Articles by: "Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift"

Mark Glaser is the founder and publisher of MediaShift. He is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review, and was an executive editor at PBS IdeaLab. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.

Featured Post | Perspectives

Are the NewFronts still worth it for publishers?

May 9, 2019 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

Certain terms like “new wave,” “new school,” and “online video” start to lose their meaning over time. The same seems to be true of the “NewFronts,” now in their eighth year in New York. The showcase for traditional and digital native publishers selling their video offerings to marketers has been split up into twice-per-year affairs (with a fall showcase in L.A.). Just 16 publishers presented in New York this year, down from 36 in 2017.

The idea of the TV Upfronts and NewFronts are to dazzle advertisers and get them to commit a chunk of their advertising to the publisher, though there is less scarcity online. Have the NewFronts made progress over the years? Most definitely. Has that progress meant there is no need for them anymore? Not quite.

What’s most interesting at this year’s shindig is that traditional players are pushing new acquisitions and initiatives, while the digital natives are trying to sound more traditional with ongoing series. This points to a convergence of purposes and the fact that online video, OTT, streaming video et al have commingled to the point of absurdity. This leaves marketers grasping at just what they’re buying and how they can track and optimize it all. And yet there’s still a place for publishers at the NewFronts as a showcase for offerings and to generate much needed buzz.

Platform domination

The biggest challenge for publishers, as always, is trying to stand out from dominant players like Hulu, YouTube, and even Twitter. And the dominant players just get more dominant. YouTube casts an immense shadow as the largest ad-supported video platform online. But, as Digiday’s Sahil Patel points out, YouTube users are spending 200 million hours per day watching YouTube on a TV, up from 100 million hours last October.

And Hulu hit $1.5 billion in ad revenues last year by offering a mix of legacy TV programming and original shows. During its NewFronts presentation, Hulu execs pointed out that they have 26 million paid subscribers, and a much younger audience than cable, at 31 years old vs. 53 years old. Plus, 80% of Hulu viewing takes place on a TV set, up 75% from last year. (And Hulu even sponsored Digiday’s coverage of the NewFronts.)

This puts many publishers in a bind because they have to sell their uniqueness to advertisers while also cutting deals with the platforms to expand reach.

“Mass reach is still a thing,” Mediahub’s Michael Piner told Digiday. “And there are certain partners that are being prioritized because they can achieve the mass reach of TV.”

What do publishers get?

So what do publishers get for their money and trouble at the NewFronts now? Well, the decrease in presenters means they do get more attention from attendees. And at least one publisher, Studio71, was touting its upfront ad sales. The company has presented at the NewFronts from 2016 through this year’s edition. Studio71’s CEO Reza Izad told Digiday that 85% of their revenues each year came from upfront commitments. They boast 100 million unique viewers per month on YouTube and vet each piece of content on the network.

Still, many publishers such as Group Nine and Refinery29 decided to forgo the NewFronts for a private tour to increase intimacy – and likely save costs. The increased competition for digital video ads is partly to blame, and people are also paying more for services such as Netflix and HBO that don’t serve ads at all.

But it’s still hard to ignore the growth of digital video, especially if you sell video advertising in entertainment. The IAB’s Video Ad Spend Report surveyed marketers and found they would be spending $18 million on average this year on digital video ads, up 25% from last year, with the Media/Entertainment vertical up a whopping 75%. (And yes, that means studios are buying more ads on other media.)

Switching places

Meanwhile, notable presentations from Meredith and Conde Nast discussed new shows for their OTT services, and Meredith is also distributing them through its local TV stations. And as OTT moves into broadcast, cable network Viacom was showcasing content on its newly acquired PlutoTV OTT service.

“Viacom is embracing digital inventory, and at the same time we see Condé and Meredith pushing themselves into the OTT universe,” Wavemaker’s Noah Mallin told AdAge. “They are starting to resemble each other more and more.”

As AdAge’s Jeanine Poggi’s so astutely points out, this is the year when the NewFronts actually looked a lot like the regular TV Upfronts, with the themes of brand safety, original programming, and scale. “This year more publishers spoke about renewing existing shows, creating long-form content akin to TV and positioning themselves as the new ‘primetime,'” Poggi wrote.

So where does that leave publishers and the IAB? Perhaps the time has come to ditch the NewFronts and merge them into the regular TV Upfronts. More importantly, publishers need to calculate carefully the benefits of a flashy program on stage at the NewFronts, and whether that still beats a private tour or other marketing outreach. Ultimately, it will take a new round of upstart video-centric publishers who want to make a splash to inject new energy into the NewFronts.

Featured Post | Perspectives

Breaking up the tech giants? How that could affect publishers

March 21, 2019 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

The drip, drip, drip of ideas to regulate tech companies continues. And when it comes to privacy, even the tech giants realize that regulation is coming and want to help craft those regulations. But 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren went even further, calling for the breakup of large technology companies with her Medium manifesto and a #BreakUpBigTech hashtag.

Her idea in a nutshell is to make any company with a marketplace of goods or ideas and $25 billion in revenues into a “platform utility” that cannot participate in the marketplace with its own goods or services. “Amazon Marketplace, Google’s ad exchange, and Google Search would be platform utilities under this law,” Warren writes. “Therefore, Amazon Marketplace and Basics, and Google’s ad exchange and businesses on the exchange would be split apart. Google Search would have to be spun off as well.”

That means Facebook would lose Instagram and WhatsApp and Google would lose Waze, Nest, and DoubleClick.

Whoa. Does that mean that suddenly publishers get their online ad mojo back? Not exactly. Those independent companies would still wield outsize power, and this campaign manifesto has a loooong way to go before it becomes real-life public policy and legislation.

Breaking Up is Easy to Love

But before we come down to Earth and reality, let’s look at just how attractive this #BreakUpBigTech idea is to so many people in media and public policy – and how it even crosses ideological boundaries. After Warren released her plan, she gave a keynote at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin on March 9. To say it was a phenomenon would be an understatement. The SXSW conference had already been trending against big tech, and Warren’s proposal and keynote lit the match for even more heated discussion and argument.

She won converts such as high-profile investor Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor who slammed the company in his new book, “Zucked.” At SXSW, he said that, “I think Warren’s proposal is brilliant. There’s a behavior that’s rampant in the industry of people owning a marketplace and then participating in it. They do so in the detriment of competitors.”

And it wasn’t just the Democrats and those on the left cheering on Warren’s proposal; she also gained some strange bedfellows on the right who have been suspicious of the growing power of tech giants. Their arguments have not typically been about economics but about how social platforms are biased against speech from conservatives.

Even Ted Cruz supported Warren’s idea on Twitter: “First time I’ve ever retweeted @ewarren But she’s right — Big Tech has way too much power to silence Free Speech. They shouldn’t be censoring Warren, or anybody else. A serious threat to our democracy.” He was referring to Facebook actually taking down some ads Warren ran on the platform to promote her #BreakUpBigTech ideas – though they blamed the takedown on her use of Facebook’s logo.

Criticism from Tech and Media Pundits

But of course: the devil is in the details. Warren’s broad plan was an easy target for tech pundits like Ben Thompson to point out its shortcomings. Thompson notes that “the reason why all of these companies have escaped antitrust scrutiny to date in the U.S. [is that] here antitrust law rests on the consumer welfare standard, and the entire reason why these companies succeed is because they deliver consumer benefit.” In other words, they remain free services that people largely like, and it’s not realistic that Apple would sell you an iPhone without apps or an App Store.

From the right, the National Review’s Rich Lowry says Warren has hit on the perfect catnip for liberals and conservatives by calling for the breakup of tech giants, but her prescriptions wouldn’t work and are too draconian. As Lowry wrote for Politico, “Their business practices aren’t above scrutiny. But any real offenses should be addressed with fixes addressing specific conduct, rather than with a massive politically imposed reorganization across the industry.”

And in the media and journalism world, an anti-trust breakup wouldn’t really move the needle for smaller local publishers who are dealing with much more intractable issues. As Free Press director Tim Karr told Sludge, “Even under a scenario where the largest online platforms are broken into their component parts, digital advertising will remain under the control of non-news media; newsrooms will continue to be shuttered and reporters laid off.”

While Warren’s proposal is a great thought experiment that builds more momentum to regulate tech giants, it is mostly a half-baked proposal that needs more details and a better way to support independent media outlets. Yes, it’s nice to dream about a more level playing field when it comes to online ads, privacy and trusted information, but we also have to realize that tech giants have armies of lobbyists and change will happen incrementally.

How publishers can win the voice war between Amazon and Google

January 17, 2019 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

“Alexa: What’s the news today?” That depends. If a consumer wants to get news from a voice assistant such as Amazon Echo or Google Home (or the hundreds of devices that support them), the process isn’t always easy and the results are inconsistent. People have complained that the news reports on voice assistants are too long, or don’t answer questions accurately, according to a recent Reuters Institute report.

But the devices aren’t going away. In fact, they are multiplying like rabbits, if last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was any indication, with more voice assistants in U.S. households and more of them built into other “smart home” devices such as refrigerators, mirrors, home security and yes, “Intelligent Toilets” (“Alexa, flush!”). So: What should publishers do? Experiments so far have been mixed, but that doesn’t mean giving up is an option. Instead, publishers need to fight to get better deals for content. They also need consider new types of business models such as product placement, as Meredith is doing.

Amazon Alexa vs. Google Assistant, Part 2

If you want to understand how big the voice wars have become between Amazon and Google, you just need to go to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. Last year, Google was the upstart taking on the incumbent at Amazon. This year’s battle was more evenly matched. Google plastered ads all over town and even had an “It’s a Small World” Disney-style ride as part of its booth. Amazon opted for a lower key approach with “Works with Alexa” tags on all the associated products.

Amazon touted selling more than 100 million Alexa devices. But Google shot back by saying it had 1 billion devices with Google Assistant – though that includes all Android phones sold with it built-in. While CNET had its writers decide who won the Amazon vs. Google voice war at CES (Google got the nod), the real question is how can publishers use this battle to their advantage? Will the tech companies ever give more credence to news and information on voice assistants, and what will that value be in the long run?

What People Want

Before we answer, we first need to understand how people are using voice assistants in their everyday life. People typically use these omnipresent devices in the morning and evening. And people mostly want them to play music, answer general questions and get weather updates. In an analysis of the Reuters Institute report, Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen noted that people love using smart speakers, but not really for news. Even though 42% said they used smart speakers for news, only 1% said news was the most important feature for them.

Users also have a lot of complaints about news on voice assistants: The updates were too long, they aren’t updated enough, many use synthesized voices to read the news, and there’s no way to skip or select stories. Even worse, when people asked specific questions related to news stories, the answers were inaccurate and inconsistent.

While people do use the devices to stream live radio (19% of all NPR online listening happens on smart speakers), they aren’t keen to listen to longer form audio or podcasts. Maybe that’s just a factor of podcasts being an on-the-go commuting format, while smart speakers are in the home.

What Publishers Can Do

In the wake of Reuters Institute study and many experiments by publishers, how can they better reach consumers via voice assistants? As with all new formats, publishers must understand how people use the devices and tailor their content appropriately. The New York Times announced a new briefing for Alexa-enabled devices based on “The Daily” podcast. It is in a much shorter format for smart speakers and they are promoting it through the print edition of the paper. The Times has developed a weekly News Quiz taking into account the popularity of trivia quizzes on the devices.

As The Verge’s James Vincent pointed out: “Audio content won’t necessarily drive subscriptions, but it could be a relatively easy way for the paper to reach millions of new listeners before — maybe — turning them into readers.”

Meanwhile, Meredith announced its new Innovation Group at CES. The new division includes a Voice Network that brings together all of the company’s audio, voice, and podcast products under one umbrella.

Meredith has experimented with “content-to-audio” where someone reads story content. However, what’s most interesting is their initiative to create skills or actions for smart speakers. One example would be using Alexa to open an AllRecipes skill with an option to order ingredients for a recipe. “The skills are actually the best place to do the product placement and direct links to commerce,” Meredith’s head of innovation Corbin de Rubertis told Folio.

Publishers are still feeling their way to what works best on voice assistants. (And the payoff is difficult to envision right now.) However, growing use of these proliferating devices means that publishers can’t dismiss them. Instead, they need to start with shorter briefings, try out some new interactive skills, and as the platforms become more mature. And perhaps they can even get compensation for offering the most up-to-date relevant answers for users.

Featured Post | Perspectives

Top 7 media trends in 2019

December 20, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

As the year comes to a close, we always get the reflexive compulsion to look back and take stock of what happened and consider what’s to come. And this year truly brought a sea change on a number of fronts in digital publishing. Facebook and other tech giants stumbled mightily from one PR disaster to the next, culminating in top executives literally telling Congress that they expect to be regulated. Who would have imagined that?

And the old, sad chase for eyeballs might finally be laid to rest, as digital pubs pivoted away from video, away from chasing mass audiences via social media, and toward reader revenues and putting the audience first. And while the digital ad duopoly of Facebook and Google face headwinds of regulation and a public backlash, Amazon is expected to make it a “triopoly” as their ad growth is skyrocketing.

Here are the media trends that made the biggest difference in 2018 and what to watch out for in 2019:

1. Facebook and Tech Giants Lose the Plot

It’s a lot easier to talk about what’s wrong at Facebook than what’s going right, and that goes doubly for its relationship with publishers. At the beginning of the year, Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm to downplay news pages and then saw its own usage flatten over the year. Things got worse when Facebook forced publishers to go through a verification process just to boost posts with political stories. Even at South by Southwest, a techie’s fevered dream, the “techlash” was in full effect with entire panels devoted to attacking Facebook.

Even worse for the technology behemoths was the continued pushback from regulators in the EU and U.S., including a rare bipartisan rebuke against executives. While Republicans and Trump have alleged anti-conservative bias at Facebook and Google, many others believe they need stronger regulation around privacy, especially after so many scandals related to politics (see Cambridge Analytica) and data leaks (see Facebook’s not-so-private photos). Expect more backlash and more regulation to come.

2. Amazon Joins the ‘Triopoly’

And if you’ve grown tired of the exploits of the digital ad duopoly, rest assured you have a new tech giant to worry about: Amazon. The Seattle behemoth has quietly slid into third place among digital ad purveyors and is set to grow a whopping 400%+ per year to grab 15% of U.S. market share by 2020, according to eMarketer. And the signs have been growing about Amazon’s dominance all year, from the time they beefed up agency and marketer support to the point where they had a scandal over sponsored wedding registry listings. Let’s celebrate another player to give Facebook and Google a run for their money – as long as they play fair.

3. Media Mergers Trump Trump

He tried so hard to penalize CNN. But in the end President Trump failed to block the AT&T purchase of Time Warner, or force a spin-off of CNN (which has been on a money-making tear). Instead, the mega-merger was approved by the courts, and we also saw Fox offload most of its assets, including the 21st Century Fox studio, to Disney, while Comcast skulked away in defeat.

And T-Mobile and Sprint passed their final hurdles to merge in 2019, leading to only three major mobile services in the U.S. They promise to cut prices for consumers, but less competition usually results in higher prices overall. How will all these huge mergers play out in 2019? For the media companies, it’s all about taking on the disruptive tech giants moving into entertainment and streaming. For the wireless carriers, it’s about moving toward speedier 5G to give us faster streaming (at higher prices). All those trends will come together as Disney unleashes its new streaming service next year.

4. The Digital Media Reckoning Continues

This year just reinforced growing trends in 2017, that will likely continue into 2019: Digital-only publishers cannot rely heavily on advertising or even sponsored content. Without diversified revenue streams, and especially reader revenues (subscriptions, memberships, etc.), most of these former darlings will end up hallowed out, like what happened to Mashable before and Mic recently. Even BuzzFeed had to move toward an NPR model, asking for $5-a-month memberships to support its news operation – complete with the cliché tote bag reward.

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti is calling for more consolidation. But most importantly, publishers need to put the audience first and take a user-centric view of sustainability. As Politico’s Tyler Fisher wrote in Nieman Lab:

“With a business model focused on reader revenue, the entire company can set its sights on making the best journalism product possible for the reader … The smartest of smart newsrooms will take one more step in their path to sustainability: They will become a trusted institution in their communities by respecting their users’ time, intelligence, and privacy.”

5. Snapchat, Flipboard, Pinterest Rise as Facebook Falls

As Facebook took a tumble this year, others stepped into the void and took advantage of the social giant’s missteps. The most ironic beneficiary was Snapchat, which had taken a beating from Facebook with copied features (ahem: Stories). The company stepped up its game by letting marketers target publishers in Discover and letting publishers use non-exclusive content in Discover. Even old stalwarts like Flipboard and Pinterest saw their stock rise as Facebook fell to earth. Why? As Facebook dealt with misinformation and algorithm angst, Flipboard focused on human curation and Pinterest on lifestyle. Of course, Facebook does own Instagram and WhatsApp, which continue to grow and thrive outside of the parent company’s shadow.

6. Linear TV Under More Pressure from Streaming

As noted above under the “Digital Media Reckoning,” the move toward reader revenues means more ad-free environments, and streaming giants like Netflix and HBO are leading the way. Even Facebook did some research on whether a subscriber-supported ad-free social network would pay off. Meanwhile, cable nets such as AMC Network saw their advertising revenues drop, while distribution revenues soared as they sold content to streaming networks and diversified.

Where does that leave our old friends, the purveyors of linear TV? They’ve had to up their game and innovate with “addressable TV ads” that target people better than mass market TV ads, which are on the wane. And AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner has given the telecom giant a chance to broaden its offerings with more content and data. Linear TV will continue to find ways to battle – and emulate – the streaming upstarts.

7. Podcasts Remain Strong After Some Contraction

Podcasts continue to mature and large publishers such as New York Times and Washington Post are pushing deeper into the audio-on-demand medium. There were some hiccups in 2018, with Panoply dropping its podcasts to focus on being a platform and infrastructure for podcasts. And BuzzFeed also closed its in-house podcast production outfit to focus on long-form video. But there were also signs of continued expansion, as Malcolm Gladwell and Slate’s Jacob Weisberg launched a new podcast company called Pushkin Industries, and iHeartRadio bought podcast producer Stuff Media (which makes “How Stuff Works” and more).

The reality is that as metrics improve, including the NPR-led open source RAD technology, more marketers will jump in and find that podcast listeners can be a very loyal bunch.

Conclusion

With the tech platforms hitting rough spots, this has been a year of retrenchment for publishers, who are taking stock of what’s really working and what’s leading them astray. The days of shiny new objects like VR and blockchain seem to be on the wane, and a laser focus on the user and serving the public are front and center. As VC funding becomes scarce, media startups need to be more practical and strategic. The chase for eyeballs is coming to a close, and now we can think about what’s real for our businesses – and for our communities.

Advertising | Featured Post | Perspectives

With ad dominance comes great responsibility for Amazon

December 5, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

Move over duopoly because the time has come to furrow your brow about the “triopoly.” Many marketers and publishers have grown tired of the dominance of Google and Facebook in the digital advertising space. Now they can add Amazon to the list of dominant tech rivals. eMarketer now predicts that Amazon will hit $4.6 billion in U.S. ad revenues for a 4.15% share of the digital ad pie this year. And its growth rate of 400%+ per year will get it to a 15% share by 2020.

You’ve probably notices that Amazon has sponsored search ads all over its e-commerce pages, enticing consumers to buy relevant products. However, it’s offering much more than that, from video ads to traditional TV ads to ads on its cardboard delivery boxes. The only problem is that it competes with its own advertisers by selling Amazon brand products alongside merchant listings. And more recently it went too far by promoting sponsored items in baby registries.

In short, if Amazon is going to be the third wheel on the triopoly tricycle, it can expect withering scrutiny from the media, marketers and eventually regulators if it doesn’t play fair.

So many ways to dominate

How did Amazon sneak up on us to become such a dominant ad player? By boring us to death. Those little sponsored links on product pages? How quaint. A sponsored related product, or a banner ad on a Kindle? Yawn. This is the same way that Amazon itself has dominated the world thanks to… cloud servers for your website or business. The engine for Amazon’s profits has long been Amazon Web Services, not its e-commerce business.

This sleight of hand works just as well in the ad business. While you were considering how they would deliver your packages via drones, Amazon was bulking up on advertising through its self-service system, placing sponsored items all over its pages. And then finally, in the sleepy days after Thanksgiving, while the country still was drowsy from tryptophan, the Wall Street Journal trumpeted that Amazon had arrived, “with little fanfare” as a new advertising behemoth.

Helpfully, the WSJ pointed out all the ways that Amazon was going to dominate in advertising. According to a Cowen & Co. survey of ad buyers, 29% buy sponsored product ads, 21% buy video ads on IMDB and Amazon.com, and 13% buy good old display ads. But there’s been more, with “The Minions” movie buying ads on delivery boxes, and a yogurt company paying to include instructions in Amazon Pantry boxes on how kids could build rockets and airplanes out of those boxes. Cute.

And the content play too

While those sponsored links followed the time-honored tradition of Google becoming a dominant ad player with its own AdWords offering way back when, Amazon is ready to spread its wings too. The video ads referenced above could explode if and when Amazon launches a rumored free ad-supproted Free Dive video service for users of its Fire TV devices.

While there is no advertising on its Prime Video service, Amazon has become a major player in content by spending $5 billion this year, according to a JPMorgan analyst. That’s less than the $8 billion that Netflix shelled out, but more than typical TV broadcast networks. And Amazon does serve TV-style ads into its streams of NFL Thursday Night Football games – as well as Premier League soccer games.

And that might grow as well if Amazon is successful in its bid for the 22 regional sports networks that Disney is selling as part of its buyout of 21^st Century Fox properties. That type of marquee purchase (which includes the New York Yankees’ YES Network) might finally open the floodgates for tech giants to get into sports programming and break the final blockade for cord-cutters.

Missteps and conflicts

But what might stall Amazon in that pursuit is what might stall the company in its overall ad ambitions: creating too many conflicts of interest. Would Disney really want to sell the regional sports networks to Amazon, a company that is trying to eat its lunch in streaming content? And how many retailers will continue to feature their content on Amazon, and pay Amazon for sponsored slots, when they are being squeezed out by Amazon’s own retail brands?

You can hear the frustration in the story of Jason Boyce, CEO of Dazadi, a home recreation retailer that has to pay for placement on Amazon. “They get all the prime real estate [for their brands]. It’s unfair,” Boyce told the Journal, but “we have to be on Amazon.”

Even more unfair are the sponsored links Amazon runs in private baby registries, with a tiny gray “sponsored” tag. The sponsored items were not chosen by the parents-to-be and led some confused friends and family to buy those items, upsetting everyone involved. After a Wall Street Journal story about the practice, Amazon said it was phasing them out.

And that’s where the rubber meets the road for Amazon as it moves stronger into the digital ad business, with one of its HQ2 offices right outside Manhattan, the epicenter of advertising. If it wants the power of being a digital content and ad player, it will have to come clean on its ambitions and compete fairly or users will tune out. And let’s face it: If the U.S. Congress, FTC and other regulators won’t do their job to keep the tech giant in line, we can expect the EU to come down harder.

Featured Post | Perspectives

Why the time is right to shine a light on ‘dark social’

November 1, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

One of the least understood portions of the web is becoming one of the most important: dark social. And as the calendar turns from Halloween to the Day of the Dead, it’s time to shine a light into the darkest corner of the web to understand how people are sharing content via messaging services, email, texting, and other platforms that don’t show up easily on analytics programs.

For a long time, referrals that showed up on Google Analytics as “direct” were a mystery. Could that many people really be typing in long URLs into their browsers? No. Instead, they were cutting and pasting URLs into an email to friends, or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. Those referrals became known as “dark social” because of our ignorance about their true source. And with public sharing on Facebook and other platforms down, dark social is only growing more important, with an estimated 84% of all sharing, according to RadiumOne.

But there are ways to better gauge where those dark social referrals are coming from. There are also ways to reach people on messaging apps, through chatbots and targeted promotions. Even more important, reaching people on dark social requires a new way of thinking of them in their “tribes” or personal space where gauging sentiment might be more important than marketing a product directly.

The Rise of Dark Social

They are like two ships passing in the night: the rise of messaging apps and the decline of public social sharing. Just looking at Facebook user statistics gives us a stark picture:

From November 2014 to September 2017, Facebook Messenger users went from 500 million to 1.3 billion.
From December 2013 to December 2017, WhatsApp users went from 400 million to 1.5 billion.
From Q1 2017 to Q2 2018, Facebook interactions went from 29.1 billion to 12.8 billion.

Yes, 12.8 billion is still a lot of interactions, but you the trend is clear. People are losing trust in social networks and flocking to private messenging services.

As Arik Hanson at Business2Community noted, even Facebook’s Instagram is thinking beyond the public feed. “Let’s look at the direction they’re going: Investing heavily in Stories and direct messaging (both “private” for the most part, when it comes to engagement). Many of the new features added recently revolve around these two areas: poll sticker, slider stickers, polling via DM. These are the areas Instagram is focused on – not the public-facing feed as much.”

How to Get a Handle on Dark Social

There are ways to bring dark social into the light. While vanilla Google Analytics shows dark social traffic, there are ways to segment pages to see which ones are getting the most action from dark social. (99Signals has a good primer on that here.)

And there are always advanced tools like GetSocial and AddThis that can help identify which pages are getting hit the most from dark social. They also show where some of those sources are.

However, tracking down dark social the same as regular social referrals might not be the point. As Alpha Group’s David Cohn points out on MediaPost, “part of dark social’s appeal is its ‘off the grid’ nature, [so] we wouldn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater by looking for too much data and meaning among the noise.”

Taking Action to Reach Users

So how does a marketer or publisher get a return on investment by reaching folks on messaging apps, texting or emails? Cohn says the key is to figure out basic demographics on the platforms and the groups who congregate there. He uses the example of a foodie group in New York that could start to send more traffic to food publications and restaurants. “A marketer or publisher wouldn’t know exactly whom to target, but they would have a place,” he wrote. “And they would recognize this community as a gathering place for worthy targets.”

One example from India shows how ROI can grow when targeting dark social. When streaming service iflix wanted to increase its users, it found that its most loyal customers had one important thing in common: They liked sharing viral content and celebrity gossip on messaging apps. According to Business Today’s Sonal Khetarpal, iflx targeted messaging apps users. They converted 1 million more paid subscribers in six months. And the cost of acquisition dropped from $25 to $3 per person.

While it’s true marketers are tiring of social media planning that moves from one platform to the next each season, they’re going to have to get serious about messaging apps and dark social. More folks will have to take chatbots seriously, or just better targeting to users of messaging apps. Otherwise, they will miss a massive, growing opportunity as more people become disaffected with public social media spaces.

Advertising | Featured Post | Perspectives

5 big takeaways from the NewFronts West

October 18, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

The Upfronts in New York were always about making big advertising deals before the TV season kicked off. Then came the NewFronts, which focused on digital offerings and innovative formats. Now comes the NewFronts West, an extension of the NewFronts that took place in Los Angeles this month, and which have evolved even further from the original Upfronts. Gone was the talk of making big ad deals. In its place was discussion of new platforms, new formats, and new ways to reach younger audiences with influencers, podcasts and, of course, online video.

In short, the personality and networking surrounding this event fits in perfectly with the ethos of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, the major West Coast hubs that have insinuated themselves into the ad market like never before.

Here are five big takeaways from the inaugural edition of the NewFronts West:

1. Big Ad Deals Take a Back Seat to Relationships and Emerging Models

Closing major ad sales was hardly the focus at this event. One reason is was that it took place outside of the traditional media buying season. Also, because there was a mix of digital-only and legacy media publishers, it offered a chance for all parties to stand out with new types of offerings.

In fact, it was the kind of space where people new to the game could come in and introduce themselves. And it was a chance to think less about traditional models of advertising and more about emerging prototypes that are just beginning to gain traction, like branded content, custom sponsorships and opportunities for publishers within Instagram’s IGTV. These avenues are especially interesting to advertising execs as ad-free platforms take hold and audiences become more and more fragmented.

Even the New York Times, one of the more well-known heavy hitters at the event, saw the NewFronts West less as a space to close deals and more as a brand marketing opportunity to talk to people about how the Times works with advertisers. In this way, the event was much more future-focused. The hope, it seemed, was that building relationships now would reap benefits down the line.

2. Podcasts Are Not Slowing Down

Podcasts have exploded over the past few years, with nearly every publisher producing some or at least considering them. But after BuzzFeed and Slate’s Panoply cut back on offerings, it was easy to think that perhaps the hype had gone too far. Judging by the NewFronts West, those cutbacks might only be a hiccup.

The Los Angeles Times, Gallery Media Group and Ellen Digital all announced new podcasts. The L.A Times announced new podcasts about a drag racer, “Big Willie,” and a reporter’s search for a hospital patient called “Room 20,” following in the footsteps of its popular “Dirty John” podcast co-produced with Wondery.

Podcasts have always been favored for the intimacy that voice offers, but a compelling host is also arguably the best brand influencer for an audience. With 92% of consumers leaning toward product recommendations, according to a FameBit presentation, podcasts are a more personal way for hosts to promote products.

3. Vice Media’s Brand Safety Splash

While there have been a lot of efforts around promoting brand safety for advertisers, Vice Media made a big splash at the NewFronts West by countering widespread use of keyword blocking by pushing a more contextual approach from Oracle Data Cloud.

Vice executives released the findings of an 18-month long study abut keyword blacklists, which are meant to flag potentially objectionable content for advertisers. Turns out they place LGBTQIA-related keywords high on the list, including “gay,” “transgender” and “bisexual.” The study also found that the keywords “Asian,” “Muslim,” and “interracial” also appear at the top of these blacklists.

For a media brand that prides itself on diverse and inclusive programming (as its executives said), Vice’s announcement made a big statement. Vice then said it would be testing Oracle Data Cloud’s contextual brand safety solution, which offers deeper analysis and scores content based on its storytelling context. They also called for other publishers to follow suit. Now we’ll have to see if Oracle Data Cloud stands up to its reputation.

4. Advertisers Will Have to Work Harder to Reach Audiences

Part of why the West Coast’s approach to the NewFronts is so attractive is that advertisers have realized they have to work much harder to secure the attention of their audiences. Thus, they’re more willing to try new platforms and experiment with techniques that are still nascent like Alexa skills, brand-sponsored podcasts or e-commerce enabled videos. Platforms like Netflix and HBO have made commercial-free viewing experiences de rigeur, and readers on the internet can also easily block ads they don’t want to see.

What to do? Create advertising that consumers can’t not pay attention to is the answer. Advertising executives are anticipating that the traditional model of advertising will evaporate sooner rather than later. So, they’re trying to stay ahead of the curve for their own survival and efficiency. That’s a no-brainer. Having influencers on IGTV or other social platforms pitching products for them has become one way to do that.

5. Snapchat Pushes More Scripted Shows

As Facebook has struggled with battles against misinformation (and lost data), Snapchat continues to move forward with its own programming. At NewFronts West, the L.A.-based social app announced a host of new serialized, scripted shows for the launch of what it’s calling Snapchat Originals. It feels a little bit like Netflix’s foray into originals, except the projects will be shot in a vertical format and feature six-second unstoppable ads. It’s definitely a big endeavor, and one to watch – even if it means that other tech giants may want to, ahem, copy this strategy as well (looking at you, IGTV).

The bottom line coming out of this year’s NewFronts West is that it’s much more important to be strategic about new advertising models and partnerships than it is to partner with name-brand entities and existing prototypes. While tried-and-true advertising formats may sound good in theory and work for the time being, they may not be viable in the future. This event gave publishers a chance to zero in on those emerging ideas. If an event like the NewFronts West can continue to present itself as the more future-forward alternative to the East Coast’s spring NewFronts — and reiterate the fact that not all agencies and ad shops are in New York — it has the chance to develop an even larger following for future shows.

Featured Post | Perspectives

In search of a Goldilocks solution to online privacy

October 4, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

For years, large tech companies have spent millions on lobbying in Washington to make sure that they escape tough regulation. And until recently, they have been successful.

But today is a new day—one where tech companies are actually asking for regulation. How did we get here? Trust in tech giants is at an all-time low. And practices that include collecting untold amounts of data, even when consumers think they have privacy (see: Google Data Collection research); selling data to nefarious players (see: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica); and losing their data to hackers (see: Facebook’s newest data breach of data from 50 million users) has focused the attention of lawmakers in the EU and United States.

While past Senate hearings have at times felt like introductory classes to social media, with tech representatives slowly explaining how their platforms work, last week’s hearings on consumer privacy took on a different tone. “The question is no longer do we need a law for consumer privacy; the question is what shape these laws will take,” Committee Chairman Senator John Thune (R-SD) said in his opening remarks.

Now, the tech industry has come to realize it can’t escape regulation, and Facebook’s data breach has only heightened the stakes. But the question is how you make everyone happy with new regulation, with tech companies chafing at California’s strict new privacy laws and the European Union’s GDPR. How do we get to the “Goldilocks” policy? One that’s not too loose for consumers and not too strict for advertising and commerce. And how much will publishers need to change their ways to comply?

The Limits of Self-Regulation

In the past, as critics have expressed more and more concern over privacy — and investigations have revealed the ways in which nefarious players have mined user data for insidious targeting — tech giants have slowly policed themselves. Facebook, for example, announced in August that it would remove 5,000 options on its site that ask for “sensitive personal attributes” that enabled advertisers to hyper-target and limit their audiences.

Facebook says the move was more pro-active on its part and not in response to anything in particular, though the timing is suspicious after a lawsuit leveled by fair housing groups charging that advertising on Facebook could prevent minority communities from seeing housing ads. The routine is now becoming familiar: Scandal on a tech platform related to data. Platform tries to solve problem with new rules and its own regulation. Remember Cambridge Analytica? If not, look no further than what Facebook is currently facing with its latest data scandal.

But last week’s hearings revealed that representatives from major tech companies like Amazon, AT&T, Google and Twitter— along with the IAB, which had previously favored self-regulation — are warming up to the idea of some kind of federal legislation that, in theory, would mandate actions that might prevent future scandals. They said they’re in “widespread agreement” about that, which Google also acknowledged in a proposal for privacy regulation it published just a few days before the hearing.

Meanwhile, publishers have had to take action to comply with GDPR from Europe. And while they realize it’s a hassle, and privacy-policy pop-ups are annoying for users, there can be upsides. At a recent panel discussion at Marfeel in Spain, publishers noted that they now could take responsibility for first-party data they collect, and make sure it’s secure so that users are comfortable handing it over.

“So, I think if there’s any silver lining, it’s that publishers in general and the media companies in general are now actually taking responsibility to collect that first-party data instead of simply hoping that Google and Facebook would play nice and share some of that,” said Rithesh Menon, vice president of monetization and account management at Good Media Group.

Operating in the Shadow of Europe and California

While this may seem like a drastic change of stance among tech companies, remember they’ve already had to pivot to new privacy laws in Europe and California. In fact, the reasoning behind their embrace of federal privacy laws is that they’re trying to avoid legislation that’s as strict as Europe’s GDPR or California’s Consumer Privacy Act. That was obvious during the Senate hearing, where tech representatives called out both laws in urging Congress to “strike the right balance,” as Leonard Cali, AT&T’s senior vice president of global public policy, put it.

Representatives from Google, Apple, and Twitter, for instance, discouraged Congress from following in the footsteps of the GDPR by noting that small and medium-sized businesses might not have the financial backing to take on the compliance costs that would come with GDPR-like legislation. Amazon’s representative pointedly critiqued California’s privacy bill, arguing it doesn’t promote the best privacy practices.

Theoretically, if federal law is not as strict as state law, tech companies could bypass California’s strict regulations that might very well serve as a model for other states, because federal law would trump state regulations. But Congress also noted that strategy is not what it has in mind.

“Your holy grail is ‘preemption.’” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) said. “And we’re not going to replace a strong California law with a weaker federal one.”

Having a Seat at the Table

Having a seat at the table when it comes to drafting federal regulation is in the best interest of tech companies at this point. But the reality is that their huffs and puffs about how strict other legislative models are might not do them any good. With yet another Facebook data breach, consumers and lawmakers alike are fed up.

California’s new law requires that people can see what data companies have on them — which makes perfect sense from a consumer perspective. And the EU is still pushing social media platforms to adjust to a new way of operating under GDPR. European Commissioner Vera Jourova warned Facebook to change some of its terms and conditions by December, so the company can finally tell users how it utilizes their data for commercial purposes. It’s a wake-up call for tech companies that the EU is not going to budge — and that gives American lawmakers the chance to pile on with more conviction.

Now that the tech giants have asked for regulation (though of course of the weaker variety), it is up to Congress to take action. But first, they also have to listen to consumer groups — because a table of decision-makers that only includes one side would not look good. Senator John Thune said Congress is not in any rush toward a decision. But let’s hope one emerges before another data breach occurs.

5 crucial questions to ask before launching your podcasting business

September 20, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

Podcasting continues to grow by leaps and bounds, and it now seems like every media business has a line of podcasts. But should they? And if they want to enter the podcasting business, what should they keep in mind?

First let’s restate the obvious: Podcasting is hot, especially when it comes to advertising. The IAB anticipates that ad spending on podcasts will more than double 2017 revenues ($313.9 million) to $659 million by 2020. That’s still only a tiny proportion of the wider U.S. radio and television advertising market, but it’s growing at a much faster rate than the more mature mediums. The recent Podcast Upfront (the fourth annual edition) added even more buzz to the topic, with broadcasters and podcasters alike — including NPR, Univision, iHeartMedia, and Midroll Media — promoting their podcasts to advertisers.

But before you launch your podcast business, make sure you can answer these five key questions:

1. Do you have a unique topic with unique expertise to tell the story?

Now that it seems like everyone has a podcast these days, it’s important to differentiate yourself from the noise of the pack. That means strategizing, and amplifying, what makes you unique.

Part of what makes the New York Times’ “The Daily” so popular, for example, is that they are in the unique position of bringing their own reporters on air to tell the stories they know well — to offer a behind-the-scenes, human perspective. “Recode Decode” with Kara Swisher, no doubt, built an audience who appreciates Swisher’s deep expertise in reporting on the tech industry, and her sometimes off-the-cuff, very blunt style of interviewing. (Just have a listen to her interview with Mark Zuckerberg, if you need an example).

So what has come of these forays into podcasting? Well, look at “The Daily.” It now reportedly has 5 million unique listeners a month and can charge $290,000 a month for sponsorship. It is even putting up billboards on Hollywood Boulevard that are attracting the attention of passersby who are taking pictures in front of them. While it’s not clear yet how the billboard ads are contributing to more downloads, it’s obvious that “The Daily” is continuing to engage its listeners in the physical world as much as through audio speakers.

2. Do you have sponsors in mind beyond vanilla ad networks?

Programmatic targeted advertising on podcasts is not yet mainstream. So, it’s not uncommon to hear advertisers catering to a podcast’s whole audience, rather than audience segments. But that doesn’t mean you have to go to the same advertisers as everyone else. Squarespace and Casper Mattresses, for instance, have become such default advertisers on podcasts. Having podcast-centric advertisers can have the side effect of making the podcast itself seem less unique from the pack. As with any medium, good advertising comes from knowing your audience well. And while podcasts do tend to attract younger, more affluent and educated listeners than other mediums, this audience is certainly not homogenous.

Take, for example, a recent collaboration between Sony and Midroll. They created a custom “minisode” of the popular podcast “My Favorite Murderer,” in which the hosts talked about the movie “Searching” and featured listeners’ examples of people who hide secrets (a theme of the movie). It was — as the hosts put it directly to their audiences — a “big long commercial” for the movie “Searching.” This kind of direct sponsorship of an entire episode can avoid ad-skipping on podcasts and keeps listeners engaged. And it’s catered directly to the kind of audience the podcast would attract anyway.

Another good example is “Shattered: White Boy Rick,” a podcast from WDIV local TV in Detroit, which includes ads for the new movie, with comments from stars such as Matthew McConaughey. I’ve been listening to the podcast while traveling, and those ads were so relevant to the story that I never fast-forwarded through them.

3. Can you rise above the noise and promote it effectively?

This goes back to being unique … and being clever with how you promote yourself. It helps when a popular podcast (like “This American Life,” for instance) can hype up a new show (like “Serial”). This turns an established audience on to a new show that needs to build an audience from scratch. Similarly, with broadcast networks now looking to attract podcast listeners, they can also reap the benefits of having a large platform to reach an audience. That’s what iHeartRadio and NPR executives both said were to their benefit in promoting their podcasts.

It also helps to build a relationship with your audience. This has as much to do with having an engaging host who seems like your friend, as much as it does with being specific with how, and why, you’re engaging your audience. That audio is “the theater of the mind” has become a common pitching point for people interested in getting into the podcasting space. Don’t forget that you have to do the work to get the audience to that level.

4. Do you have solid metrics to prove your audience and its engagement?

And doing the work to bring the audience to the hyper-engaged, imaginative visualization of audio brings us to metrics. This is tricky territory and becoming a bigger part of the podcasting conversation. This year’s Podcast Upfront, for instance, was much more about targeting, measurement and results than in the past. While it’s still hard to prove true listenership (including listening to ads) with just a raw number of downloads alone, metrics and data are improving, as are the chances you can prove your audience and engagement.

Which brings us to another point: Before even trying to attract advertising, it’s important to build a foundation of listeners and episodes — a resumé, if you will — to showcase why you’re worth the investment. And it’s also worth considering if creating a new podcast is really best for a given publisher. While some branded podcasts exist (for example, Tinder launched a branded podcast with Gimlet about dating), it’s also possible to, say, pitch an episode to an existing podcast, and reap the benefits of a built-in audience who already trusts their host. This is especially important to consider if you don’t have the time or resources to build an audience — otherwise, it is very easy for a podcast to stay in the territory of being an experimental investment that might not necessarily reap financial or editorial benefits.

5. How much can you extend the podcast brand into ancillary revenues?

Think about how “Longform,” another popular podcast, and Recode have partnered to create live “on stage” podcasting events you have to purchase tickets for. The New York Times sent the stars and creators of its popular podcast “Caliphate” (reporter Rukmini Callimachi and producer Andy Mills, respectively) to participate in live New York Times subscriber events around the country. While these events were generally recorded for specific local podcasts, attendees came to find Times tote bags on their chairs.

And movies and TV are part of this equation. The TV show “Alex, Inc.,” was loosely based on the popular Gimlet podcast “Startup.” The podcast “Limetown” is expected to hit the small screen as well. And HBO created a TV series based on the popular “2 Dope Queens” comedy podcast from WNYC Studios.

That’s just a few examples. Remember, a good story has the potential to live anywhere. It’s not uncommon for books to be turned into movies. So why not podcasts?

So, while podcasting – and podcast sponsorship – is growing, it’s still vital to take stock of what you can offer and how much you can invest before you find yourself in the weeds. Podcasting may be less expensive medium to break into than most other media (e.g. video), but that doesn’t necessarily mean growing a podcast is a piece of cake. The more you take it seriously, plan ahead, and learn lessons from the masters, the more it can deliver for you and your audience.

Ads are coming to streaming TV. But will consumers buy in or opt out?

August 30, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

One nice bonus of being a cord-cutter is that you don’t get inundated with a lot of ads. Many over-the-top (OTT) streaming services offer ad-free viewing, and those with ads have tried not to anger viewers. But as streaming services gain more and more viewers, advertisers are finally getting a chance to reach the “unreachables.” And the numbers back that up: The connected TV advertising spend will hit $8.2 billion this year, according to Tru Optik, rising to $20.1 billion by 2020.

Recent acquisitions and new technologies signal that companies such as AT&T, Sinclair, Adobe, and even Netflix are planning to add advertising to the mix, which will give targeted ads on OTT programming a new path forward. This heavy investment in OTT shows where advertisers are placing their bets. But ultimately, good advertising — advertising that’s relevant and interesting for audiences and profitable for marketers — is what will make these moves worth it.

A Megamerger for Addressable Ads

Now that the AT&T/Time Warner acquisition has finally closed (despite an ongoing lawsuit from the Department of Justice), AT&T can take advantage of the data trove Warner offers to focus on addressable ads that scale. This means it can take viewer data and information to craft highly specific, highly targeted advertising. AT&T has been experimenting with addressable TV for a while, as I previously wrote.

In June, it announced it would also acquire the digital ad platform AppNexus, which helps AT&T expand advertising beyond its own devices and partner with media companies. The goal for AT&T is to reach both the streaming audience and the traditional TV audience; it wouldn’t matter where a viewer is watching from or whether they have a cable or satellite subscription.

And AT&T’s plan is not a completely novel concept, as CNBC’s Michelle Castillo wrote:

“The service would be similar to Comcast’s Freewheel, which is used by TV networks and major video distributors to serve ads on their streaming content. Freewheel places addressable ads on NBCUniversal content (owned by Comcast), as well as partner networks like Viacom and Disney. Ads can appear on traditional (linear) television programming, on video-on-demand content accessed through cable set-top boxes, and on streaming OTT services that use a device to connect to the internet.

Emerging Ads, Emerging Tech

Not to be outdone, Sinclair Broadcasting Group recently launched CompulseOTT, an ad product to help sell local ads into streaming services around the country. CompulseOTT currently has more than 2,000 segments advertisers can use to target audiences and is available on multiple OTT platforms.

Recent deals in the ad tech world also show that both networks and advertisers are making bigger bets on targeted ads on OTT. Liveramp, an identity unification platform, recently inked deals with the data company Inscape as well as Adobe. With Adobe, Liveramp will use its data to oversee Adobe’s Advertising Cloud. With Inscape, Liveramp will be able to better merge TV and digital audiences, and therefore offer a more fluid audience to marketers.

iSpot has also been helping marketers move more easily between digital and TV audiences. It’s been tracking advertising throughout the entire TV ecosystem and recently developed a custom-segments feature that advertisers can match their digital segments against. Theoretically, iSpot’s tools can help brands optimize their spending.

And even Netflix, the bastion of ad-free viewing, has started experimenting with ads that promote its own shows. That move definitely ruffled users’ feathers. Subscribers expressed disdain at the breaks they were paying to avoid – not to mention worrying if pay ads might come next for the highly leveraged streaming giant.

Making the Audience Happy

But here’s the rub: As much as addressable advertising is becoming more and more possible, giving marketers detailed targeting for streaming audiences, the question remains if the public will buy in or opt out.

Seventy-four percent of Americans don’t believe TV advertising is relevant to them, according to research by Adobe Digital Insights. Nearly 60% of Americans are streaming content, and mostly with Netflix (and don’t forget: its viewers were pretty angry at the idea of ads). Skipping and blocking ads is just as routine as paying money to have no ads at all.

In other words, the route to reach audiences may be different with OTT programming. But the experience of reaching them will likely mirror advertising elsewhere. So, before marketers can claim a breakthrough with streaming audiences, let’s see what the new process of making ads interesting and relevant will be — and make sure the costs of doing so don’t exceed the benefits.

Why outdoor advertising is having a renaissance

August 16, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

It’s a tough market for traditional advertising. Virtually every sector will see a drop this year, except one: outdoor advertising. What’s driving the growth? Intense interest from large tech companies advertising on billboards and even buying into billboard companies. Plus, new technology allows better digital tracking of who seeks billboards. Not to mention the fact that some billboards end up being photographed and shared as memes on social media.

Both Google and Facebook, as well as Netflix and China’s Alibaba, among other companies, have started investing in outdoor advertising. And out-of-home ads are expected to expand by two percent this year, compared to one percent from last year. These incremental gains don’t mean that aging billboards will proliferate, of course. But with interest from tech behemoths – and startups trying to disrupt the buying process – outdoor advertising is having an unexpected renaissance. (Plus, no one has invented an ad blocker for real-life billboards yet.)

Tech Giants Drive Interest

While Facebook touts its targeted online adverting and rakes in billions, the social giant is actually pushing its own marketing campaigns to the physical world. Case in point: Facebook recently ran an outdoor advertising campaign to showcase its approach to user safety and privacy.

And Google is now bringing targeted ads to outside advertising after three years of testing programmatic ad technology on billboards. With an emphasis on transit points and the times and people who show up there, the company is banking on targeting ads toward these populations. These might be affluent commuters or die-hard soccer fans, as Bloomberg’s Alex Webb explained. Although a recent AP investigation is drawing attention to the ways Google tracks your location without your consent, this very location-targeting — assuming users are aware it’s on — is what will give Google an edge in serving relevant outdoor ads.

The renewed interest in old fashioned outdoor advertising is not just an American phenomenon. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, for one, has invested $2.23 billion in Focus Media, a company based in Shanghai that operates outdoor digital advertising screens in China, Singapore and Hong Kong. The move goes back to Alibaba’s “online-to-offline” strategy, also referred to as “New Retail,” that Alibaba hopes can be an alternative way of reaching China’s growing middle class.

New Technology, Digital Tracking

Of course, billboards today are much more than static images. Digital billboard advertising can switch screens every 10 seconds or so. And with their size, (especially if you’re stuck in traffic) they’re hard to ignore. Clever ad campaigns on huge digital screens can prompt viewers to share the experience of the ad on social media. Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, which operates more than 1,200 digital roadside billboards in the U.S., uses mobile data from third-party providers to know which phones are passing in front of billboards.

Despite all the interest from tech firms, the buying process for billboards is still complicated and byzantine. To circumvent some of these issues, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is now backing a startup, AdQuick, that hopes to smooth the process of purchasing billboard ads. AdQuick has secured $2.1 million to develop targeting and measuring tools. This included what CEO and co-founder Matt O’Conner hopes will include voice technology like Amazon Alexa or Google Home. The idea is that passersby will be able to ask digital voice assistants to ping billboard information directly to their phones.

Netflix Gets Exposure in Hollywood

Online advertising may get all the credit for being hyper-targeted. However, for some companies, this kind of targeted advertising is also possible when you’re in the right place at the right time. Netflix, for example, bought half the assets of Regency Outdoor Advertising, a Los Angeles-based company, in a $150 million deal. Its focus: Sunset Strip.

Why? Sunset Strip is the everyday pathway for actors, directors and writers — and would-be actors, directors and writers. So, Netflix can both promote its existing shows while enticing talent for upcoming projects. It’s a no brainer, according to Nancy Fletcher, the president and CEO of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. “In the entertainment capital of the world — where your waitress could be producing a movie — Netflix chose to buy billboards.”

But while Los Angeles is happy to plaster the highways with billboards, not every city is so welcoming of them. Nearby San Diego, for example, has long fought “sign pollution and visual blight,” but could be affected by a new California bill that would loosen the rules on outdoor advertising and allow more digital billboards. With the amount of potential revenue these advertising campaigns offer, though, this could be a tough bill to fight.

The opportunities for outdoor advertising seem endless with the right amount of investment and creative technique. Viewers might not always be happy about being bombarded with yet another advertisement — but then again, when are they not? The question is whether new technologies and interest from tech companies can truly make billboards a long-term growth story, or just another blip in the tech boom.

Snap rises as Facebook falls

August 2, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

For so long, Facebook has been the classroom bully in social media, with Snapchat taking it on the chin when Facebook copied Snapchat’s Stories format on FB, Instagram and WhatsApp. But now, the little tyke is exacting revenge as Facebook deals with blow after blow in the public arena: ongoing Russian meddling on the platform, incendiary posts inspiring real-life violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and a stock market plunge that encapsulates its challenges fighting misinformation. Meanwhile, Snap has been quietly rolling out new deals with publishers and making itself out to be a much friendlier space to do business.

While it’s hard to compete with Facebook’s 1.47 billion daily active users, the story of Snapchat as the underdog fighting back is one to watch — especially as publishers tire of Facebook’s litany of problems.

‘Brand Safety and Control’

While Facebook consistently dominates tech news coverage, Snapchat also turned heads recently when it launched a private marketplace for advertisers akin to its own premium programmatic advertising marketplace. Now, advertisers can book space on specific shows and channels from a variety of publishing partners, including BuzzFeed, ESPN, and NBC Universal. Previously, brands could buy Snapchat ad inventory, but not target their advertising to specific publishers.

The beauty of this? Publishers can set their own ad rates, target only certain segments of a show’s audience, and advertisers can find more brand safety on Snapchat than they currently do with Facebook and Google’s YouTube. This is of course a boon for Snapchat too, as AdAge’s Garrett Sloane put it:

“Advertisers have been concerned about the type of content that appears on both YouTube and Facebook. Snapchat is trying to take advantage of the industry’s unease by offering a higher level of brand safety and control: Discover already operates as a gated community for professional publishers only, and the private marketplace now lets advertisers expressly select the shows they want while still using ad tech.”

On top of this, Snapchat is planning to sell six-second, unskippable ads in the private marketplace — meaning the chances of sustaining audience attention is even higher.

Broadening Discover’s Horizon

Snap also recently announced a new Discover partnership with an LGBT publisher — its first one — the U.K.-based website PinkNews. According to PinkNews CEO and editor-in-chief Benjamin Cohen, part of the incentive is that Discover is still a curated platform, meaning that accessing the humans behind the automation is still possible. Snapchat was also enticing in part because Facebook traffic for PinkNews— as is the case with many publishers — has gone down, Cohen said, and so he was looking to broaden audience traffic elsewhere.

The idea of working with a social platform like Snapchat that is actually willing to pay publishers became even more attractive for PinkNews. The partnership is also, undeniably, a win for Snapchat. It gains an outlet that will help the platform attract a young audience willing to push the boundaries of sexuality.

Indeed, it’s obvious that Snapchat is on the hunt to broaden its 191 million daily active users. In addition to working with traditional publishers, Snapchat has made a bigger effort this year to partner with digital publishers and social media stars that appeal to younger audiences. That includes Daquan Gesese, a hip-hop and pop culture personality with a huge presence on Instagram, and Fanbytes, an 18-month-old digital media company that runs four popular accounts on Snapchat, and operates a network of mostly 15- and 16-year-old creators who run their own accounts and publishing brands on Snapchat.

In May, Daquan launched his own Discover channel, and Fanbytes and Snapchat are currently trying to figure out whether “official” versions of its channels could be tailor-made for Discover.

More Flexiblity

But here’s what’s ironic about the Snapchat comeback: It wasn’t that long ago that Snapchat was ridiculed for a redesign that paired friends and family in one stream, and publishers and advertisers in another. Audiences complained, publishers worried.

“Content producers from eight publishers I spoke to said that the redesign had made their metrics go haywire,” Vanity Fair’s Maya Kosoff wrote. So it seems pretty natural that some publishers don’t necessarily see Snapchat as a particularly good long-term strategy if they can monetize better elsewhere, as one publisher anonymously confessed to Digiday last month.

However, it’s also understandable — decent, really — that Snapchat is letting publishers introduce non-exclusive shows to Snapchat Discover. Syndication is not particularly sexy, but even if shows have already aired on YouTube or Facebook Watch, this is a chance for Snapchat to build a Discover audience — and it’s a chance for publishers to ignite new revenue streams for its most popular intellectual property without having to create something original for each platform.

While publishers aren’t going to give up on a massive platform like Facebook anytime soon, Snapchat is getting back in the game on two counts. First, it’s actually the steady performer as Facebook struggles. And second, it is finally serving publishers in more ways while opening itself up to newer creatives. As with all platforms, there’s only so much trust publishers can give third parties who change their practices and rules on a whim, but it’s a good thing that Snap is trending up at just the right time – finally getting off the mat to give Facebook a few good licks.