Articles by: "Rande Price, Research VP – DCN"

Strong worldwide content connection

March 16, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

We live in a highly connected world these days with nearly half (45%) or 3.3 billion people using the Internet by the end of 2016. A majority of these users, 2.6 billion, are accessing the Internet using a mobile phone reports eMarketer in their roundup of media usage measurements from around the world.

The increase in digital access provides a surge in television viewing. This year eMarketer estimates that 205.7 million U.S. adults will watch TV through traditional channels while 129.7 million adults will watch digital TV. Access to over-the-top TV and the abundance of new content from Netflix, Amazon and Hulu has also contributed to the growth of the digital marketplace. It’s predicted that by 2018, U.S. adult viewers of traditional TV will drop to 202.1 million while adults watching streaming TV will increase to 138.8 million. Industry experts expect traditional television viewing shifts in favor of digital streaming services given all the new content and the ability to view on multi-platforms.

Viewership by demographics points to some big differences. The biggest consumers of total digital video consumption which includes TV shows, movies, news, and even advertising are the millennials. eMarketer estimates that 93.7% of millennial internet users will watch digital video content in 2016 and grow to 94.1% by 2019. In particular, nearly all (96.5%) of adults 18 – 24 internet users will watch streaming video this year.

Consumers worldwide are accessing lots of different content on mobile from social networking sites to messaging apps to streaming music to digital TV. Mobile has been the first digital screen for many throughout the world especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Further, usage of mobile messaging apps grew to 1.4 billion consumers in 2015, an increase of 32% from the prior year. eMarketer predicts that by 2018, mobile chat users will reach 2 billion or 80% of smartphone users. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, both Facebook owned, are seen at the two most powerful apps globally.

The growth of video streaming and mobile messaging continues to provide publishers and marketers with new opportunities to reach consumers. The variety of content from high quality to consumer generated and the ability to share instantaneously offers a social extension for marketers to use both domestically and abroad.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives | Revenue

Marketers’ programmatic buying habits more than double

March 9, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Programmatic ad buying behavior more than doubled over the last two years despite major ad fraud and transparency concerns. The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and Forrester just released the results of a new study reporting of a new study reporting an increase in programmatic ad buying habits among marketers from 34% in 2014 to 79% in 2016. This research was conducted last month among 128 ANA members.

Two-thirds (66%) of marketers reported “I understand it (programmatic) and use it to execute campaigns” compared to 23% in 2014. Nearly all marketers reported programmatic buying of display advertising and eight in 10 (84%) reported purchasing programmatic video advertising.

Marketers identified key benefits of programmatic ad buying as:

Better targeting (90% rating),
Real-time optimization (76%),
Managing buys across multiple channels (66%)
Reach consumers at multiple points along the purchase path; decreased cost of media (62%, each)
Ability to personalize ads to individual consumers (60%)
Reach more consumers by buying ads in more channel (56%)
Dynamic ad placement (49%)
Access to a broader set of media options (48%)
Faster executions of media buys (43%)
Ability to buy ad directly from media companies, without an agency (24%)

Still markets cite there three top concerns in programmatic ad buying as the higher bot fraud in programmatic buys (69%), the lack of transparency to the costs within the programmatic supply change (64%) and the potential for buying traffic with low viewability (63%).

The research confirms the industries rapid adoption of programmatic buying habits. With the reported complexity of programmatic amid critical concerns, 31% of marketers stated that they expanded their in-house capabilities to manage programmatic ad buying. It appears marketers are looking to new opportunities to fully analyze the digital supply chain from request to execution.

Industry-Research

The majority of smartphone users are still getting news from traditional media sources

March 2, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Nearly three-quarters (72%) of adult smartphone owners in the U.S. reported that they still get their news and information frequently or very frequently from at least one traditional source like the television news or the printed newspapers.

The latest 2015 RJI Mobile Media News Consumption Survey also reported the local television news as the most popular “old” media source with more than half (55%) of smartphone respondents saying they frequently or very frequently used in the past week. Network television news ranked second at 49%, followed by printed local newspapers at 36%. While the percentages of each “old” media source varied, usage of at least one “old” media source was relatively consistent across all demographics:

67% of adults 18-24;
75% of adults
69% of adults 35-44, 79% of adults 45-54;
69% of adults 55-64; and
70% of adults 65 plus used at least one “old” media source.

Additionally, just under one-third (33%) of adult smartphone owners said they had followed news stories frequently or very frequently on their smartphones in the past seven days. Smartphone owners are also actively engaged in social networking. In fact, 49% reported they interacted on social media platforms and 24% stated they shared news stories using their smartphones.

The report provides a good understanding of consumer preference and the power of a multi-platform news operation, offering both quality news and information and the ability for a more dynamic interaction.

Industry-Research

Editorial analytics sharpen newsrooms’ focus

February 24, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

News organization everywhere are competing for attention. In a continuously changing media environment, journalism is challenged more than ever before to connect to its audience. In its report, the Digital News Project 2016, Reuters Institute examined how news organizations, across Europe and the United States, analyze their audience’s behavior in order to inform and develop their editorial voices.

The Guardian and The Financial Times, both subscription-based business models, developed proprietary metric tools. The Guardian’s real-time analytics tool called Orphan offers minute-by-minute data on individual articles like pageviews, social shares, and attention-time for each article published in the last two weeks. Orphan can also show whether the article has been pushed via the Guardian’s social media channels and/or if it was promoted on the homepage. The data can also be broken down by different segments, such as time, section, device, browser, country, referrer, loyalty, and attention time. The editors can use this data to inform decisions on headlines, pictures, placement, and how to promote across social media channels.

Similarly, the Financial Times’s is developing a dashboard for its analytics called, Lantern. The Financial Times see editorial analytics as a step to its newsroom and its reporters being audience-first journalists, integrating engagement objectives into the editorial process. The tool will focus mostly on engagement-related metrics such as time spent, recirculation, volume of articles read per visit, and number of comments.

The report identified a few third party analytic tools available to news organization:

Chartbeat known for real-time analytics that focus on audience attention. Its dashboard advices on homepage structure and helps to refine headlines and formats. Editors can modify content in real-time.
Ly tracks in real-time as well and helps to identify topics audiences have responded well to in the past as well as where readers are coming from, where they’re headed next and on what devices.
NewsWhip is also a real-time tool that offers social media tracking like tweets, shares, and comments. It also allows newsrooms to monitor what stories are trending and breaking news.

In addition to Chartbeat, Parse.Ly and NewsWhip, the more standardized report of pageviews and visits are available in analytics tools like Omniture, google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and twitter Analytic.

Usage of multiple data sources is also common among news organizations. The Huffington Post, an advertising based business model, uses an Omniture dashboard, which includes traditional metrics like visits, pageviews, and unique visitors as well as referrals from specific sources and video data. They also use a customized version of Chartbeat tracking real-time split testing where different versions of an article (copy, headline and/or pictures) are tested to see which performs best.

Importantly, even in the most data-driven analysis, decisions often involve qualitative assessment. It’s a mix of art and science. It’s also important to ensure personal assessment is included especially in terms of how the data is leveraged for both short-term and long-term operations.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Ad blockers are the new premium target audience

February 17, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Marketers are focusing on a newly valued audience segment know as ad blockers. Consumers using ad blocking software tend to be more tech savvy and in the millennial age range. According to a new report published by the International News Media Association (INMA), this premium audience segment offers a new opportunity for advertisers to engage with consumers who care and interact with valued advertisements.

PageFair, which sells services to measure ad blocking and offers alternative non-intrusive advertising to consumers, contributed to the INMA report, “What to do about ad blocking?” PageFair has also estimated that the total lost revenue from ad blocking grew approximately from $5.8 billion in 2014 to $10.7 in 2015.

The INMA report recommends specific strategies for publishers to avoid:

Do not use undeveloped anti-ad blocking technology like domain rotation.
Do not rely on native advertising since this can also be blocked.
Do not depend on advertising partnerships with walled gardens like Facebook or Apple News.
Do not refuse to show content to ad blockers.

Importantly publishers need to respond to ad blockers. This is the time to talk to ad blockers, the time to try new ad formats and the time to discover what specifications need to be included in advertising 2.0.

Industry-Research

Publishing is essential for marketing growth

February 10, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Publishing is a prerequisite for effective content marketing. According to Forbes’ new CMO Practice report, “Publish or Perish” nearly all of the surveyed marketing executives (95%) agreed that effective content marketing is critical to the success of their company’s growth strategies. Further, eighty percent of marketing executives stated that successful content marketing is important to building and differentiating the brand. Today’s CMOs reported allocations of 25% or more of their marketing budget to content creation.

Brand publishing allows corporations to be agile in delivering new and diverse marketing programs to their customers. Marketing content can also provide customer personalization and offers the ability to manage and scale large processes.

Forbes identified seven key strategies for marketing executives to manage throughout the content marketing and operations process:

Content Planning – establish management teams to ensure editorial strategies and processes are in place for the production, curation and licensing of relevant and timely content.
Content Sourcing – manage the quality, volume and relevance of content from both internal and external content contributors.
Content Targeting – optimize content performance by customizing for specific audience segments to ensure a stronger return on investment.
Content Governance – manage and control content quality, consistency and compliance by establishing content governance across the company.
Content Distribution – establish processes and systems to distribute and track content across all channels and touch points.
Content Assembly – create an internal content assembly team to reduce costs on operations and to easily allow for the repurpose of materials.
Content Systems – leverage technology investments to increase productivity and reduce operational cost.

Marketing leaders need control over the publishing process or they and their teams will be at risk. Further, advancing content marketing is crucial to delivering actionable content in today’s digital marketplace.

For executive highlights: http://www.cmo-practice.forbes.com/advice/.

Industry-Research

Online ad fraud continues to plague industry

January 27, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Non-human traffic continues to drive digital ad fraud at a significant cost to marketers. While overall fraud levels are unchanged from a year ago, digital advertising spend globally is estimated to grow by 15% increasing the advertiser loss to $7.2 billion in 2016 from $6.3 billion last year, according to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in their newly released report with White Ops, a cyber security firm.

Additional key findings include:

Higher cost-per-thousand impressions (CPMs) were actually more vulnerable to fraud traffic. In fact, display CPMs over $10 had a 39% higher bot rates than lower display CPMs and video CPMs over $15 had 173% higher bot rates than lower video CPMs.
Programmatic ad buys displayed higher levels of fraud, especially among programmatic video. Programmatic display ads had 14% more bots than the study average, while programmatic video ads had 73% more bots than average. Interestingly, programmatic buys targeting Hispanics were nearly twice as likely to result in bot traffic than programmatic non-Hispanic targeted ads.
Publishers who acquire traffic through third parties (sourced traffic) registered a higher level of sophisticated bots.

The report advices marketers to continue working with The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) and their recommendations. TAG was established last year by the IAB, the 4As and the ANA as an industry program to help eliminate digital advertising fraud and malware.

In addition, the report made the following recommendations:

Demand inventory transparency from your partners.

Request publishers to identify all third-party sources of traffic.
Consider adding language to insertion orders that notes there will be no payment for fraudulent impressions.

Use a third-party monitoring to monitor all traffic.

Ensure that your anti-fraud policies are followed by all external partners.

Importantly, advertisers can reduce bot fraud and their costs by using anti-fraud policies and technologies. It’s critical for the industry to still remain focused on fraud reduction.

Industry-Research

What’s privacy really worth?

January 15, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Consumers are willing to trade some amount of privacy for a returned benefit reports a new Pew Research Center study. Americans see privacy tradeoffs as conditional and very context related. The type of company collecting the data, as well as how trustworthy it is plays an important role. Though, consumers still report concerns with potential consequences such as data breaches that could have damaging effects. Consumers are not pleased when data is collected for one purpose and is used for another and they are often suspicion about the data collectors.

Pew provided the research participants with six scenarios that involved sharing some level of their personal data in exchange for using a product or service. The participants, adults 18-plus, were then asked whether what they were offered in return was “acceptable”, “not acceptable”, or “it depends”.

#1 Surveillance in the workplace
Office surveillance cameras with facial recognition are placed in the workplace. Surveillance footage can also track measures of employee attendance and performance. Retention of footage is not specified.

One-half of the consumers (54%) surveyed reported that the installation of surveillance cameras at work and the retention of the data is acceptable, while one fifth (21%) said the tradeoff depended on the circumstances.

#2 Health information website
A new health information website used by doctors to manage patient health records. Doctors can upload files for patient access. The website is promised to be a secure site.

Fifty-two percent of consumers reported this was acceptable while 26% said it depended on the details.

#3 Loyalty card
A free loyalty card offered to customers to save money on purchases in exchange for the tracking of personal shopping habits. This data can be sold to third parties.

Less than one-half (47%) of adults said this is acceptable and 20% reported it depended on the details of the offer. Interestingly 39% of consumers 50-plus said they would not accept this offer compared to 27% of adults 18-49.

#4 Insurance offering
An insurance company offered a discount to consumers that agreed to place a device in their car that monitors driving speed and location. The data can be analyzed for driving habits which may offer additional rewards for safe driving.

Just over one-third of consumers (37%) found this acceptable and 16% said the decision depended on the circumstances. Importantly, 45% of consumers reported the tradeoff was not acceptable.

#5 Social media site
A new social media platform manages communications for class reunions. Targeted advertising is served to consumers in exchange for free access.

Fifty-one percent of consumers did not find this plan acceptable compared to one-third who said it was acceptable.

#6 Smart thermostat
An inexpensive thermostat sensor learns the temperature zone and movements in a consumer’s household and can possibly save money on energy bills. It’s programmable remote is given in exchange for sharing household data of the basic activities that take place in the home.

More than half (55%) of consumers found this offer not acceptable while 37% claimed it was acceptable.

What does this all mean for the future of consumer privacy? Many consumers see data tracking unstoppable. And while most consumers understand the need for government surveillance with the threat of terrorism, there still is the opinion that there should be limits on what activities can be monitored and how long the data can be retained.

Industry-Research | Revenue

Media companies find new revenue streams

January 13, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

The International News Media Association (INMA) newly released report focuses on revenue diversification beyond the scope of print and digital media. This report presents 14 case studies of global publishers in ten countries where new value is being found from to highlight ground-breaking success stories for revenue diversification.

The report identifies five key strategies port to promote diversification: (1) opening new markets, (2) reaching new audiences, (3) creating new partnerships, (4) making smart acquisitions, and (5) seeking steady income.

In additional to revenue diversification, acquiring the right talent is also critical for innovation to develop new competencies and explore new revenue streams.

New revenue streams highlighted in the case studies include:

El Colombiano, Colombia:Collaborative digital advertising sales company.
The Dallas Morning News, USA:Content marketing, marketing automation, branded merchandise, SEO, event marketing.
W. Scripps Company, USA:Podcasting.
Grupo Nación, Costa Rica:Digital printing.
Independent Media, South Africa:Events for public institutions.
KM Media Group, UK:Creative services for local businesses.
Kompas, Indonesia:Collaborating to build smarter cities.
com, USA:Incubator.
Rheinische Post Mediengruppe, Germany:Mail delivery.
Rodale/Hearst UK:Vitamin co-branding.
Singapore Press Holdings, Singapore:Retail properties and events.
Toronto Star, Canada:Sample packs for Millennials.
Vecerniji list, Croatia:Exercise classes.
The Washington Post, USA:Technology vendor.

Notably, media companies are looking at new ideas and strategies to connect to their core business and services in collaborative ventures and licensing deals with other partners.

Industry-Research

Consumers cannot tell online native ads and editorial content apart

January 6, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Consumers cannot distinguish online native advertising from online editorial content according to a research study conducted by assistant professors Bartosz W. Wojdynski and Nathaniel J. Evans from the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Their research included two separate studies to assess consumers’ recognition of paid advertising content.

Sponsored content is often designed to look as if it is a part of the editorial content. Noting this, publishers identify native ads and disclose it as promotional content. Business Insider Intelligence forecasts spending on online native advertisements will grow to $21 billion by 2018 from $7.9 billion in 2015. The growth of native advertising online has brought forward questions regarding the consumers’ ability to recognize them as advertisement.

The professors first study invited subjects to read online content featuring two stories: one that was editorial content and one that was a native ad. The study assessed the impact of the disclosure label and whether consumers could identify sponsored articles as advertising content. The second study included eye-tracking to help determine the best position for visual attention to disclosure labels. In the first study 7% of readers identified the content as advertising, and in the second eye-tracking study, 17% identified the articles as advertising. Further, the second study also found that readers were seven times more likely to identify as advertising those articles that used “advertising” or “sponsored content” in the disclosure label versus those that used terms like “brand voice” or “presented by.”

The practice of online native advertising is still evolving as advertisers work creatively to reach consumers. Importantly, as native advertising becomes more prevalent it’s essential to identify best practice by monitor the impact of designs of the disclosure labels on consumers’ recognition.

DCN-Research

2015 DCN Consumer Ad Block Report

January 5, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

The 2015 DCN Consumer Ad Block Report explores the increasing threat posed by ad blocking software. The Report examines consumer attitudes toward ad blocking software, finding that 33% of U.S. consumers are very likely or somewhat likely to try ad blocking software in the next three months. Available to DCN members only, the report offers additional insights into awareness and usage of ad blocking software, attitudes towards perceived performance impact on browsing experience, and how perceptions differ between premium content and social media sites.

According to DCN Research Director Rande Price, survey responses often over-estimate actual behavior, therefore a “discounting” formula was applied to attempt to estimate intended install rates. “We estimate about half of the ‘very likely’ responders and one quarter of the ‘somewhat likely’ responders – a net take rate of 9% – will opt out of advertising in the next three months,” said Price.

Additional findings from the report:

Experience: More than 70% dislike ads that expand over content or play with sound.
Tracking: 68% are concerned when ads track their behavior.
Performance: 57% note their web pages load too slowly with ads.

If you are a DCN publisher member, please be sure to log in or register to access the special member’s only Report, which will appear below this notice once you have logged in.