Category results for "Innovation"

Web accessibility isn’t just an ethical duty – it’s good business

December 10, 2020 Greg Dool – Independent Media Reporter

The Covid-19 pandemic has shifted an ever-larger share of public life online. Unfortunately, however, the internet remains a largely inaccessible place for people with visual or hearing impairments. As publishers rightfully aim to become more inclusive, the 61 million American adults with disabilities are an underserved group well worth remembering.

To overworked editors and designers, provisions for web accessibility can feel extraneous and opaque. Considerations like image alt text or video subtitles often require added steps before publishing a story and may not seem like a vital imperative. But given last year’s Supreme Court ruling that essentially sets precedent that the Americans With Disabilities Act applies to online platforms, media companies should be thinking about digital accessibility.

Priorities and skill development

“Web accessibility can be very confusing. It can be daunting,” says Bryan Gould, director of accessible learning and assessment technologies at the National Center for Accessible Media. “It’s a whole other skillset to learn, potentially. And you don’t necessarily have editors who can talk to developers and designers all in the same language.”

Publishers, particularly news outlets serving the public interest, should consider making themselves as widely accessible as possible central to their mission. But the fact is that accessibility isn’t just the right thing to do, it is also good business.

Text matters

Gareth Ford Williams, head of user experience design at the BBC, has long been an advocate for accessibility in media. In 2004, he founded the national broadcaster’s first digital accessibility team.

More recently, he was part of the team that developed BBC Reith, a new uniform typeface used across the organization. With distinguishable letter shapes, legible in small sizes, Reith is meant to ease the experience for a multitude of users. These include those with visual impairments and neurological conditions like dyslexia, as well as less-advanced readers.

On top of improving accessibility, Reith has become an element of the BBC brand. Moreover, it actually saves money, eliminating the cost of licensing third-party fonts.

“Pretty much everything in accessibility has a much bigger context,” Williams says. “It is about disabilities, very much so. But it’s also about situational and environmental disabilities as well as medical disabilities.”

Williams points to video consumption statistics on social media platforms. On Facebook alone, as much as 85% of all video views occur with the sound turned off. “Captioning is expensive,” he adds. “But look at the reach opportunity. If you’re not capturing that potential, you’re undermining your own business case.”

A good look

Three years ago, Boston public radio station GBH undertook a “massive redesign” of its website, says senior editor Ellen London. Among the priorities was creating a more “visual-forward” experience. This meant a design that is accessible and appealing to a larger share of users.

The newsroom partnered with Gould’s team at NCAM, a part of the GBH organization, to develop accessibility guidelines specific to the new CMS. Provisions included sufficient contrast between text and background colors and alt text for images. Rather than simply saying “click here,” hyperlinks should be descriptive, catering to users of assistive technology like screen readers.

GBH then created a highly condensed, one-sheet checklist, which editors, reporters and producers can print and keep at their workstations. “Putting together some great resources to refer to and empowering producers and editors to get involved has worked really well for us,” says Gould. “It’s not that editors don’t want to make their content accessible, it’s just that you can’t know what you don’t know.”

Picture this

This focus on accessibility was manifested in GBH’s “Year in Pictures” feature, published at the end of 2019. Photographs representing the most important stories of the year were accompanied by concise yet thorough descriptions. These descriptions were then recorded by GBH radio reporters and uploaded as audio files.

“The whole point was to put the accessibility out where everybody can see what it is and why it’s there,” says Gould. “The idea was not just to make it accessible, but to make accessibility a feature.”

It was a learning experience for the GBH team, London says. Creating effective image descriptions proved to be more of an art than previously thought. It required careful decision-making around how to best convey the purpose, context and information in an image for someone who can’t see it.

“As an editor, I have definitely put elements like audio descriptions in more of a transactional category,” London adds. “In learning how to write and record and produce them myself, I learned how much those descriptions are part of the editorial process just like any other part of the story. That was really an eye-opener to me; it’s highly editorial.”

Identifying weaknesses

Of course, not every publisher has the benefit of a media accessibility center within its organization. While resources such as the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines exist, they are dense and difficult to understand—even for experts.

“I myself remember looking at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and being overwhelmed,” says Patrick Garvin, a former designer and developer at The Boston Globe. Now an adjunct professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, Garvin suggests that one of the biggest accessibility obstacles publishers face is simply awareness.

“The way to appreciate the WCAG is to first understand how people with disabilities use the web,” he says. “I think many people either are unaware of how their work is inaccessible. Or they might be aware but not sure what they can do to fix it.”

Inclusive approach

At the BBC, internal design research teams recruit users of various levels of ability for focus groups. Williams specifically recommends consulting with users who have disabilities.

“They’re brilliant people to work with, because they know the coping strategies and can teach you about the barriers that they experience,” he says.

Just as architects no longer design buildings without ramps, Williams says publishers shouldn’t build websites that exclude people.

“If you have an impairment and we don’t build things that are accessible, we are disabling you,” he says. “You’re not disabled until we gave you a barrier, and it’s our fault the barrier is there. We designed it.”

To better integrate this mission into the corporate culture, Williams established an “accessibility champions” network in 2011. Completely voluntary, that group has since grown to include about 230 BBC employees.

“They have one core function, and that’s to be the voice of the disabled user in every sprint,” he says. “They don’t have to be the person with the answers. All we expect them to do is to talk about it. It’s more cultural and structural. It gets people thinking about accessibility and dealing with it.”

Basic steps

For publishers who wish to ensure they’re at least covering the basics of accessibility, Gould recommends four key considerations. Multimedia and images should be accompanied by captions. Colors and fonts should not be distracting. There shouldn’t be motion on a page that can’t be paused or switched off.

Accessibility considerations extend off of owned and operated platforms as well. Social media strategist Alexa Heinrich suggests taking advantage of platforms’ accessibility features, limiting emojis, and avoiding text-heavy images.

On a cultural level, encouraging staffers to think about accessibility throughout the design and production process is far easier (and cheaper) than retrofitting things after the fact, says London.

“Accessibility should be treated the same way as accuracy: Everyone has a role to play in ensuring it, even if not everyone plays the same role,” adds Garvin. “The commitment to accessibility should come from the top.”

Gould believes that awareness is growing that digital accessibility is important. And he emphasizes that it doesn’t have to be expensive. “If you start planning from the beginning, you can make an accessible web experience that doesn’t really cost more. In fact, it saves you money from having to retrofit things—or deal with a lawsuit.”

When embedded into the culture of an organization, accessibility becomes a self-sustaining investment, says Williams. “It brings so much value and efficiency back into the organization, it enables accessibility in such a massive context, that it improves usability across the board,” he adds.

Innovation | Perspectives

Streamlined streaming: How to improve newsroom efficiency

December 1, 2020 David Hemingway, Sr. Product Manager, New Ventures – Bitcentral

With a rapidly evolving digital media landscape, it’s not surprising that media companies — newsrooms in particular — have faced new challenges and new pressures. A significant decline in traditional broadcast and appointment-style viewership has coincided with an explosion in increasingly accessible digital and on-demand streaming. Technology has already radically altered many of the fundamental realities around content creation and consumption that newsrooms were built on.

Media professionals recognize the need to evolve to keep pace with these changes. But connecting with and retaining content consumers who now have a virtually unlimited range of options available to them is easier said than done. More importantly, finding efficient and cost-effective ways to produce, distribute, and monetize content can seem like a formidable hurdle. But it is possible, especially with new tools and platforms emerging that are designed to enable newsrooms and other traditional content creators to make the process better fit the realities of today.

Be an educated adopter

Every platform makes big claims. All promise new efficiencies. Educate yourself and understand how to examine those claims with a critical eye. Make sure whatever path you choose, your digital content solution can efficiently develop content and create and deliver high quality viewing experiences in a way that is impactful, profitable, and sustainable. The right solution should answer important questions for you, including how to balance live and pre-recorded content, how to access and insert ads, and how to do all that in a streamlined and efficient manner.

Utilize automation

For organizations where a large majority of on-demand content originates from their live programming or other sources of traditional linear content, taking full advantage of digital streaming requires some level of automated prowess. The goal is to minimize the number of toolsets needed to be deployed throughout the process of generating digital streaming content.

Automation and “hands-free” production can yield new efficiencies, saving time and money on tools, resources, and manpower at a time when media companies are often dealing with tight margins and are already making tough ROI calculations. In that context, the ability to effectively automate the process of generating more digital content is enormously valuable. Automated tools and solutions make it possible to accelerate the digital production and distribution of your content without interrupting what you are already doing.

Lighten the workload

For media companies, creating content is just the first step. It is critically important to find ways to streamline the workflow required to efficiently edit, develop and distribute volumes of new content to digital audiences. Fortunately, new suites of tools are becoming available that can make that digital/online transition possible.

Keeping fresh content in front of viewers is difficult. Instead of relying on tools that require manual curation of playlists – and thus a person on staff dedicated to the role – consider a tool with capabilities to populate playlists automatically. This frees up staff to focus on the actual process of creating the content, rather than managing it. And the best tools on the market today also can lighten the load in other ways, from auto-clipping a newscast to the seamless transition between live and breaking news to prerecorded video.

Prioritize simplicity

At a time when some newsrooms have had to entirely reorganize to accommodate much more extensive digital production and distribution needs, simplicity is an appealing prospect. Which is why it makes sense to invest in tools meant to automate the ingestion of incoming content. Whether it’s aggregating content from multiple newsrooms or introducing content from other sources, bringing designated content from a range of different sources into the digital content ecosystem of target audiences is a way to lessen the load on your team and your resources, while still delivering compelling content.

Another important feature for streamlined simplicity is handling all of the technical heavy-lifting server-side, which makes it possible to have a simplified workflow and create a unified viewing experience across all digital platforms.

Embrace efficiency

As newsrooms evaluate and leverage tools and technology designed specifically to help them take that all-important step to expand the distribution of streaming monetizable content, it’s important to understand how efficiency translates into revenue. Monetization opportunities are all about scale. More content yields more viewers, which subsequently creates numerous opportunities for monetization. In other words, efficiency isn’t just helpful, it’s a prerequisite for sustainable profitability.

To take the next step forward, newsrooms will need to embrace tools and systems that allow them to quickly, efficiently and automatically update digital content. This includes graphic elements, closed captioning, and added metadata.

Engage viewers

Recognize the importance of the viewer experience. Manage your content with tools designed to connect content with viewers and help them understand critical context about what they are watching. Creating a better viewing experience also means letting consumers know when something is breaking news, and then returning them back to what they were originally tuned in to watch. It’s the feel of live content with dynamic elements that elevate the standard static viewing model into something more engaging.

Viewer expectations are skyrocketing. And media companies are wrestling with complex (and often costly) changes they feel like they need to make to meet those expectations. But charting a path forward in our new environment might be easier than many suspect. Streamlined content creation tools can not only make the digital transition successful for newsrooms and their operational needs; they can enhance the online viewing experience and boost bottom lines in the process.

About the author

David Hemingway is the Sr. Product Manager, New Ventures at Bitcentral, one of the video industry’s most trusted and innovative software providers.

Advertising | Innovation

Rethinking ad production for connected TV

November 24, 2020 Simon Asselin, SVP, Engineering – trueX

Connected TV presents some inherent trade-offs, like more limited targeting capabilities as well as a complex and heterogeneous array of devices. And, of course, there’s the viewing environment. In part one of this op ed, we tackled the dizzying array of CTV platforms, the multitude of capabilities that can drive impact, and performance. Even for planners, developers, and designers who have been building advertising for desktop and mobile video for a decade or more, CTV presents a new host of questions and challenges.

But it is worth stepping up to the challenge. CTV is increasingly where audiences are spending their time. It is important to note that, while CTV offers the same potential for rich interactivity that a computer or mobile device does, it’s still on a television, and consumers are used to approaching TV in a more “lean-back” way.

Advertising on CTV truly embodies the adage that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Advertisers, publishers, and technology companies are all interdependent. And, in order for any of us to succeed in it, the whole industry has to understand how to approach the medium.

Rethinking strategy from the ground up

Structure

Building for connected TV means, in many cases, starting completely from scratch — including with your technical team. The complex, multi-device CTV landscape means that you’re often building for platforms with a range of capacities and technical limitations. That is unless you’ve chosen to restrict a campaign by platform, which might be your best route if your goals are innovation rather than scale.

How audiences react to CTV ads is in many ways still evolving. That means that it’s important to set up an experimentation feedback loop where you can rapidly develop, test and flight new experiences and capabilities. Then you need to graduate only those experiments that were successful into scaled, cross-platform formats. It’s important to engage your advertiser clients to participate in this process. You must partner with them in supporting these innovative advertising projects and being upfront about the fact that you’re working in a relatively unproven medium — but one that has massive potential.

Your learnings from these technical investments can form the basis of an ongoing strategy that enables you to drive rich advertising experiences in a scalable way across platforms as different as a Roku box to LG TVs to the Sony PS4.

Targeting

As Part 1 of this series explained, many CTV platforms do not support cookies at all. On CTV in general, targeting is very different from what digital advertisers are used to. Many CTV campaigns aren’t targeted at all beyond the network or show that they run against.

Consider incorporating self-identified targeting by using an interactive card to try and qualify the viewer for its requirements. This card might ask the viewer if they have pets, for example. If they said yes, a campaign targeted to pet owners would run. Otherwise, the experience would revert to an untargeted fallback campaign.

This experience is open and transparent, as there is a direct link between a targeted campaign and the collection of the information enabling the targeting to be fulfilled. (You can also offer the viewer the choice to opt out of any question, leading them to said fallback campaign.)

Engagement

How do you get a viewer to follow through on a call to action in a CTV ad? To be blunt, neither the living room setting nor the device / app environment lends itself well to clicking through to a landing page. These are usually not possible due to reasons noted above, like the lack of a web browser, as well as the fact that viewers tend to be in a more lean-back state. As a result, most branded experiences on CTV leave a lot of campaign performance on the table by being passive and failing to pull the audience in.

We had a bit of an unfair advantage at true[X], given that all our ads already require a deliberate opt-in — not just on CTV. So, we only put ads in front of viewers who have actively chosen to see them. We’d be thrilled if more companies adopted this, to be honest. Opt-in advertising puts those viewers into a state where they will be more actively processing and reacting to an advertiser’s message, and as it turns out, this is perfect for addressing connected TV’s “lean-back” problem.

There’s also one well-known alleged drawback to viewer engagement on CTV (and non-connected TV, for that matter) that you can turn it into a major opportunity. Over 90% of consumers have their mobile devices in-hand while they watch TV. Rather than get discouraged by the implication that it means they’ll never pay attention to ads, consider incorporating mobile phones into the CTV ad experience.

You can implement QR codes that enable a click through onto the viewer’s mobile device, where it then becomes much easier to drive lower-funnel goals such as consideration and purchase. And you can go a step further and create a two-screen real time session. As a test, we built an interactive pizza builder where the viewer could assemble a custom pizza by swiping ingredients up from her mobile device to the CTV screen. Pepperoni, mushrooms, or anchovies would seamlessly animate up from the mobile screen and onto the pizza on the large screen — presumably, that very pizza could be ordered right at the end of the experience.

Future ready

But will viewers actually engage? Will the ads work? That’s where we go back to the question of structure and workflow. Restructuring teams to address an emerging medium meant that we could adequately test experimental features and proceed with the prototypes that “stuck.”

Just because a new technology is widely available doesn’t mean consumers are actually using it, after all. Figuring out what sticks is paramount to CTV success. And if something doesn’t stick? Don’t force it.

The transition to connected TV advertising requires the whole industry to take what we know from both linear and digital platforms, keep what works, and adapt it for this totally new environment. The unique capabilities of the medium, and diverse array of device architectures rule out simply replicating solutions that worked before. It requires a new, innovative approach. But remember that it’s one we all need to work on to create, because the connected living room is where consumers are now.

Featured Post | Innovation

Text-to-speech is the audio opportunity no one’s talking about

November 5, 2020 Charlotte Ricca – Independent Media Reporter

Audio articles are making quite a noise in publishing. Podcasting may be hogging the headlines. But creating features and news that your audience can listen to is an audio opportunity that should not be ignored.

While offering articles in an audible format is nothing new, this type of content is currently enjoying a massive boom, as time-strapped audiences look for convenient ways to consume online media.

A boom

In the U.S. alone, spoken word’s share of audio listening has increased 30% over the last six years and 8% in the last year alone. And when multi Pulitzer Prize-winning titles jump on-board, you know that audio content is a serious business. In July, The Washington Post announced plans to make audio versions of all of its articles. And a few months earlier, the New York Times acquired Audm, a platform that turns longform journalism into audio content.

Other big brands using Audm’s audio services include The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Wired, and Rolling Stone. Similar platforms Curio and Noa – which are based in the UK and Ireland respectively – have signed up the likes of the Financial Times, The Telegraph, The Economist, and The Guardian.

What’s even more interesting is that listener numbers have risen since Covid-19. In fact, 75% of the U.S. population has listened to spoken word audio in the past month.

The Washington Post began testing text-to-speech capabilities on its Android app in early 2020, assuming the feature would appeal to readers on their daily commute. But Leila Siddique, senior product manager, said they have been surprised to see steady adoption rates, despite people working from home.

“What we’ve learned from users is that they listen to the news while doing other things. And they are consuming far more content than they would normally,” she says.

It’s not just the U.S. that has seen a boom in audio articles during the pandemic. England’s The Economist has offered audio editions of its weekly magazine since 2007. However, according deputy editor Tom Standage they are currently enjoying “record numbers of streams/downloads and unique listeners.”

Engagement

Listener figures are still way below the numbers of people who read text online, with the New York Times enjoying in excess of five million subscribers across its print and digital content. However, audio content isn’t just about numbers, it’s about audience engagement.

Reading takes time and focus – which is in short supply with modern audiences. According to Chartbeat, even the top stories only engage readers for around two-and-a-half minutes, while 45% of readers leave within 15 seconds. In contrast, Noa cites an 84% average completion rate for stories

“Completion rates are higher because people are generally busy doing other things while listening. So, it’s less convenient to switch away from something,” says Standage.

Basic value

Despite the fact that these platforms use professional narrators, audio content is still fairly simplistic compared to podcasts, which often require dramatic story-telling and high production values. The key to audio articles’ success is convenience – and quality journalism.

“We know that readers are time-pressed and feel guilty that they have not read enough of a given week’s edition before the next one arrives,” says Standage. “Offering audio content sends the message: we know you are busy and are willing to pay for high-quality information. So, here’s a handy feature that will help you ensure that you get value from our journalism.”

Publishers, in turn, get more value from their audience. While The Economist hasn’t shared numbers for the performance of their audio content, Standage says figures suggests the audio edition is an effective retention tool. “Once you come to rely on it, you won’t unsubscribe.”

The Washington Post’s managing editor Kat Downs Mulder agrees the convenience of audio is a “huge benefit” to both their subscribers and their subscription numbers.

“We know people love listening to news – our podcasts show that,” she comments. “Opening up more audio content and making it easier for them engage with The Post helps draw them into our ecosystem even further. That improves retention rates.”

Offer more

Interestingly, while most publishers create a limited number of long-form, analytical audio articles, The Post is using the text-to-speech features on Android and iOS to offer audio versions of all its articles. The 143-year-old paper has been experimenting with audio since 2017. However, Downs Mulder explains that they decided to offer automated storytelling across all its content.

“We are excited about the habit-forming nature of audio. But it’s

hard to build those habits if you only offer a limited number of articles,” she says. “Our readers know they always have an audio option, across all articles, which really reinforces its availability.”

Feedback from users is positive so far. Downs Mulder says subscribers who listen to audio articles spend three times as much time in Post apps.

Niche and personal

It’s not just the big brands getting onboard. Audio is a great way for niche brands to engage with their audience and create loyalty. Danish startup, Zetland, launched its audio model in early 2017 and has since grown an incredible 650%.

Just like The Post, all Zetland articles are available as audio. However, they only produce about three longform articles a day. This means they can offer a far more personalized audio experience, with each article read out by the journalist that wrote it.

“The personal voice of the journalists is quite important to the success of our audio products,” explains Zetland CEO, Tav Klitgaard. “We originally tried using professional voice actors, but it sounded too perfect. We like to build what we call a ‘human product’, including all the glitches and quirks of human beings. It is important for us that our content conveys honest passion and curiosity, and we’ve found that to be done best when the journalist narrates.”

This personalized approach certainly seems to be working. They now have more than 18,500 paid members, whose consumer habits are around 75% audio. What’s more, engagement levels are impressive, with close to a 90% listen-through rate.

“We’ve learned that once we get people to hit play on that first piece of content, chances are they listen to the end,” says Klitgaard. “They also have a higher usage frequency and subsequently membership retention, than those who do not listen.”

Audience appeal

In addition to increased retention, audio is also a great way to reach out to new audiences, as it is traditionally consumed by a younger demographic. According to Klitgaard, more than 30% of their paying members are under age 30. And The Post says their audio audience is “generally younger” than their average reader.

As with all content, creating a successful audio model is all about knowing your audience. You need to recognize their needs and match the user experience accordingly. Whether that’s long-form analytical content, or easy-to-access daily news, audio is proving to be a highly effective way to engage, retain and attract audiences.

“Audio isn’t about changing user habits, it’s about embracing their habits,” states Downs Mulder. “Our goal is to convert causal listeners into dedicated listeners, by opening them up to getting news from us in other ways. And audio is proving to have an enormous importance to the news-interested public.”

Featured Post | Innovation

How Vox Media uses its podcast network to grow franchises

October 15, 2020 Esther Kezia Thorpe – Independent Media Reporter

Vox Media has become a podcasting powerhouse, with more than 200 shows across multiple categories. From news and tech to culture, comedy and sports, the publisher is seen as a leader when it comes to building and monetizing audiences around their premium podcasts.

The Vox Media Podcast Network is well-established. However, there is a great deal of strategic thinking and consideration that goes into developing new shows. This has been highlighted recently with the launch of a new narrative podcast, Go For Broke, from Epic Magazine.

Vox Media’s VP and Executive Producer of Audio Nishat Kurwa and Epic Magazine’s Director of Business Operations Melis Tusiray discussed the development of Go For Broke. They also explore the ways in which they leverage the power of the network when launching new shows.

Developing Epic’s first podcast

Go For Broke is a narrative franchise that looks at the stories within historical success “bubbles.” The idea for the podcast stemmed from a discussion of Pets.com. For those who don’t remember, the pet supply enterprise rose to fame after a sock puppet advertising campaign. It became one of the more high-profile victims of the dotcom bubble burst in the early 2000s.

“As we started talking about bubbles, it just really occurred to us at that moment that there was so much rich storytelling under this thematic concept of bubbles. It really made sense to do it as a podcast,” said Tusiray. “We could put in the audio texture of that time period, and really immerse the listeners in it. So when Epic merged with Vox Media in 2019, this was one of the first stories that we pitched.”

Hosted by BuzzFeed News alumna Julia Furlan, the series will address the ways in which the first dotcom bubble set up the dominance of the tech industry. It will also highlight how the same forces that caused the first crash are still at work in today’s tech economy.

This is Epic’s first full podcast show. So, it will be an opportunity for the team to discover their own audio voice and style within Vox Media’s Podcast Network. The brand has a strong background in storytelling through their publications. They’ve also done film and TV work, all with a focus on telling extraordinary true stories.

“It was when we joined Vox Media and we got to know the Vox Media Podcast Team that the opportunity became very clear,” explained Tusiray. “It became the right entry point for us to do our first Epic Magazine-branded narrative podcast.”

Leveraging a network

Having a well-established podcast network is key to the success of new shows at Vox Media. “We leverage our network inventory to do a lot of audio promotion across different audio sets and different categories,” Kurwa said.

New podcasts are frequently cross-promoted through audio promotions in similar categories. Occasionally Vox Media makes use of feed drops; it puts a trailer or whole episode of a new podcast into another show’s feed in order to attract listeners.

Go For Broke’s focus on the dotcom crash for the first season means that it covers both business and technology. These are categories which the Vox Media Podcast Network already publishes some of its biggest shows such as Pivot and Land of the Giants. “We know our audience is already interested in insightful coverage and historical narratives in those areas,” explained Kurwa. “So we took that as a strong signal that this would be a smart series to pursue.”

“That is really important when we’re thinking about developing a new show. What do we know about the audiences we already have? What do we know about the ways that we’ll be able to leverage our network to promote any new shows that we decide to publish?”

Building out franchises

One of the strategies that has made the Vox Media Podcast Network so successful over the past few years has been leaning into its franchises. This involves building out an area of focus for a brand, and then doing special series within that. For Epic, Go For Broke will play a formative part of shaping its future audio portfolio within Vox Media.

“Part of that initial pitch and development process was looking at what we can grow as a franchise,” Kurwa outlined. “As a network, we really have to develop our discipline around what makes sense for the individual brands, and what makes business sense, especially when looking at a very saturated podcast market. Where can we have success, where can we make inroads?”

This strategy plays out across other podcasts Vox Media looks to develop as well. The idea has to be able to extend across multiple seasons and stories to capitalize on the established audience. “While we’re in production for the first season, we’re already thinking about what a second, and even third season can be,” Kurwa added.

Go For Broke has benefited from Vox Media’s centralized audio team, who work across the various editorial networks to help shape their audio strategies under the Vox Media umbrella. This covers everything from the pitching and development process to support with production, marketing and sales.

Stability in podcasting

Coronavirus has not slowed Vox Media’s podcasting efforts. Like many other publishers, it has seen growth during this period, with listeners increasing by almost 50% over the past year.

At the start of 2020, Vox Media was reportedly aiming to double their $10 million-a- year podcasting business. Kurwa wouldn’t comment on revenue specifics, but said that they were on track with the target. Most importantly, the podcast business has shown stability throughout the pandemic.

“The fact that podcast audiences have remained stable and grown so much is very encouraging for the Podcast Network,” Kurwa said. There have been changes in the time that people listen, with a notable shift from the commute to now listening in the middle of the day or in the evening after dinner.

“The listening has time shifted. But it’s grown in really promising ways,” she added.

The strength of the Vox Media Podcast Network is in knowing its audiences. Epic Magazine’s Go For Broke launches into a vertical that Vox Media already has established podcasts in. This gives the brand an edge when it comes to promotion, monetization, and developing further audio products.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives | Revenue

How machine learning improves header bidding

October 15, 2020 Ankit Oberoi, CEO & Co-Founder – AdPushup

If you have worked in the digital space in the past few years, you’ve likely encountered the term Machine Learning (ML) in some context. For those of us who aren’t tech experts, this buzzword may be a little daunting. However, these technologies are actually widely used across industries including digital advertising.

So, what exactly is Machine Learning? To explain that, let’s take a step back and talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI describes a computer program’s ability to conduct a task that would normally require human intelligence, such as drawing conclusions based on data or recognizing patterns in a dataset. Machine learning is a step above this. A subset of AI, ML is the ability of programs to “learn” and self-improve as they get more data. This allows them to make more accurate decisions and predictions over time. This greatly reduces the human input required in performing crucial tasks.

How is machine learning positively impacting header bidding

Many publishers across the world rely on header bidding as the most efficient way to boost programmatic revenue. However, the technique in itself has undergone significant advancements. Initially, the majority of publishers used client-side header bidding to maximize yield through multiple demand partners. But it had its own challenges such as latency.

Then, server-side header bidding arrived. It helped publishers combat latency issues but had its own shortcomings. Publishers now use a combination of both, which is generally known as hybrid header bidding.

Among all of these advancements, one thing has remained constant: the use of machine learning in improving header bidding for all publishers. Therefore, the future of header bidding relies on how well technology companies can incorporate ML into improving header bidding tech. This will ultimately yield a robust solution that does not require any workarounds for its peripheral issues.

Impact of machine learning on header bidding dynamics

Automatic selection of demand partners

One of the key challenges that publishers dealt with before heading bidding was a lack of control over demand partners. That is key to optimizing revenue. Without knowledge of demand partners, the entire system would lack critical transparency.

Through the use of ML in header bidding, publishers get access to multiple demand partners. In fact, the selection process ois automatic, while simultaneously providing maximum yield. This massively benefits publishers as it saves them time for other activities while ensuring a consistent increase in revenue.

Timeout management

For every publisher, managing timeouts is a tricky process. Timeouts can often result in lost revenue and publishers need to spend some time troubleshooting. However, ML has completely altered the game. Publishers can now use managed heading bidding solutions that utilize machine learning to fine-tune timeout settings in a way that maximizes yield but reduces latency.

Server-side header bidding

Server-side header bidding was introduced to reduce the latency issues associated with client-side header bidding. Instead of a user’s browser, the auction takes place on a server. Many publishers have gravitated towards a combination of client-side header bidding and this to get the maximum out of their investment.

The credit however, goes to ML for helping the ad tech industry in advancing this technology. Machine learning helps in tracking deal performances through automated systems. All this is done in real-time with multiple demand partners in place.

Price floor optimization

Another added advantage with using ML in header bidding is optimizations of price floors. As mentioned above, ML is what makes algorithms smart. With a consistent tracking of data, patterns, trends, demand partners, ad requests, and related factors, ML can help in automated price floor optimization. Over time, this can considerably improve header bidding performance.

Why machine learning is here to stay and scale

ML capacity to learn and improve is uncapped. This means that with time, as the programs amass and go through more data, their predictions will only become sharper, quicker, and more accurate. While ML may not replace humans anytime soon, these tools can definitely help marketing teams free up time to focus on high-level strategy, instead of repetitive data analytics.

Advertisers across the world are already witnessing increasing returns on their ad spends, thanks to ML-based optimization of everything from creatives, targeting, and bid values. However, advertisers are not the only ones who stand to benefit from the adoption of ML tools. Publishers typically receive a percentage of the revenue (through CPM, CPC or other models) and more effective advertising campaigns mean a chunk of a larger pie for publishers.

However, publishers can by no means afford to be merely passive bystanders in the ML revolution. Thanks to the data at their disposal, advertisers, today, have a clearer picture of how, where and when their ads work best. In contextual advertising, for instance, publishers need to continually create content. However, they must also evolve based on their audience’s changing consumption patterns. This requires knowing your target audience deeply, and often working with advertisers to create a synergistic experience for the audience. Publishers, too, can leverage ML solutions for layout optimization to create greater value for advertisers, and by extension for their own platforms.

Overall, AI and ML tools offer an opportunity for all parties involved in advertising technology. Early adopters of these solutions will likely see the best outcomes and returns, and given that these tools are based on the premise of self-improvement over time, it is likely that those who adopt a wait-and-watch approach will face an uphill task of catching up.

About the author

Ankit is the CEO and Co-Founder of AdPushup, a leading technology company which helps web publishers and e-commerce companies accelerate their revenue growth. At AdPushup, he has led the product development, market strategy, and business development efforts, which has allowed the company to scale to 4 billion+ monthly impressions for over 300 publishers worldwide.

Innovation

How content companies can ring in the revenues this holiday season

October 13, 2020 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

There’s no precedent for holiday shopping this year. It could be muted, or it could be massive. If data from the 2008 financial crisis is a guide, then holiday shopping is likely to stay the course. Back then, consumers reported they would spend 29% less for the holidays. As it turned out, retail in the U.S. dipped just 4.7% as compared to the year before.

Still, with so many variables and unknowns, we can only be sure of one outcome: This will be a holiday season unlike any other. The impact of the pandemic is profound. But mandatory lockdowns and self-isolation have accelerated a number of digital trends, including ecommerce. It has also opened opportunities for ecommerce marketplaces and mobile apps.

Mobile must-haves

In particular, mobile shopping is set to skyrocket. App store intelligence provider App Annie estimates U.S. consumers will spend more than 1 billion hours on shopping apps on Android devices alone. That’s a 50% increase from the same time last year. App Annie is convinced this year will be the biggest year for shopping apps yet. The ecommerce explosion is good news for brands and businesses. However, content will be a critical component for companies that want to clinch the sale. In particular, they will need content that drives upper-funnel awareness and deeper-funnel engagement.

While most content companies today have a mobile app, they need to raise the bar by better integrating content into commerce. Serving the pandemic era shopper means being nimble and adaptable,

Today’s consumers want experiential content that brightens dreary days and drives meaningful connection. Here are two strategies content companies should consider as they prepare to be ecommerce-ready for the holidays.

#1 Refocus your approach to mobile development

Mobile is a stage in the customer journey where content companies can make a huge impression, provided they position their media properties and assets to be a growth driver for retail businesses. Today, more than ever, that means being able to iterate your mobile app at the speed of change.

Mobile and apps have combined to become the “the central nervous system of our connected lives,” according to App Annie’s State of Mobile 2020 report. Ease of use, convenience and personalization are driving a surge in shopping-app use and downloads. They are also factors fueling a massive increase in new shopping app releases.

The race to be app-optimized in time for the holidays is one even industry laggards can win thanks to the evolution of low-code solutions. At its core, low-code allows companies to fast-track mobile app development allowing companies to cut development time by “an average of 50%,” according to Samir Addamine, Founder and President of low-code platform provider FollowAnalytics.

But it’s not enough to deliver content that supports shoppers every step of the journey. It’s critical to embrace what Addamine calls an “always-on innovation” mindset. This means relying on low-code to “surface the same experience as the website and leverage mobile capabilities such as push notification, augmented reality and geolocation.”

Even better if the outcome is an app experience that anticipates, not just answers, shopper requirements. Because of their intimate audience understanding, and first-party data, content companies are uniquely able to deliver on this.

Aspiring to this level of integration is a must for companies seeking to add or enhance their commerce experience. From advice and assistance based on location, to chat dialogs that infuse messaging with a personal touch, apps are evolving because they must.

The pandemic has accelerated this dynamic, creating a “forcing function” that pushes audiences to apps for all their needs. It also turns up the pressure on content companies to evolve a full-funnel strategy, powered by feature-rich apps, to meet ever-evolving customer requirements.

#2 Prepare now to enable “content-enhanced commerce”

Content companies can win big if they position themselves to deliver what I call “content-enhanced commerce” to consumers online and in-app. In this scenario, content companies do more than offer advertising space or craft native advertising. They forge partnerships and harness platforms (including their own) to deliver commerce-complementary content, relevant messaging, and riveting storytelling.

The concept of content-enhanced commerce is in its infancy. However, it draws inspiration from a mature and massively successful model: home shopping. Thanks to mobile devices, chat apps and live streaming, this reboot makes ecommerce a two-way conversation. Hosts, brands, companies and consumers connect in real-time. And that authentic engagement makes this model unstoppable.

While technology is a must, the right content clinches the sale. This means priming audiences with expert reviews, entertaining hosts, and exciting approaches to drive content and product discovery. If it sounds like heavy lifting, then consider the enormous market potential. In China alone – a mobile-focused country where shoppable live streaming got its start – sales revenues reached $63 billion in 2019.

Elsewhere in APAC, content companies are teaming up with brands and broadcasters to deliver a local and lucrative spin. Mediacorp, Singapore’s largest content creator and national media network operates a suite of TV channels, radio stations and multiple digital platforms. The company has partnered with ecommerce platform Lazada. The alliance turns shopping into a retail experience. To go one better Mediacorp plans to leverage more “immersive content marketing. That will allow people to discover products, compare prices and shop items, all while watching content.”

Is APAC an indicator of what will come next to the west? Let’s just say Asia has a first-mover advantage in what is shaping up to be the next trend in e-commerce.

Happy holidays

Content companies need to use this unusual holiday season as an opportunity to experiment. They should test ways to infuse the shopping experience with credible content and reviews. It is important to partner with brands that understand that content is an asset.

Content companies are in the enviable position of employing experts in any number of areas. This allows for a seamless integration between that expertise and commerce, which is far superior to the social media influencer model.

Finally, if your content has a local focus, explore partnerships with local brands and businesses. Research shows that new audiences gravitate to companies that support local interests and enterprises. Clearly, working with local-focused companies is the best way to show your support.

Maybe you plan to drive full-funnel engagement through your app to empower ecommerce. Or perhaps you want to enhance a shoppable live streaming experience. The precise path you take will depend on your content assets and strategy. But these pathways are sure to pay dividends and prepare you to ring in the revenues at a time when the pandemic is wreaking havoc with physical retail and driving consumers into digital at a breakneck pace.

Innovation | Revenue

Five tips for running (much) better online events

October 12, 2020 Corinne Podger—Director, Digital Skills Agency

This year, we’ve all swapped physical conferences for online ones. Socializing over tiny sandwiches and buffet lines has been replaced by what feels a bit like one long Zoom call.

However, thanks to Covid-19 (if you will), I’ve been able to participate in more events than ever now that they are online. Some have been great, and some have been truly awful. Of course, pretty much all of us are figuring this out in real time. So, here are five tips for creating online events your target attendee might not just sign up for, but actually enjoy.

Choose a platform wisely

If you are launching a virtual event, choosing a platform is likely going to be one of the most significant decisions you make. When selecting or updating your platform choice, involve your target participants. Get a focus group together to demonstrate the available options. Explore the pros and cons collaboratively, so you can settle on one that will make people like them more likely to sign up.

There are certainly plenty of options. Eight months ago, most of us would have balked at a Zoom call. Now, there are dozens of online platforms to choose from, and they’re all rapidly iterating.

Virtual events in virtual reality

You might try a VR platforms like Mozilla Hubs, which was used to deliver IEEEVR back in March. You could also take a look at VFairs , which created a physical convention center last month for The Photography and Video Show. They went all in on the digital replica model, including a foyer (image above), exhibition hall, main stage, workshop rooms, and an in-platform chat facility for networking.

VR platforms might suit you if your participants are tech-savvy enough to learn a new platform quickly, and keen to be immersed in a long-form event and take. But if your ideal attendee only has a spare hour or two and/or doesn’t want to learn a new digital interface, that’s not going to work.

Webinars evolve

At the other end of the complexity scale are webinar platforms like Zoom and Google Meet. Most of us are familiar with them (or have gotten familiar this year). Therefore, you can reasonably expect attendees to jump straight into the proceedings without spending too much time learning the interface.

Webinar platforms can work for time-poor attendees. However, they don’t offer much in the way of networking tools. If that’s important to your audience, you may need a third-party tool like Telegram or Slack to keep them happy.

Conferences that have taken this approach include Splice Beta. They ran dozens of one-hour events throughout September using Google Meet. They also set up a Telegram group for off-site networking during and after the conference period.

Meet in the middle

Platforms that offer a middle way between real-life replication and a webinar include HopIn and EventsAir. They have better interactivity tools. However, they typically take longer for your events team and attendees to learn to use and navigate. If you up your game in terms of platform, you’ll need to be prepared to offer sufficient guidance and tech support for attendees before and during the event.

That was a sacrifice worth making for Audiocraft, a day-long Australian podcast festival held in July. According to organizer Jess O’Callaghan, “There are those accidental encounters at physical conferences. You’re just eating a sandwich with someone you’ve never talked to before, and all of a sudden you have a connection that leads to something new and exciting. Offering that online was essential for our attendees”.

HopIn allowed Audiocraft participants to direct-message each other. They could create their own meetups during conference breaks and attend three-minute speed-networking sessions. To make the event a seamless experience, O’Callaghan’s team spent hours on rehearsals. They used HopIn for staff meetings to ensure everyone was comfortable with the interface. They also appointed “virtual ambassadors” to help field participant questions on the day.

Success is in the details

This attention to detail is essential, according to David Meerman Scott, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Fanocracy. Scott has spoken at more than two dozen virtual events around the world since March. Unfortunately, he says, many virtual events are “mind-numbingly awful”.

“People are using the old-school webinar approach. It’s a big set of slides with a voice track over it, and a tiny thumbnail of someone at their kitchen table,” he says. “The other thing that’s happening is people are trying to recreate an in-person event and put it online. That is essentially televising a keynote, like a TED talk. Why would someone pay or persevere through a TED talk that’s not just 12 minutes, but 45?”

Scott has just published Standout Virtual Events, co-authored with Digital Content Next editor and event organizer Michelle Manafy. The book is packed with recommendations for designing events, considerations for choosing a platform, ideas for audience interactivity, and pricing strategies.

Critically, the book also offers tips to help speakers deliver their best on the day. “As an event organizer, you have to take charge of the quality of the event. You simply cannot assume the speaker is going to be able to pull it off without your help,” Scott says.

Define and measure your impact

Razlan Manjaji has led the events team at the South China Morning Post for the past year. Under his leadership, the team of 12 has gone from running one virtual event a month to one every week, with revenue targets for most of them. “That was a leap of faith for us, because it was four times our previous workload,” he says.

It’s involved more than faith, though. Manjaji sets KPIs for every event, and gives each event a net score based on attendee satisfaction. The Post uses Bizzabo, a platform that allows users to track performance on key metrics.

SCMP’s KPIs include overall sign-ups as well as the percentage of attendees that meet a sponsor’s desired demographics. They also measure actual turn-out on the day and how long attendees spend on the event platform. They also track well as whether they interact with the content and each other during the event. And, of course, they are keeping a close eye on revenue generation.

For events aimed at new audiences, like the Digital Transformation Series for tech leaders, Manjaji takes a pilot-and-scale approach. He works with supportive brands like Microsoft to sponsor a test event before turning it into an ongoing project.

Not everything has worked well, or indeed at all. An attempt to return to live events in June with a kindergarten showcase aimed at young parents was “a disaster,” according to Manjaji. But the learnings are being ploughed into a second education-focused conference later this month.

“It’s a learning time for everyone, and there will be more mistakes than usual. But the point is that we’re moving in the right direction, and I feel very encouraged by that fact,” he says.

Don’t forget the long tail

Yes, you can put the whole conference on YouTube for free. Or you can make it available as a recording for a set price. But is that the best value you can have from that content, given the time, energy and money you’ve put into making it perfect?

I’ve been really impressed by SRCCON, which ran online in July. Some of that content was repurposed into Watch Parties a few weeks later. A small selection has been made permanently public, which is an innovative way of attracting new audiences to your brand, long after you’ve turned off the computer at the end of your next event.

Embrace experimentation

My last tip is to stop wishing for a return to the “old normal.” For however long social distancing is with us, and it could be years, offline meetings will be risky to run and tough to make profitable. Of course we miss the camaraderie of physical conferences. It’s a chance to see old friends and have those accidental meetings that help drive new projects and business. But this is no time for nostalgia. It’s a time for brave experimentation in the online space to reach and leverage new audiences for your brand.

How NowThis’ new channel plans to tackle climate in a crowded video ecosystem

October 8, 2020 Evan DeSimone – Independent Journalist

When you’re launching a new brand amidst multiple global crises, it helps to hone your focus and target audience. That’s part of the thinking behind NowThis Earth. The new channel from Group Nine Media’s mobile-first news publisher NowThis will address the impact of human actions on the Earth’s climate.

NowThis Earth launched in partnership with a coalition of climate-focused non-profits, research organizations, and NGO’s. The new channel will offer daily coverage of science-based coverage of the changing climate, as well as stories that focus on sustainable living. According to NowThis President Athan Stephanopoulos, climate change is a topic around which the NowThis audience is already highly engaged.

Mobilizing the brand

That’s one way in which NowThis differs from some legacy publishers. Many have struggled to find a way to cover climate change comprehensively. They cite limited consumer appetite for science-based coverage and the risk of fatigue with the sometimes-dire stakes of the issue. Attitudes toward and interest in the issue has started to shift among the public at large. However, Stephanopoulos is confident that NowThis’ young audience, primarily composed of Millennials and Generation Z, is more than ready for a sharper editorial focus on the issue many see as the defining challenge of their age.

“When we’ve covered issues of climate and sustainability in the past we’ve seen those stories over-index in terms of engagement, particularly with our younger audience,” says Stephanopoulos. In fact, NowThis viewers are five times more likely to engage with climate and sustainability content than with any other topic. This engagement has produced a reported 600 million views across NowThis’ existing news and politics channels. Clearly, its native audience is ready to see the topic take center stage.

Audience engagement

Of course, even with signs of growing consumer interest, launching a new mobile-first news channel in a crowded ecosystem presents challenges. That’s why NowThis is leveraging some of its existing assets to give the new brand a boost. NowThis Earth will take over the channel previously occupied by NowThis Future, a science and technology vertical that was one of NowThis’ most frequent homes for sustainability-driven content. Taking over an existing channel with a built-in audience will give Earth a leg up as it aims to break into an increasingly competitive mobile video market. NowThis can seamlessly connect new brand’s content directly with the segment of the audience most primed to receive it.

The channel also enjoyed a boost from science educator, climate activist, and occasional NowThis collaborator Bill Nye. He gave the launch a boost with the introduction of a live climate tracker. The new channel is open to partnerships with relevant voices in the climate conversation. However, Stephanoulos stays that bringing Nye into the launch has more to do with foregrounding future collaborations with the brand than a concerted influencer strategy for the channel. “It was mostly about the fact that we’ve done work with Bill in the past. And we’re talking about things we can do with him now under the NowThis Earth umbrella.”

Strategic partnerships

The new channel will also leverage an array of non-profit partnerships that will play a key role in informing its editorial coverage and helping it to connect with new audiences. NowThis has teamed with the Global Commons Alliance, a coalition of climate-focused organizations including research, business, and philanthropy. According to Stephanopoulos, the partnership will help NowThis Earth to identify stories on the frontlines of climate coverage. IT will also provide access experts who can provide additional context. GCA member organizations will also contribute local reporting from journalists and NGO employees involved in conservation efforts around the world.

The Global Commons Alliance will also help support the new channel through funding that will allow it to remain, at least initially, ad-free. In the near-term, the focus for Stephanopoulos and his team is on building an editorial brand that can motivate its viewers to take the kind of actions that help to address the global climate crisis. This could be by donating to preferred causes, following tips for more sustainable living, or engaging in activism.

NowThis has successfully partnered with commercial brands in the past. However, Stephanopolous thinks it’s important to avoid any potential conflicts at launch. He remains optimistic about the long-term potential of traditional advertisers to support sustainability-driven content both on NowThis Earth at large.

“We’ve seen a lot of brands and advertisers who want to be in this space, particularly content around sustainability,” says Stephanopoulos. “There are a number of companies that are driving themselves to be more sustainable as brands. I believe there will be even more opportunities in the future.”

Lessons to repeat

For publishers looking to launch a new video brand into today’s highly competitive market, there are some valuable lessons in the NowThis approach. NowThis Earth isn’t so much a new vertical, as a distillation of coverage that was previously spread across multiple channels in the NowThis portfolio.

With close attention to user engagement, the NowThis team was able to identify an area of opportunity that it was already well-positioned to develop based on its existing network of partners and to grow based on its established cross-channel audiences. The topic is timely, but as Stephanopoulos pointed out, NowThis has been nurturing this audience across several of its brands for years already.

Insight killed the video star: The role of video in premium subscriptions

October 1, 2020 Chris M. Sutcliffe – Independent Media Reporter

It doesn’t seem so long ago that premium video was the great hope for publishers. Newspapers including The Daily Telegraph were investing heavily in building up their video teams, only to have the ground fall away from underneath them when platforms changed the terms of agreements. The result? Newspapers cut their losses and jettisoned the teams around which they had so recently built their strategies.

Premium video now finds itself in a bit of a limbo. It is no longer the star of most publishers’ offerings (save for a few examples). And it has taken a back seat when it comes to the marketing of news paywalls. Instead, insight and access are the new tentpoles of subscriptions. That’s never been more clear than when the Telegraph, fresh from abandoning its video unit, launched an out of home ad campaign heralding its unfettered access to Westminster.

The Athletic has taken a similar approach. The sports analysis site, which has outperformed during Covid, has emphasized the access its journalists have with athletes (and the access its subscribers get with the journalists). Crucially, The Athletic has eschewed video for the most part. The company does create or licensing video. However, it does not view it as central to its value proposition, as this interview with its president and cofounder Adam Hansmann demonstrates:

“According to Hansmann, the industry’s sense of news, often based on daily newspaper deadlines rather than what readers will pay for, is outdated. ‘The modern fan already knows what happened in a game, whether it be from Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. They’ve seen the highlights a million times on the internet’”.

Short and social

Hansmann’s nod to the popularity social video is telling. Mobile video is still far and away the largest growth market for the medium. That’s especially true in markets like China, where short-form video dominates any growth charts. Users spent a total of nearly 600 million hours per day watching short-form videos on mobile in April 2019. That’s more than in any other category.

Additionally, premium video is expensive to produce and the ROI is less clear-cut than for the mass-produced videos on YouTube. As Vanita Kohli-Khandekar explains: “Because [ad-supported] video is free, platforms will do anything to get eyeballs. But subscription-supported programming (usually) is well-researched, written and produced – whether in entertainment or news.”

So, the bottom has dropped out of the video advertising market on platforms. Short-form video is the new normal. And even sports-based digital publications don’t feel the need to make premium video part-and-parcel of their offering. Is it now time to call “cut” on the concept of premium news video at newspapers?

Not news

News publishers do license footage and social video to accompany breaking news. However, the reality is that, unless premium video is a newspaper’s key focus, it just doesn’t make sense for them to invest in strictly news-centric video. For one thing, news video has a shorter tail than other types of video. For another, given that individual papers have a far smaller footprint than other platforms, it’s unlikely that they can attract enough eyeballs to compete with viewers on, say, YouTube.

That is, in part, why publishers like Joe (and its current affairs-based YouTube spinoff PoliticsJOE) choose to produce vox-pops and simple interviews. Frankly, they suit the ad-based platforms better. Even The Financial Times, which does produce longer form videos, typically hews close to the interview-led format on its in-house videos. This format entails a relatively low investment in terms of time and editing, despite looking extremely professional. However, they don’t match the level of production quality of traditional broadcasters or OTT entertainment services.

Head of audio and video for The Evening Standard Chris Stone said: “When a breaking news event happens there is obviously massive spikes in traffic, and everybody’s very interested in this one thing that’s happening. And so, it’s actually quite easy to serve video to that audience, because there’s people out there that are looking for that right then. But it tends to be a shorter tail. And that spike will disappear very quickly. And then you’ll be on to the next thing.”

The lifestyle lifecycle

Instead, he argues that lifestyle video content is the way forward for newspapers. It has a longer lifespan and greater opportunity for commercial partnerships.

Paul Newman is brand director for Future Plc’s home interest titles. Speaking about its own “pivot to video” with the Real Homes Show, he notes that: “Real Homes Show… has been a huge success since we launched it last April. We generated hundreds of thousands of views of the show. It’s proved incredibly popular with commercial partners.”

“I think the important thing is just to start with a good solid business plan, and to understand why you’re creating video, rather than just creating video because you think you should, or because somebody in senior management thinks, ‘Oh we haven’t gotten the video content, maybe we should get on with creating some.’”

The success of lifestyle content in attracting users to sign up for a subscription has already been clearly demonstrated by The New York Times, whose Cooking app is frequently cited as a reason for paying. It is, unsurprisingly, heavily base d around video.

Similarly, major lifestyle publications have made their archive of health and fitness videos available as part and parcel of their memberships. The reality, then, is that while video is still a good investment for newspapers for driving subscriptions, oftentimes news video is not.

Marketing medium

So, does that mean that there is no opportunity for newspapers around news video? Not at all. Just look at the success of Vox’s Explained series on Netflix. It delivers an awful lot of value to the parent brand in other ways that aren’t primarily monetary. At the time of Explained’s launch, Vox’s editor-at-large Ezra Klein stated that “… the Vox team did think about the overall Netflix audience, which is much bigger than Vox’s. But not as much about whether those people were watching on phones or tablets or other devices.”

Newspapers also recognize that video consumption habits are different among their key demographics. Consumption is growing across the board. However, it is effectively the primary means of media consumption among younger audiences. The Guardian, which hit one million subscribers on its YouTube channel last year, is keenly aware that those younger audiences are the key to its future.

One million subscribers may not sound like a lot on YouTube. It is considerably smaller than many individual’s channels, and any ad revenue it generates is likely to barely cover production costs, if at all. That, after all, is why many larger (non-media) YouTube channels operate Patreon or donation models as well.

The longer-form explainer news videos that The Guardian produces and makes available for free is effectively the best form of brand marketing possible. It hits audiences where they typically spend their time and can be used as a lure to drive interest back to the paper’s own membership scheme. More than that, as audiences shift to seeing YouTube as a primary source of news, it helps demonstrate that the brand can be trusted above all the conspiracy and polarized videos that typify the platform.

News publishers are serious about the quality of their journalism, no matter the medium. As younger people’s consumption habits lean further towards video, then investment in news video is a way to communicate that quality. It just requires publishers to recognize that the return on that investment is unlikely to come quickly or easily. Rather, it will come from a deeper overall relationship with the audience segment on which they will soon depend.

Advertising | Innovation

How Insider Inc. leverages first-party data for its partners

September 21, 2020 Kristy Schafer, VP Americas – Permutive

About Insider Inc.

Insider Inc. is the parent of Business Insider and its general interest news and lifestyle sibling, Insider. Insider is one of the world’s largest digital news platforms, with a global audience of 275 million. The company was founded in 2007 with the launch of Business Insider, which now has 14 editions around the globe and is published in eight languages.

The challenge

Insider, Inc. wanted to gain a more holistic understanding of its audiences to better serve advertisers

Insider faced challenges connecting data across its sites and getting a holistic view of its audience. It wanted to understand programmatic buying behavior and learn which audiences advertisers were looking for. Insider knew that this information would help it to inform editorial and content strategies as well as ad pricing and packaging. To increase the value of advertising on its site, the company needed a solution to connect all the different data pieces in its arsenal.

The Solution

Insider and Permutive build first-party data platform, SÁGA

Insider worked with Permutive’s Data Management Platform to create SÁGA (named after the Norse goddess of history and storytelling). The platform was designed to better understand users and their behavior in order to make tailored recommendations for advertisers and partners.

The platform has three key components:

‘Audience’ enables audience segmentation for effective ad targeting
‘Inform’ empowers strategic content creation recommendations
‘Insights’ provides real-time data to improve campaign performance

The results so far

With a first-party data strategy and an efficient way to view audience data, Insider helps advertisers tailor their campaigns and improve engagement. Now, Insider is better able to:

Create bespoke segments for advertisers

With SÁGA, Insider can discern more than five billion user data points each month. These include: content consumption, engagement frequency, where traffic comes from, and ad clicks — just to name a few. Using this data, Insider can create valuable, bespoke segments for its advertisers. For example, the Insider ‘business influencers’ cohort consists of users that consumed content on the Insider platform over the last week on finance or technology verticals, or as part of subscription-driven stories. To these segments, Insider is also able to overlay third-party data, such as job title or industry.

Tailor content and advertising to users

With better analytics tools, Insider can now discover which content resonates best with different audiences. This helps advertisers make smarter decisions about their content and advertising strategies. For example, Insider found that readers of small business content are often likely to be interested in pet stories. This insight led to a banking advertiser creating a unique campaign that spotlighted how a pet-themed small business worked with said company.

“It’s about understanding behavior. While respecting user privacy, we are able to discern a lot about our readers from what they do on our platform. Our goal is to better serve our audience — and our partners — with actionable insights based on what we know about behavior.”

–Jana Meron, SVP Programmatic & Data Strategy, Insider Inc.

Leveraging more granular audience data helps advertisers reach the right users at the right time with the right message on Insider. This works regardless of whether the browser blocks third-party cookies, which is a a growing reality for publishers.

Showcase the value of first-party data

Today data provided by SÁGA informs all campaigns running on Insider Inc. sites. Each campaign begins with a tailored strategy that aims to meet the specific goals of a given RFP.

“First-party data goes beyond the authenticated web to gauge how readers engage on our platform. This has tremendous value.”

-– Jana Meron, SVP Programmatic & Data Strategy, Insider Inc.

For example, Insider worked with a financial client with strict audience targeting parameters. The advertiser had always relied on third-party data. Insider conducted an A/B test comparing a campaign using first-party data with one relying on third-party data. The result was that the first-party data segment outperformed by +11% against the advertiser’s KPI (+11% first-party versus third-party segment).

Insider Inc. continues to improve its first-party data strategy

Insider has had success with its approach to first-party data but is just getting started. The company plans to make additional improvements, such as:

Creating a rich taxonomy by adding Natural Language Processing (NLP) to SÁGA. This will provide better targeting options for advertisers so they can reach their audiences across different parts of the Insider platform.
Collecting more first-party data. Insider believes that the number of logged-in users at any time will be less than 25% of total traffic. It wants to ensure its campaigns can scale by including behavioral and contextual data alongside that declared data. It gathers first-party data from multiple sources, including newsletters, on-site calculators, and surveys.
Educating the advertising market. In addition to helping to educate its advertising partners about the benefits of first-party data, Insider is committed to spreading the word to the larger advertising community.

Insider is actively preparing for diminution of third-party cookies by focusing on a first-party data strategy. Through its use of SÁGA ,the company now has a radically improved view of its audiences that can greatly benefit its partners as well as readers and viewers.

Featured Post | Innovation

How 3 local news outlets optimize mobile experiences

September 3, 2020 Esther Kezia Thorpe – Independent Media Reporter

Around the world, mobile accounts for just over half of all online traffic. However, a concerningly large number of local news publishers have sites that are either inaccessible to mobile users, or are slow to load and clunky.

“A good mobile experience is absolutely pivotal,” emphasized news industry analyst Ken Doctor, who is launching his own local news outlet Lookout in the fall. “At least 65-70% of news reading is mobile. That defines the landscape. If you want to be in the news distribution business, you’ve got to go where people are.” And they are using their phones.

But providing a good local news experience is about more than just making sure the content is accessible to readers. “The massive yet slow movement of traditional publishers to the web meant that they largely took their news sections and put the headlines on mobile in the most boring way possible,” Doctor explained. “A good local newspaper always gave you a sense of city life. It would show you the problems. But it also told you what was going on in town, fun things to do, characters in town.”

According to Doctor, most mobile experiences from local publishers lack a sense of place. “And local press at its best has always been about a sense of place.”

Many legacy organizations struggle to cater to the growth of mobile. But some recent launches have shown just how vital a good mobile experience is. Here, three publishers explain how they’re putting the mobile experience at the front and center of their local news delivery.

Spectrum’s new News App

SSpectrum Networks, a News and Sports Network owned by Charter, has recently launched its own local news app. The Spectrum News App combines written reporting from existing newsrooms and curated content from partner news organizations. It also includes local weather and linear feeds of all Spectrum News networks.

Although Spectrum already has local linear news networks, they saw a mobile app as a way to go deeper into those communities with a wider range of content. “We were seeing these trends with mobile growth just exploding, and TV and mobile getting to a similar amount of time spent,” said Alison Hellman, Group VP, Audience and Content Strategy at Spectrum. “It made sense for us as a business, but when you look at the gaps, there really is a gap in high-quality, targeted local news. We wanted to bring it to a new platform, and that’s how we got here.”

The app has live video and podcasts as well as text content. Hellman emphasised that it was how it all worked together which is one of the key draws. “Weather is critical for local news, and it’s not just the data, but it’s about the context,” she explained. “If we do this right, we are a one stop shop. People are doing some of these pieces well in the mobile space. But no one was providing it all.”

The app is free to access to all 28 million of Spectrum’s residential customers. For non-customers, the company offers a 30 day trial. The mobile initiative is a play for a long-term relationship with their customers. “We want to be a part of their lives in the way that they live their lives,” Hellman said. “If they watch TV, we want to be there. But if they’re on the go, we want to be providing that information as well.”

Each locale in the Spectrum News App features original content produced specifically for the app by dedicated local digital journalists. It is also includes content from nearly three dozen local news partners. Sources range from major daily newspapers to community digital news outlets. This has helped bolster the app’s content in local areas.

Launching The Longmont Leader

McClatchy is another publisher using mobile as a key part of its local news strategy. The company has partnered with Google to found The Compass Experiment. This news laboratory explores new sustainable business models for local news. The second of their local news sites, The Longmont Leader, was launched in May in Colorado.

Rather than building the site from scratch, The Compass Experiment partnered with Village Media, which operates a number of local news sites in Canada. Village Media’s platform is mobile-responsive. It also has features such as classifieds and obituaries which can sometimes be complex to build and manage from scratch.

The Compass Experiment’s General Manager Mandy Jenkins explained that partnering means the team can focus resources on reporting rather than development. “I’ve seen other startups that have built their own thing. It always ends up being more expensive and more clunky than they think,” she said. “Ultimately, there’s a lot of people who do this well. And I don’t feel like we have to reinvent the wheel.”

The team did extensive research in the local community before launching to find out what people’s expectations were around both the content and the experience. The answers were unsurprising, but included not wanting hugely busy screens, ads popping up or autoplay videos. A clear, easy-to-navigate site was needed. And with the vast majority accessing the internet via mobile, a mobile-default mindset was essential.

This mindset extends back even to before the stories are published. “Even within the CMS, when [the journalists] produce stories, we get a mobile preview by default,” explained Jenkins. “Most of our readers are on mobile, so that’s where we have to look at it.”

This mobile-first thinking doesn’t have to mean producing an app as there are plenty of ways to engage users through mobile sites. “Although we’re not going with an app strategy, we’re sticking with a mobile web strategy, we’re still looking at doing mobile push alerts,” Jenkins outlined. “Not just for breaking news, but things like local election alerts and what’s going on around town. We’re starting to put together the strategy around that and how we’ll use them.”

Lookout for local news in Santa Cruz

Unlike Spectrum and The Longmont Leader, Ken Doctor’s Lookout has yet to launch. However, he is applying his extensive knowledge of the news ecosystem to how he and the team are shaping the Santa Cruz, CA publication.

Doctor is working on the assumption that around four fifths of the readers are going to be on mobile. So, the whole experience will be mobile-first. Like the Longmont Leader, Lookout has chosen not to build the site from scratch. Instead, they’ve opted to use the L.A. Times’ Graphene platform. The team will benefit from the technology expertise and development resources of a much larger publisher, which allows Lookout to focus on the content.

Lookout will also focus on just content for the first few months, saving audio and video capabilities for later down the line. But they are looking to get the community involved very early on.

“We have a number of community features and interactive features that are important in terms of the two-way communication between our reporters and the public,” Doctor explained. “It’s a small community – 275,000 people – and to get to know them, to be able to interact with them and do weekly chats with the correspondents, those kinds of things are build-in.”

However, a good mobile experience is just a part of the puzzle piece for local news organizations. “It’s a combination of what kind of content [it is], how it’s presented, what the overall experience is, and how it’s optimized,” Doctor outlined.

His advice for local publishers looking to provide a better experience is to work hard to understand their readers and would-be readers. “They need to understand how their reading habits work today, because they’re not going to change those reading habits,” he emphasized. “It takes a mind shift and it takes investment, and it’s amazing how slow both moves have been.”