Consumers value access to ad-supported content when they feel that there’s a fair trade between the content and advertising. The study, “Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio,” examines the balance in this relationship. Specifically, the research analyzes the correlation between the number of advertising breaks, the number of ads, and content consumption. While Pandora sells display, video, and audio advertising, this study focuses on audio ads. Today most of Pandora’s advertising revenue is generated from audio advertising.
Jason Huang, David Reiley, and Nickolai M. Riabov created an experimental design using more than 30 million Pandora listeners. The design included nine test groups (1% of listeners) and a control group (10% of listeners). Each test group received either three, four or six ad interruptions per hour. And each interruption was comprised of either 1, 1.5, or 2 ads. By varying these two dimensions, the research assessed whether listeners prefer more commercial interruptions or longer commercial interruptions. The control group received Pandora’s normal advertising experience: four interruptions with 1.5 ads per interruption. The level of audio advertising remained consistent for each test group for the 21-month duration of the research.
Quantity Matters
The findings identify aclear relationship between the quantity of hours listened and the number of audio ads per hour. Interestingly, the number of commercial interruptions per hour showed little impact on listening behavior. Reactions in the test groups in the final month support these findings.
The findings identify a clear relationship between the quantity of hours listened and the number of audio ads per hour. Interestingly, the number of commercial interruptions per hour showed little impact on listening behavior.
Results across all nine test groups included:
A 41% percent decline in the number of active Pandora listeners,
A 41% decline in the number of days per active Pandora listener, and
An 18% decline in the number of hours per active Pandora listener.
Of the three reactions, the most common (82%) reaction involves a decline in listeners or listening sessions.
Age Impact
Further, the decline in demand for Pandora’s ad-supported product that was triggered by an increase in ads suggests a potential opportunity to transition consumers to an ad-free alternative. The findings show that the correlation is highly significant and increases the older the consumer. Therefore, the probability of leaving Pandora entirely due to an increase in ad load decreases with age. It turned out that older consumers were just as likely to switch to an ad-free paid subscription as they were to leave the Pandora service entirely.
Huang, Reiley, and Riabov use of an experimental design allows for a better understanding of causal relationships. Each independent variable, the number of ad interruptions and the number of ads per interruption, is important to evaluate. Examining the impact of the independent variables and the correlation with listening time (the dependent variable) offers a dynamic learning environment. Interplay between the elements identifies the variable impacting a change in behavior.
It’s hard to see change when you’re in the moment. Progress is something that’s best observed in hindsight. It’s easy to let the challenges of the day grab your focus. Going the next few feet often feels more important than miles you’ve already come. I think about this often when I look back on the changes that have taken place in our industry over the last four years.
Viewability has been completely overhauled. It wasn’t so long ago that even the most hard-nosed media buyers were resigned to the idea that 30% of their ads were destined to be below-the-fold, partially loaded– in effect, unviewable. Today those numbers have improved dramatically. Even the least demanding buyers know that they can get to 60% viewability, and with the right tools and solutions in place 100% viewability is within reach. In retrospect, it seems crazy that we ever accepted anything less.
What’s going on
You can tell the same story about fraud. Just a few years ago the conventional wisdom held that fraud levels of 30% (or or even 50%) were an unavoidable. To reach real people, you had to go to through a mountain of bots. It was the cost of doing business, and an “unofficial tax” on digital advertisers. But that was before the industry reset its thinking about what is actually possible. Today, thanks to advances in fraud detection, most advertisers would consider a fraud threshold of just 2% to be the upper threshold of what is acceptable.
Today, “fraud free,” “viewable only,” and “100% brand safe” are all commonplace. These would have seemed out of reach for advertisers just a few years ago. And those aren’t just slogans, they’re promises with meaningful business implications.
Why it matters
There’s a tendency to get lost in the weeds, or to think about metrics as goals unto themselves. As focused as we are on reducing fraud, improving viewability, or protecting brands those things aren’t really the end goal. A more viewable ad ecosystem means cost savings for advertisers, more efficient CPMs, and better ROI for your marketing dollars.
When we accepted that only 50% of our ad buys were reliably fraud free we were accepting that we might be throwing away about half the money we spend in digital. Half of an advertisers million dollar ad buy could go to waste. For publishers that meant half a million dollars going into the pockets of fraudsters instead of into their revenue column. A healthier ecosystem means better business opportunities for everyone.
What’s next?
The work of cleaning up the digital advertising industry is just beginning. We’ve made great strides in desktop environments, but the conversation is already moving with the audiences as well. New platforms like mobile in-app, proprietary platforms, and over-the-top video all face challenges of their own. But those challenges shouldn’t deter us. Instead we should look back at the incredible progress we’ve made and realize that that same kind of transformation is possible in every new environment.
Advertisers and publishers can continue to carve out big opportunities on mobile, video, and social the same way they have on desktop. That’s why we believe that the work we do is so important. We want to encourage everyone to keep rethinking what they’re willing to accept from the digital ecosystem. It’s the only way to keep improving value, effectiveness, and revenue to move digital forward.
Harmon joined Integral Ad Science in 2013 to support the company’s accelerated growth and demand for its media quality solutions. In his role, Harmon is responsible for strategic partnerships and integrations of Integral’s digital technology solutions with both publishers and platforms.
Harmon is a veteran of the online media industry, leading and mentoring teams on both the publisher and agency side of the business. He is a frequent speaker and writer in the digital advertising community and is an advocate of both the art and science of digital marketing.
As Microsoft founder Bill Gates said this week, “People don’t mind having a little bit of demographic information about themselves used to target ads. That’s value added to the user.” When data is clearly used to improve the relevance of the ads consumers see, it can improve their overall experience.
Unfortunately, the amount of data collected and the myriad ways in which it is used are opaque to most consumers. And, when they get a glimpse behind the curtain, (as with Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica dealings) consumers grow mistrustful of data collection—and even online advertising—as a whole.
However, it is possible that if consumers are more informed on the tracking process and what’s going on behind the scenes, advertising would be more effective and impactful. This is what Tami Kim, Kate Barasz, and Leslie John examine in their study, “Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The Effect of Ad Transparency on Ad Effectiveness” published recently in the Journal of Consumer Research. Their research analyzes the impact of ad transparency on ad effectiveness.
Today, some websites and advertisers are informing users (albeit in a limited fashion) about what they are tracking and their data practices. Some sites may display an adChoices icon that indicates an ad is targeted based on user characteristics. Consumers can find out why the ad is being displayed to them by clicking on the icon. Other websites are alerting visitors, upon first visits, of their tracking user software and practices (e.g., cookies).
The Ad Transparency Effect
Kim, Barasz, and John conducted five studies using the Facebook platform. They analyzed the findings to identify the core dimensions of ad transparency needed to positively impact ad effectiveness.
Study 1 allows consumers to select acceptable tracking methods from a pre-defined list. The analysis identifies two important ad tracking practices consumers find acceptable: 1) the information is obtained from tracking within the site and not outside of it; and 2) the information (attributes) is provide by the consumer and not inferred by the site.
Study 2 tests the effectiveness of revealing data tracking practices within a site versus across-websites. Participants are shown an ad. Then, they are shown either no information or messaging as to why they are seeing this ad (message a: the ad has been generated based on user information obtained within the platform or message b: the ad has been generated either based on information obtained cross-platform). The results from Study 2 confirms that transparency messaging increases ad effectiveness especially when it reveals the information is obtained within the platform and not from cross-website tracking.
Study 3 examines the impact of revealing a targeted ad is based on stated attributes versus inferred attributes. Participants are shown an ad and then given one of two messages (message a: the ad is generated based on information stated by the consumer or message b: the ad is generated based on information inferred by the site). Results for Study 3 indicate that privacy concerns are higher in the inferred attributes and detracts from advertising effectiveness.
Study 4 looks at the role trust plays in a site’s data transparency and its impact on ad effectiveness. The results of this study indicate that users who trust a site are more likely to engage with an ad that offers ad transparent messaging than those sites they distrust.
Study 5A and 5B explore the impact of ad effectiveness when there’s both trust of a site and ad transparent messaging. Study 5A divides consumers into two groups, half are assigned to a loyalty program (higher trust of site) and the other half to a non-loyalty program (no trust of site). Personal information was obtained transparently from the loyalty program consumer group.
This study found consumers are more willing to click on recommended items, spend more time, and purchase more when they both trust the platform. They will also provide their own data (attribute information). Study 5B includes two additional consumer groups and offers messaging regarding shared or inferred user attributes. Message group one: Recommended based on what you’ve shared with us (implies data user provides). And message group two: Recommended (implying the data is inferred about the user). Study 5B reveals that consumers are more likely to have a higher propensity to click on recommended items if they state their attributes than those targeted based on inferred attributes.
Kim, Barasz, and John’s research is an important step to understand how consumers’ readiness to engage with digital ads is affected by their awareness of the data practices used to deliver such ads. Ad transparency messaging is a critical step to increase advertising effectiveness on your site.
The NewFronts are far from new. And old-line publishers are making more noise this year, even as the event is shortened to one week from two, with another week coming in the fall in Los Angeles. This week, the discussion between publishers and advertisers around online video had the usual buzzwords and focus on youth, mobile, and fun. However, challenges remain relating to brand safety, metrics, and building awareness of publishers’ digital video offerings.
As digital video ad revenue in the U.S. continues to grow — predicted to hit $15.42 billion this year and reach $22.18 billion in 2021 — according to eMarketer, more publishers and tech platforms will battle it out for those ad dollars even as popular video destinations like Netflix and HBO lack ads. And with so many publishers and platforms working together, it’s become more of a “coopetition” among them at the NewFronts.
Here’s a roundup of some of the key NewFronts trends to watch.
Brand Safety Concerns Continue
Last year’s NewFronts said it all: Whether this dog-and-pony show is worth it highly depends on how much money you have, and what you have to offer. Similar to last year, for most publishers, what they want to offer — and therefore what is at the forefront of their minds — is brand safety.
As YouTube continues to battle crisis after crisis on its platform, brands are under pressure to make sure their content doesn’t appear next to extremist or racist propaganda. Other platforms hardly match YouTube’s scale, making it hard for advertisers to boycott YouTube for any length of time.
Whereas some companies might feel anxiety, others see opportunity. Take NBCUniversal. The company isn’t hosting a NewFront presentation but is still pitching a new way of buying short-form video — NBCU Choice — that it’s guaranteeing to be brand safe and effective at hyper-targeting. And Digiday reports that half of that inventory is on YouTube.
“With the widely reported issues around questionable adjacencies and toxic environments, this has only become more important,” Hearst Magazines Digital Media’s Todd Haskell told Digiday. “We speak to issues around brand safety in every pitch, but particularly in ambitious content marketing programs like this.”
For YouTube itself, the tech giant has revealed a slew of changes to bolster its services. In yet another effort to quell brand safety fears, Google has announced it will improve the quality of ad-supported content on Google Preferred, YouTube’s program to allow advertisers to place their advertising on the most popular 5% of YouTube channels. The tech giant will now add inventory from YouTube TV — its streaming service that packages popular TV channels — to Google Preferred. Noting that audiences are also watching YouTube on TV screens more — 150 million hours a day, by its accounts — Google has also announced advertisers can buy YouTube video ads meant to only stream on TV screens through AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager.
These changes may not be enough to make publishers forget how precarious their content is online — but it’s certainly enough to keep publishers and advertisers hooked on Google.
The Metrics and Awareness Challenge
The convergence of video and TV means that brands this year are also paying more attention to metrics. Nothing comparable to Nielsen ratings has yet to exist for digital. As such, publishers that define success with their own metrics can lead to the kind of inflation and misinformation that has gotten some of them in trouble in the first place.
“With regard to the NewFront, one of the things that has come up historically has been almost an abstract discussion of data,” Zenith Media digital investment EVP Will Warren told BeetTV.
“I think what needs to come into play is, ‘How are publishers themselves using those types of information that they own specifically to help drive their own business forward?’”
Beyond the typical vanity metrics, Meredith exec Andrew Snyder mentioned how important measuring impact is for the publisher, which swallowed up Time Inc. recently.
“We are really focused on driving impact,” Snyder told Broadcasting & Cable. “We think about impact in two ways. On one side, it’s about impact with consumers. On the advertising side of the house, what matters most to our customers is scale, and together the new Meredith reaches over 170 million consumers. We reach 80% of millennial women.”
But what really puts some traditional broadcast and print publishers behind the eight ball is the fact that audiences don’t think about them as purveyors of original online video content. According to the 2018 Digital Content NewFronts Sentiment Forecast, commissioned by Matrix Solutions, consumer interest in original content from big media names like ESPN and the New York Times is pretty abysmal. While Americans who watched online content were excited about YouTube (57%) and Hulu (32%), only 16% were excited about ESPN, 10% about New York Times, and 2% about Conde Nast.
Big Media ‘Coopetition’ with Platforms
That problem around awareness might explain why some larger media brands like ESPN and Viacom presented for the first time at the NewFronts this week. Both companies are pushing very big digital initiatives. But they have a long way to go to catch up to established players.
Disney had been content in the past to tout its Maker Studios at NewFronts in the past, but this year is breaking out with its Disney Digital Network, using the “brand safe” buzzword throughout its presentation. The company touted new food shows via Tastemade and a “Star Wars” fan event. Disney even had ESPN present in its own slot, pushing its new ESPN+ streaming service, as well as new original content deals with Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.
And Viacom was touting its new 300-person division, Viacom Digital Studios, with hundreds of hours of original digital-native content, along with expanded programming for Snapchat. Plus, Viacom will produce the first VidCon conference in London in February 2019.
While many larger publishers have had love/hate relationships with the tech platforms, it’s interesting just how much love there has been at the NewFronts. Twitter announced even more live video programming with publisher partners, and nearly every publisher mentioning programming on tech platforms.
For marketers, it’s not an either/or proposition between the platforms and publishers, but how to spread the word in brand-safe content, with measurable results to the right audience. How they get there isn’t as important as the fact that they can get there.
It’s been a common theme of mine and this publication for months, but it bears repeating: The Facebook and Google duopoly have never been more vulnerable. So, the time is right for publishers to double down on proven tactics and test new ones in pursuit of gaining market share.
If you still need convincing of market conditions, consider the news of just this week from three of the most influential publications on the planet:
A coalition of 20 consumer groups are about to file a federal complaint against YouTube/Google for violating a children’s privacy law (NY Times)
Facebook’s CEO admitted to a “huge mistake”, and the platform may have leaked info from 87 million users (Wall Street Journal)
A lawmaker said the scandals plaguing the social media giant might be “too big” for it to fix alone, and that he might “be in favor of regulating Facebook” (Washington Post)
This coverage is, of course, in addition to the real whopper involving Russian meddling in the most recent U.S. presidential election. These venerable newspapers – which collectively influence millions directly, and tens of millions indirectly – are singing from the same hymnbook. When it comes to the duopoly, they are on the attack. It’s not so much that Google and Facebook have been consistently bad actors, necessarily. But let’s face it, Congressional hearings and privacy problems make great copy. Or, maybe it’s personal. No matter – this is happening either way.
A Perfect Storm
Several overlapping and intersecting factors, occurring over many years, have lead to today’s market conditions: shifting consumer needs and market demand; thinly-veiled, monopolistic corporate behavior characterized by overreach and insufficient self-governance; and unintended consequences of streamlining the advertising supply chain. To be sure, the past decade has been tumultuous. But the current state of affairs in digital advertising will not come as a surprise to DCN community members.
To wit: Last week, Mark Glaser warned publishers to be careful about gloating in the wake of Facebook’s troubles – sage advice. Last month, DCN CEO Jason Kint addressed Google’s “battle with transparency” when reporting its massive digital advertising revenues. And at the beginning of the year, I offered techniques for publishers to employ to sell more advertising to media buyers via easily digestible sales tools,an emphasis on branding, and formidable client service. Even with all this attention, however, I don’t know that the community expected the situation to get *this hot* for the duopoly.
Having experienced extraordinarily challenging conditions since the late 2000s – and being in the unenviable position of shrinking in the face of a growing, ancillary market –– publishers now have a compelling talking point, a reason to reach out to customers, prospects, partners, and the press. Certainly, behaviors change slowly. Customers are risk-averse, and no one has “gotten fired for buying ads from Google and Facebook” in quite awhile. Now, if only for reasons of diligence, media buyers now have to pick their heads up from Google and Facebook dashboards and assess alternatives.
If Not Now, When?
Last year, and for the first time, companies spent more on digital advertising than TV spots. We all saw this coming, but it actually happened last year, and it signaled an official changing-of-the-guard in the industry. Most professional prognosticators believe digital ad spending will continue to grow for the foreseeable future, to eventually capture 40% or more of the overall marketplace.
Publishers certainly continue to face meaningful growth challenges. However, it’s difficult to imagine conditions being more fertile than today for building market share. The time is right for making aggressive moves.
Marketers are concerned about brand safety and focused on investing their media dollars wisely to ensure that their ads are seen in a good environment. And rightly so. A new Australian study from Galaxy Research, The Company You Keep, provides insight into consumers views on trust in relation to the media and advertising they consume.
The framework of Galaxy’s study was the Adtrust Matrix, academic research published in 2009. The Adtrust Matrix is a recognized set of dimensions and elements used to measure trust in advertising. It includes four key characteristics, which breakdown further into 20 attributes:
Usefulness: valuable, good, useful and helps people make the best decisions
Affect: likeable, enjoyable and positive
Willingness to rely on: willing to consider the ad-conveyed information when making purchase-related decisions, willing to rely on ad-conveyed information when making purchase-related decisions, willing to make important purchase-related decisions based on ad-conveyed information and willing to recommend the product or service that I have seen in ads to my friends or family
In total, almost 3,000 Australians adults rated the content and ads against the 20 Adtrust characteristics across Newspapers (National, Metro, Regional, Community), Television, Radio, Magazines, Cinema, Outdoor, Digital news media (newspaper-based websites and apps), Social, Search and Any (other) websites.
Net Trust
The research findings identify newspapers as the medium scoring the greatest in consumer trust in advertising, followed by cinema, radio, magazines and digital news media. Further, the study shows social media scores lowest in consumer trust in advertising.
The Galaxy research finds a high correlation between trust in advertising and the content experienced in the same environment. The consumer scores offer a strong link between the content experience and the advertising experience. An overall high degree of trust in advertising occurs where there is a positive net trust in content. An overall low degree of trust in advertising occurs when there is negative net trust in content.
These findings were similar to those from DCN’s research study, Trust as a Proxy for Brand Value, which also found a high correlation between consumers trust in content and their trust in ads in the same environment. In the DCN study, consumers scored branded sites high for trust in advertising while social media scored the lowest in trust for advertising. Both studies confirm that greater trust in content leads to greater trust in ads.
Trust Drives Purchases
Importantly, the Galaxy research also shows greater trust in ads yields greater purchase intent. In fact, 50% of respondents agree that the more they trust an ad, the more likely they are to buy the product/service.
The Galaxy research finds once again that the environment, or context, in which the ads appear, has an impact on the ads receptivity and effectiveness. It reaffirms the value and importance of working with trusted publishers in the marketplace.
The most significant opportunity in more than a decade to steer value towards our members is playing out now in Europe.
It is DCN’s role to help shape the future of the digital ecosystem to bend towards the interests of trusted content companies while your team focuses on the day-to-day operations. We work every day to do this and to raise the bar of trust with both advertisers and consumers. Unlike other parts of the web media industry, we’re fortunate these efforts often align. That is, by increasing trust for consumers and advertisers, the brands of DCN will prosper in the long-term. We are starting to see the pendulum swing in our favor – both in consumer subscriptions and the trust and transparency of the advertising market – and are working hard to accelerate it.
Since DCN exclusively represents content companies, we occasionally have a different point of view from other parts of the media ecosystem including intermediaries (e.g. ad tech companies, Google, Facebook). The business model of these intermediaries has for many years relied on harvesting the data generated from advertiser and consumer relationships with our members’ websites and apps. Right now, there is significant debate over how to best participate in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and what the effects of the roll-out of will be. The rules of GDPR, which set a new bar for consumer privacy, were finalized years ago and since that time have inspired a rich amount of misinformation, disagreement and fear, only increasing as the GDPR enforcement date of May 25, 2018 approaches.
The IAB and IAB Europe, which are charged with representing a much broader set of stakeholders including hundreds of ad tech companies, Google, Facebook, Oath, and many others with significant intermediary interests, has released its plan to handle the GDPR roll-out. The IAB framework, which was submitted for industry commenting, was clearly designed by ad tech companies and included endorsement from 23 ad tech companies and, most notably, zero publishers.
Details will be discussed in other forums but can be summarized as it:
relies on cookies which are unreliable in many experiences;
pushes all liability to the publisher without providing any control over the CMPs, SSPs, DSPs, exchanges and how they use this data;
outsources the consent relationship with the user to a “Consent Manager Provider” (CMP) operated by an IAB-friendly;
does not leverage the direct relationship between a publisher and its audience to manage consent and store it persistently in the browser (e.g. DNT);
fails to reduce friction for users giving consent for purposes most important to publishers and most acceptable to users;
unintentionally creates more friction with your audience for editorial and product features for the sake of protecting ad tech vendors.
Thus, it will most likely enable a practical use case where global consent is enacted to protect the status quo of maximum behaviorally-targeted advertising and unbridled data collection. In other words, their goal is to use “free” services to encourage users to click, “Turn All On” and opt back into the status quo.
Please reach out to us directly and make certain your business leaders and partners understand there are serious flaws with the IAB Consent Framework. We strongly urge publishers to hold off signing up with the 23 companies (and Google and Facebook behind the scenes) to support the framework in its current form.
Once again, there is a window here in which publishers can rebuild consumer and advertiser trust. The most significant advertisers in the world are aligned with us on this as they begin to see their pursuit of truly one-to-one advertising across the wider web as economically and legally challenging. GDPR will create opportunity for audience selection based on cohorts and context which is a significant risk to Google and Facebook. GDPR moves advertisers away from their current buying habits supported by the myth they can simply harvest demand through microtargeting personal data. Creating new demand through context and true relevance is the sweet spot of trust and true publishers.
And where there is significant risk to Facebook and Google and opportunity for growing consumer trust, you will come out ahead.
(Note: I work for Mozilla. None of this is secret. None of this is Mozilla policy. Not speaking for Mozilla here.)
A big objection to tracking protection is the idea that the tracker will always get through. Some people suggest that as browsers give users more ability to control how their personal information gets leaked across sites, things won’t get better for users, because third-party tracking will just keep up. On this view, today’s easy-to-block third-party cookies will be replaced by techniques such as passive fingerprinting where it’s hard to tell if the browser is succeeding at protecting the user or not, and users will be stuck in the same place they are now, or worse.
I doubt this is the case because we’re playing a more complex game than just trackers vs. users. The game has at least five sides, and some of the fastest-moving players with the best understanding of the game are the ad fraud hackers. Right now ad fraud is losing in some areas where they had been winning, and the resulting shift in ad fraud is likely to shift the risks and rewards of tracking techniques.
Data center ad fraud
Fraudbots, running in data centers, visit legit sites (with third-party ads and trackers) to pick up a realistic set of third-party cookies to make them look like high-value users. Then the bots visit dedicated fraudulent “cash out” sites (whose operators have the same third-party ads and trackers) to generate valuable ad impressions for those sites.
If you wonder why so many sites made a big deal out of “pivot to video” but can’t remember watching a video ad, this is why. Fraudbots are patient enough to get profiled as, say, a car buyer, and watch those big-money ads. And the money is good enough to motivate fraud hackers to make good bots, usually based on real browser code. When a fraudbot network gets caught and blocked from high-value ads, it gets recycled for lower and lower value forms of advertising. By the time you see traffic for sale on fraud boards, those bots are probably only getting past just enough third-party anti-fraud services to be worth running.
This version of ad fraud has minimal impact on real users. Real users don’t go to fraud sites, and fraudbots do their thing in data centers and don’t touch users’ systems. The companies that pay for it are legit publishers, who not only have to serve pages to fraudbots—remember, a bot needs to visit enough legit sites to look like a real user—but also end up competing with ad fraud for ad revenue. Ad fraud has only really been a problem for legit publishers. The adtech business is fine with it, since they make more money from fraud than the fraud hackers do, and the advertisers are fine with it because fraud is priced in, so they pay the fraud-adjusted price even for real impressions.
What’s new for ad fraud
So what’s changing? More fraudbots in data centers are getting caught, just because the adtech firms have mostly been shamed into filtering out the embarassingly obvious traffic from IP addresses that everyone can tell probably don’t have a human user on them. So where is fraud going now? More fraud is likely to move to a place where a bot can look more realistic but probably not stay up as long—your computer or mobile device. Expect ad fraud concealed within web pages, as a payload for malware, and of course in lots and lots of cheesy native mobile apps. Ad fraud makes way more money than cryptocurrency mining, using less CPU and battery.
So the bad news is that you’re going to have to reformat your uncle’s computer a lot this year, because more client-side fraud is coming. Data center IPs don’t get by the ad networks as well as they once did, so ad fraud is getting personal. The good news, is, hey, you know all that big, scary passive fingerprinting that’s supposed to become the harder-to-beat replacement for the third-party cookie? Client-side fraud has to beat it in order to get paid, so they’ll beat it. As a bonus, client-side bots are way better at attribution fraud (where a fraudulent ad gets credit for a real sale) than data center bots.
Advertisers have two possible responses to ad fraud: either try to out-hack it, or join the “flight to quality” and cut back on trying to follow big-money users to low-reputation sites in the first place. Hard-to-detect client-side bots, by making creepy fingerprinting techniques less trustworthy, tend to increase the uncertainty of the hacking option and make flight to quality relatively more attractive.
The digital media business is finally making the shift from attention to user engagement. We see users as individuals rather than sets of eyeballs and focus on winning hearts and minds. This is a huge, ultimately positive change that will produce a much healthier media ecosystem. But it’s not going to be easy. It requires new technology, new marketing and product skills, and most importantly a change in mindset from content-first to customer-first. That means moving away from some very entrenched habits.
The first 20 years of the consumer internet, especially in media, have been almost entirely about aggregating audience. Sites seek to attract millions, often tens of millions, occasionally hundreds of millions of people, with all those eyeballs “looking” at billions of banner ads. That focus on big, unidentified, often undifferentiated audiences made it possible for media companies to take the existing ad models—based mostly on audience size—and adapt them pretty easily to digital. Yes, there were significant creative and technical challenges in making that shift—learning to create digital stories and to sell and serve digital ads. But fundamentally the model itself didn’t change much.
The relationship with the audience was still largely a one-way, anonymous relationship, despite the new ability to engage directly, to measure behavior and to learn more about that audience. Most media companies were shortsighted, opting to avoid friction-inducing roadblocks like registration in order to maximize unique visitors, pageviews and ad impressions, missing a chance to develop a direct relationship with readers.
The end result: massive harvesting of user data, ad-cluttered sites powered by the ad tech Lumascape, “recommended for you” widgets, ad fraud, and ultimately unhappy, ad blocking users.
But simply launching a paywall, adding affiliate links or announcing an event series isn’t enough (hello, Buzzfeed). That’s just throwing new revenue streams up against the digital wall like spaghetti. There are four essential elements required for success in the new user-engagement era of digital media: customer knowledge, product strategy, enabling technology and marketing skill.
Let’s dig into each in turn.
Customer knowledge
In the attention era, media companies didn’t need to change their fundamental model. We could still follow an editor-first content strategy—writing about what editors thought was important or interesting. And the ad tech revenue stream didn’t require any understanding of who was reading beyond some basic demographics. Yes, there were audience analytics, paying attention to SEO trends and later social traffic. But the starting point was always what WE thought was interesting. We didn’t truly know our customers. In the user engagement era, understanding the reader (or viewer) has to come first. Whom are we serving? What can we learn about them? What do they need to live their lives, do their jobs or be entertained? Then we can apply editorial and product creativity to serve, surprise and delight them with great products and stories they didn’t know they wanted.
Product strategy
Once you know your customer, developing the right product to serve them takes more than creativity. It also requires focus, experimentation and iteration. In product management terms, it’s “finding product-market fit.” Focus means keeping your eye on the customer you’ve identified when deciding what product ideas to pursue and rejecting ideas that aren’t a fit for those customers. Experimentation and iteration go hand-in-hand. Buildenough of the product to test it with your customers (or at least a few of them), see what works and what doesn’t, and iterate to make changes and improve the product. This method will apply across multiple dimensions of product and business decisions—from editorial and product focus, to features, to pricing. It’s also an ongoing process, continuing even after achieving success.
Technology
While there has been a massive investment over the past 20 years in ad tech, there’s been relatively little investment in software and services to understand and engage with users as individuals, to measure behaviors like loyalty and conversion to repeat usage. Driving user engagement and powering consumer-paid content requires a robust technology platform that provides measurement and reporting, customer messaging, content gating rules, entitlements, and payment processing. Moving forward, machine learning will be a powerful tool for anticipating which users are most likely to become loyal and ultimately willing to pay.
Marketing skill
It’s become conventional wisdom among media business observers that—through his often disparaging tweets—President Donald Trump deserves a lot of credit for the recent success driving subscriptions at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media companies. The follow-up question is often “What happens when the ‘Trump bump’ fades?” Piano’s CEO, Trevor Kaufman, points out that’s a pretty limiting way to look at it. No one asks, “Will consumers pay for Nike shoes?” the way media pundits ask “Will people pay for journalism?”
The problem is that most media companies don’t know how to think like product marketers. They generally don’t have the skills in house, haven’t got the tools available and aren’t building marketing into their business plans and P&Ls. So, once you understand your customer, create a compelling product they’re willing to pay for and have the technology support. The last element to put in place is the ongoing marketing plan to drive customers through the engagement funnel. Then Google and Facebook transform from behemoths with the power to slash your audience and destroy your business into just another channel for marketing your product.
The ultimate vision is a healthy media market based on true relationships with known customers. For publishers, creating products that meaningfully connect with a loyal audience will unlock multiple revenue opportunities—whether consumer-paid products, events, merchandise sales or even advertising based on that real customer connection.
Did you get the letter from Google? Late last summer, Google notified 1,000 website owners that their ads were annoying, misleading, or harmful to the user experience. They were directed to Google’s Ad Experience Report and encouraged to clean up their ads.
This encouragement is now a directive. As of February 15, the latest Chrome version (v64) began to filter all failing ads across every website with a failing status as listed on the Ad Experience Report. Given that Chrome dominates the browser market (60-65%, depending on the source), this news has serious repercussions for ad-supported websites. Never has so much hinged on ad quality.
Defining bad ads
The classification of a bad ad is no longer in the eye of the beholder (or media publisher). Formed in 2016, the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA) researched the acceptable advertising experience of 25,000 consumers in North America and Europe. The result is the Better Ads Standards, released in March 2017.
In a nutshell, 12 ad types regularly annoy consumers and correlate to the adoption of ad blockers: four for desktop and eight for mobile. Google is using the Better Ads Standards to evaluate ads on ad-supported websites. Upon initial review last summer, less than 1% of 100,000 websites contained ads violating the standards.
Fixing bad ads before they fix you
When it comes down to it, meeting the CBA standards shouldn’t be that difficult, especially if you’re a premium publisher that knows all parties contributing content to the user experience. This knowledge makes it easier to communicate and enforce any policy—be it ad quality, security, data leakage, performance and more—and cease business with those that don’t have your—and, therefore, the user—best interests at heart.
What happens if you chose to ignore the Chrome audience? Your website will be assigned a “failing” status, and if this status remains for more than 30 days, then Chrome will filter all ads running on your website. Therefore, your choice directly affects the website’s ad-based revenue continuity.
Be proactive. Adopt a holistic creative quality assurance approach to continuously assess ads—creative and tags—for compliance with regulatory requirements, company policies and industry practices, like those promoted by CBA. By developing a tactical ad governance structure, you can codify what constitutes an acceptable ad and ensure compliance with multiple industry standards.
Check: What’s your status?
The CBA also announced a self-attested certification program whereby publisher participants pledge to abide by CBA standards. The program is free during the trial period, with an expectation that it will run at least until July when fees will be announced. As of now, Google agrees to not filter ads for any company participating in the CBA program. With the program’s initial steps only requiring registration, self-attestation and no fees, it makes sense for publishers to participate.
Remedy for Bad Ads
Regardless if you register with CBA, all media publishers should verify their status and take steps to remediate offending ad quality as soon as possible.
Initiate verification by selecting “Manage property” and downloading the HTML file to your site. (Note that there are alternative methods such as using your Google Analytics or Tag Manager.)
Once your website is verified, Google will initiate scanning. The process may take some time.
Review your website’s status for both desktop and mobile
Warning or Failing status requires immediate attention
Remediate all ad quality issues, especially those promulgated by CBA through these steps:
Identify the source of the issue
Communicate digital policy requirements, i.e., CBA standards
Demand correction or remove the source from your digital ecosystem
Document your remediation steps in the “Request review” area of the portal
Submit for review by clicking “I fixed this”
As a member of Coalition for Better Ads, The Media Trust has various solutions to address ad quality, from creative policy enforcement, to campaign verification. Whatever your decision, you can achieve ad revenue objectives while delivering a clean and regulatory-compliant user experience. Clearly, a more positive ad experience benefits everyone—publishers, ad/martech and agencies and, most of all, consumers.
Strategies for differentiating their premium news and entertainment companies in an environment of disruption, trust issues, and monetization challenges were the focus of the annual closed-door members-only Digital Content Next (DCN) Summit held Feb. 8-9 in Miami, Florida.
DCN CEO Jason Kint updated attendees on consumer privacy, net neutrality, and press freedom policy initiatives. He said that pressure on platforms will increase this year and that advertisers will seek greater transparency. Kint cited findings from DCN’s new Distributed Content Revenue Benchmark Report, which found that publishers only garner 5% of their revenue from social platforms. However, he also touched upon the growth in paid content, on-demand video, and promising signs of sustainable advertising models.
Trust
For the digital media industry, Trust has reached a crisis level, Kint said. He and other speakers throughout the event pointed to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, which reveals a low consumer perception of the media, platforms, and advertisers—particularly around digital.
An absence of trust has been a driving factor toward regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad. It has also profoundly affected digital advertising, one of the mainstays of the industry. Kint applauded DCN members for embracing DCN’s new tool for rebuilding trust: TrustX. The cooperative private programmatic marketplace serves as a collaboration platform for marketers and publishers to create innovative advertising solutions that drive measurable value and improve the consumer experience with confidence and safety at scale.
Kint was far from alone in extolling the importance of trust in the digital content marketplace, however. Fatemeh Khatibloo, principal analyst at Forrester Research cited the building blocks for trust, which include integrity, competence, transparency, privacy, and data security.
David Sable, Global Chief Executive Officer, Y&R, noted that trusted brands employ honesty, environmental sustainability, and kindness. He also pointed out that millennials are keen to identify trusted news sources. Building trust starts early, according to Sean Cohen, president, International and Digital Media, A+E Networks, citing how brands such as the History Channel have become a trusted source for students.
Brian Stelter, Katy Tur, Arianna Davis, and Jorge Ramos
While Edelman’s barometer noted a five-point jump in trust of journalists, a social media-weaponized world has given way to readers and viewers expressing anger, often anonymously and without consequences, as vividly reported by a panel of journalists— Arianna Davis of Refinery29, Jorge Ramos of Noticiero Univision, CNN’s Brian Stelter, and Katy Tur of MSNBC Live.
Brand Quality and Context
People won’t pay for brands that don’t focus on quality, noted Andrew Essex, former CEO of Tribeca Enterprises and Droga5 [pictured, top]. Quartz President and Publisher Jay Lauf also emphasized value-based selling over commodified volume selling.
Context is critical, he said, adding that marketers “are terrified” about ads appearing on an exploitive YouTube video or inadvertently funding fake news on Facebook. And Hearts & Science research on negative reach confirms advertising appearing next to content a consumer finds offensive does more harm than good according to the agency’s president Zak Treuhaft.
Sean Cohan, President, International and Digital Media, A+E Networks & Jason Kint, CEO, Digital Content Next
And, in a world dominated by memes and disembodied news delivered via social platforms, “Context is king,” according to Sean Cohan, President, International and Digital Media, A+E Networks. For example, he pointed to the History brand’s increased emphasis on providing a larger historical context for today’s news, such as the history of sports figures’ involvement in political protests.
Disruption and Opportunity
Disruption has led to a competitive marketplace imbalance as DCN member companies try to transform their business models, as Kint noted. At the same time, disruptive technologies, such as voice assistants, can create significant opportunities.
Loren Mayor, COO, NPR, spoke of the station’s mission to connect with people through storytelling journalism and is using on-demand audio and podcasting to enhance audience growth and engagement.
Smarter use of data and respectful personalization were subjects that came up in a number of conversations and presentations. More-informed data will help drive value, according to Lou Paskalis, SVP, Enterprise Media Planning, Investment and Measurement Executive, Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Marcus East, EVP & Chief Technology Officer, National Geographic
Marcus East, EVP, Product & Technology/CTO, National Geographic, said that successful brands create personalized experiences and help consumers save time and money, create emotional connections, offer life-changing elements, and promote positive social impact.
That said, in today’s uncertain digital environment, the hallmarks of reputable journalism have reemerged as critical for consumer trust and attention. Michael Anastasi, VP News, USA Today Network, Tennessee pointed to importance of the Indianapolis Star’s investigative coverage of U.S. Olympic gymnastics doctor Dr. Larry Nassar, which stands out in a time of local news outlets’ survival uncertainties.
Anastasi said that USA Today leverages its local/national symbiosis on to inform some of its stories. He cited the brand’s coverage of the opioid crisis across all platforms—and with national, local, and individual ramifications. The comprehensive coverage was made possible through a sponsorship from BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee.
In addressing financial sustainability in non-profit journalism, ProPublica President Richard Tofel noted significant growth in donation-based revenues since the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The non-profit model seems to be working for ProPublica as Tofel said that they launched with a staff of 25 nine and a half years ago and now number more than 100.
Diversification and Monetization
Ed Davis, EVP & CPO, Advertising Products, Fox Networks Group
Unsurprisingly, revenue was a key topic at the Summit. And while advertising remains a critical focus, diversification was a dominant theme. In all aspects of monetization, good consumer experience and engagement were essential. As Ed Davis, EVP & CPO Advertising Products, Fox Networks Group put it: “Attention is currency.”
Maggie McLean Suniewick, President, NBCUniversal Digital Enterprises & Tracy Corrigan, Chief Strategy Officer, Dow Jones
Maggie McLean Suniewick, President, NBCUniversal Digital Enterprises, showed off the many ways the company’s Olympic coverage is tapping into a wide range of platforms to engage target audiences wherever they might be. Bloomberg Media’s initiatives include global partnerships that help it transcend the competitive U.S. market according to Scott Havens, Global Head of Digital, Bloomberg Media. And The Washington Post has launched 15 products specifically designed to engage consumer interaction according to Jarrod Dicker, The Post’s VP of Innovation and Commercial.
The History Channel is leaning into new platforms and partners with The New York Times on stories and photo spreads. Sean Cohan, President, International and Digital Media, A+E Networks said that the company is seeing doubled social engagement, significant newsletter interest, and substantial boosts in YouTube video revenues.
Marty Moe, Vox Media President, said his company focuses on finding ways to grow quality, scale, and audience across its eight brands while retaining relevancy on each platform. However, diversification brings challenges such as tracking and measuring performance on multiple platforms, noted Christy Tanner, EVP & GM, CBS News Digital CBS interactive.
Dr. Jens Mueffelmann, CEO, Axel Springer Digital Ventures GmbH, President, Axel Springer USA, said his company’s success in global acquisitions is based on later-stage investment, development and partnership. While its successful classified ad profits have stunned critics, Mueffelmann urged companies to “stay paranoid” and continue to keep a close eye on emerging digital technologies and players.
On the heels of the news that The New York Times added 157,000 digital subscriptions in the 2017 fourth quarter, pushing its subscription revenues – which comprise 60% of overall revenues – to more than $1 billion, COO Meredith Kopit Levien encouraged everyone to get into the subscription business. It’s important to understand what drives subscribers, she said. For The New York Times, it’s the resources to create better original content, including 250 daily stories, a popular crossword puzzle and a cooking app, she said, noting “our strength is as a brand.”
While challenges in trust, brand quality, disruption and diversification continue to throw roadblocks up in the news and entertainment industry, Kint emphasized that for DCN members, there is strength in numbers, citing The New York Times’ subscription victory as a victory for all DCN members because of what it symbolizes for the industry.
At the core, DCN members are focusing on what they do best and continue to innovate and experiment in order to best serve audiences.
“All of our members have a direct and trusted relationship with your audience and with your advertisers,” Kint told the packed conference room. “They come to your brands because they know what they’re going to get when they give you their valued attention or valued advertising dollars.”
10 actionable steps to charting a publisher’s course to digital GDPR compliance
Yes, it is the topic du jour, but somehow many are still adrift when it comes to the European Union’s impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect on 25 May 2018—under 100 working days or five short months away. Countless articles summarise requirements into generalities covering organisation-wide data elements, such as customer, partner and vendor information. More often than not this approach doesn’t mean much to Ad/Revenue Operations (Ad Ops) professionals.
The Ad Ops Challenge
GDPR presents three significant hurdles to Ad Ops:
Identifying known data collection activity;
Confirming it is legitimate under GDPR (i.e. that the rules are being met); and
Detecting and remediating unauthorized data collection, which is potentially considered a data breach.
The highly-dynamic and opaque nature of the digital ecosystem often means that all three of these hurdles are difficult to clear without adversely affecting a media publisher’s strategic revenue channel. So, the key issue to resolve is this: how does a publisher go about managing data in a GDPR-compliant way but without undermining its business model(s) and therefore its commercial viability?
The answer, as usual, is Ad Ops. For this group, GDPR presents an important opportunity. As the frontline of digital operations, Ad Ops professionals are in the unique position to influence, drive, and co-create strategies to protect and optimise revenue in the changing regulatory environment. In fact, they have a powerful legitimate reason to control audience data collection activities on their digital properties and demand compliance from upstream partners.
10 Steps to GDPR Compliance
The daily demands placed on Ad Ops can be overwhelming, with the complexities—and vagaries—of GDPR an unwelcome intrusion. But it’s a critical opportunity. Here’s a 10-step approach (with supporting GDPR references) towards GDPR compliance for media-oriented websites and mobile apps:
1. Participate in an internal GDPR Task Force [GDPR Articles 37-39]
Every business— large and small—should have a GDPR ‘Task Force’ or something similar. This could be organised by a senior data privacy leader, such as a Data Protection Officer (DPO), which is now a requirement for many organisations. The Task Force should be staffed with key personnel across the organisation who interact with any type of personal data, i.e. operations, IT, privacy and risk, security, HR etc, and should include individuals across strategic markets as the GDPR has a global reach (see GDPR Article 3). As part of the Task Force, Ad Ops can explain the role of consumer data in the digital environment to deliver user-specific content and advertisements and how it supports the publication’s mission and contributes to revenue.
It is important to understand that the scope of personal data is broader than under existing EU data protection law. Under Article 4 of the GDPR, personal data is defined as “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.”
To this extent, typical data collection, use and sharing activity generated from everyday access of websites and/or mobile apps for digital advertising purposes (i.e. cookie deployment or device identification) should be treated as personal data. Therefore, the term ‘non-Personally Identifiable Information’ should no longer exist as personal data under the GDPR is broader than PII, which is a significant change for digital advertising.
The Task Force will probably be responsible for developing a centralised roadmap for the organisation’s digital data and designing the plans to implement necessary processes and changes (including budgetary considerations) required to comply with the new law. Many organisations will need to conduct a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA–a valuable exercise for good data hygiene), mapping the kind of data collected and processed. (Here’s a good template to follow.)
The DPIA should enable revenue and Ad Ops teams to get up close and personal with all data collection and processing activities, and knowing with whom data is being shared. There are many companies that can assist with DPIAs to develop a point-in-time data picture, which is a critical start to identifying data in the publisher ecosystem. However, the ever-changing digital environment requires continuous monitoring for compliance in order to provide an audit trail or truly demonstrate ongoing compliance. The bottom line is that the GDPR seeks to introduce a ‘Privacy by Design’ approach: removing or minimizing data or ‘pseudonymising’ it (e.g. hashing) to minimize the privacy risks.
3. Create an Authorised Partner List [GDPR Article 30]
Accountability is a central theme within the GDPR: you are required to record and account for all data processing activities. Ultimately, publishers will need to know and understand what data is being collected and processed, and who it is shared with—a serious challenge for the dynamic digital environment.
This means Ad Ops needs to develop a list of all parties that execute on the website (including contracted second parties and any subsequent parties called during the rendering of the visitor experience), analyse digital behaviour to understand data collection or targeting needs, and block those that exhibit anomalous or unapproved activity.
Conducting a data audit, compiling inventory and documenting authorized partners is a good first step; however, these will have to be continuously evaluated with an eye towards changing partner activity, new digital supply chain partners, international data transfers and consumer understanding of tracking/identification and its value to the digital experience.
4. Get Legal! [GDPR Article 6]
It may seem strange for Ad Ops teams to concern themselves with too many legalities, but with the GDPR it is imperative that those involved in data collection activities understand the consequences of their actions. The regulation outlines six legal bases to justify the processing of personal data:
the user’s consent (which is defined more stringently than under current data protection law)
the use of contracts involving the user
legal compliance (i.e. with another law)
protecting the interests of an individual
when it is in the public interest to do so
when it is the organisation’s legitimate interests to do so (provided it doesn’t override the rights of the individual)
Digital advertising will require the user’s consent, not least because it is required for the storing of information or gaining access to information already stored on a device—whether personal or not—(i.e. via a cookie) under the existing ePrivacy Directive (See Step 6.) This is where Ad Ops needs to work closely with the compliance teams: an innovative consent mechanism will be required for digital advertising activities. But, keep in mind that some data processing activities (e.g. for network security or when tackling fraud) may warrant different legal bases.
5. Enforce Digital Partner Compliance [Articles 26-30]
The GDPR introduces obligations (and liability) for all organisations, whether a ‘data controller’ or ‘data processor’. Find out how data partners are preparing for the GDPR and establish a working group with key partners to discuss compliance strategies. This requires first knowing your upstream partners from SSPs and exchanges through to DMP and DSPs. Some data partners are likely to have to conduct a DPIA as well—guide the process for them. In time, revisit, review and adapt contracts or agreements with existing partners to ensure that shared obligations and responsibilities under the GDPR are accounted for and that partners are complying with digital asset policies for your company. If a partner chooses to not comply with your policies reconsider your relationship with them.
6. Obtain Consent [GDPR Articles 7-9]
Consent is the new king in digital advertising, so review where and how you obtain it. Under the GDPR, consent must be given freely, specifically, and unambiguously, and it requires affirmative user action. Some pre-GDPR consent mechanisms (i.e. so-called ‘implied’ consent) may not be valid when the GDPR applies. And it remains to be seen if existing consent management platforms can properly handle authorized cookies delivered by third-party partners in addition to a publisher’s first-party cookies. It’s important that practical and user-friendly consent mechanisms are adopted. Where appropriate, review existing consent mechanisms and explore evolving market solutions to suit your business. EU regulators have provided some draft guidance on consent.
7. Be Transparent [GDPR Articles 12-14]
Revisit and restructure your Privacy Notice to ensure that it meets the requirements of GDPR. It is likely it will need to include more information than your existing one (such as all the technologies used to process data, including by third-party solution providers). Ad Ops teams will be directly responsible for any data collection activities. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Code of Practice provides a good template to follow, including what information to include, how the Privacy Notice should be written, and how to test, review and roll it out. But don’t stop there. Consider enhancing transparency by deploying additional measures including ‘Just-in Time’ mechanisms, video messages or the EU AdChoices programme.
8. Give your Customers Greater Control over their Information [GDPR Articles 15-22]
The GDPR seeks to give people greater control over their data and therefore includes many rights for individuals, such as the Right to Erasure and the Right to Data Portability. Media publishers will need to put in place processes to achieve these for their customers. Beyond consent, publishers need to provide mechanisms for consumers to solicit information collected and used by the publisher and absolutely honor requests for data removal. The ability to offer this functionality and test its reliability are further proof points to demonstrate compliance. Where appropriate, point to existing controls such as unsubscribe mechanisms and opt-out points, and consider other innovative data control solutions.
9. Designate a Lead Supervisory Authority [GDPR Article 56, 60-61]
Choose who your ‘Lead Supervisory Authority’ (i.e. regulator) will be when the GDPR becomes effective. This regulator will act as a single point of contact for the enterprise’s data activities throughout the EU. Documenting and opening up communication channels with the Lead Supervisory Authority now is critical to understanding how future enforcement will be carried out. Keep an eye on Brexit: if you are hoping to designate the UK ICO you may have to think again.
10. Prepare for any Data Breaches [GDPR Articles 33-34]
Implement (and test) procedures to detect, report, investigate and resolve a personal data breach (e.g. data loss or hack). Keep in mind that the reporting of high-risk breaches to the relevant Supervisory Authority (regulator) needs to happen within 72 hours of discovery—a timeline publishers are not positioned to meet. As Data Controllers, Publishers are ultimately responsible for breach notifications and, therefore, they need to be aware of any breach that occurs throughout the digital supply chain including upstream partners.
Sailing Through the GDPR Storm
All experts agree: GDPR will be a watershed moment for digital publishers. The next several months (let alone years) will be tumultuous as stragglers try to catch up and the more-prepared publishers await the success of their compliance programs.
On a positive note, the winds are favorable for digital publishers to take back control over their audience data. Direct access to the consumer relationship and the control of consumer consent puts publishers at the helm. However, it is up to the unlikely heroes—Ad Ops teams—to ensure smooth sailing when it comes to digital data compliance and risk management.
Since 1999 Matt has been working on the front line of digital advertising in an industry-facing capacity. Most recently he has taken on the role of European General Manager for The Media Trust, a US-based digital security and advertising quality assurance company.
Matt has consistently strived to generate industry consensus from senior leaders and drive innovation through collaboration. He is a frequent speaker, panelist, and chair at industry conferences including Digiday, IAB, dmexco, The Guardian, AOP (UK), Admangerforum, and corporate-operated events. He is an active advisor and investor for advertising and marketing technology start-up enterprises and a senior partner at AtlanticLeap.