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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 Judy Shapiro, founder and CEO at engageSimply. I don’t believe it’s an overstatement to suggest we are witnessing the first real rightsizing of digital media impressions since ad tech became… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Telecom At Me, Bro Comcast is planning a $31 billion bid to purchase all of UK broadcaster Sky – though Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told the The Wall Street Journal it would also accept a majority stake. Fox’s 39% stake in Sky was a… Continue reading »

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The cyclical nature of media means that Twitter is enjoying some time in the sun with publishers. According to multiple publishers, Twitter has delivered more video views than usual over the last two months, for some making up for the reach lost on Facebook since it made changes to the news feed.

Across its top brands, magazine publisher Bauer found that Twitter video views increased fivefold from October to December 2017. CNBC International said it has had “notable growth” in its video views in February, but the company declined to share specific numbers. During the same month, lifestyle publisher Stylist saw a 500 percent increase in its Twitter video views as a result of dedicating more resources to Twitter. Men’s interest site Joe Media saw a 20 percent increase in video views over the last four months to 6.2 million. A source familiar with the matter said that over the last year, Twitter has had a “significant” increase in the number of video views on the platform compared to the previous year.

Last year, Twitter announced feature updates to improve content relevance, including mobile push notifications and “while you were away” tweets to surface highly engaging content, driving up discoverability for publisher videos. Twitter has also introduced view counts for video. Buoyed by higher views, the number of publishers and the amount they post to the platform have naturally increased.

Bauer started to focus more on Twitter halfway through last year across a number of its entertainment and lifestyle titles, including fashion title Grazia, urban radio station Kiss FM and film brand Empire. Since then, Bauer has tweaked metadata and video length in order to figure out what works, which is typically video clips between 40 and 60 seconds in length. For Empire, three-minute video clips perform just as well, according to the publisher.

“We’ve seen a big resurgence in Twitter,” said Niall McGarry, founder of Joe Media, adding that the growth in views “is significant.” In the last six months, Joe Media has doubled the size of its editorial and production team and increased the amount of content it posts to Twitter, particularly before, during and after football matches. In December, Neville Southall, former Everton goalkeeper, delivered a Christmas message urging people to be more compassionate, which the publisher posted to Twitter. The combination of a football personality and a political message worked well, with the video amassing 7,000 retweets, 12,000 likes and nearly a million views, while the same content on Facebook got comparably little traction, with 1,000 shares.

“Whether content does well on Facebook is in the lap of the gods. The algorithm is much more complex,” said McGarry. “Twitter has a consistency that Facebook doesn’t.”

Twitter’s payouts to publishers as part of its Amplify program have grown 60 percent since last year, according to the platform, although Twitter wouldn’t share how many publishers are part of the program. Amplify launched five years ago as a way to help publishers make money from selling pre-roll ads around their Twitter content. Bauer tends not to monetize its events-coverage videos on Twitter to avoid hampering their reach. However, having a variety of ways for publishers to monetize their content on Twitter, like sponsorships and Periscope Super Hearts, is a bonus.

“One of the advantages [with Amplify] is that publishers are often getting an extra paycheck with minimal extra effort,” said Garrett Goodman, vp of business development at social video platform Wochit. “They’re just posting the same videos they’re already making for Facebook, but this time actually monetizing the views, so there’s virtually no downside here.”

But Twitter won’t ever match Facebook as a referral source. Parsely data shows Twitter makes up less than 3 percent of publisher referral traffic.

Twitter also has its own issues. The platform can be a toxic environment for hate speech and trolling. But moves like removing verification from accounts with ties to far-right political groups show it is trying to address these problems.

The fact that publishers are exploring wider distribution on platforms beyond Facebook is hardly surprising, given Facebook’s news-feed changes and the way U.K. publishers found out about them. Other platforms like LinkedIn and Snapchat are seizing the opportunity. Publishers say Twitter’s U.K. team, particularly Lee LeBorgne, Amplify partnerships lead, and Julia White, head of entertainment and lifestyle content partnerships, are making advances to work more collaboratively, too.

For example, within 24 hours of Grazia posting an explainer video on Twitter with facts about Meghan Markle, shortly after the announcement that she was engaged to Prince Harry, the Twitter team flagged Bauer that the video was performing better than expected. This spurred the publisher to create additional content for the platform.

“We have an open dialogue on almost a daily basis,” said Greg Adams, head of video at Bauer Xcel Media. “That makes it easy to quickly adapt strategy and key learnings.”

For more on all things video, subscribe to Digiday’s new weekly video briefing, written by Sahil Patel.

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Turner’s Super Deluxe would have as good a reason as any other publisher to stop airing live videos on Facebook as the social network stops subsidizing broadcasts and cuts publishers’ organic reach. Throughout 2017, Super Deluxe’s live videos on Facebook averaged half a million views, but this year, that number has hovered around 250,000 views.

“The minute that Facebook made this announcement [in January that it would deprioritize publishers’ organic content], our views split in half,” said Cyrus Ghahremani, head of live programming at Super Deluxe.

Despite that decline, Super Deluxe plans to do more with Facebook Live. By the end of 2018, it plans to produce one brand-sponsored live video every week, Ghahremani said. That’s because while Super Deluxe’s live viewership has fallen, its engagement rates have risen, and Facebook, along with brands, is prioritizing engagement.

“Generally speaking, engagements mean a lot more than views, especially with different standards of what counts as a view,” said Gabe Gordon, managing partner at Reach Agency. “Someone interacting or engaging with a piece of content is always going to mean more. If you’re driving people to purchase or click on something, any form of engagement is always going to be valued over reaching someone passively.”

Still, many publishers prize views and the ad revenue they can reap from those views. So it’s no surprise that some publishers have cooled on the format after Facebook stopped paying them subsidies for live video.

The share of top U.S. publishers using Facebook Live in a given month has waned since peaking in November 2016, though the majority of them still use the format, according to data from Socialbakers. The social marketing firm examined the 1,000 most-followed U.S. publisher accounts on Facebook and tracked how many had aired at least one live video on Facebook for each month from January 2016 through January 2018.

Based on that data, Facebook Live’s popularity among publishers has receded, but not to the point of a full-blown retreat. In January 2018, 52 percent of the examined U.S. publishers aired a Facebook Live broadcast, down from a high of 63 percent in November 2016. Similarly, the total number of monthly live videos these publishers posted is down from its peak of more than 21,000 in September 2017, but is still trending up.

The downward usage trend may coincide with Facebook’s decision to no longer pay some publishers to produce live videos. But it may also be that publishers are struggling to produce live video that keeps viewers’ attention and attracts attention-seeking brands in the process.

“When [the money from Facebook] got cut off and also when publishers realized they needed whole staffs to go live, I feel like they were like, ‘If we’re not good at this and it’s not really helping on the revenue side or scaling our audience that much, we don’t need to do it as much,’” said Shira Lazar, co-founder of digital video studio What’s Trending.

Like Super Deluxe, Lazar is sticking with Facebook Live. She hosts a daily show on Facebook called “Circa Pop Live” that her company produces and is backed by Sinclair Broadcast Group. The TV broadcaster’s backing has helped Lazar to navigate Facebook’s seemingly ever-shifting emphasis on live video. In addition to getting paid by Sinclair to produce the show and syndicate clips across the media company’s properties, she works with Sinclair to find brands to sponsor the show, which averages 50,000 viewers per airing.

Live video on Facebook could see a renaissance following the company’s recent news-feed algorithm change. At the same time as Facebook said it would de-emphasize publishers’ and brands’ organic posts in people’s feeds, it held out hope for companies producing live videos.

“Page posts that generate conversation between people will show higher in news feed. For example, live videos often lead to discussion among viewers on Facebook — in fact, live videos on average get six times as many interactions as regular videos,” wrote Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of news feed, in a company blog post.

Stats from Socialbakers appear to back that implication. Live videos reach twice as many people and receive 25 percent more engagements than native videos on Facebook, according to Moses Velasco, Socialbakers’ chief of strategy.

If Facebook’s algorithm does reward live videos that elicit comments, shares and likes, then Super Deluxe may stand to recoup the views it has lost. Not only that, but those views that remain views may be more valuable if they’re more engaging.

“The engagement rates and watch times were staying the same while the views dropped. And since then, those have been rising while the views stayed the same,” said Ghahremani. “So I think there is a shift happening where the quality of the views is getting better.”

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As sexual harassment issues sweep the ad industry, some heads are rolling. But in many cases, it feels like agencies aren’t getting ahead of the problem. In this edition of Confessions, in which we grant anonymity for honesty, a female agency veteran who has worked in both human resources and public relations at major agencies discusses why HR is often the problem. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

How do you view #MeToo and its arrival to the ad industry?
It comes down to size. The bigger you get, the harder it is to maintain a culture. And the culture agencies have maintained is one of trying to be cool. The ad industry is the one industry where everyone acts like little kids. Everyone wants to be cool. The white middle-aged guy in the suburbs who talks like a hip-hop artist is the CEO.

That’s awkward.
Of course. It reeks of so much white privilege. I feel like with the heads of so many agencies, it’s probably one of the most liberal, democratic places. For the most part, they’re really social justice types. But they speak with white privilege. Just look at how everyone got their jobs. They went to great schools; their dads knew someone in the industry. They say they get it when it comes to diversity, but I don’t think they do. They might know what’s politically correct, but I don’t think they understand what’s correct.

How is that expressed?
The ad culture is all about sexual innuendo. And joking around. And dropping the F-bomb. It’s inappropriate, and our culture as a whole has gotten this way. But what’s happening now is that it’s going the other way. But not in a good way. People are now afraid to speak at work.

How does HR play into that?
Two things. One, the culture of agencies is changing because on the face of it, people are afraid to joke around. Two, I think because of [Instagram account] Diet Madison Avenue and #MeToo, I think that HR is paying attention, but not because they should, but because it’s a liability. But the fact is, if you’re putting a complaint against a senior-level person who is more important than you, they will take the senior’s side.

Explain.
HR is really siloed, as much as they say they’re not. I know it’s siloed. I don’t feel like HR works in tandem in with corporate comms.

Give me an example.
Let’s say it’s layoffs, not even harassment stuff. Sometimes, there is an agencywide email that explains the cuts. But usually what happens is people get laid off, and they hear rumors internally. That ruins the culture. People are scared for their jobs and are angry.

Social media has helped a lot of rumors and allegations surface.
People already know the truth. People aren’t stupid. When there are companies who are firing someone at the top, there are usually other people at the top who have protected the harasser or abuser. Once your culture is poisoned by a negative leader or organization, it’s important to adjust it. I don’t think it’s a huge town hall meeting. Not enough agencies do the small-group thing, department by department, floor by floor. Hearing from their boss and senior management is so important. I don’t think enough marketing companies do what they should be doing with PR 101, which is getting ahead of the issue.

How does HR deal with rumors?
They just don’t, and part of it is that PR has to be part of the conversation. I don’t think they often are. Unlike other industries, I think agencies aren’t getting ahead of the story. I work with CEOs who simply pretend it’s not happening around them, that there aren’t rumors about people. You kind of see that they want to pretend it never happened, that it’s going to go away.

Why?
This is speculation, but HR is female. The toughest women are the best gatekeepers when it comes to getting information out. Same with PR. Some of the most respected PR people are really hard on reporters and protect the company no matter what. HR does it, too. Agencies have a problem, but they have an HR problem.

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Concerns about the looming ePrivacy Regulation, not to mention fear of the duopoly, are prompting European publishers to collaborate on joint consumer login systems. So far, Germany and Portugal have led the charge. Now, it looks like France could join the fray.

Leading national newspapers Le Monde, Le Figaro and Le Parisien are among the publishers discussing the potential for implementing a common single login across their sites, through which users can be automatically authenticated each time they visit one of the publishers’ sites.

The talks aren’t limited to newspaper publishers. Radio and TV broadcasters are also involved, as are pure-play digital publishers, according to Laure de Lataillade, executive director of France’s online publishing trade body Geste.

Nothing has been decided yet, but French media companies want to explore whether building a common login system is a feasible way to simplify gaining consumer consent for cookie use. They’re examining the German single-login system Verimi and Portugal’s equivalent Nonio to see if they can be replicated in the French market.

The idea is to pool resources to create an independent, common technology infrastructure that all publishers and other media owners can plug into. A consumer would then upload their email and password, which would automatically log them in to any site that’s part of the partnership. Any other personal data such as social, demographic or location data wouldn’t be collected or shared between the publisher partners, according to de Lataillade. In doing so, all media owners could ensure they have user consent.

Although the ePrivacy Regulation isn’t yet set in stone, European publishers and trade groups are lobbying hard against the current proposal, which, if passed, would block any business from being able to use cookies without explicit consumer consent. Should that happen, it would severely hamper publishers’ ability to make money from advertising.

“The media business model is threatened by the future ePrivacy Regulation,” said de Lataillade. “We have so far not found better than advertising to fund free information. The consequence could therefore be the end of free content, which means that a very large part of the population would no longer have access to information.”

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Jaguar Land Rover may spend hundreds of millions a year on ads, but it will be some time before the advertiser can take ownership of that money in the way Procter & Gamble, L’Oréal and Unilever can. That’s the view of Ian Armstrong, the brand’s global head of advertising, who believes Jaguar Land Rover isn’t as “sophisticated” with its budgets “compared to lots of other organizations.”

Armstrong, whose work with British advertiser trade body ISBA gives him a good read on how proficient his peers are with their money, is trying to change that — albeit by asking the basic questions first. These questions are leading Jaguar Land Rover to address the following issues: moving away from click-throughs and impressions as a standard, enforcing anti-fraud initiative ads.txt, coming up with a new agency model to retake control of its media budgets, building a deeper understanding of the context and impact of its ads, and establishing direct relationships with media owners and ad tech vendors closest to them.

“Some might argue that what we’re doing is basic, and it probably is to a degree, but we don’t have 200 people sitting in the analytics team going, ‘Have you realized this is all wrong?’” Armstrong said. “We’re trying to encourage a bunch of our markets to become more sophisticated, which will probably yield a bit of a surprise.” Armstrong added that he presides over some markets that just run display when “we know that shouldn’t be the place, either.”

Further details on how Jaguar Land Rover will get more transparency are hard to come by. However, the advertiser will eventually take more in-house as it spends more on the duopoly. The company is hiring more experts with data and programmatic expertise, which would lead to it managing the bulk of its relationships itself with the likes of YouTube and Facebook. That would leave Jaguar Land Rover’s media agency to manage the advertiser’s traditional offline channels. Armstrong would not comment on if such moves factored into its revamped $500 million (£360 million) media account, which has reportedly moved from Mindshare to Dentsu Aegis Network, but he did hint at changes.

“I think we will take the opportunity to cast a different lens [on our media] and look at how we set ourselves up for the next few years,” Armstrong said. “We’ll make some changes that support that part for us, which will include increased reliance and increased working practices on the analytics people.”

That analytics expertise can’t come soon enough at Jaguar Land Rover. Armstrong said he was “happy” with the ad tech vendors and measurement firms he already employs, but said explaining why to other parts of the business is a challenge. Having all those partners means the “value chain is now even longer because of all the required components, and therefore the perception could be drawn that the money is less effective,” he said.

“If all you’re doing is feeding the components in that chain, then that money is not necessarily going to a consumer, and so that then begins to influence the relationship between the marketing community and the finance community in the client organization,” Armstrong added. “So we’re putting all of the expected checks and balances in place as many others are doing.”

Part of the solution could also come from Jaguar Land Rover’s work with media-buying platform Iotec, which involves the advertiser encouraging its peers to take action against dishonest ad tech vendors via a recently launched manifesto.

In the absence of internal expertise, Jaguar Land Rover has followed insights into transparent ad buying shared by P&G and relied on ISBA’s and trade body the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s work around effectiveness and agency remuneration. “Everyone is making a margin somewhere,” Armstrong said. “No one is in the [ad] business to lose money. But I don’t want it [the margin] to be unfair or unreasonable.”

Armstrong’s insights no doubt helped shape the second version of ISBA’s media services contract, a list of checks advertisers such as Sky, Barclays and the U.K. government have used to review agency deals. Released Feb. 28, the update is based on feedback from advertisers, the IPA and the big agency networks, which were not consulted for the first version of the contract.

“Put simply, if rebates and other sources of margin are going to get returned back to clients,” said Phil Smith, director general of ISBA, “then the fee structure needs to get back to a place where an agency is incentivized to help the advertiser grow its business.”

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When Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake took her company public in 2017, her pitch was a little bit rusty.

“We hadn’t raised money in a long time, and we’ve kept quiet about the business,” said Lake. “I was actually out of practice, when it came to introducing the business to investors to help people understand it. It was a double-edged sword: People were shocked and impressed with how big the business was, and that we had been profitable for so long, but it was a lot for people to wrap their heads around exactly how the business worked.”

Stitch Fix’s IPO, which valued it at nearly $2 billion, was the biggest exit for an e-commerce company last year. Now, the company has to prove it can continue to recruit new customers — on top of the more than 2 million who use Stitch Fix already, according to its S-1 — if it wants to keep growing. For the first few years of business, Stitch Fix did little paid marketing, relying on word of mouth and organic growth to bring in new users. That’s changing, as the company figures out the best ways to reach potential customers, and it’s top of mind for Lake as she navigates her first year at the head of a public company.

Lake joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss Stitch Fix’s category expansions and marketing push, plus the changing customer behavior it’s both leading the way for and adjusting to. Edited highlights, below.

On post-IPO priorities
Lake said that a few years ago, when the business was growing at around 100 percent year-over-year, it would have been an exciting time to share that growth rate publicly. But she knew it wasn’t sustainable. By the time the company actually went public, it was growing at a rate of 25 percent year-over-year.

“We had to reach a point of stability first. As a result, our strategy didn’t have to change,” said Lake. “The engines we’re focused on are improving and innovating on the client experience: how to be deeply personalized, how to use data science to get clients more of what they want. The second engine is new launches; we launched plus sizes, men’s and premium, and we’re excited to see those grow.”

On applying the data science behind women’s clothing to menswear
When Stitch Fix launched a menswear category, the business goal was clear: to open up services to the other half of the population to fuel more growth. But deciding where to get started, and finding out whether or not men would take to the customer behavior that’s critical to Stitch Fix’s model — answering personal questions, providing plenty of feedback — was all up in the air. Luckily, according to Lake, Stitch Fix’s men’s business got to a stable path of growth six months in, when she had anticipated it would take a year.

“What works with women seems to work with men. The first day we started considering a men’s business, everything was on the table, including whether it should also be called Stitch Fix at all,” said Lake. “But as we tested and got to understand men, from a psychology perspective, they were a lot more similar than we were expecting. To be able to feel like what we figured out with women translates to men gives us a lot of confidence, as we figure out the future.”

On Stitch Fix’s positioning in a new retail market
Lake said that part of Stitch Fix’s key to success is that it improves its own service by offering brands the data they need to improve their inventory. If customers consistently report that a brand’s size XL isn’t working, the brand can adjust their fit specs accordingly. Working with brands to take Stitch Fix’s wealth of data, and make decisions based off of it, can change whether or not a customer intends to buy from a certain brand, no matter the retail channel.

“The current shift in customer behavior is permanent,” said Lake. “There are a lot of companies out there doing innovative, authentic things with loyal clients. For us, we’re proud that we can be part of a positive brand ecosystem. When brands win, we win, and the clients win.”

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Facebook’s recent algorithm change has claimed a casualty. LittleThings, a 4-year-old site that scaled an audience by sharing feel-good stories and videos on Facebook, shut down today, putting 100 out of work, after Facebook decided it wanted more user posts and less publisher content in its news feed. The change, announced in January, had a “material” impact on LittleThings, said Gretchen Tibbits, president and COO of the company, and killed 75 percent of the site’s organic reach, the company told Business Insider.

LittleThings isn’t the only publisher to have built an audience on Facebook, with its billions of users, but it was more heavily dependent on the platform than most, making almost an art of riding Facebook’s algorithm changes. It started out shoving out viral clips and then pivoted to live video once Facebook decided it wanted to make that a priority. At one point, fully 75 percent of LittleThings’ show views came from live viewing.

But it wouldn’t last — and LittleThings is hardly likely to be the last social publisher to meet this fate. Facebook remains a huge source of publisher traffic, but over the past year has been continually curtailing the amount of traffic it sends publishers. The final nail in the coffin came in January when Facebook said it would prioritize users’ posts in an effort to improve engagement on the platform. Facebook also has been fending off threats of regulation and dealing with a PR crisis over its failure to curtail the spread of fake news and propaganda on the platform, and many saw the shift to users as part of a flight to safety.

“We’re disappointed. It’s their platform,” Tibbits said of Facebook. “But until earlier this month, what we were doing was working.”

One staffer reported being “heartbroken. There are only so many hits a digital media company can afford to take and we exceeded ours.”

LittleThings had other factors working against it. Unlike a lot of distributed media upstarts that chased audiences on platforms using VC money, LittleThings was self-funded, which meant there wasn’t a big cushion when things went south. It largely built its business on programmatic advertising, but then pivoted to more lucrative direct sales. LittleThings’ inspirational stories were a safe haven for advertisers that were increasingly getting spooked by the contentious news climate, but there was a downside there, too. “The brand safety was a huge selling point for us, but the flip is, our audience is women over 30 in middle America, and they’re not sexy,” Tibbits said. The company made some inroads, getting buys from blue-chip advertisers including Procter & Gamble and eBay, but it wasn’t enough, and the first quarter of the year is typically slow for advertising.

Other publishers are looking to Google and Twitter to make up for what they’re losing from Facebook, but for LittleThings, there was nowhere else to go. LittleThings’ comScore traffic had declined to 40 million from 58 million last May, according to Tibbits.

“For our audience, there’s not another platform right now,” she said. “There are 100 great, talented people who were here and doing content that resonated with an audience that’s just harder to find right now.”

Max Willens contributed reporting.

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Which one of the five most-shared news outlets by African Americans, feminists and Asian Americans on Twitter is considered the most trustworthy by those groups? If you guessed The Washington Post, The New York Times, HuffPost or CNN, guess again. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation commissioned a study of more than 46…