Data-Labor-Technology

Don’t confuse Google’s Waze with its homegrown Maps product. Waze, which Google acquired in 2013, has a much different value prop. “Waze is for drivers,” said Suzie Reider, Waze’s head of ads in North America. “Google Maps is about navigating the physical world.” Waze also has a big community that works collectively to update the… Continue reading »

The post Waze Ads Head Suzie Reider Sets Her Sights On QSR, Retail And Fuel appeared first on AdExchanger.

The games category was hardest hit in 2017, with 35% fraud rates, followed by e-commerce at 20%. E-commerce is now most affected, according to new research from Adjust. The dramatic increase in fraud
can be explained by a newly popular form of ad fraud: SDK Spoofing.

As an industry, our biggest preconception is that the best work needs to be new and disruptive. “It’s been done before” is the death of the agency brainstorm. But do consumers really care?

Lyft has a new look. The company created a signature font, icons and expanded its color palette–adding “a dynamic secondary palette,” according to Lyft creative director Jesse McMillin–as a way to energize and elevate the growing ride-sharing company. Created by the company’s in-house creative team, the new look is part of a broader strategy to…

2018 is turning into the year of the paywall as publishers realize advertising, and certainly the platforms, won’t save the day for them. Wired, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Business Insider and Bloomberg have launched digital paywalls in recent months, and others have said they’re exploring reader-revenue schemes.

But at some point, publishers will start bumping into each other. Case in point is Bloomberg, which is elbowing its way into a category already teeming with subscription publications like The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist and recently, Business Insider. Bloomberg set the meter at a generous 10 articles per month, but as Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith conceded, some of the growth of his company’s new paywall would come at the expense of competitors. Even credit card-expensed subscriptions have their limit.

The post The Rundown: Paywall pains appeared first on Digiday.

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Philip Inghelbrecht, co-founder and CEO at Tatari. To date, TV has mostly been measured through a baseline and lift model. It is a framework that works well for linear TV, since many people watch the… Continue reading »

The post TV Advertising Measurement: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Bespoke Petroleum BP has consolidated its corporate, fuel and castrol marketing business under WPP after an almost year-long review process. The holding company will launch a new unit called Team Energy to provide services for advertising, media, investment, digital, branding, PR and research. Talent… Continue reading »

The post WPP Goes ‘Bespoke’ For BP; Unlockd Vs Google appeared first on AdExchanger.

It’s easy to focus on the abstract, long-term potential of artificial intelligence. But its true promise is much more near-term, in the immediate impact and relief it can bring to a marketing team. This is made much clearer when looking at AI through a recruiter’s lens.

AI has joined the workforce at a quickening rate over the past few years, with high-profile uses in retail, banking, medicine and now marketing. But while aspects of AI have become core to some professions (today’s copywriters are handicapped without a spell checker), it’s still tough for some industries to accept that AI can actually stand on its own in a supporting role that augments the rest of the team.

We talked to two recruiters about the bona fides of IBM Watson Marketing to discover the best roles and responsibilities for this new cognitive resource as it joins marketing departments worldwide.

The ideal marketing partner
With a resume that includes everything from email campaign management to comprehensive unstructured data analysis, Watson Marketing stands out from both the familiar human resources and other AI solutions. But just like any other hire, these virtual workers need to be placed in the right role to truly shine.

“In a business focused on people and driving growth, AI is best used as a support function for those in leadership roles,” says David Salinger, president of Engro Partners a marketing and tech recruitment firm. “The whole concept of AI in general, especially Watson, should be around enabling teams and individuals in organizations to be more effective.”

And its past experience shows that it can support in a ton of ways, from crafting data-driven email campaigns for the Georgia Aquarium to insightful UX enhancements to help ING DIRECT Australia personalize consumer experiences and improve its customer acquisition rate. With expertise that extends to processing data, analyzing images and automating routine tasks, it’s perfect for a role as a marketing exec’s right hand.

“I would put Watson in a definite number two role, where it could lead the supporting team,” said Allen Cutter, CEO of tech and marketing recruitment firm AC Lion. It can also shave hours off the workdays of higher level employees, taking routine tasks off of their plates and leaving those creatives to do what they do best — idea generation.

“AI is going to allow you to do what you specialize in and allow you to use your brain to think more, to be more strategic and creative,” said Cutter. “Allow the AI to do the job that you never really wanted to do and, frankly, aren’t as good at.” This includes areas like data analysis and routine task management—areas in which Watson Marketing excels, but most humans don’t have the time or interest to do with machine precision.

The advantage of a T-shaped skill set
With unique attributes that can translate across a number of disciplines, recruiters would refer to Watson Marketing’s skillset as “T-shaped”: deep focus in one specialized area (in this case, marketing analysis and prediction) but supporting skills across multiple facets.

While Watson Marketing’s core competency rests in its analytic and predictive ability, its secondary skills include things like image recognition and sentiment analysis. These contribute to the platform’s versatility and can be key to solving unconventional (but all too common) marketing problems, like analyzing images, audio recordings and chatter from social platforms.

Watson also has an impressive fluency in nine languages, has been trained in 20 industries and is currently deployed in 45 countries — traits which help marketers globalize their messages.

“Targeting marketing messages for different groups within the United States in itself is a major field, and it can be very, very difficult to find multilingual marketing people,” said Cutter. “It’s also quite expensive.”

This global fluency also helps marketers localize their operations, ensuring that each team, regardless of geography, can use the same unified solution. Salinger notes an accelerating trend in businesses opening local offices to stay in touch with regional communities: “There has been a growing need for people that speak certain languages or have worked for certain markets.” Watson Marketing passes the test.

Introducing AI to the team
When a team is ready to add AI to their roster, the onboarding process should focus on the potential and availability of these new tools to all members. The best approach is inclusive and forward-looking, showing the relative gains and advantages of AI-powered marketing.

“Get demos,” advised Salinger. “You have to show them [how much more efficient these tools are] in relation to what it would be with an intern or with a junior person.” Relating Watson back to a common context can provide a more seamless transition—as can pointing out the inherent benefits of bringing on AI support.

“The way to have the buy-in of the managers is to really make sure they understand that this is going to be a support role,” says Cutter. “Emphasize that they’re going to learn from the AI, it’s going to make everything more data-driven, [allow them to] make more rational, truthful decisions. They’re going to embrace that change.”

The post Recruiters speak: The ideal role for AI in the workplace appeared first on Digiday.

As more publishers dip their toes into commerce content, Wirecutter is distributing versions of its product guides through publishers including Forbes, Engadget and Greatist, and is pitching others, according to sources that have heard the proposal.

One source familiar with the pitch said Wirecutter is offering publishers the chance to distribute Wirecutter content on their own sites in exchange for a cut of the sales commission generated by the content. The participating publishers produce commerce content on their own and supplement it with versions of Wirecutter’s guides. The commissions depend on the product, one source said.

Wirecutter declined to comment for this story. A New York Times rep sent over a statement that read: “We are constantly testing ways to bring our content to wider audiences. This includes finding new ways to work with publishers where both parties benefit.”

Wirecutter has experimented with content syndication since its founding in 2011. Wired, where Wirecutter founder Brian Lam once worked, syndicated a handful of commerce posts in 2012; Wirecutter’s home-focused vertical, The Sweethome, began distributing a weekly guide through Engadget in 2015. Wirecutter folded The Sweethome back into itself late last year; Wirecutter in the past has shared content for free with publishers including Ars Technica.

Most recently, Wirecutter syndicated two posts about Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals across publishers including TechCrunch and Fatherly.

For this current effort, Wirecutter guides, which can run thousands of words, are slimmed down to better match the personality of each partner’s site. A Wirecutter guide to the best camping gear that Greatist published in early May, for example, has under 100 words on each item featured. A guide to office chairs that recently ran in Forbes’s deals and commerce section, Forbes Finds, ran over 900 words, significantly fewer than the 6,700 that make up Wirecutter’s original guide.

Paring down the guides makes it easier for partners to share that content across different distribution channels. Greatist has put Wirecutter guides into its newsletters and shared them through Facebook, where Greatist has more than half a million fans.

“We trust their recommendations, and our audience does, too,” said Dria de Botton Barnes, Greatist’s editor-in-chief. “The Wirecutter content we published for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday performed really well, and we wanted to keep that going with them.”

Other commerce-focused publishers have taken a similar distribution approach. The Strategist, for example, New York magazine’s commerce-focused title, ran a distribution test with Slate last year, which will be expanded.  

Getting other publishers to share their content can be appealing to commerce publishers because social distribution channels such as Facebook, which were once great for sharing lifestyle content, tend to deliver poor organic results for commerce content.

That hasn’t kept them from using Facebook as a paid channel, however. According to content distribution tool Keywee, spending on commerce content distribution among its publisher clients has more than doubled quarter over quarter, though the company wouldn’t share raw dollar figures.

The post Wirecutter is distributing commerce content through other publishers appeared first on Digiday.