Data-Labor-Technology

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The rise (and fall, and rise, etc,) of cryptcurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum brought mainstream attention to blockchain technology. And advertisers and online publishers hope blockchain-based ad buys could expose bad actors in digital media. Despite the hype, however, the number of advertising dollars transacted through blockchain technology is near zero, and blockchain ad tech… Continue reading »

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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 Ari Paparo, CEO at Beeswax. The latest ad tech buzzword is supply-path optimization, and conveniently it comes with a tidy acronym – SPO – to save us all typing time.… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Big Blue Bet IBM hopes marketer interest in AI and blockchain technologies will help it seize programmatic market share. “Programmatic is a relatively dumb system – it doesn’t learn,” IBM CMO Michelle Peluso tells Digiday. Raw audience targeting is being outperformed by AI programs… Continue reading »

The post IBM’s Programmatic Pitch; The Uses Of Loyalty Data appeared first on AdExchanger.

Influencer talent agencies are using social-amplification practices to pump up results, creating erroneously successful campaigns or potentially causing safety issues for brands. 

It’s an oft-hidden practice that has its roots in the industry’s scramble to show big numbers. Brands often preach “quality” engagement but seek big numbers, which means influencer networks are often scrambling to make up big goals. That means corner-cutting, through practices like pods, network amplification or bought followings. But it’s network amplification that is the biggest problem, since it’s harder to spot when a network kicks into action to amplify a certain post or campaign.

Influencer marketing fraud is a known problem. In an industry worth over $1 billion, social media stars with very large followings have become attractive for marketing because they’re perceived as being more authentic. But authenticity is often manufactured: High engagement is often because of bots, for example.

Influencers often engage in practices that are in a gray area such as Instagram pods, groups of up to 30 Instagrammers that work with each other to comment and like each other’s posts to increase engagement.

But now, those amplification tactics are spilling over into the networks that represent thousands of influencers.

“The influencer marketing marketplace is incredibly bifurcated,” said Corey Martin, 360i’s head of influencer marketing. “There are influencer agents who are now acting like agencies, and they all work differently.”

Another buyer said any problems that emerge from these agencies emanated from a practice of guaranteeing impressions for influencer campaigns. For example, when an influencer network represents 120 influencers, a brand can request for it to create a campaign. The agency in turn could propose 10 influencers who are “cast” for the campaign. But the impressions offered would be those influencers plus an amplified mix from the network.

A brand marketing manager at an auto brand that frequently uses influencers said this practice is common and occurs because agents have to make sure they hit numbers they agreed on in their contracts. Networks will chip in and promote the post or account through Instagram Stories, for example. “As soon as they hit the target, the post is removed,” this person said.

That in itself isn’t a problem, but brands and their media agencies then question whether the engagement they’re getting is real.

Ultimately, the big problem is these influencer networks agree to any goal the brand or its media agency sets.

One influencer speaking under condition of anonymity told Digiday that his agent frequently “forces” him to engage with other social stars’ posts. He gets paid a small amount for reposting an Instagram photo. The network will calculate whatever engagement his repost gets. Even more interesting, because of the way platforms work, people are inclined to click through to the original Instagrammer’s profile, increasing the chance they end up liking the original post or even following that influencer as well.

Another Instagram star said the agency that represents her will frequently engage in this kind of amplification. “I’m in fashion, so reposting something from a mommy blogger isn’t a huge deal for me because I can just tell my followers that she’s a friend,” said this person. “But if I was a brand paying for mommy bloggers and their audiences, I wouldn’t be thrilled.”

“They juice the numbers,” said Collectively CEO Alexa Tonner, adding that agents can sometimes pay influencers bonuses for sharing and commenting on posts. “There’s an FTC issue in here. If there’s a material connection between you and a brand, you have to disclose it. If you’re being paid to retweet and comment, you should be disclosing.”

The other issue is the engagement that brands want is from consumers — not from other influencers. That specifically was the issue for many with Instagram pods, which used comment collusion to game the Instagram algorithm. If the engagement doesn’t feel genuine, brands and media agencies wonder why they’re paying for it.

“I’ve seen it put straight in a deck by an influencer agent: You will get 5 million likes, and once the network kicks in, you’ll get an additional 10 million,” said one buyer. Sometimes it’s disclosed, but other times it’s not.

“The tactic of having other influencers like, comment or reshare posts is something agencies do, and oftentimes it can be a great formula to driving up engagement if it’s done with the right audience match and properly disclosed to the client,” said Speakr CEO Marco Hansell. “The worse scenario is when you choose an influencer who fits your audience, and then the agency just has tons of completely unrelated accounts reshare or interact with that influencer’s content in order to drive up engagements. Now, you’ve got engagements from the wrong audience, making your numbers look good but your results poor.”

Another buyer said the agent he engaged simply guaranteed a few million impressions without explaining it would happen through an amplification strategy. That’s bad for a few reasons: When a brand engages a certain group of influencers, it’s because it works for that brand. Amplifying means a group of social stars that potentially doesn’t appeal to the brand’s target demographic is sharing the content. The numbers look good, but they aren’t actually hitting goals. “There are influencers who have agents who push for campaigns and do something that may be out of sync with brand values, creating brand-safety issues,” said this buyer.

“The worst thing that can happen to influencer marketing is this way of overcommoditzation of the industry — platformification, gamification and incentivizing influencers,” said Tonner. “It devalues the industry. You’re paying for engagement that doesn’t reach an audience you want to reach, not indicative of performance of value of that content. You’re not understanding the consumer you want.”

The post Chasing scale, Instagram influencer networks cut corners appeared first on Digiday.

With Facebook deprioritizing publishers’ content in its news feed again, publishers are casting about for other places to diversify their traffic, including Apple News. But so far, most of the benefits of that platform appear limited to news publishers.

About 25 percent of the 4.5 million who read Michael Wolff’s buzzy New York magazine article about Donald Trump did so on Apple News. An exec at a comScore 200 news publisher, requesting anonymity, said in 2017, his site’s Apple News traffic doubled to 10 million readers a month. For The Washington Post, Apple News traffic is growing and among the newspaper’s top four sources of referral traffic, said Dave Merrell, lead product manager at the Post. At Boston.com, Apple News outstripped referral traffic from Facebook in December.

But Apple News remains tough for lifestyle publishers, according to conversations with seven publisher executives, which is problematic because they depend on Facebook more than other publishers. About 87 percent of the referral traffic for lifestyle articles comes from Facebook, according to Parsely. For comparison, between 15 and 60 percent of the traffic for business and political content comes from Facebook, per Parsely.

Outside Magazine and Ranker haven’t adopted Apple News yet because they’re unsure it is worth integrating and monitoring another traffic source where their evergreen content is unlikely to catch fire. LittleThings and Kiplinger get less than 5 percent of their referral traffic from Apple News. News publishers are driving traffic from Apple News, but some remain cautious about publishing all of their content on the platform since they’ve struggled to make money from it. Apple declined to comment on the record for this story.

After testing Apple News for a month and obtaining under 500,000 readers, a millennial lifestyle site dropped the platform, said one of its executives, speaking on condition of anonymity. In the weeks following Facebook’s news feed change, publishers may get more serious about deriving traffic from other sources, but in the opinion of this exec, lifestyle publishers simply aren’t Apple’s priority.

Apple News tends to surface and push stories about what’s happening in the world today. For lifestyle publishers looking to wean themselves off Facebook, Apple News doesn’t work well as a referral traffic substitute.

“It’s called Apple News for a reason,” one publisher source quipped.

Even publishers that are getting audience on Apple News still have problems with it. Many publishers struggle to monetize their content on Apple News because advertising hasn’t been a priority of Apple’s. Daniel Hallac, chief product officer at New York magazine, acknowledged that monetization on Apple News isn’t as great as it is on owned-and-operated properties.

But Hallac believes Apple News monetization will improve considerably once it integrates Google’s DoubleClick ad server into its platform. Multiple sources speculated this could happen by the end of the first quarter. The integration with DoubleClick would allow publishers to pipe ads into their Apple News articles that they already serve on their own websites.

Apple News provides about 5 percent of New York magazine’s referral traffic per month, and Hallac wants to continue growing traffic on the platform to diversify where New York gets its readers.

“It is unhealthy to be attached to any one referral source,” he said.

The post Apple News shows promise delivering traffic but won’t make up for Facebook shortfalls appeared first on Digiday.

In the U.K., publishers are cool on Facebook’s mid-roll video ads.

Facebook’s way of monetizing video through mid-roll ad breaks has had mixed results in the U.S. The opportunity is even more fledgling in the U.K., where Watch, Facebook’s video destination, has yet to have a firm launch date. Facebook’s plan to prioritize users’ posts over publishers’ in the news feed has further stifled the chance of Facebook’s mid-roll making much of an impact in the U.K. For some publishers, it’s a bitter pill to swallow that a chunk of the revenue they could make through mid-roll ads will return to Facebook’s pockets, either through its commission structure or through promoting posts.

“Your mid-roll audience opportunity is immediately halved,” said one publisher, speaking anonymously to avoid jeopardizing relations with Facebook. “If mid-roll is a way to placate media owners and give them an opportunity to make money off content, then the content you can make money off is so limited because you’ll have to pay the way to get into the feed. It’s classic Facebook — it gives with one hand and takes with the other.”

Even before Facebook’s news feed change, which shocked some, but not all, publishers, mid-roll revenue in the U.K. was disappointing some of those that tested it. One publisher that has experimented at length with using mid-roll ads said it didn’t generate nearly enough revenue from using Facebook’s mid-roll ads to cement the format into its long-term publishing strategy.

“Advertising on mid-roll is not going to work as a business model,” said the publisher. “It’s not something to hang your video strategy on. Like most publishers, we’ve had a wake-up call that as a video business, not to put all our eggs in one basket.”

For this publishing exec, revenue from mid-roll ads quadrupled during November and December, reaching at its peak just five figures in revenue. That spike could have been due to Facebook giving preferential pricing when selling ads during Black Friday and Christmas, according to the same exec. Before that, a video fetching a few hundred thousand video views would get up to $50.

When contacted for this story, Facebook said it had no new updates to share. In December, the platform announced it would change its mid-roll product in January, extending the required video length for running mid-roll ads from 20 seconds to 60 seconds before showing the first ad and requiring a minimum of three minutes of content rather than 90 seconds.

Not all publishers find revenue from mid-rolls insignificant; some see it as incremental revenue to content that’s already being created. A digital publisher contacted for this story has worked with Facebook on improving formats and sequencing for user experience on mid-rolls across the U.S. and U.K., and it also saw revenue from mid-rolls reach new highs at the end of last year.

“From a U.K. perspective, we have been happy with the revenue scale and improving yield in 2017,” said the publisher. “It’s not insignificant for us. Obviously, [it’s] dependent on your existing social Facebook video scale, which we have.”

Scale of video in the news feed is critical, but publishers cooling on mid-rolls would likely lead to a drop in investment in quality video content if it can’t be monetized.

“Facebook doesn’t want to encourage a relationship where it funds content,” said the second publisher. “A lot of the content will be off the shelf, probably not created by the person putting it out there.” Publishers have also noted instances where videos are looped in order to reach the maximum length to claim a mid-roll — another knock to the user experience.

For some ad agencies, the possibility of poor user experience — including repeated videos — is enough to make them opt out of Facebook mid-roll ads entirely. Equally, the placement of the mid-roll ads uses time-based triggers, which could end up jarring. On YouTube, publishers say you can place breaks manually or use automatic placement, which is based on audio and scene changes.

“There’s no need for our advertisers to go there,” said Ben Foster, digital client director at media agency MC&C, which spends millions of dollars annually on advertising on Facebook. “Right now, it’s not overly appealing until content becomes more premium.” Of equal concern is that ads are served based on audience preferences, rather than environment, raising eyebrows around brand safety and context.

“Arguably within the news feed, you don’t control adjacent content anyway,” said Katie Manor, head of paid social, worldwide, at MediaCom. “That’s what you accept with the way that platforms serve social content.”

MediaCom has been testing mid-roll ad breaks for around five clients globally and has been pretty satisfied with the results, particularly around viewability, which in some cases has doubled from industry standards of around 30 percent for social video, as people are waiting for content they are willing to watch.

“We’re mindful of many brands’ safety and targeting concerns,” said Manor, “so we make sure we apply the same targeting parameters.”

The post With no sign of Watch, Facebook mid-roll ads yield slim prospects for UK publishers appeared first on Digiday.

Most brands have yet to see what augmented reality on Facebook looks like, but that could soon change.

The social network is hiring a product management lead for its in-app camera, called the Camera Effects Platform, who will lead its fledgling AR team in London. Facebook wants the hire, who must be “passionate about AR,” to grow a team of product managers and designers capable of taking the AR Studio tool within the Camera Effects Platform to advertisers in the U.K.

Since Facebook revealed the studio last April, the social network’s own developers, based in the U.S., created a large portion of the early AR effects for advertisers. That worked when there was limited access to the tool through a closed beta program, but since it was made available to all third-party developers last month, the social network will expand its AR plan beyond the U.S.

Facebook is gradually building a portfolio of high-profile brand AR effects as the platform moves past its open beta phase, said one developer, who revealed Facebook’s AR pitch to Digiday on condition of anonymity.

Nike, Manchester City, MTV, Gucci, StudioCanal and HBO are among a handful of big brands that have tried Facebook’s AR effects in recent months. Metrics from Facebook for those AR effects have been “basic,” said the same developer, who only has access to usage and view numbers. Facebook has promised, however, that its Facebook Analytics tools will include AR effects later this year, the developer added. What few campaign statistics the developer has seen have been encouraging: “You hear how proud influencer agencies get when their work receives high conversions, but we’re seeing some AR effects on Facebook that are more than double the typical influencer conversion rates at 7 percent and higher,” the developer said.

StudioCanal has been “delighted” with the usage stats from the “Paddington 2” effect it ran during the holiday season, said Jamie McHale, the digital marketing manager at StudioCanal. The campaign, which the studio’s team of Havas agencies developed, generated over 324,000 uses and 2 million views, revealed McHale. Considering StudioCanal’s investment on the AR effect’s design and development, these results are solid, he said. “As such, we are in various stages of development for camera effects for our upcoming titles.”

Part of the attraction for brands like StudioCanal is that the effects are a content type rather than an ad unit. The advertiser either develops the effect itself or hires a developer to produce it, rather than purchasing an ad unit from the social network. Therefore, the cost of creating a Facebook AR effect is relatively low compared to sponsored lens packages on Snap, the developer claimed. And an advertiser’s overall reach depends on the creative and wider marketing support it receives rather than how big the media buy is.

Advertisers could be further tempted to try Facebook’s AR effects following its decision to shift the news feed to favor posts from friends and family over those from brands and publishers. While paid ads remain unaffected by the change, AR, like Facebook Live, could be seen as a relatively low-cost way to reach more people with organic posts. “As a content form hatched on a brand page,” said the developer, “AR is highly remixable video that travels beyond a brand-to-person exchange and seeps into other parts of Facebook and other parts of the social web.”

The post Facebook is building a team to pitch its AR camera to UK advertisers appeared first on Digiday.

It’s taken a little longer for the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein scandal to spread to the U.K. media scene. But people in the industry are starting to feel safer about speaking out about sexual harassment and misogyny in the workplace — up to a point.

The widespread use of nondisclosure agreements on departing female employees in the U.S. is also a common tactic in U.K. agencies and media businesses, deterring women from speaking on the record about sexual harassment and gender-related bullying.

“You feel like shit as you don’t want it to happen to anyone else, but you’re in the worst possible state to take this on and stand up for yourself because your confidence has plummeted as a result of how you’ve been treated,” said a former media executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. “So you take the guilt money, and then spend your time putting your life back together.”

Those who don’t fit the template of what’s considered typical for women are often bullied and treated badly in U.K. businesses, according to sources. “I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve heard ‘she needs a good shag’ said about women in powerful positions who don’t play to the caring, bubbly woman stereotype,” said a senior media agency executive. Men aren’t immune either, with sources describing occasions when senior management executives called male staffers homophobic terms like “faggot” loudly across the office to get their attention.

Several female senior executives Digiday spoke to for this story said gender-related bullying plays a big part in impeding women from reaching senior positions, with some adding that they left media due to hounding and bullying by dominant male bosses, whose behavior often rubbed off on other staffers. Another agency executive described a meeting with a colleague where she was told: “Are you going to make like a c*nt in meetings because you’ll do all the talking?”

It makes the ever-present drumbeat for diversity quotas, long touted by agencies and media businesses in the U.K., seem somewhat hollow. “Everyone agrees they have to change, but no one wants to speak publicly as they’re afraid what their bosses will say,” said Mary Keane-Dawson, co-founder and CEO of Truth media agency.

“What they don’t want is to call this out, only to be told, ‘We have to condone this behavior, as that person has been with the organization for the last 25 years. Yeah, I know they’re a bully, but that’s just their way,’” she added. “It’s really bad for the business and the industry.”

Vice is among those recently in the hot seat for revelations of sexual misconduct, with its owners accused of cultivating a culture of sex and drugs. Two senior employees were suspended in the U.S., prompting some of Vice’s U.K. staffers to call for an independent investigation into conduct at their own office and for all staffers to have sexual harassment training.

In a Medium post, the U.K. staff wrote: “We are united in our aim to make this company a place where anyone, especially women, can flourish without fear of sexual harassment, racism or reprisal for speaking their mind. The revelations that the company pays more for silence than in wages is abhorrent, as is the knowledge our co-workers and superiors have been involved in abuse.”

Sources within Vice UK have described the publisher as being a “boys’ club” that rewards those who party with the bosses. “Women are spoilsports if they don’t participate, or if they challenge [the drug culture], you’re seen as anti-Vice,” said a Vice UK employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Many of the women in the U.K. feel immensely downtrodden, vulnerable in our jobs, not listened to, not respected or valued,” said another staff member. “The guys are more respected and valued, as they’re more ‘the mission’ than women. Vice is a very narrow set of personas — all male, all aggressive.”

However, several other Vice employees stressed that the Medium post did not represent the feelings of the 300 people in the U.K. office. “It’s a sweeping generalization and absolutely not reflective of all the female staff here,” said one female executive who sits on the Vice UK staff council.

Still, there’s no smoke without fire, and Vice has faced serious fire for previous conduct with female staffers, specifically involving founder Shane Smith.

Another Vice executive, who also asked to remain anonymous, said media companies she previously worked at were far worse than Vice. For example, a former media executive cultivated a glittering career at a major publisher that was inclusive and diverse. But when she moved to a digital media company years later, she was subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation from a male boss, a known bully in the company. She was eventually diagnosed with stress and let go with a severance package. “I remember sitting outside the doctor’s surgery with a note signing me off work for a month, thinking, ‘What the hell have I done with my career?!’” this person said.

Other companies have been quick to distance themselves from employees that have behaved inappropriately with female staffers. Sources have described seeing on-the-spot firings for sexual misconduct at parties.

“The [sexual harassment] issue is not going to go away, and I think there will be collateral damage in the U.K., as I’m certainly aware of two or three individuals who are yet to be exposed,” said a recruitment agency executive who asked to remain anonymous. “The issue isn’t slowing down. It’s just a case of people really getting their cases nice and tight before they go to press.”

The post ‘Women are spoilsports if they don’t participate’: The Weinstein effect spreads to the UK media industry appeared first on Digiday.