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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Makeup Breakup Amazon is the largest online cosmetics seller, but many top brands see the platform – “a scroll of endless products on white background” – as incompatible with luxury appeal, reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The EU’s top court ruled last month that luxury… Continue reading »

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Sky can’t make money from football fans watching this year’s World Cup on TV, but the broadcaster will try to make money from how they follow the tournament online.

World Cups have always been somewhat of a moot point for Sky. Football’s biggest event must be shown on free-to-air channels in the U.K. due to strict regulations, meaning the commercial broadcaster misses out on the lucrative TV budgets pumped into the matches. But since the 2014 World Cup, social video has become central to how younger fans watch sports, and Sky sees a chance to win a larger slice of budgets.

Previously, the broadcaster hadn’t done enough to push its social media credentials to brands and agencies in the absence of TV rights, said Jason Hughes, head of Sky Media’s creative solutions. Instead, display and bespoke native ads were Sky’s main ways of monetizing the tournament online.

For this year’s World Cup, Hughes and his team are pushing social media, particularly the organic reach Sky can generate from it, to advertisers. Just 1 percent of Sky Sports’ interactions on Facebook came from promoted posts between Jan. 1, 2017 and Jan. 1, 2018, while posts that linked outside of Facebook to Sky Sports sites were the most popular content type over the same period, ahead of video and photos, according to Socialbakers.

“We’ve known for some time how important our social media channels have been at driving traffic back to our sites,” Hughes said. “But from a strategic perspective, we’ve not done enough to show that expertise.”

Sky’s pitch to advertisers sorts World Cup campaigns into pregame, in-game or postgame slots, depending on advertisers’ objectives. For a pregame slot, an advertiser could produce a show like beer brand Carling’s “In Off The Bar” with the broadcaster’s presenters such as Max Rushden to riff on the buildup to matches. Another brand might want to do something away from the games and be matched with influencers, whom Sky has employed to produce short videos reporting on fan culture around the tournament.

Sky will use its influencers from its chat show “Soccer AM” and Football Daily, the YouTube channel Sky acquired when it bought social content producer Diagonal View last March. Diagonal View’s channels will add more than 15 million subscribers to Sky’s own following, which it said amounts to around 11 million monthly unique users.

Hughes said branded campaigns will run across all its own sites and social media channels, including Snapchat, YouTube and Twitter. Sky Media won’t prioritize one platform, he added, though he did talk up livestreaming on Facebook Live. Facebook Live, which launched in 2016, struggled to win over much of the sports media industry in 2017, but Sky continued to experiment with it. The broadcaster considers livestreaming on social networks a way to reach younger audiences, which may not subscribe but can be sold to advertisers.

While branded social video will be Sky Media’s main focus for the World Cup, the broadcaster will also offer to turn ads into sequentially targeted campaigns using its AdVance platform and addressable TV inventory via AdSmart. “When we talk to advertisers, it’s not so much the decline in viewing that they’re interested in when it comes to discussion about social video,” Hughes said. “It’s about being savvier about following that customer journey.”

Image courtesy of Sky Media

The post Sky chases social video budgets for World Cup appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers may be pulling away from Facebook in favor of keeping readers on their own sites, but they’re warming to Facebook Groups.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg overhauled Facebook’s mission last year to focus on fostering community, touting Groups in the process. Naturally, publishers are following suit. The New York Times, BuzzFeed and the “Today” show have all launched special-interest groups on the platform in the past few months.

Growing audience is the basic goal, but publishers are finding benefits beyond that. The Washington Post is trying to grow subscriptions, and PostThis, a Facebook group with more than 4,000 members, is an efficient way to promote the accountability journalism that seems to get people to subscribe. Bloomberg News uses Money Talks, a 3,500-plus member group, to promote its personal finance articles and its reporters and highlight content that Bloomberg News wouldn’t normally be associated with, like a 30-day challenge to get people to improve their financial health, said Meena Thiruvengadam, head of audience strategy.

“It’s engagement, it’s community, it’s urging people to build conversation around your stories,” she said.

Publishers’ and Facebook’s goals have often been at odds, but the groups seem to align with publishers’ focus on communities and subject-specific content — sort of a vertical strategy around community. The groups also are a way for publishers to promote their own journalists, who lead or join the discussions.

“We’re actually marching in the same direction,” said Matt Karolian, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard who heads social media at Boston Globe Media, which has two Facebook groups to discuss race and the news in general, each with about 3,000 members. A third, smaller one suggests things to do around Boston.

To promote the groups, Facebook launched analytics tools last year to help administrators track usage. Admins can now see the number of active members they have and how often they post and comment, which can show them if a particular topic resonates or not. Before, admins had to manually count this data. They can also qualify people before they join a particular group, which can help weed out trolls.

“For us so far, it’s definitely been worth it,” said Terri Rupar, senior projects editor at the Post who administers PostThis. “It’s not been a huge time investment, but it’s a way to connect readers with stories they really want to read. It’s been a useful way to say, ‘You’re interested in this, and this is a way to find it.’ Engagement can be tricky; we want to keep it from being overly partisan. But for the most part, the group has embraced what we’re trying to do.”

Publishers aren’t always pushing their own content. In a different approach, the Times has a podcast club of 22,000-plus members that it uses to lead discussions about podcasts but doesn’t expressly promote the Times’ own podcasts.

“We’re paying attention to what people respond to, and it does help us think about our own programming,” said Samantha Henig, editorial director for audio at the Times. “It also helps get The New York Times out there as an important brand in the audio space.”

In yet another use case, some publishers including The Information and The Atlantic are using private Facebook groups as a benefit of subscription or paid membership programs.

For publishers, distributing content and conversation off-site is always a double-edged sword because they need to go where readers are, but they can’t track readers and upsell them to subscriptions and other products as well as they can when they’re on the publisher’s own site. Karolian said he hasn’t seen groups cannibalize The Boston Globe, where commenting tends to be article-specific.

“People are going to spend a set amount of time on Facebook every day, and I want them to spend as much time with us as possible,” he said. ”I don’t necessarily see it as competition with our website. Comments on our site are more important, but they’re more targeted to what people are reading at the moment.”

The post ‘We’re marching in the same direction’: Facebook is emphasizing Groups, and publishers are following suit appeared first on Digiday.

The duopoly may be soaking up all the growth in digital advertising, but not the ad dollars of one growing category: weed marketers.

That’s because Facebook and Google won’t accept marijuana ads. A Google spokesperson said the company doesn’t allow marijuana ads on either the display or search side because the product is illegal on the federal level, while Facebook’s ad policy prohibits sales promotions on cannabis. ​That’s opened to door to smaller programmatic ad marketplaces, in particular, to grow their cannabis business. Six agency and programmatic executives report that their weed business is expanding, thanks in part to less competition. (Holding company agencies also swear off marijuana accounts.)

“Cannabis advertising really started picking up in programmatic buying over the past year because more and more people are getting into the business, and legit marijuana brands are also growing bigger,” said Jeffrey Finch, co-founder and chief product officer for Denver-headquartered demand-side platform Choozle. “They realized that they need more advertising.”

Programmatic buying for marijuana clients requires more human supervision and technological sophistication due to the legal complexities. After all, weed is not legal in every state in the U.S. Because of that, Finch said his team only runs managed programmatic campaigns for marijuana advertisers, although 90 percent of Choozle’s clients use self-serve. “Cannabis is still considered as sensitive content, so we have to be extra careful with the creative and the targeting,” said Finch. “Those ads will show up on publishers who have no aversion to cannabis content.”

Vendors must go through several validation points to make sure weed ads are compliant with laws. For instance, Finch said that in addition to targeting people who are over 21 and in states that legalized marijuana based on ZIP code, his team also uses keyword targeting to find the right content to serve cannabis ads against. For instance, a marijuana chocolate brand can target web pages with the phrase “weed chocolate.” If “weed chocolate” appears on one page over three times, the page would probably be a good fit for the brand.

Meanwhile, Darren Roberts, co-founder of High There!, a dating app for cannabis consumers, is also seeing this uptick in programmatic buying. He said his company is integrating Twitter-owned MoPub to serve display, interstitial and video ads programmatically. “We have a community of individuals who happen to enjoy cannabis, but they are like anyone else,” said Roberts. “That means advertisers can target based on people’s interests like food, culture and outdoor activities. We don’t set the goal of advertising to marijuana brands only — we want to bring mainstream advertisers to our community.”

Despite cannabis advertisers’ growing interest in programmatic, ad tech is nascent in cannabis. Olivia Mannix, CEO and founder of cannabis marketing agency Cannabrand, said her clients usually spend a small part of their marketing budget, like around $10,000 a month, on programmatic. “Cannabis brands are still more interested in earned and owned [media] than paid media because of ad platforms’ limitations,” said Mannix. “When we created ads, the content tends to be more educational and less recreational-focused.”

Meghan Larson, CEO and co-founder of Adistry, an ad network specialized in cannabis advertising, said that although the number of publishers her company works with has doubled to around 300 over the past year, overall publisher traffic for the cannabis industry is much lower compared to other industry verticals. This is because major exchanges like Google, AppNexus and Rubicon Project all declined marijuana advertising, according to Larson. “We can’t move forward yet. It would be great if we can work with Google and Facebook to run device ID tracking,” she said. “But it will come eventually because cannabis advertisers are looking for alternatives to traditional advertising.”

Finch also believes programmatic ad spend in cannabis is too small to interest the likes of Google and Facebook. His brand and agency clients in this category usually spend somewhere between $5,000 and $20,000 a month, and cannabis advertisers make less than 1 percent of Choozle’s overall revenue, he said.

“The only reason why we are doing programmatic for cannabis advertisers right now is someone has to do it — and do it right,” said Finch. “It’s a legit industry in Colorado, and I personally want to make it work.”

The post One digital media area the duopoly isn’t dominating: Cannabis ads appeared first on Digiday.

In our new series “Life After Advertising,” we share the stories of past advertisers who endured the long hours in the industry and have emerged in a new career, perhaps a little worn, but mostly unscathed and living new dreams.

Bill Gross, 64, spent 25 years working at ad agencies like Benton & Bowles, Grey, JWT on food accounts like Kool-Aid, Nestle, Unilever and General Foods. But after 9/11, Gross pursued a new route. He moved to Connecticut and opened the Brookfield Learning Center, a tutoring and test-prep business that helps second-graders to early college students complete their education.

Since leaving the advertising industry 14 years ago, Gross also started running marathons, recently completing his 102nd marathon. He is featured in the book “Running Past Fifty: Advice and Inspiration for Senior Runners,” which will be published in October.

Why did you leave advertising to open a learning center?
After 25 years, I realized two things. I wanted a business of my own and I wanted to find something where the outcome had more of a benefit to someone than 30-second commercials. Someone once said to me that you spend the first half of your life doing stuff and the second half of your life making up for the stuff you did in the first half of your life. I decided I could put what I learned from advertising to use helping build kids’ brains instead of filling their stomachs with Kool-Aid.

What skills did you learn in advertising that help you today?
When I’m working with students or meeting parents, I’m applying all the different things I did in advertising, only to a different audience. You look at the market and do a market analysis, just like you would do for a new business pitch. Who is your customer? It’s a kid. Who is your secondary customer? It’s their parents. What is the emotional benefit? They want their problems solved.

What’s your vision for the learning center?
There’s an enormous opportunity to expand the test-prep business. The stakes of going to college, both financially and socially, are enormous. If you want to see what anxiety looks like, look in the eyes of an 11th-grader. Their parents look even worse. Somebody who can honestly, legitimately help them with this process is the business I would like to be in on a larger scale.

What do you miss about advertising?
I miss the people. There aren’t other businesses where you can meet a bunch of people who vibrate at that speed. There’s also something about the idea that good advertising can change people’s behavior. I’m always in awe of the business when that works, but it works infrequently.

What don’t you miss?
The knowledge that sometimes you are selling things that aren’t exactly correct. There were times I would meet with clients and “sell” ideas that I knew in my heart weren’t the best thing, but they were sellable. Everything I sell now, I believe in.

What made you start running at age 50?
I saw my 50th birthday coming up, and I had a little kid I wanted to see grow up. I started to run and really liked it. I’ve now run 102 marathons in 14 years. That’s an obsessive amount, but I think that’s consistent with the personalities of advertising people. They’re high-strung people who want to achieve. I’ll stop running when I fall over at the finish line.

You ran in the Boston Marathon the year the bomb went off. How close were you to the finish line?
I was about half a mile from the finish line. The only reason I wasn’t at the finish line at the time the bomb went off was because I tripped over a grocery bag that had blown into the street and fell hard. It took me about five minutes to get going again. I think someone was watching over me that day.

The post Life After Advertising: From selling Kool-Aid to helping kids graduate appeared first on Digiday.

The tussle between publishers and platforms shows little sign of abating. Publishers want the reach that platforms afford and a fair reward for filling them with content. On top of this, publishers increasingly want the platforms to take more responsibility for their role in hosting inappropriate content.

Here are four charts on the state of publisher attitudes toward platforms.

Google leads while Facebook falters
Forty-four percent of publishers are more worried about the growth and power of platforms now compared to last year, while just 7 percent are less worried, according to Reuters Institute’s latest Digital News Project report.

The report found that out of all platforms, publishers are the most positive about their relationship with Google, as the below chart illustrates. (A score of three or above indicates a positive view.)

The not-so-surprising finding from the report is that sentiment about Facebook has worsened. The platform has faced struggles that have affected its relationship with publishers, such as its role in spreading fake news, lack of monetization opportunities and changes to referral traffic. Google, meanwhile, has proven itself to be more of a friend to publishers, partly because of Google’s and Facebook’s divergent business models: Publishers’ interests are more in line with Google’s interest in sharing information than with Facebook, a closed social network that earns revenue through advertising.

Traffic referral plays a role
For some time, Facebook was the No. 1 source of referral traffic for publishers’ sites, where publishers could monetize traffic more effectively. In December, data from Parsely found that Google now accounts for 44 percent of publishers’ referral traffic, overtaking Facebook, which accounts for roughly 26 percent. This is partly because of publishers’ adoption of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages and Facebook’s continued focus on native video.

Publishers have griped about the lack of responsiveness from platforms, transparency in audience data and upcoming projects, overall business alignment and, most important, monetization opportunities.

“The underlying discontent is platforms have too much power, and publishers don’t get the fair financial reward,” said Nic Newman, research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Snapchat offers the lowest returns
Publishers struggle to keep up with platforms’ products, especially those that have yet to prove financially viable. Snapchat in particular has required a lot of legwork, with publishers staffing teams to meet content demands without much proven return on investment.

A Digiday+ survey of 35 European publishers found that 3 percent of respondents thought Snapchat offered the strongest monetization potential among platforms, with over half (52 percent) citing YouTube as offering the best monetization potential.

Publishers eye alternative revenue streams
With the concerns about platforms’ power, the need for publishers to diversify their revenue streams is more pronounced. Nearly half (44 percent) of respondents see subscriptions as a very important source of digital revenue in 2018, while both display advertising and branded content were viewed as important revenue sources by 40 percent, according to the same Reuters Institute report.

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