Data-Labor-Technology

NBCUniversal and BuzzFeed are creating a new millennial parenting channel together called Playfull, hoping to replicate BuzzFeed’s success with verticals like Tasty and Nifty.

Playfull launches today on Facebook and is the first publishing brand that will be co-owned by the longtime partners. NBCUniversal has invested $400 million in BuzzFeed since 2015 and has embedded the digital publisher within its Digital Enterprises group, which oversees NBCU’s digital media investments including other partnerships with Vox Media and Snap.

As part of the arrangement, BuzzFeed will have a dedicated team creating videos for Playfull. BuzzFeed said that so far, it has about a dozen people on the team, led by Peggy Wang, BuzzFeed’s editorial director for lifestyle brands. BuzzFeed started creating a library of videos for Playfull before launch so it could to hit the ground running, said Wang.

NBCUniversal’s primary role will be to oversee ad sales and other business partnerships for Playfull. The Playfull partnership will be overseen by Patricia Hadden, svp and head of marketing in NBCUniversal’s Digital Enterprises group. Advertising formats will include custom videos, integrations and other editorial sponsorships, Hadden said.

NBCUniversal will provide marketing support in the form of a 15-second commercial that will air during the Winter Olympics (which NBCU exclusively broadcasts in the U.S.). BuzzFeed, meanwhile, will use its other Facebook verticals to share Playfull videos.

Playfull’s target audience is parents aged 20 to 34. Initially, the focus will be giving parents valuable and relatable information with a BuzzFeed bent, Wang said. Previous BuzzFeed video examples include “Little tricks to teach your kids the basics,” “9 kid-friendly science experiments” and “How I make mom friends.”

“One thing I’m excited about is that on Tasty and Nifty, we make a lot of content that appeals to parents, but it’s not necessarily being made with parents in mind,” said Wang. “This is the opportunity to make that type of content with parents in mind.”

The first video is a good example of how BuzzFeed can iterate, as its success led BuzzFeed to create another video on teaching kids to take care of themselves, Wang said.

“The idea is to reach people who might relate to specific situations, because they are going to be the people that share this content,” said Wang.

Looking ahead, NBCU will also explore ways to expand Playfull beyond Facebook, including content partnership opportunities with NBCU networks and media brands. Hadden pointed to how Tasty has collaborated with “The Today Show” on editorial and branded video campaigns as an example of how this would work. NBCU’s portfolio includes networks such as Bravo, Oxygen and even NBC Sports, which have audiences that overlap with millennial parents.

“We have a great relationship with Snap and have already started talking to them about how to incorporate Playfull into their content slate,” said Hadden.

Collaborations between BuzzFeed and NBCUniversal have now become commonplace. Since investing in BuzzFeed, NBCU has frequently tapped the digital publisher to create digital and social content, including Snapchat Discover channels for the Summer and Winter Olympics as well as a tie-up between Tasty and “The Today Show.” Through its Symphony ad sales program, NBCU also features BuzzFeed in its multiplatform sales pitches.

Parenting isn’t entirely new territory for BuzzFeed. Last December, its BuzzFeed Parents Facebook page had 43.9 million video views, according to Tubular Labs. Following the Playfull launch, BuzzFeed Parents will remain a distinct editorial unit at BuzzFeed, the digital publisher said, though Playfull will likely use data and insights from BuzzFeed Parents to help develop content for Facebook and other platforms.

Of course, there’s no shortage of publishers and social channels making content for millennial parents. And content distribution on Facebook itself is an open question following the platform’s news-feed changes that will prioritize videos shared by users rather than most media content.

For NBCUniversal, that’s not a cause for concern because of BuzzFeed’s track record in building new media brands on Facebook. Tasty and Nifty are giants on Facebook and their videos frequently get shared, said Hadden.

“We look at Facebook as a phenomenal marketing platform, and BuzzFeed has done a great job at launching brands there,” said Hadden. “Plus, that’s where the parents live. This will resonate with fellow parents.”

The post NBCUniversal and BuzzFeed are teaming up for a new parenting channel called Playfull appeared first on Digiday.

While some financial institutions invest in their relationships with customers, U.K. challenger bank Monzo focuses on hooking customers with community building efforts.

“[The goal] is broadly to get to a stage where customers are referring their friends because they love the product and feel like they’re a part of the mission — you need to take customers away from being ‘standard customers’ to being advocates feeling like they’re part of it,” said Tristan Thomas, Monzo’s head of marketing and community.

The company’s biggest growth driver is loyalty, with word-of-mouth referrals being the source of 80 percent of new customer growth, according to the company. The remaining 20 percent is based on a limited amount of sponsored ads on Facebook and Twitter. Monzo’s approach is based on the principle that customers will stay loyal and will refer others if they’ve got some kind of stake in the business.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

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With its new augmented reality app, Audi wants to bring the car showroom to people’s phones.

The app, which was introduced in key markets excluding the U.S. at the start of February, lets users view one of four Audi Quattro models on their device, in miniature form or actual size, making the cars appear in their own living room or anywhere else. The same AR feature lets people create a personalized test track so they can test drive the Quattro cars from the app.

For now, the app is more about driving awareness than providing a service, so it won’t be measured by how many downloads it gets, said Øyvind Rognlien Skovli, communications director at Audi Norway. A TV campaign in Norway that’s tied to the app is designed to look like the car is bursting out of the TV and onto the person’s device. Plans are underway to take the TV ad to other markets.

Eventually, Audi wants people to use the app to view and test-drive other models besides the Quattro, such as prototypes. It also sees giving people the ability to design and book test-drives through the app. Audi also imagines the app changing how Audi sells cars in the future, said Skovli, who believes AR on its owned platform will play second fiddle to whatever it decides to do on Facebook’s and Snapchat’s platforms.

Audi’s decision to build its own AR platform points to the question many marketers are asking themselves, said Adrian Leu, CEO of technology agency Inition. Building and maintaining an app is a massive undertaking in an immature market like AR where development costs are high, but gives the developer more control.

“If you want to build an AR project that provides a service and leaves you in control of not only the experience but the customer data, then it makes more sense to develop your own,” Leu said. “Neither Facebook nor Snapchat give advertisers that flexibility within their closed ecosystems.”

Not every carmaker believes an app is the right route to AR. BMW recently ran augmented reality ads on Snapchat as part of a push to recruit younger fans. At the time, Jörg Poggenpohl, BMW’s head of digital marketing, told Digiday that platforms like Snapchat and Apple’s ARKit were key to making AR mainstream on mobile devices.

Audi has been playing around with AR since 2013, when it launched its first AR-enabled ads with Blippar, though, and believes the cost of the new app will be justified if it can actually mimic the showroom experience.

“We’re looking at this app as if it could be the start of the customer journey in many respects,” Skovli said. “What comes next is hard to say, but it’s easy to see how we could use the app to launch new models and keep people updated on what’s coming to the market.”

The post Audi wants to turn its AR app into a personal showroom appeared first on Digiday.

Amid fashion calendar turmoil, New York Fashion Week: Men’s has changed its strategy to adjust to designers’ changing priorities.

For five seasons, the standalone men’s week event hosted about 65 designers during the months of January and July, including legacy brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Perry Ellis, as well as a crew of emerging designer names. But, less than three years after the first NYFW: Men’s premiered in 2015, the January event has been moved to join the main New York Fashion Week schedule. The now 10-day NYFW started on Monday, February 5 with three days of menswear shows. The women’s and coed shows will start on February 8. The July event, however, will remain a separate platform from New York Fashion Week in September.

The original goal of a men’s fashion week in January was to bring the designers onto the international men’s schedule, during the stretch of weeks where Paris, London and Milan shows take place, and the major menswear trade show, Pitti Uomo, happens as well. This move aligned the men’s shows with the schedule of the buyers, who were making investments in collections before the main fashion weeks started in February. Having a men’s week in January was supposed to put unknown designers in front of the buyers as they were making their decisions, but it was difficult to convince buyers to make the trip to New York for the event during an already busy season.

“In the past year, the rules began changing for everyone in terms of when designers are showing, why and where. And it’s all customer driven,” said Valentine Uhovski, the head of fashion at Tumblr. “In that sense, the new schedule in New York makes it more convenient for everyone involved.”

Christopher Bevans, the designer at the menswear brand Dyne, said that the shift of the men’s shows from January to February, during the main fashion week, was a relief.

“To put men’s and women’s together just made sense. The buyers are here, New York City is buzzing,” said Bevans. Splitting the men’s schedule away from the women’s schedule was a stress on resources and made it harder to justify two shows in New York, he added. “It all comes down to resources — money, time and energy. As a global brand, we have shows in every other city twice a year, too, so we’re busy. And we have to prioritize around the timing of the calendar, the traffic of the people, and the dollars are allocated for the season for the buyers. New York ends up getting stretched pretty thin.”

So why not merge the July event with September’s New York Fashion Week, as well? The CFDA insists there’s still an opportunity to build a New York-based event around menswear.

“Menswear in the U.S. is a fairly new and growing business,” said Mark Beckham, the CFDA’s vp of marketing. “Our effort is to raise the profile of the designers who are coming out of New York, and the U.S. has tremendous growth potential. Before New York Fashion Week: Men’s, designers were trying to do it by themselves. There’s much more power to have a collective of designers together to stick a flag in what American menswear is.”

With the format of fashion shows in flux, designers are becoming accustomed to making decisions based on what’s best for their businesses, rather than based on overarching industry guidelines, so more options to show in different cities during different seasons should help. And designers are on the fence. Bevans said that he hasn’t decided whether or not to show during the July men’s fashion week, when fewer global buyers will be in town.

“Men’s designers will have to look longer and harder at what makes sense for their businesses — a digital-only retail presence, a gallery collaboration, an actual retail partnership, an in-season show — it will all come down to their customer,” said Uhovski. “And that will dictate the where and the why of their showing. For years, the shows have been such an integral twice-a-year parade for the designers and a big part of their budget. Now, they can be more creative.”

The CFDA, meanwhile, is trying to keep up with designer sentiment in order to make scheduling easier, said Beckham, and moving the January event to the February shows, while keeping July’s event separate, seemed like a proper balance.

“All we want to do is help everyone get their collections in front of the right people,” said Beckham. “There’s no mandate.”

The post Why NYFW: Men’s didn’t last as a standalone event appeared first on Digiday.

How advertisers collect, store and use people’s data is being scrutinized more than ever, in large part due to the General Data Protection Regulation. Starting May 25, businesses will need explicit consumer consent to use their data. This is more of a headache for the use of third-party audience data than first-party data that comes directly from the publisher.

Here is a look at the current state of data in advertising, in five charts.

U.S., Canada lead in data spending
Advertisers use three types of data to target digital ad campaigns to the right people: first-party, second-party and third-party. The markets where advertisers spend the most on all three types of data are the U.S., Canada, U.K., China and Japan, according to a report by data research firm OnAudience.con. The report also includes spending connected to the gathering and managing of first-party data — meaning DMPs, along with all second-party and online campaign data.

Big-data spenders love programmatic 
Unsurprisingly, the markets that spend the most on programmatic and general display advertising also spend the most on audience data. The U.S. and China lead the pack, with $31 billion and $6 billion, respectively, spent on programmatic advertising in 2017, according to OnAudience.com. The U.K. was third with $4.4 billion in programmatic spend in 2017, followed by Canada, Germany and France.

Use of second-party data on the rise
Most advertisers use some type of online data to target their ads, whether it’s based on behavior, demographic, interest or location. Anonymous first-party data is the most common, with 71 percent of advertisers using it globally, but is growing the slowest of all data types, projected to grow 5 percent over the next two years, according to a Salesforce report. In the Asia-Pacific region, use of first-party data is expected to shrink by 9 percent.

Second– and third-party data partnerships, which let advertisers tap into data sources they don’t own, are projected to grow faster. Second-party data, formed when publishers share audience data with advertisers who then overlay it directly onto their own data, is expected to shoot up 26 percent over the next two years, when it will be used by 64 percent of all advertisers, driven by the desire to work directly with publishers. Under the GDPR, it will also be easier to make second-party data partnerships compliant than third-party data. Advertisers’ use of third-party data, which marketers buy from a range of external sources that don’t have a direct relationship with the consumer, is also set to rise by 30 percent in the next two years, according to the same report.

Tech giants dominate logged-in data
There’s a new battle in Europe to own consumer log-ins at scale, in part triggered by uncertainty around how the current ePrivacy Regulation proposal will require companies to change how they gather data. In Germany, that’s leading companies to collaborate on building mass consumer log-in platforms to rival the massive databases of logged-in consumers that the likes of Facebook and Google already have. Many believe the current draft of the ePrivacy Regulation will favor companies with large log-in databases, which means Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. Facebook claims 2.2 billion users worldwide, who have to be logged in to use the platform. Google has seven services, each with more than 1 billion users, including Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Chrome, Google Maps, Google Play and Android. Apple surpassed 1 billion active users of its devices in 2016. Amazon last year stated it has 65 million Prime members worldwide — which is only a fraction of its user base.
Privacy regulations will shrink the data market 
Research on exactly how much GDPR or the potential ePrivacy Regulation may shrink the volume of data advertisers can buy to target is scant, given the laws are new. Still, advertisers will need to get used to the idea that data will grow scarcer, especially third-party data. Germany is the first market in Europe to produce a report estimating how much the ePrivacy Regulation could affect publisher and marketer revenues. In the report, by VDZ, the Association of German Magazine Publishers, 67 percent of publishers said that more than 30 percent of their programmatic revenue would be lost, and 53 percent said 30 percent of any revenue generated by retargeting would be lost.

The post The current state of advertising data, in 5 charts appeared first on Digiday.

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