights to sell sponsorships and ad slots within their programs. The media companies get a favorable cut on ads they sell, typically more than the 50 percent of revenue Snap splits with Discover publishers on ads sold by Snap, sources said. For advertisers that want to sponsor individual shows from these major media companies, it means working with that specific company on a campaign. Prices for individual show sponsorships can still cost several hundred thousands of dollars or more, according to two senior ad executives.
Today, the CPMs on Snapchat video inventory is in the $6 to $10 range, according to ad buyers. If the buy is made through a Snapchat shows partner, the CPMs net out to $15 to $20.
Some of Snap’s content partners are also creating new packages for advertisers that want to buy more than one show. For instance, NBCUniversal, which produces everything from NBC News’ twice-daily “Stay Tuned” to E!’s thrice-weekly “The Rundown,” is already out in the market with a bundle that allows marketers to advertise against all of its Snapchat shows, a source said.
The story is slightly different with digital publishers and studios making shows for Snapchat. For instance, Uproxx, which will soon launch a new series called “Brawler” on Snapchat, said Snap is taking the lead on monetizing the show. Snap brought a Wendy’s series sponsorship for Barstool Sports’ “Fifth Year” last fall, according to Barstool Sports CEO Erika Nardini.
Snap is planning to double the number of shows it offers in 2018 to roughly 80, which will include working with both traditional media companies and digital publishers on the content.
While it can be pricey, sponsoring an entire show and creating specific assets that are contextually relevant to that program will lead to better engagement and ad performance, said Brent Poer, president and executive creative director for brand and content at Zenith.
“We have assets and if we want to be on Snapchat, we can go buy audiences run of site,” said Poer. “But I tend to want to go and cherry-pick and work with specific partners and shows — even if it’s the harder way.”
Increasingly, though, Snap itself is moving away from selling individual series sponsorships, according to the two senior ad executives. One ad exec said in a recent meeting with Snap, the company was nudging him toward a broader Snap Ads video buy across Snapchat, which would include placements within Snapchat shows targeted to the audiences the advertiser wanted to reach.
“Snap hasn’t been pitching specific shows to us, but it’s possible to buy their individual show sponsorships through the media partners,” said the exec. “Snap’s pitching in-stream inventory as a channel similar to the way that Google sells its preferred inventory. They talk about their inventory being consistent, high-quality and evenly reaching their audience.”
However, Snap is also beginning to put new types of shows on the table. The company is looking to stretch into long-form original video, though long is a relative term. As part of its new push into scripted programming, Snap is talking to advertisers about its plans to premiere episodic series and one-off programs that would run roughly six minutes long, said an agency executive familiar with the matter. It’s likely that this content is being produced by the joint venture that Snap formed with NBCUniversal last year to develop original scripted programming; NBCU has been mentioned as being involved in the longer content, according to the agency exec.
One senior ad exec, from an agency that frequently runs campaigns on Snapchat, said he expects the Snap Ads product to go almost entirely programmatic in the near future. More than 90 percent of Snap Ads were bought programmatically in the fourth quarter, and the number of advertisers spending in the auction doubled quarter over quarter, Snap said. This, combined with the recent departure of Snap’s head of sales Jeff Lucas — a longtime TV and media sales exec — only further reinforces the notion that Snap is emphasizing programmatic video buying above all else.
This won’t necessarily rule out the ability for advertisers to sponsor individual media companies and shows on the platform. The agency exec pointed to Twitter’s in-stream video ad product, which allows marketers to pick individual publishers, as a model that Snap is likely to employ as its programmatic business grows.
“Like Twitter, they are facing pressure to be profitable and streamline their sales force and operations teams,” said an ad buyer. “Going programmatic might sacrifice some CPM, but if they have demand, which it feels like they do based on their earnings and the fact that so many clients work with them, they could go fully programmatic. They already have self-service for geofilters.”
Tim Peterson contributed reporting.
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Maybe chatbots can jazz up regular old display ads.
Emirates airline is using artificial intelligence for a chatbot that lies within display ads for its Emirates Vacations unit. The ads allow people to ask travel and trip questions and receive answers immediately within the ad unit. But the company believes AI can be impactful for another application: breaking down additional friction points when it comes to search. The chatbot will recommend destinations and vacation packages based on the context of users’ questions, the content on the site it appears on and Emirates Vacations’ inventory. For instance, if Emirates Vacations doesn’t have a hotel in Toronto, the chatbot won’t suggest a hotel in Toronto. “Explore the world without leaving the page,” the ads read.
“For us, it’s about looking at the customer journey and removing as many friction points as we can,” said Ailsa Pollard, svp of marketing at Emirates Vacations, which worked with WayBlazer on the execution.
Emirates Vacations began testing the ads in a 30-day campaign starting at the end of December. The ads ran on sites like The New Yorker, Lonely Planet, Time and Smithsonian in major cities across the U.S. At the end of the 30 days, Emirates Vacations saw an 87 percent lift in engagement compared to its traditional click-through ads, according to Pollard. Emirates Vacations tested 550,000 impressions for the new chat ad format and compared those to the same number of impressions for its traditional display format. Emirates Vacations wouldn’t share any metrics around engagement for its original display ads, only that it plans on continuing using the enhanced version.
Right now, the chat ads advertise four destinations: the Maldives, Bangkok, Milan and the Seychelles. So, if a user types in a general question about where they should go on vacation, the chat ad will recommend travel packages to these locations. The ads are also strategically placed against articles that reference these locations. For instance, Emirates Vacations ran one of its chat ads on People.com next to an article about singer Jordin Sparks visiting the Maldives.
Pollard also said these chat ads help to “weave new life into traditional display ads.” Traditional display ads have long played a role in consumer annoyance with online advertising, and many brands are looking into ways they can provide more value to users. Travel brands especially have to pay attention to user experience, Pollard said.
“Travel is really all about the experience,” said Pollard. “We see AI as a way we can add more relevance to the consumer journey and provide better responses.”
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Vaibhav Khullar, a London-based banking technology startup founder, noticed that digital ads alone wouldn’t generate a big enough bump in business. Six months ago, he decided that content, or branded stories, could be the answer.
“We started off with paid advertising, but online ads aren’t good for the market we’re working in,” said Khullar, the founder of six-year-old OSREC Financial, whose clients are mostly banks and hedge funds. “People who are tech savvy aren’t going to be as influenced by online ads as a high-quality article that’s shared around — it could be an article talking about things that might address an existing problem.”
In finance, content marketing has become a must-have to keep customers and attract new ones. But it’s a cluttered market. It’s tough for a company to distinguish its voice from others presenting the same topic in a similar format or style. For example, the “news and stories” section of Chase’s website features the headline “7 essential rules of saving“; Bank of America’s “Better Money Habits” offers “7 steps to stay financially fit” and Capital One weighs in on “7 ways to enjoy your wedding season without crushing your wallet.” The similarity in look, feel and presentation can make branded articles seem less authentic.
“You’re generally going into a marketplace where everyone is just shouting,” said Khullar. “It’s eventually going to be a mess of noise, and there’s going to be nothing coherent to be heard.”
Read the full story on tearsheet.co
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