Data-Labor-Technology

Reuters is experimenting with how it presents news on its site as it continues to expand and evolve its consumer news brand.

The news giant, which has 250 staffers dedicated to consumer publishing globally, wants to modernize how it presents content on all 17 of its editions. So far, that has involved reorganizing thousands of articles into new topic channels such as The Future of Money, The Trump Effect, North Korea and Investigations. The publisher is testing this on the U.S. edition and plans to extend it internationally in the next six months.

In conjunction with these changes, the six-person London-based mobile team is developing a new mobile app. The plan is for the mobile app to launch first in the spring, with the remaining 16 international editions, including the U.K., to be updated in the next six months.

With these updates, Reuters hopes to give its users the chance to personalize their news feeds by selecting the most relevant topic channels for them. This method has worked well for the Reuters TV app — the first of its consumer products to feature personalized video news feeds.

The TV app has doubled its monthly viewers in the last year, with 2 million people now watching per month, according to the publisher. The growth has been attributed to the personalized five- to 30-minute news broadcasts that pull together different video clips based on factors like a user’s location, their viewing history and how much time they have to watch a video.

The TV app was borne out of investments Reuters has made in machine learning and personalization over the last few years, according to Isaac Showman, managing director of Reuters TV. Now, the publisher wants to apply the same algorithm used to personalize video news for Reuters TV to text articles on its other consumer products.

“We are expanding Reuters’ consumer presence, which isn’t always as well-known in various markets as other publications might be,” said Showman. “We’re doing so by focusing on being a utility: How we can be the most useful, relevant source of information to professionals in a way that helps them do their jobs better? Then, we’ll work hard with clients to take that lean-forward engagement to layer on commercial messages.”

Reuters has a way to go before its consumer presence matches that of its legacy business, providing thousands of publishers around the world with raw news content. It has faced setbacks in getting its consumer brand off the ground, abandoning a website redesign in 2013 after two years of investment. But Showman is confident these new changes will help assert Reuters as a must-have news utility among its target audience of business professionals.

“There’s a certain type of consumer for whom Reuters is a highly trusted news brand, so there could be an opportunity there,” said Enders analyst Joseph Evans. “I can also understand the desire to diversify their business in the face of the financial pressures their B2B customers are under, but going further into consumer news provision is not the best way to escape a reliance on declining consumer news providers.”

That said, Showman said client demand is growing for branded-content campaigns that involve its own audiences. For example, for financial services company Synchrony Financial, Reuters TV app users were asked to be part of a video series about entrepreneurs called “Working Forward.” The videos, which featured the entrepreneurs talking about their ambitions and businesses, were produced in four 15-second segments that ran separately in sequential ad breaks during Reuters TV programs. Reuters said the campaign delivered a 27 percent lift in brand awareness, 14 percent lift in brand advocacy and 100 percent completion rates.

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Football clubs are anxiously waiting to see if Facebook’s news-feed purge stunts their efforts to get sponsors to pay more for the reach and engagement they generate online.

European clubs such as Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City and Southampton FC monetize their social media inventory. Some, like Real Madrid, try to monetize video they post on social networks like Facebook, while others, like PSG, use algorithms to put a value on the reach and subsequent engagement they generate. In both instances, the reach generated is used to help boost the value of commercial deals with sponsors. Facebook likes are central to clubs’ claims for social engagement and factor into sponsorship valuations, said Jim Dowling, managing director at Cake, the Havas Sports & Entertainment agency.

“The club tells sponsors that on Facebook, for example, we can reach a certain amount of people with each post,” said a commercial exec at one club. “We then tell them it’s worth €10,000 [$12,000] per post. Those paid posts are usually capped because we want to retain a good experience across all our social feeds. Therefore, we tell the sponsor that you can have a maximum of six posts on our Facebook page per year, which will cost €10,000.”

For clubs that have linked higher reach with higher value, Facebook’s revamped news feed threatens to upset that arrangement.

“If either of those [reach or engagement] go down as a result of Facebook’s news-feed change, then the club could be getting revenue based on reaching previous levels of inventory,” said Daniel Ayers, consulting partner at sports marketing agency Seven League. “They could get in trouble for not being able to hit those numbers anymore.”

Sustaining reach is of even more concern for teams trying to foster fan bases beyond their home turf. Teams have spent big on regional Facebook pages to boost their reach and are now reassessing that approach. Any business — football clubs included — that bases its distribution strategy on third-party platforms leaves itself vulnerable when algorithms change. “When you break that decrease in global [Facebook] reach down to different page structures, it means that individual reach for each of those is going to be decimated ever more, which makes hitting those regional fans harder,” said one marketing executive at a football club, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity.

If clubs can’t reach those regional fans organically, they may consider paying to guarantee the reach they’ve promised sponsors. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for some commercial bosses accustomed to the money they’ve generated from content that has cost virtually nothing to distribute.

Impressions, views and reach may be enough to market to potential sponsors and bring in new revenue. However, the trend in sponsorship is toward meaningful partnerships between brands and rights holders where results are measured beyond traditional awareness and reach metrics. Premier League club West Ham, for example, uses a tool to attribute value to its reach on social media and other platforms, which will adjust accordingly, should Facebook’s algorithm change affect performance for its social content. Amar Singh, West Ham’s head of content, said this is a more “nuanced” way of using social reach to provide value and engagement opportunities for commercial partners.

Unlike some of his peers, Singh doesn’t believe Facebook’s news-feed changes will threaten the club’s commercial model. Since joining West Ham last May, Singh has devised a strategy that “isn’t about driving cold hard numbers, coming from gimmicky posts that create engagement for the sake of it.” The risk for clubs like West Ham, as with any publisher, is that if they publish passive content that does not drive engagement, they will have decreased visibility in the feed. Singh is trying to improve the quality of content so people will want to discuss and share it with their friends organically. He is mindful of the expected drop in dwell time on Facebook, which West Ham’s content team will monitor as the algorithm rolls out.

As more clubs follow West Ham’s lead to determine the value of their social media based on how many fans interact with the content rather than how many people it reaches, strategies will shift to direct users to sites, over-the-top platforms or e-commerce stores to drive ticket sales and merchandising.

Gareth Capon, CEO at video technology platform Grabyo, believes this is the direction branded content is going. “Content should be less about how many people the content reached and more about how many people interacted [with] and took action from the content — video is the key driver for this,” he said. “Football clubs have built meaningful global fan bases on social platforms, and these users expect a volume of content and conversation with the clubs and players that they follow.”

Image courtesy of the Premier League

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I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who said three things that really surprised me about Facebook: 1) He was no longer on it and didn’t plan to go back. 2) His teenagers are never on it
(kind of like mine, they stay pretty much within the confines of Instagram and Snapchat). 3) His elderly mother just joined Facebook.

This is a real offer: Try a healthy snack that tastes like some combination of hyena crap, garbage, resentment and sawdust. Bring it on, you say? The marketer Kind feels confident that its new protein-packed bar is considerably more palatable than that. But you–the first 10,000 consumers to step up, that is–can be the judge….

Publishers still reeling from the Facebook news feed-pocalypse might find comfort in Snapchat. The disappearing messages app is stepping up efforts to curry favor with publishers.

On Jan. 18, Snapchat’s new platform content head Mike Su emailed publishers to introduce Snapchat longtimer Josh Stone as its new manager of media partnerships, a new role overseeing day-to-day work with Discover publishers. Su, a former exec at Snapchat Discover partner Mitú, also announced a first-time publisher summit and affirmed the platform’s strong interest in helping publishers be successful on the platform, multiple publishers confirmed. There were no details about the summit or a date set.

“As Evan [Spiegel, CEO of Snap,] mentioned on our previous earnings call, content is one of our top three priorities in 2018, and your success on Snapchat is at the heart of that. So we’re going to push harder and be more proactive with helping you succeed on Snapchat. This means finding more ways we can work together, more ways to support your business goals, and being more proactive with sharing insights and best practices to help your teams improve content quality and reach more of your audience, while continuing the support the team has already been providing,” Su wrote.

The email comes as publishers have had reason to be unsure about Snapchat. User time spent on the app has stagnated. The app just laid off about 24 people from its content division. (A source familiar with the matter said the layoffs were the result of a recent reorganization and that the company is still growing its content team.)

It’s been three years since Snapchat created the Discover section that features curated sections by a several dozen hand-picked media companies, including CNN, People and BuzzFeed. But CNN and Comedy Central have pulled back in recent months, with CNN saying the revenue wasn’t big enough, and one view is that Snapchat is worried that more publishers will flee the platform. Separate from Discover, Snapchat recently announced a redesign that would separate user content from media publishers’ and brands’ content, which could diminish those companies’ visibility in the app.

Snapchat has changed the terms of some of its Discover partnerships in a way that could limit the amount of revenue publishers can make on their Discover editions by selling ads into them. Snapchat has been steering media companies to make TV-like shows, causing text-based publishers to wonder what the future holds for them on the platform.

Snapchat wouldn’t comment on the record for this story.

Su joined Snapchat in December, so the media partnerships team has been in the works well before the Facebook news last week. But with Facebook saying it’ll deprioritize news in its news feed, publishers are looking for good news wherever they can get it.

“They’re definitely out courting publishers,” said one publisher that got the heads-up. “I think it’s a wonderful coincidence.”

Here’s the text of the email in full:

Discover Publishers!

I want to reach out and introduce myself and give you a quick update on some exciting things we have to kick off 2018!

My Role
I’ve joined [Snap vp of content] Nick Bell’s team to lead Platform Content, which includes Publisher Stories, as well as Product. As Evan mentioned on our previous earnings call, content is one of our top three priorities in 2018, and your success on Snapchat is at the heart of that.

So we’re going to push harder and be more proactive with helping you succeed on Snapchat. This means finding more ways we can work together, more ways to support your business goals, and being more proactive with sharing insights and best practices to help your teams improve content quality and reach more of your audience, while continuing the support the team has already been providing.

Josh Stone
As part of this effort, I’m also excited to share that Josh Stone, whom many of you have worked with in the past, will be taking on a newly created role as Manager of Media Partnerships. This role was specifically created to work with our partners to deepen our strategic relationships, understand your needs and concerns, and figure out ways we can expand our partnership. As you know, Josh has been here since the early days of Snap and was integral in launching the Discover platform, so his deep knowledge and relationships across the company, his insights into the platform, and his understanding of the publishing landscape makes him uniquely suited for this role.

Publisher Summit
I’m also excited to let you know that we will soon announce our first ever Publisher Summit. While specific dates and details will follow, the goal of the summit is to provide updates on our product and platform, share best practices, hear feedback, as well as provide a networking opportunity among our publishing partners. We’ll be shaping the agenda in the coming weeks, so if there are specific things you’d like to see to get the most out of it, I would love to hear your ideas!

These moves are designed to double down on our commitment to all of you, and we believe will set us up well to help make 2018 a great year for content on Snapchat. Really excited to get to know you all and find ways we can better support you. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, and stay tuned for more details on the summit!

Best,
Mike

Sahil Patel contributed reporting

The post As Facebook retreats from publishers, Snapchat is rolling out a publisher charm offensive appeared first on Digiday.

A majority of Americans say 2018 will be a better year than 2017, a shift from a year ago when public expectations were far less positive.

Fatherly COO Michael Wertheim joined Digiday+ members for a Slack town hall on Jan. 18 to talk about the fallout from Facebook’s latest algorithm changes for publishers, diversification of traffic sources and why advertisers respond well to publishers chasing smaller, targeted audiences.

The full conversation is available exclusively to Digiday+ members, but lightly edited excerpts appear below. Click here to join Digiday+.

On Facebook demoting publisher content in news feed
“We had been hearing about the algorithm change for a while from both the Facebook reps and the media sphere. Facebook is always going to change its algorithm, and any publisher who puts all of their chips in Facebook for traffic is playing a dangerous game.”

“It is still unclear if this will actually be “Facebookmageddon” for publishers. Worst-case scenario is the continued decline of organic traffic from Facebook, which will affect some businesses much more than others. For those completely dependent on Facebook, it may involve rethinking their business model completely.”

On diversifying traffic sources
“Publishers are investing in channels like Instagram and Snapchat because that’s where their audiences live, and there are monetization opportunities there. I know some lifestyle publishers for whom Instagram is actually their third-biggest referral source behind Facebook and organic search. In terms of other platforms, we are finding a lot of success on Pinterest and Flipboard, for two examples. Pinterest has been our fastest-growing referral source.”

“There isn’t enough tributary traffic to make up for the ocean of traffic that Facebook used to provide, but they have been turning the dial down on referrals for quite a while now. I do think that with a smart strategy for search especially, but also for the other sources, plus some time, it could make up for the river.”

On vertical media companies
“I think publishers are much more savvy now in general. We have seen the trend move toward engagement metrics and slightly smaller, but more targeted and engaged audiences.”

“We are significantly smaller in owned and operated reach than are many of our competitors, but advertisers have responded very favorably to us, and reach hasn’t been as much of an issue as we thought it would be. We have seen that reach does not equal revenue.”

The post ‘Reach does not equal revenue’: A Digiday+ Slack town hall with Fatherly COO Michael Wertheim appeared first on Digiday.

The whirlwind of last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is in the rearview mirror now. Not surprisingly, the event was full of data and stats about everything from the Internet of Things to smart TVs and artificial intelligence. Here’s what stuck out to us last week, as well as a couple of numbers…

Wait, we’re not done with the 2017 lists yet! Here’s an intriguing one from research firm System1 ranking the 10 most emotionally engaging spots of the year–based on testing of 705 award-winning or viral global TV ads and digital films among 56,400 consumers. Coming out on top was a little-known British ad with less than…

Making it easier for agencies and brands to evaluate, plan, and buy digital out-of-home media along with online media, the Interactive Advertising Bureau DOOH committee released a glossary that
evaluates the commonalities between phrases and identifies unique terms related to DOOH.