Articles by: "Research Team—DCN"

Data powers digital media

July 26, 2016 Research Team—DCN

Shifting from the tactics of next-generation data analytics to converting corporate cultures to being data-first is the emerging great challenge for media companies battling for consumer and advertiser relevance, according to a report released by the International News Media Association (INMA).“Big Data For Media 2.0: Going Data-First” synthesizes case studies shared with INMA through a co-hosted Big Data For Media conference and study tour, along with best practices from association members. The report features eight video interviews INMA conducted with Big Data innovators at five media companies.

Companies featured in the INMA report include Axel Springer, Dow Jones, Financial Times, Forbes Media, Hearst, The New York Times, Schibsted, The Washington Post, and The Weather Channel. Based upon the best practices at these media companies, author Martha L. Stone of the World Newsmedia Network (WNMN) makes the case that data-first strategies are yielding better outcomes and better results.

That said, she finds that even major media companies are facing cultural challenges in implementing these company-wide data-first strategies. However, the central role of data in the modern media company is highlighted by Rick McFarland, chief data scientist at Hearst Corp., who is quoted as saying: “Hearst is not in the publishing business or even in the media business. It is really in the data distribution business. Data is the gasoline” that fuels the business.

Overall, the report categorizes data-centric practices as being synonymous with customer-first strategies. Based upon her synthesis of the case studies and best practices, Stone says that her overall impression is one of “companies leading a cultural revolution” — with some succeeding faster than others.

The report examines:

Why Big Data is important at media companies and how different types of analytics are being applied

Who innovative media companies are in Big Data — and why

The process of developing the media company’s data operation

How companies implement a culture of experimentation using data

How leading media companies are structuring and staffing their data departments

The pending onslaught of data regulations

Results from the latest Big Data For Media Survey — including what media companies are doing with analytics and how that is changing

How best to generate revenue using data analytics

“Media companies are in the data distribution business and data is the gasoline,” said Earl J. Wilkinson, executive director and CEO of INMA, paraphrasing one of the executives interviewed in the report. “What we see among the industry leaders is Big Data not as a tactic to grow subscriptions but as a catalyst for fundamental culture change. This report is a snapshot in that revolution.”

Advertising | Industry-Research

Podcast consumption on the rise, and that’s good news for digital advertising

June 6, 2016 Research Team—DCN

One in three podcast listeners expect to increase their podcast consumption over the next six months, following a similar increase in their behavior in the past six months. The results were revealed as part of comScore’s first study dedicated to podcasting, commissioned by audio on-demand network Wondery.

Significantly, among all forms of advertising on mobile devices, podcasts create the highest improvement in perception. And among all forms of digital advertising, podcast ads are considered the least intrusive.

Key findings include:

Over two-thirds of online Americans aged 18-49 are aware of podcasting and nearly one in five listen to podcasts at least once a month.
Incidence of podcast listening is highest among males aged 18-34, at 30%, who spend an average of more than 11 hours per month listening.
About half of podcast consumption is done via mobile devices.
Podcast listeners like the educational and entertainment value of the experience, and report an increase in positive emotions after listening to an episode.
Two-thirds of podcast listeners say they have engaged in various research and/or purchase related behaviors as a result of advertising exposure from podcasts.
More than half of non-podcast listeners say they would be interested in listening if they knew where and how to find podcast episodes.

The study was commissioned between March and April of 2016 among over 2,000 respondents in the US aged 18-49. Full results are available upon request at wondery.com/contact-us.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Americans say free, ad-supported online services worth $1,200 a year

May 13, 2016 Research Team—DCN

Americans assigned a value of nearly $1,200 per year to the array of free, ad-supported services and content currently available to them online, according to a survey conducted by Zogby Analytics. Unsurprisingly, the majority (more than 85%) prefer an ad-supported internet model instead of paying for online content, and three-quarters said they would reduce their online activities “a great deal” if they had to pay for those services and content. At the same time, almost as many say (72.8%) that free internet content such as news, weather, email and blogs is very important.

Commissioned by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), the Zogby Analytics poll of 1,004 adults sought to better understand the aggregate value that Americans perceive in the major types of services and content made available free to consumers because of advertising. Respondents were asked to estimate how much people would have to pay for 17 different types of online services and content, ranging from e-mail to video and weather, if they were offered only on a subscription basis rather than for free with ads.

Among the survey’s key findings:

Consumers assigned an aggregate value of $99.77 per month to a package of 17 major types of ad-supported services and content.
Eighty% of respondents said they had found ads useful in finding new products, researching a purchase, or assisting with the shopping process.
The types of advertising that consumers had found most useful were movies/TV shows (43%), technology/devices (37%), clothing (36%), local restaurants (34%), groceries (33%), phone/internet services (32%), and travel (30%).

Zogby Analytics was commissioned by Digital Advertising Alliance to conduct an online survey of 1004 adults in the US. The survey was conducted from April 19-20, 2016. Based on a confidence interval of 95%, the margin of error is +/- 3.2%age points.

Industry-Research

Connected TVs outnumber set-top boxes

May 3, 2016 Research Team—DCN

Overall, there are more connected TV devices in US households than there are pay-TV set-top boxes according to new consumer research from Leichtman Research Group, Inc. (LRG). Across all households (including those that do not have any of these), the mean number of connected TV devices per household is 2.1, while the mean number of pay-TV settop boxes per household is 1.8.

LRG finds that 65% of US TV households have at least one television set connected to the Internet via a video game system, a smart TV set, a Blu-ray player, and/or a stand-alone device (such as Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, or Amazon Fire TV) – up from 44% in 2013, and 24% in 2010. Among those with any connected TV devices, 74% have more than one device, with a mean of 3.3 per connected TV household.

Other findings include:

83% of households with any type of connected TV device get a pay-TV service
38% of adults with a pay-TV service watch video via a connected TV device at least weekly
79% of all TV sets in US households are HDTVs – an increase from 34% of all TV sets in 2010
33% of non-4K Ultra HDTV owners have seen one in use – up from 10% in 2014

These findings are based on a survey of 1,206 TV households throughout the US, and are part of a new LRG study, HD and Connected TVs XIII. This is LRG’s thirteenth annual study on TVs in the US.

Industry-Research

Mobile ad inventory value rose substantially in Q1

April 25, 2016 Research Team—DCN

It’s been a very strong first quarter for the global mobile advertising space according to PubMatic’s Q1 2016 Quarterly Mobile Index (QMI), which found that ad inventory value on both mobile app and mobile web increased substantially, with CPMs (cost per thousand ad impressions) on mobile app up 67% and on mobile web up 57% year-over-year. For publishers and advertisers, this demonstrates increasing ad quality and value across both mobile platforms.

By analyzing the billions of daily impressions that flow through their platform, PubMatic observes real-time developments in the mobile space that allude to broader digital industry trends.

In its latest QMI report, PubMatic has updated and added several key benchmarks for mobile advertising performance around pricing, volume and growth. Note that each report provides a quarterly snapshot, and directional data might not be comparable with prior quarter reports.

Here are five key trends called out in the report:

Android app inventory value up nearly 150% YOY, as advertisers seek to target the majority of global mobile consumers
For premium publishers, mobile web represents the majority of mobile traffic and inventory, and a significant monetization opportunity
Average mobile CPMs in the Americas and the EMEA region grew 30% and 64%, respectively, demonstrating increasing quality of mobile inventory on a global level
Major sporting events attracted significant spending in mobile private marketplaces, driving PMP volume in the sports category over 1000% YOY
Programmatic is improving mobile CPMs, driving broader mobile advertising growth

Looking ahead, PubMatic suggests that premium publishers can continue to monetize on their mobile web inventory through two key strategies:

Add geolocation (i.e. latitude & longitude) or device ID to mobile web inventory to increase targeting capabilities. Better targetability can increase value of mobile web inventory significantly.
Bundle their mobile inventory into private marketplace (PMP) packages to make them cross-platform, which is more attractive to media buyers and typically attract higher prices than single-platform PMP packages.

Industry-Research

Tweets drive 8.5% of social traffic, so does the content matter?

April 15, 2016 Research Team—DCN

Twitter drives a median 8.5 % of all social traffic to media sites across Parse.ly’s network of digital publishers. That said, Parse.ly decided to take a look at what extent publishers influence this number. In other words, they wondered if the type of content shared on Twitter impacts how readers engage. So, Parse.ly partnered with Twitter’s “firehose” data team to collect and analyze 100% of tweets that link to its customers’ websites, the results of which it has compiled in an Authority Report.

For this study, Parse.ly examined data from 200 websites, spanning 14 calendar days (January 10–24), to see what trends they could uncover. Here are some of those trends:

Publishers with “typical” content get about 1.5% of traffic from Twitter as compared with 11% for publishers with the “most active” content.
The most active content garners 18 clicks per tweet as compared with only 3 clicks for typical content.
Typical content is often “conversational news” such as tweets about the presidential elections.
Breaking news stories often drive large spikes in traffic over shorter periods of time.

According to Parse.ly, as a medium Twitter excels at both conversational and breaking news. With respect to conversational news, Twitter acts as a “public square” where ongoing conversations happen around long-lived news topics. When it comes to breaking news, Twitter is a place journalists post their earliest reports and seek immediate confirmation of reports coming from other news outlets.

Industry-Research

What should be made of the civic power of social media platforms?

April 5, 2016 Research Team—DCN

King’s College, London, has released a new study about the growing phenomenon of global tech giants, their increasing civic power, and what this means for democracies entitled “Tech giants and civic power.” Written by Martin Moore, director of the Centre for the Study of Media Communication and Power in the Policy Institute at King’s College, with a foreword by Director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University Emily Bell, the 92-page report offers a series of observations and provocations in an effort to stimulate debate about the role of the tech giants – notably Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and others – in democracy and civic life, as distinct from their impact on privacy and security, or their economic and financial status.

As Moore points out, “The growing civic status of these organisations would be less of an issue were it not for their size and reach. By 2015 more than half the online global population of three billion people were using one or more of these services (1.5 billion using Facebook alone). At the same time the growth in their use continued at a dizzying pace.”

While these tech giants argue that they are not the same as traditional media organizations and shouldn’t be viewed in the same way. Rather, they take the position that they are “pathways to enable people to reach content. And, as platforms, they argue, they should not be considered responsible in the same way that traditional media publisher would be.

And thus, he concludes that “The use of their power to command attention to promote their own views and services takes large information intermediaries beyond neutral platforms, and can give them a political power comparable to that of a broadcaster. The difference being that, in many democracies, broadcasters are constrained in what they can broadcast and in the political views they themselves can express.”

The aim of the study is:

To identify the civic powers that these organizations and their services are acquiring.
To encourage the corporations these organizations and their services are acquiring.
To encourage the corporations themselves to recognize the powers they now have and devise better ways to use them responsibly.

And, by identifying some of the potential dangers of digital dominance, the study is intended to help start to inform the inevitable government responses to these organizations – responses that will have repercussions far beyond the organizations themselves, and could be instrumental in the structure of future digital societies. The study then concludes with a plea for democratic publics and their governments to take the civic power of these giants more seriously, and to put more effort into considering how to respond to the questions they raise

Advertising | Industry-Research | Video

Understanding youth’s video diet so you can satisfy their cravings

April 1, 2016 Research Team—DCN

Defy Media undertook a study to explore the complete “video diet” for today’s youth. They sought to understand the role of video in youths’ everyday lives, how each source—be it digital, terrestrial, paid, free, new or old—is used, and if advertising impacts use of any particular sources.

For this research , Defy Media partnered with Hunter Qualitative and Kelton Global. From greater Chicago, Raleigh-Durham, and Seattle, they selected 54 youth ages 13-24 years to complete 14-day journals chronicling the videos watched daily and supplying opinions and information on their habits. They then interviewed 27 of these youth in-person—eighteen ages 13-17 in “buddy pairs” and nine ages 19-24 individually. Finally, they followed with an online survey of 1,300 youth ages 13-24 representative of the U.S. population by age, gender, ethnicity/race, and parental education.

The resulting Defy Media Acumen Report “Youth Video Diet” found that video is not just about entertainment. Given its broad content offerings and on-the-go accessibility, video satisfies needs beyond amusement and passing the time. Video is educational, stress-relieving, and helps keeps youth connected.

Unsurprisingly, Defy Media’s research confirms that that youth don’t like watching ads any more than adults do. However, they did discover that “not all advertising leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.”

The report looks at several areas of digital video consumption patterns among young people including:

The most popular channels for video consumption: YouTube and Netflix top the list.
Social video consumption habits, with digital celebs dominating social video viewing.
What times dominate video consumption, as well as time spent on free and fee content.
Reasons youth watch videos—from offsetting boredom to how-too tips and mood lifting.
Youth’s perception of advertising and the need to pay for video: They don’t like it, but there are strategies that can help make it palatable.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Location moving up in marketing priorities

March 29, 2016 Research Team—DCN

Location is fast becoming one of the most powerful means for identifying and delivering on consumers’ real-time intent. It also offers a means to create purchase incentives and foster engagement and provides the ability to tap into precise moments of decision making.

Forbes Insights, in association with xAd, has released a new paper entitled Location: A Strategic Marketing Imperative. For this paper, Forbes Insights conducted interviews with some of today’s leading brands on how they’ve effectively leveraged location.

According to the paper, location-based mobile advertising has become more than simply a nice-to-have tactic in a marketer’s toolkit. Rather, it’s fast becoming a strategic imperative in today’s data-driven, highly competitive landscape. Given mobile ubiquity, and the impact of apps such as Uber, Tinder and Yelp on consumer’s expectation of personalized, relevant experiences, location-based services promise to enhance consumer experiences, whether purchasing products online or browsing the aisles of a brick-and-mortar retailer.

Forbes Insights looked at how top brands are using location-based marketing to support four key developments in consumers’ buying journey. These include:

Keeping Pace With Consumer Expectations
Bridging the Gap Between Online and Offline
Reinventing the In-Store Experience
Beyond Search and Social—A New Category

Forbes Insights found that, as these trends develop, location-driven campaigns promise to close the gap between online and offline worlds; browsing and buying; expectation and delivery.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Revenue

6 Lessons learned from header bidding

March 22, 2016 Research Team—DCN

Header bidding has been top of mind for premium publishers over the past year. Many publishers have adopted the marketing strategy and are seeing significant revenue gains, but due to a lack of education in the market, multiple publishers are unsure if it is right for their business, or they are implementing header bidding without the right expectations.

PubMatic has released new white paper titles, “Lessons Learned in Header Bidding,” that explores how publishers can experience success with header bidding—to drive advertising sales—and what role technology partners play in the pre- and post- implementation phases. We see header bidding as a key part in the ad decisioning evolution paving the way for new innovations, such as wrapper tags (see more in Lesson 6).

Here the five lessons learned, along with a bonus lesson in wrapper solutions.

Understand if Header Bidding is Right for You: Take a quick questionnaire to see if header bidding makes sense for your organization.
Heed Expectations and Understand the Potential Pitfalls: Before jumping into header bidding, learn about possible challenges that might arise and how to address those challenges.
Set Both Short- and Long-Term Expectations in Header Bidding: Learn about typical short- and long-term goals in header bidding and define what success means to your organization.
Define Who is in Charge and of What: Learn about the roles and responsibilities needed to effectively implement header bidding, on both the publisher and technology partner side.
Test, Test… and Then Test Again: Learn how to optimize header bidding setups to achieve success. In header bidding, testing is everything.
Prepare for Wrapper Solutions in 2016: Thinking about what’s next, all publishers (even those without header bidding) should understand what wrapper tag solutions mean to the digital advertising industry.

Industry-Research

US and global consumer spending on media content and technology continues to rise

March 11, 2016 Research Team—DCN

US and global consumer spending on media content and technology rose 6.8% in 2015, decelerating from 7.8% growth in 2014, as spending on legacy internet media—including PCs, broadband and pure-play online content—slowed markedly due to the worldwide shift to mobile media, content, access and smart tech, according to the new Global Consumer Spending on Media Content & Technology Forecast 2015-19, the third and final installment in PQ Media’s annual Global Media Intellicast Series.

PQ Media predicts that the global consumer media spend will post a CAGR of 7.0% in the 2015-19 period, reaching $2.01 trillion in 2019, nearly double the 2009 level. The US market is projected to expand at a 5.3% CAGR in the forecast period.

Other highlights from the forecast include:

The US remained the world’s largest overall consumer media content & tech market at $369.91 billion in 2014, and led in per-capita user spend with $1,160, although it ranked eighth in annual growth with 5.8%.
Digital media spending grew 12% to $863.2 billion, while traditional media spend inched up 2% to $571.5 billion in 2014.;
Average global consumer spend was $265.26 on media content & tech in 2014, with 60% dropped on digital media.
The US and global consumer media content and tech spend is expected to grow 7% to $1.5T in 2015.

PQ Media defines digital media and technology as including media content obtained through the Internet on wireless and digital devices, including video-game consoles, over-the-top (OTT), pay TV services, and satellite radio receivers.

Traditional media content and technology spending is defined by content and technology developed originally in analog formats.

Per Capita Spending on Media Content & Tech by Global

Industry-Research

How newspapers can capitalize on consumers’ content demand(s)

March 8, 2016 Research Team—DCN

According to the cliché: Content is king. Yet while an ever-expanding cadre of “content companies” such as Netflix, Spotify, and Apple are profiting mightily, newspapers continue to struggle. MECLABS Institute surveyed 900 people who earn at least $40,000 and spend at least three hours a week consuming print or digital news to explore what newspaper publishers can do to transform their customer experience in order to profit from consumers’ growing hunger for digital content experiences. Using the results of this survey as well as expert interviews, the report provides insights in how to increase the probability of converting the many readers who are open, but have not yet committed, to digital subscription news products.

The report, Newspaper Paywalls and Digital Subscriptions, is part of of the MECLABS Institute Executive Series. The Newspaper Paywalls and Digital Subscriptions report offers four key insights, which are explored in depth:

Key insight #1: Because digital subscriptions lack a perceived product-level value proposition, consumers have commoditized digital news content

The reason most readers do not purchase a digital news subscription is not because they do not understand the value of your content, but rather, they do not yet understand the value of a digital subscription.

Key insight #2: News consumers have been conditioned to expect a seamless digital experience

Poor user interface design and user experience may be negatively impacting the perception of your digital subscription.

Key insight #3: Exclusive content is the primary motivation for subscribers

Subscribers are motivated most by exclusive content—like arts/culture and local news—rather than other kinds of news topics.

Key insight #4: Customers are waiting for you to ask them to engage

Customers are more willing to engage with newspapers than you might think