Data-Labor-Technology

Broadcom plans to announce the higher offer on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said, a move aimed at increasing pressure on the takeover target in what would be the largest-ever technology deal.

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At the Digiday Hot Topic UK: Data-Driven Publishing event last November in London, we sat down with over 20 media-buying executives from major agencies across the country to discuss trends such as media-buying transparency and ad fraud. Check out our earlier research on addressable TV’s role in a post-GDPR world here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.

Top findings:

• Communication between clients and agencies was cited as the largest transparency-based issue in digital advertising.
• Seventy-one percent of media buyers don’t believe ads.txt is a sufficient solution to ad fraud.

Digital advertising is beset by transparency issues that have left brands skeptical about its effectiveness. The process of buying and tracking ads is notoriously overcomplicated, burdened by technology and laden with acronyms that few understand. However, Digiday’s research found that the most common contributor to the lack of transparency was human interaction, not technical challenges.

The post Digiday Research: Communication is at the heart of media transparency problems appeared first on Digiday.

The #MeToo movement has led to high-profile departures across the business world and a re-examination of workplace processes. In the ad industry, which has seen big-name exits such as Gustavo Martinez at JWT, Joe Alexander at The Martin Agency and, just this week, Mike Germano at Vice Media’s Carrot Creative and Ted Royer at Droga5, policies on interoffice dating are getting a new look.

Digiday spoke with a combination of 23 agencies, human resources consultancies and marketers, several of whom asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the subject, about their existing or nonexistent dating policies. Across the 11 ad agencies Digiday spoke to, views vary on whether they should enforce a dating policy or if one would have any effect on sexual harassment. Out of the 11 ad agencies, five agencies have dating policies and are revisiting them. Six agencies say they’ve have never had such a policy, and they question their effectiveness.

“Dating polices are not a new phenomenon, but with the renewed conversation around harassment in the workplace, we are seeing ad agencies take a moment to consider whether they need one or how they might update one,” said Annick Miller, director of HR consulting at Namely, an HR software platform that also consults on companies’ HR strategies.

“We’ve been thinking about adding a dating policy,” said one HR director at an independent ad agency, who requested anonymity. “Not that we have a large issue with dating, but we want to do everything we can to make sure we are protecting ourselves when it comes to situations that could open ourselves up to sexual harassment issues.”

Other independent agencies that have dating policies are looking into aligning them with their sexual harassment policies.

For instance, two months ago, one HR director said its agency changed its dating policy to include a reference to sexual harassment. It now states that “supervisors cannot date subordinates under any circumstances because it can compromise the ability to enforce the sexual harassment policy.”

Some agencies are leaving their dating policies intact but changing their sexual harassment policies instead. The Jun Group just updated its employee handbook to include additional examples of what sexual harassment can look like. (The agency wouldn’t say which examples it’s adding.) 

Ad agencies can seem like breeding grounds for relationships. Employees work long hours, work closely together in small teams and attend lots of parties where alcohol is abundant. Many times, healthy relationships develop. Other times, such an environment can lead to what one junior agency employee calls a “cesspool.” This person said several fellow employees have dated each other, and everyone is aware of it. Another agency employee said office relationships create drama and distract from work.

Many agencies are OK with employees dating each other as long as their work isn’t impacted. On the extreme end is a “non-fraternization” policy that bans employees from dating at work.

The most common cause for concern is with manager-subordinate relationships, which is why at Omnicom agencies such as BBDO, DDB and TBWA, office dating is permitted as long as neither person has authority over the other.

At Interpublic Group agencies, such as The Martin Agency, R/GA and McCann, all employees are supposed to abide by a code of conduct that threatens “disciplinary action” if employees do not report a relationship where one party has authority over another, according to an IPG spokesperson. The spokesperson said fears about sexual harassment “absolutely” play into the policy.

Policy or not, relationships between supervisors and underlings are inevitable. In part given that reality, while most holding companies have dating policies that extend to their agencies, six of the eight independent agencies Digiday spoke to have none at all. At Los Angeles-based independent agency Dailey, “the expectation is that things be handled professionally and that it be nondisruptive,” said Heidi Williams, svp and director of HR there.

It’s a similar case at independent agency RPA, said Laura Small, vp and human resources director at RPA. “People work very closely with each other for extended periods of time,” she said. “There are lots of opportunities to socialize. Personal relationships are part of the fabric of advertising and communication.” Small acknowledged that junior-manager relationships can “get complicated very quickly,” but said a dating policy isn’t the solution.

There is data that backs up this thinking. According to CareerBuilder’s annual survey published last week, out of 809 workers surveyed across industries, 22 percent of them have dated their boss, up from 15 percent last year, and 41 percent of them had to keep their romance a secret.

It’s questionable how effective the dating policies are at holding-company agencies.

“Holding companies drag out those corporate policies the moment the media gets hold of the fact that someone is suing them,” said Cindy Gallop, previous chairman of BBH, founder of MakeLoveNotPorn and an advocate of gender equality. “They are used purely as protection.”

Employees might not even be aware if dating policies exist at all. Of the eight ad agency employees Digiday spoke with, six employees had to check with their HR director to find out whether or not their agency had a dating policy. One account manager at a well-known agency said imposing dating policies can be difficult to do at agencies. “Everyone wants to believe that agencies are full of cool young people and anything goes,” this person said.

“What agencies need are living and breathing policies that are part of an agency’s culture and communicated clearly,” said Gallop.

Small agreed. Instead of writing up a code of conduct, she said agencies need to make actionable efforts to get the message across to their employees. Barbarian agency not only has a dating policy everyone signs and reads, but it also has a lawyer come in every six months to speak to the agency about sexual harassment in the workplace and how supervisors should not date subordinates.

This past Monday, RPA held a training around sexual harassment for all its officers that went over best practices for dating in the office. “It’s not about a policy,” said Small. “It’s about a way you conduct yourself. It’s about education.”

The post Agencies rethink their dating policies in the #MeToo era appeared first on Digiday.

Discovery Communications wants a more complete picture of who’s tuning in to watch the Winter Olympics this month, so it’s aggregating data from linear broadcast, digital platforms and social media engagement metrics.

Tying TV and digital viewing patterns together has become more of a conundrum as content consumption has shifted online and split across screens. The Winter Olympics, which start Feb. 9 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, offer a test bed for the broadcaster to understand how people are watching sports. While it’s not using these metrics as a currency for trading ads yet, although that’s the ultimate aim, the findings will inform how Discovery programs the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

“The primary objective has always been to bring the games to more people on more screens. We had to reinvent how we collect the data,” said JB Perrette, president and CEO of Discovery Networks International. “The reality is, we’re still living in a world where people talk about the health and progress of TV based on TV-set rating. That’s completely prehistoric.”

Discovery aims to give clients and partners a number of metrics in three groups. One is the number of hours of video viewed across Discovery’s owned-and-operated platforms, including free-to-air, pay TV, streaming services, digital, apps and social media, and from its 30 linear TV partners across Europe. It will also share the numbers of total users across Discovery’s platforms and through its linear TV partners and engagements — likes, comments and shares — on social media platforms like Snapchat Discover.

Discovery bought the digital and TV broadcast rights for €1.3 billion ($1.6 billion) across Europe to show the Olympics from 2018 to 2024, marking the first time the rights have been distributed to the region as a whole rather than country by country.

Discovery will broadcast all the events live and on demand across its Eurosport networks, Eurosport.com, cable and pay-TV options, as well as through partnerships with Amazon and Snapchat, a combination of free and subscription content.

In the U.K., TV is measured from a panel of 5,100 households by the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board and extrapolated to the rest of the population. The measurement company is working on an initiative called Project Dovetail to tie in digital viewing. The media industry has long sought a more a complete and accurate picture of viewing habits, but having multiple parties with vested interests — broadcasters, media agencies, clients and measurement companies — makes any collective change glacial.

“The money factor is very real,” said Perrette. “When you make a change to how a currency is devised, people get concerned. The implicit risk associated to it will mean people are slower at overcoming it.”

Discovery has also partnered with Publicis Media’s Sport and Entertainment division to design the approach for and calculate deduplicated and unique reach through a post-Olympic Games survey. This adds credibility to its methods, as long as the broadcaster is able to show how it works to advertisers, according to Daniel Ayers, partner at digital sports consultancy Seven League.

It’s good to have more accurate reporting, but any measurement approach has its imperfections, and getting a complete picture of Olympic Games viewing comes with its own issues.

Comparing social engagements across different regions, each with their own social media behavior, is complicated for ad buying, said Jack Gibbon, associate director for Iris Concise, the strategy and consulting arm of Iris. “When it comes to user data and inferring how this has been compared to other sports campaigns, it will still be difficult for marketers,” he said.

Perrette is quick to note this is the first step to creating a more accurate representation of viewership and admitted that variables like athlete stories, time differences and how well big markets perform in the games will all affect viewing numbers.

“The one number that continues to increase is social and digital viewing,” he said.

The post Discovery ties broadcast and digital viewing for Winter Olympics to woo advertisers appeared first on Digiday.

Amazon’s U.K. ad revenue is small compared to Google’s and Facebook’s. Industry experts estimated Amazon’s U.K. ad business to be in the low hundreds of millions of pounds versus Google’s £4.4 billion ($6.2 billion) U.K. ad revenue in 2017. But Amazon has big plans to grow its ad business in the U.K. this year.

Here’s a breakdown of its setup, based on conversations with advertisers, agencies and publishers familiar with its U.K. ad business, several of which spoke on condition of anonymity. Amazon declined to comment for this story.

Meet the team
Amazon has steadily grown its U.K. agency team over the last few years, with many of its hires ex-Microsoft staffers who came with strong relationships with U.K. agencies. Amazon doesn’t disclose its head counts, but agency sources have said Amazon has a team dedicated to servicing independent agencies, while agency groups have separate, dedicated Amazon representatives. “They’re really investing,” said one agency executive.

Amazon’s hiring spree doesn’t seem to be waning either, as the e-tailer tries to appeal to new clients that don’t already sell products on its site. The company lists 28 open advertising-based roles, spanning Amazon Media Group, Amazon Marketing Services and Amazon Advertising Platform, according to LinkedIn. The platform is advertising for roles ranging from senior agency development manager to more specialist job titles like head of partnerships for affiliates and partner marketing, as Amazon tries to shed light on a part of its business it has been reluctant to push too far to date.

After outgrowing its existing London offices in Holborn and Barbican, Amazon has begun to move into a new building in Shoreditch last summer. The new offices are believed to have capacity for 5,000 people, a large number of whom will be in media and advertising.

Amazon’s ad business has arrived in the U.K.
Amazon has been notoriously secretive about its ad business across Europe in general. Amazon’s reticence may in part stem from its decision to get as many existing sellers to advertise first before pursuing new clients. Any new advertisers would need the staff and resources to bring them up to speed with the intricacies of the platform, particularly given Amazon’s insistence that they both sell and advertise to get the most out of its platform.

Amazon has been quiet about its advertising services, but it doesn’t really need to actively promote itself, said Aydin Moghaddam, head of paid search at digital agency Roast. “Brands are becoming aware that more people start product searches on Amazon than on Google,” he said. “This is pertinent because product searches ultimately have the most commercial value for brands.”

One big difference between Amazon and the duopoly is that Amazon sells its three search ad formats — sponsored products, headline search ads and product display ads — by promoting the halo effect of organic sales on Amazon, according to agency executives. If an advertiser can drive more people to product pages on Amazon, the brand gets more exposure, reviews and visibility on the site.

The ad platform itself is basic in functionality compared to what the duopoly offers, which makes it hard to measure Amazon’s supposed halo effect, executives said.

The pitch to advertisers 
Amazon’s proposition in the U.K. consists of Amazon Marketing Services, its auction that’s akin to Google’s paid search, and Amazon Media Group. Amazon Media Group is the in-house team that sells Amazon’s ad products, working with brands and agencies on campaigns across display, video, custom ad units and voice across Amazon.com, IMDb, Digital Photography Review and Kindle. The AMG team is already known to have struck a close relationship with Diageo and its agency Carat in London, as evidenced by the former’s early attempts to monetize voice search via Echo devices and test shoppable videos on the Amazon Prime streaming service.

Barriers to growth
For some agencies, Amazon is their first choice for performance ad budgets, particularly for retail clients. But there is a limit to how much they’ll spend on the platform because there’s not enough competition in the auction from other advertisers. There comes a point when pouring more money in doesn’t have any effect on how many people click on the ad, and that’s when agencies cap their spending and switch to another platform.

“Every brand I know wants to spend on Amazon,” said Alistair Dent, chief media officer at independent agency iCrossing, “but it’s where the U.K. [Amazon] ad business lags behind the U.S., where there are a lot more businesses competing and far more consumers with disposable income purchasing on the platform.”

For Amazon to tap larger ad budgets in the U.K., it’ll have to offer more branding opportunities for advertisers and address its reputation as an enabler of counterfeiters selling dodgy products — an issue that’s kept a lot of luxury brands off the platform, agency executives said.

To grow its ad business in the U.K., Amazon also will have to become more than just a performance marketing channel. As of now, advertisers are limited to providing lists of products for banners rather than eye-catching branding banners. Advertisers might spend more on Amazon if they could target customers based on what they’ve bought in the past, rather than what they’re browsing at the moment.

“As a brand owner doing a branding campaign, I’d want to target people who have a history of liking shoes — not necessarily for an immediate sale,” said Dent.

Amazon’s publisher services ambitions
Compared to its advertiser charm offensive, Amazon’s push into publisher services — its header and server-side bidding products — seems even more threadbare. Some industry experts believe these services were more of a byproduct of Amazon’s sprawling growth than an intentional plan, like that of its advertising business. Case in point: Amazon’s server-side bidding wrapper, which has been hailed as yet another attempt to rival Google, was originally designed to serve its own ads at super fast speeds, Dent said. At a time when publishers are looking to reduce page latency, repackaging its existing server-side wrapper to sell to publishers seems like a no-brainer.

Adding publisher products in a piecemeal fashion has kept Amazon from getting its U.K. publisher offering off to a fighting start, though, some industry sources believe. It launched header-bidding products several years ago, then in Europe rolled out its cloud-based, server-side header-bidding product via its Transparent Ad Marketplace. “It’s a lot harder for them to convince publishers to migrate everything for that reason,” said an agency executive.

Timing can be everything
U.K. publisher attitudes toward Amazon vary. Some, having been burned by the duopoly for years, are suspicious of getting too cozy with another U.S. tech giant, so they refuse to use Amazon’s wrapper, suspecting it won’t be agnostic with demand, given Amazon both buys and sells media.

Amazon has an edge over other ad exchanges because of its trove of first-party customer data, including shopping intent data. That makes it a compelling demand source for publishers and is why many are curious about testing TAM. So far, the platform has pledged a level of transparency on auction data that Google hasn’t, according to sources.

“Amazon [along with Google] are also not offering full log-level data, but at least make one hour’s worth available to publishers. This insight gives us peace of mind that the product is working correctly and in the interest of the publisher,” said a media executive, who requested anonymity.

Amazon may trail other platform giants in building an ad business, but its timing is auspicious. Facebook’s relationship with publishers is more fraught than ever. Publisher enthusiasm for Facebook’s Instant Articles has cooled, and Facebook’s ever-changing algorithm has led publishers to prioritize other distribution channels.

“With the death of Instant Articles and the fact Facebook has messed up with publishers, there’s a big opportunity for Amazon [with publishers],” said a different media executive, who also requested anonymity. “People are starting to believe that Amazon will work more transparently with publishers and agencies from now on.”

The post Inside Amazon’s UK media and advertising growth ambitions appeared first on Digiday.

Citizens Bank of Edmond is trying to get closer to small business customers by providing space, guidance and almost anything else they might need — besides, of course, a loan.

The one-branch community bank in Edmond, Oklahoma once had another branch, 12,000 square feet located one block away from the main space, with a drive-thru window and some executive offices. But recently the bank decided to consolidate it into a single location and has now turned it into a “business social” co-working environment, called Vault 405, for its small business customers that includes wireless charging stations, conference rooms and a podcast studio.

It’s similar to the way Barclays’ Rise accelerator provides a co-working space for its startups, but Citizens also sees it differently.

“The difference is as that as a community banker I’m also a small business owner,” said CEO Jill Castilla. “So when I’m talking and collaborating with them in this incubator type of space we’re not just talking about what’s good for them, we’re talking about challenges we have in our small business and how we address them… The office space will be just as beneficial to the bank beyond loans and depots, it’ll make us a better small business.”

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

The post What a scrappy Oklahoma bank can teach the industry about branch strategy appeared first on Digiday.

Fashion week’s existential crisis continues to splinter the industry, sending designers to new cities, pushing them to off-season schedules, changing the way they do business with retailers and taking them off the runway altogether. As New York Fashion Week kicks off for the Fall 2018 season, the event feels as scattered as ever.

You could blame the customer for turning the fashion calendar on its head, but the changing tide has opened an opportunity for designers to forge their own path. Rather than fitting into a slot on a crowded fashion week schedule, they can make decisions based on what seems best for business. Because after all, it’s true: What matters today are the customers, and how they decide to spend their dollars.

“For us, we’re just a scheduler,” said Mark Beckham, business director of fashion weeks for the CFDA. “We want to present designers with the resources to do what’s best for their businesses, but there’s always going to be designers showing here. It’s OK if there’s fluidity — we’re supportive.”

For some, the new world order (or lack thereof), has worked out in their favor. An international see-now-buy-now strategy looks good on Tommy Hilfiger, which reported runway collection sellouts for every celebrity-studded in-season show. Coach’s revitalized return to the runway, while traditional in format, has lifted sales of its Coach 1941 handbag collection as well as its ready to wear. Others haven’t fared so well: Thakoon’s business has been put on indefinite hold since the New York-based designer tried out a direct-to-consumer, in-season model that failed to pan out in 2016.

But for the most part, luxury brands are stuck in a wait-and-see limbo that proves just how hard it is to turn around a sinking ship: Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, Diane von Furstenberg and more are all in the progress of revitalizing business, and it’s a slow process.

“You can sort some of this progress into overarching buckets: the promising, the failing,” said Elizabeth Stafford, managing director of strategy at the brand engagement firm Sullivan. “But for the most part, we’re in an era of testing something new.”

As New York Fashion Week begins today (with two days of men’s shows, the result of another failed experiment), here’s the current state of the fashion calendar. It sheds light on an industry in flux, with shifting schedules, new strategies and a renewed approach on Instagram.

Leave it to the ‘gram
Who: Kanye West, Rodarte, Rebecca Minkoff
What: Skip the runway, the press appointments and the presentation-parties, and debut a new season’s collection directly to the masses through an Instagram feed.

It’s been a long time since an “Instagram fashion show” felt novel, but new takes on the approach have made a fair case that this is the runway show of the future. While Kanye West announced Yeezy Season 6 wouldn’t be showing during fashion week, there was no warning before he flooded Instagram with a barrage of images of models wearing the new collection. Each photo was a recreation of prior Kim Kardashian paparazzi photos, which included a perfectly meme-able Paris Hilton cameo. The whole thing was potentially illegal, since no models posting their photos disclosed that they were in a Yeezy ad, but the internet buzz bolstered the event as much as any runway show would have.

So much fun being a #KimClone in the new #YeezySeason6 campaign.

A post shared by Paris Hilton (@parishilton) on Jan 30, 2018 at 11:02pm PST

Brands didn’t need the celebrity of Kanye West to pull it off, either; they just needed a celebrity cast. Rodarte, which has previously moved its runway show from New York to Paris, also skipped the runway this year, opting instead to release a “digital lookbook” for the fall 2018 season directly on Instagram featuring Kirsten Dunst, Grimes and Kim Gordon as models. Rebecca Minkoff got ahead of fashion week with a new collection dropping in time with the Women’s March, premiering on Instagram with influencer buzz.

“There are several perks to the social media launch. The long-term strategy is really a budget consideration for designers, and this is a cheap way to show a collection. You’re going straight to the customer, and the press will ultimately follow,” said Laurie De Jong, a fashion week producer who operates LDJ Productions.

The shifting target
Who: Alexander Wang, Diane von Furstenberg, Kate Spade, Mara Hoffman, Audra Noyes, Marchesa, Altuzarra, Victoria Beckham, Tome, Philipp Plein, Tommy Hilfiger, Rebecca Taylor, etc.
What: Debut a new collection during a presentation, a party or a private appointment, in Paris or elsewhere internationally, or during a different season altogether

The fashion calendar has become impossible to keep up with because it’s impossible to pin down. Left to their own devices, designers are deciding new ways to launch collections, and sometimes that approach changes with every new season.

“It’s the Wild West,” said Aliza Licht, head of communications and marketing at Alice + Olivia. “I almost wish there was some topline order, because right now, it feels like a circus.”

There are several reasons designers’ strategies are scattered. For those showing during a private appointment, à la DVF (which recently saw its creative director depart) and Audra Noyes, it saves money and reverts the fashion show away from the public eye, diminishing the clash between showing and sale. Presentations, like Kate Spade’s fashion parties, on the other hand, capitalize on the free agency of the form, creating more Instagrammable moments. They can also scale down the spectacle: Victoria Beckham moved her runway show to a series of mini-presentations on the Upper East Side. For brands like Proenza Schouler and Altuzarra, going to an international city opens up the scope of the audience to attract new buyers and customers.

There’s one approach that could have staying power: shifting to the preseason schedule, in June and December. For now, it gives designers a less crowded space in which to present. But it also allows for more flexibility in the production schedule to experiment with more capsule collections throughout the year, fulfilling customers’ appetite for constant newness. That was the reason for Alexander Wang to make the switch, and Steven Kolb, the president of the CFDA, expects more will follow.

“There will be a transition period, a period of chaos,” Kolb said during a recent NYFW panel. “A core group of designers will root themselves in June and December, and if that business model holds true and proves successful, everyone will migrate and go there.”

The state of immediacy
Who: Tommy Hilfiger, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Kanye West, Michael Kors
What: Designers continue to grapple with bringing the collections they’re showing on the runway in alignment with the season that runway showing is in.

After being seen as an industry savior, see-now-buy-now has become a feat that only the biggest brands with the deepest pockets have been able to pull off at scale. Save for a few small designers with nimble production processes, it hasn’t dramatically influenced the way designers show collections.

But it has had a rippling effect on what a fashion show’s purpose is. Since designers are expected to release more than two new collections each year, it makes sense that they shouldn’t just rely on two big runway shows each year, either. So they’re moving shows out of season, focusing on releasing more collections and dotting the year with special “projects” that yield more product.

“It’s less of a shift to immediacy than it is newness,” said Stafford. “Customers can figure out how to plan their closets — when to buy a coat, and so on. But what they’re used to is newness.”

The post Ahead of NYFW, deciphering this season’s fashion calendar appeared first on Digiday.

During the Super Bowl match-up of the Philadelphia Eagles versus the New England Patriots, brands looked for the next big hit. Would Chris Pratt’s flexing for Michelob Ultra work? Or would Mountain Dew’s lip-sync battle be the big hit? Ultimately, it’s clear that Tide’s attempt to hijack the Super Bowl won the day. Below, we…

The Super Bowl is over but Amazon’s ads definitely aren’t. Amazon, which released its Super Bowl ad on Jan. 31, followed up after the game with another short clip featuring Leslie Jones and JB Smoove. In the spot produced by Lucky Generals and D1, Amazon’s own creative team, the same student who asked Cardi B…