Nielsen [has] announced that it has completed its acquisition of eXelate, a leading provider of data and technology to facilitate the buying and selling of advertising across programmatic platforms. This acquisition allows Nielsen to enable its clients to make better and faster marketing and media decisions.
With the acquisition of eXelate, Nielsen clients gain the ability to activate in real-time Nielsen audience insights as well as eXelate’s aggregated consumer segments from over 200 data providers. eXelate’s advanced technology leverages data to inform the highest quality programmatic buying decisions in the marketplace…
eXelate aggregates and distributes third-party online data, composed of premium demographic, interest, and intent data from over 200 online and offline data providers. Nielsen intends to further develop and expand eXelate’s already rapidly-growing data marketplace and innovative technology solutions.
Nielsen’s acquisition raises a couple of key issues:
This move may have a significant impact on data-driven programmatic for television. The acquisition brings Nielsen closer to being able to transact based on measurement and data.
It will enhance measurement capabilities from Nielsen, answering questions about who’s watching and what they’re doing post exposure.
It will be interesting to see if comScore responds with an acquisition of its own in order to keep up (though there are few independent DMPs left out there, such as Krux and Lotame)
“Data is the new oil.” That is the modern maxim across a host of industries. From shopping to shipping, businesses are being urged to gain better insight and improve performance by delving into their underlying numbers.
News media are no different. In the last couple of years, journalists have been encouraged to adopt analytics software as part of their daily editorial efforts. Now it is common to find newsroom editors checking their page views, time-spent metrics and social referrals on a minute-by-minute basis.
This kind of data used to be kept under lock and key, used only by website technical administrators and advertising auditors while journalists gave two hoots. Now, with always-on dashboards from tools like ChartBeat, Parse.ly and Outbrain’s own Visual Revenue in the hands of editors, content producers are becoming skilled numerical interpreters. The industry has come a long way. However, it’s time to go to the next level.
Modern journalists are constantly being told which new skills they have to learn—a dizzying array of video production, coding, even drone-flying. Those who also up-skill sufficiently to become their newsroom’s virtual data analyst can manufacture higher user engagement for their employer. After all, when particular stories cause traffic to spike, writing more of the same is a quick win.
But more data doesn’t necessarily produce better journalism. The danger with the growing role of audience numbers in publisher strategy is the risk of over-reliance, creating a belief that every reader data point should be responded to with an editorial outcome: quantity and category of story over quality and ambition.
The Data Endoskeleton
The first wave of newsroom analytics has served its purpose (we now know that stories about kittens and celebrities trend well, for example). What the professionals now need is a support system that does not encourage them to make snap decisions based on reams of numbers, but one which is more in harmony with the craft of editorship, playing a softer and more symbiotic role as editors’ sidekick, not their auditor.
Just think of the way Apple’s Siri hides from users so much of the underlying data that rival services like to bombard them with. When you ask Siri a question, it returns not unlimited options but fewer, more directed opportunities.
In the same way, in the next wave of publishing analytics, software would suggest publication improvements after noting not just the raw, blunt performance of site content but also the priorities and goals of conscious managing staff.
In the future, editors should be able to pre-populate their software with their own, qualified goals and ambitions, helping tailor system recommendations that are in line with publications’ true missions.
By allowing editors to make smarter decisions that are based on their own instincts, not just being a slave to the spreadsheet, the industry can keep readers coming back and rediscover a lost metric: lifetime value.
You can already see the beginnings of this new philosophy being applied. Despite often being accused of publishing low-brow click-fodder, BuzzFeed looks at engagement and virality in a whole new way. Publishing purely to the numbers could have prompted it to publish even more cat slideshows and quizzes. However selective insight led it to also make risky bets, such as its commitment to long-form journalism, which have ended up surprising success stories.
Publishers who are excitedly following the data trail to clear traffic growth should pause to reclaim their own part in the process. In a world becoming familiar with the concept of automated “robo-journalism,” I envision the future of journalism not as this replacement of flesh with circuitry, but as an endoskeleton—a perfect combination of the best qualities of each.
Matt Crenshaw is the Vice President of Product Marketing, Engage at Outbrain. Matt is responsible for setting the product vision and delivering solutions to publishers that build their audience relationships and grow their revenues.
Last week, the President publicly unveiled a proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. While the bill language needs some work, the President and his team should be applauded for introducing some good concepts that would improve consumer privacy.
For one, it makes a lot of sense that consumers should understand how their data is collected and used. Reputable companies are transparent with consumers about the ways in which their data may be used and there are multiple ways in which they can (and do) provide consumers with a means to opt-out of various data uses. But there are many companies that aren’t so forthright. Educating consumers is a good first step because the industry won’t fully gain the trust of consumers without first educating them. And without consumer trust, the digital ecosystem can’t flourish.
Another good concept in the Privacy Bill of Rights is the idea of “context,” which again maps back to consumers’ expectations. The bill notes that data collected in one context and then used in another context should be subject to some level of control by the consumer. Depending on the sensitivity of the data and/or its use, this could mean providing the consumer with an opt-out or an opt-in.
By emphasizing the importance of context, the President highlights that fact that every day consumers make conscious and subconscious decisions about whether their favorite websites or digital services provide a sufficient value proposition to continue that relationship. Most consumers are perfectly agreeable to exchanging some of their data for access to free content or to have a more engaging or personalized experience. However the value proposition is eroded when consumers don’t trust that all parties will respect their data–especially if they are not even aware of all the parties that may collect their data. Providing consumers with more controls over unexpected data collection and use would go a long way toward regaining the trust of consumers, which is why we’ve argued for industry to develop a DNT standard.
Finally, the bill notes that de-identified data should be outside the scope of this law. This is an enormously important concept because it allows companies to continue innovating with “big data” sets. By allowing for the use of de-identified data, researchers, scientists and entrepreneurs can better understand how data flows, how it might be used differently and develop new technologies that we cannot even imagine today.
As many have noted–and will no doubt continue to be highly vocal about–the bill has some serious flaws in that some of the definitions are overly broad or seem to contradict the President’s intentions. But there are concepts within the President’s proposal that are well worth discussing. As an industry, we should be taking this proposal very seriously because it’s yet another sign that more work needs to be done to regain the trust of consumers.
Last week, I had the pleasure of kicking off the Op/Ed event with a talk called “The Profitable Publisher: Unification & Survival.” As part of my presentation, I shared a couple of charts that caused a bit of a stir among the audience of media execs charged with leading their organizations digital media ad sales businesses. The fact that these particular slides triggered such a reaction struck me as particularly timely because later that day the White House released its proposal for a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which would require companies to clearly communicate their data practices to consumers and give them more control over what information is collected and how it is used.
The first of these two charts is a Ghostery map illustrating all of the third party connections and cookies that are set with a click on the St. Louis Post Dispatch site. Each of these connection points is a call to another 3rd party server.
As you can see in the labels, some of these are for operations of the site (e.g. analytics or serving of a display ad). But you can also see that there are over 100+ additional connections. Not a pretty picture. The issue of the disturbing number of intermediaries tracking consumer behavior has been well documented and, unfortunately, ignored by most.
This problem is only getting worse and the consumer tools that counter it are getting less effective and more and more damaging to those who respect the consumer’s right to understand when and why their activities are being tracked. Transparency and providing the consumer with adequate control over their online privacy are vital—not harmful—to businesses that are built on a solid foundation of trust. However, the fact that there are so many (potentially) bad actors out there, and so much tracking going on for unclear and potentially unwelcome reasons leads me to my second chart: a look at worldwide AdBlocker adoption. worldwide ad blocker adoption (source: @adobe / @Pagefair report).
See the hockey stick curve? That is the result of consumers who want to avoid seeing any ads at all. It isn’t shocking that there are those who cite the reason “I hate advertising.” But another documented reason is “I want to protect my privacy.” And let’s face it: A lack of trust in online advertising behavior reinforces either perspective.
It is not new to hear that some consumers want to enjoy ad-free content experiences. Some demonstrate that by paying for content without ads. But the use of ad blocking tools creates a slew of issues for content creators that rely on advertising to fund content creation. It also doesn’t effectively address consumers’ underlying concerns.
The Ad Blocking companies (AdBlock Plus being the leader) have what looks to be a pretty subjective criteria for which ads it deems “acceptable” and which are “obtrusive.” But even if working with their criteria would get a certain percentage of ads viewed, that is not a viable solution. The reality is that when one blocking solution is neutralized, another will crop up. Addressing individual blockers is not the answer.
We need to address the root cause of the problem. Online advertising is trusted less than any other form of advertising. When we see examples like the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s approach to online advertising, we shouldn’t be wondering why consumers are flocking to ad blockers in droves. (Why wouldn’t they?) We should be doing what it takes to repair consumer trust in the digital ecosystem.
The Federal Communications Commission by a 3-2 vote today voted to reclassify broadband internet service as a public utility. This will prohibit Internet service providers from blocking Web traffic or charging websites for priority service.
Jason Kint, DCN CEO, commented:
We appreciate the FCC’s action today because it starts with the premise that the consumer experience should not be compromised. Consumers’ access to great content and experiences on the Internet should be protected. Under these rules, future and current content creators will continue to have the ability to innovate and connect with their consumers.
How are we to judge social juggernauts such as Twitter anyway? If we go by Wall Street, the longtime microblogging service is a miserable failure for having “just” 288 million active users at the end of 2014. While most publishers would give their left arm for that kind of massive engagement, Twitter is judged by a different standard: Facebook and its billion-plus user base. Twitter is damned if they do (grow users without revenues) or damned if they don’t (grow revenues without users).
And even when Twitter turns around its business, nearly doubling revenues in its most recent quarter to $479 million — with a profit to boot (if you don’t count one-time stock expenses) — there’s still grousing by some journalists who say Twitter isn’t driving enough referral traffic to their stories.
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson recently did an in-depth analysis of his engagement on Twitter by looking at the stats surrounding what he thought was an enticing tweet. He found, disappointingly, that only one percent of the people who saw that tweet actually clicked on the link, even though it received more than 1,200 retweets and had upwards of 155,260 impressions. The link, of course, was to Thompson’s story on The Atlantic’s site. As he put it, “So, 99 percent of my labor on Twitter went to Twitter, and 1 percent went to The Atlantic. That’s not a very good deal for our boss!”
Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile tweeted the moral of Thompson’s story: that there is “effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading.”
However it’s important to remember that the frustration with Twitter engagement and branding is different for different users. Journalists interact with and use Twitter in one way, brands and publishers another. Building a brand or following, or attracting the influence of “tastemakers” who could help a tweet reach a wider audience, is strategic for both groups. So even if Thompson’s tweet had a poor click-through rate, no one can deny the power of those tweet impressions. He also offered up the kind of tweet that’s useful for people on the go or those who aren’t necessarily interested in reading the whole article (as upsetting as it probably is to most writers, sometimes a headline fills the reader’s need).
Thompson tweeted: “Almost every major patent concept from the 1930s was in chemistry. Today, all software.” And he included a visual to illustrate his point.
Arguably, that is a pretty satisfying tweet all on its own.
But brands are pretty happy getting engagement on Twitter without clickthroughs. Digiday’s John McDermott responded to Thompson’s story by noting that a Simply Measured report found that “engagement with tweets from [top] brands increased by 85 percent in the last three months of 2014.” Plus, out of the Top 100 brands, the volume of tweets increased by 11% and follower counts were up 38% — all likely due to the more prominent engagement buttons on Twitter.
Perhaps anticipating letdown at its poor user growth, Twitter announced a slew of new offerings ahead of its fourth quarter earnings. Users can now take advantage of group messaging, utilize a new in-site video recording service up to 30 seconds (compared with Vine’s six-second loop), observe the tweets they may have missed while they were away, and — for new or potential users — get insight into top tweets on the revamped Twitter homepage.
Twitter also recently announced that Twitter ads would be featured outside of Twitter for the first time, on Flipboard and Yahoo Japan. The new partnership effectively helps Twitter make money off of non-users. Although it’s tough to say now how effective this collaboration might be (don’t forget Twitter will have to split the revenue), it’s positive news on the advertising business front.
Maybe it’s time we just face the facts: Twitter is not another Facebook, nor should it strive to be. It’s a great communication platform for reporters, publishers, brands and anyone who wants to help shape the conversation about what’s happening now (or on TV). Even if USA Today’s “For the Win” blog has dropped the Twitter share button on its stories, that doesn’t mean they won’t be present on Twitter. It just means that the value of a tweet is more than a tally of clickthroughs.
For the past several years, The research team at BrightRoll (a vendor of video ad automation software) has surveyed agencies to reveal trends and topics that deserve more attention. They look at how agencies are allocating media budgets, how RFPs are changing, frequently used success metrics, etc.
In a quiet announcement leading into President’s Day weekend Vivaki disclosed a restructuring of its Audience on Demand (AOD) trading desk. The agency reassigned 120 employees to individual Publicis agencies. Vivaki’s stated goal of the restructure to increase integration as well as to comply with the client request of eliminating the “black box” veil of the agency trading desk (ATD) model—but it is likely to cause other ripples of effect in the industry.
Here are some thoughts on what this announcement signals:
This announcement should, theoretically, move programmatic buying closer to individual agency client teams.
The restructure aligns with increasing marketer hesitation to leverage agency trading desks and marketers moving to setting up their own in-house trading desks or leveraging third parties outside of the agency and holding company network.
The move has the potential to improve communication within the agency team around inventory, targeting, effectiveness and efficiency. It can also deepen integration and optimization across strategies and tactics.
This shift allows managing, leveraging, compiling and aggregating data to be done campaign-wide rather than siloed by the programmatic/ATD portion of the plan. It effectively breaks down silo of programmatic as a separate tactic.
The change brings talent in-agency to prepare for adoption of programmatic as a buying mechanism (programmatic direct, programmatic TV, programmatic premium, cross-screen, etc.).
It remains to be seen if client concerns such as inventory, fee and data usage transparency will improve.
Holding companies may follow suit or create different value propositions that help justify an increasingly outdated model.
Certainly, this move illuminates the fact that digital has permeated through every portion of media buying. At first there were digital agencies and experts but when it stopped being a specialty they were no longer needed. As the Ad Age article on Vivaki’s move suggests, we’ve seen this gradual shift in Social Media marketing as well. The timing of this announcement is interesting as we lead into the Upfronts and NewFronts. Though it seems likely that agencies will continue to ask that programmatic spend be incorporated to larger deals.
One thing is definitely clear: Agency trading desks must pivot to keep up with marketer demands around trust and transparency. It will be very interesting to see if and when other agency desks follow Vivaki’s lead.
They were the perfect foils: Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer of Facebook followed by Nick Denton, CEO of Gawker. After dinner on day one of Code/Media, host Peter Kafka interviewed Cox and Denton in a brilliant bit of programming, which juxtaposed these two viewpoints:
Cox represented the evil platform intent upon vacuuming up all data, content and humanity to maximize clicks by us, the “human” robots, to support Facebook’s almighty quest for shareholder growth.
Denton represented the modern-day media czar who candidly–even caustically–fights off the controls of the platforms to protect the sustainable, independent voice for the future.
The problem was that I believed everything they both said.
While original content creators have had a love/hate relationship with Facebook for many years, there was no denying Cox’s eloquence in expressing Facebook’s current ambition to provide better consumer content experiences, particularly on mobile, by hosting content on Facebook rather than on publishers’ own sites. He deftly answered Kafka’s pointed questions about Facebook’s News Feed changes, publisher relationships and user experience decisions like auto-playing video.
But I can’t deny that Cox was the most authentic speaker I’ve ever seen from Facebook. As a rule, Facebook speakers usually leave me feeling a bit disappointed; like I’ve received the corporate playbook. But Kafka didn’t throw a lot of softballs Cox’s way and Cox wasn’t ducking.
I witnessed an hour of genuine answers that, regardless of whether or not I agreed, left me feeling like Cox was candidly sharing many of the complexities of Facebook’s global business. He explained how Facebook is different from all “archaic platforms” like Yahoo!, AOL and Google in that it’s held together by the notion that your friends and family will deliver the best content and info to you. If you agreed with Chris Cox, you should aggressively license content to Facebook’s platform where the largest audience congregates and the most conversations happen every day.
Needless to say, this is not a world view Nick Denton shares.
Denton smoothly shifted gears, channeling (if not quoting) Fred Wilson’s wise counsel to “Be Your Own Bitch.” While not quite the fiery Denton of yore, he deftly navigated Kafka’s many challenging questions. He didn’t flinch from topics that included Gawker’s publishing decisions — including the Sony files and Charlie Hebdo covers — and Gawker’s relationship with its audience, employee culture, Denton’s public exchanges with his reporters, GamerGate and anything else in the world according to Gawker, where controversy breeds like rabbits.
Denton made it clear that he doesn’t want to be informed about the news by the selections of his friends and family, which take place through some sort of democratic vote. He said that his news habits are aspirational and that he looks to brand experts to make what’s-newsworthy decisions for him. If you agreed with Nick Denton, you would defend your independence from any single platform and focus on engaging in conversations with your audience on your own platforms.
As I stood outside the spectacular Ritz Carlton waiting for my car at the end of the night, I found myself talking to a young student from California Marymount — recalling that BuzzFeed Publisher Dao Nguyen has often pressed me to find millennials to talk to about their media habits. So I asked this student what he thought of the event. He highlighted how much he had learned from listening to one of the event’s earlier speakers, New York Times CEO, Mark Thompson, and then Cox and Denton.
The young man said he was just thrilled to be in attendance as the topics covered at <Code/Media> aren’t likely to be discussed in his classrooms. In his words, “the history books on digital media haven’t even been written yet.” He’s absolutely correct. We’re writing them now. And I have zero doubt that the names Chris Cox and Nick Denton will appear in those books. And I bet, as we look back at this phase of the media business, we’ll find that they were both right. Content matters. Audiences matter. The conversations between the two matter. And great content conversations can happen everywhere.
Top photo: Re/code’s Peter Kafka interviews Nick Denton, CEO of Gawker Media
Lower photo: Kafka interviews Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer of Facebook
Not since the introduction of the television have entertainment and media consumption shifted so rapidly. It’s easy to overgeneralize that this rapid shift in media consumption means that everything goes mobile (particularly for younger audiences). However research we released last week in our Getting Audiences Right report, shows that the real headline is the extent of audience fragmentation across both media consumption and shopping behavior.
Nonetheless, this is not a disorganized fragmentation, rather we see that screen engagement coalesces around two organizing principles: the generation which an audience is a part of (we studied Millennials, GenX and Boomers) and the digital task which an audience member will perform.
The Audience Generation Generation is so important in how we understand media consumption and channel receptivity, because generation rolls up not only life stage events (career, children, and retirement), but also a set of beliefs that that cohort holds about itself (consider, for example, a 2010 Pew Research poll that asked audiences of these generations if they thought their own generation was unique, about 60% of Boomers and Millennials said yes, in contrast to half of Gen Xers). These life events and world views influence generations’ preferences for channels, devices, and even how they purchase.
In our Getting Audiences Right Research we see three generational trends emerge:
Millennials have moved to mostly mobile (particularly smartphones) and have moved away from traditional entertainment channels (like network and cable TV) for more curated entertainment (like Netflix and YouTube);
GenX is task-dependent and gender plays more of a role for men in entertainment consumption than any other generation (for example 68% of GenX men report using YouTube on a weekly basis compared to 47% of GenX women).
Boomers, who often pride themselves in their facility with and use of technology (31% of them shop online via their laptop more than once a week and 18% shop online with their smartphone once a week) still prefer traditional channels for entertainment (cable TV is still the screen they’re most likely to watch on a weekly basis — 68% of women watch cable on a weekly basis and 62% of men).
The Task at Hand Nonetheless, in the consumer path to purchase, all generations lean towards PCs as the device of choice.
Even Millennials rely heavily on PCs and laptops for shopping activity. The largest proportion of Millennials had searched or purchased consumer packaged goods using their laptops/PCs (39%) and the same was true for consumer electronics (36%) and financial services (31%)
GenX was most likely to use a laptop/PC for all purchase paths and were particularly strong adopters of laptops for the search or research of consumer packaged goods (49% of GenX had purchased or researched consumer packaged goods on their laptop in the past 6 months, compared to 27% having used smartphones for the same). Interestingly, GenXers use of tablets for CPG search/purchase was higher than that of other generations (20% of GenXers had used a tablet to research or purchase consumer packaged goods in the past 6 months).
Finally, Boomers shared a preference for laptops (54% of them have used a laptop in the past 6 months to search/research consumer packaged goods, 46% for consumer electronics and 41% for researching or purchasing travel).
All audiences stated that the primary drivers of their screen preference were screen size and the performance and speed of the device. However, our research also reveals that task time plays a large role in screen preference. Almost all audiences (81%) prefer to complete a five minute task on a smartphone. However, that percentage drops to 43% for tasks over 10 minutes.
The Message for Marketers Task and generation are so important because advertising is much more successful when contextualized and when the advertiser’s call to action can be heeded without switching tasks (or devices for that matter). We think that these findings give rise to the following three considerations for marketers:
The marketers who are beginning to consider how time shifting and on-demand viewing affect their full communication plan will be a step ahead, particularly with audiences under 50 (GenX and Millennials). The use-case for YouTube may be easier to grasp as marketers begin to understand the elements of good pre-roll, but the marketers who understand the role of advertising and the type of advertising that is effective in over the top will have an advantage.
GenX is the perfect generation for experimentation with a brand’s media mix, because GenXers still consume traditional television content (though more on cable than network TV), but have also moved to emerging channels like over the top (OTT). Given GenX’s omnichannel behavior, marketers must consider the ways in which messages can be sequenced across the channels. They must also be mindful of whether the content running on the channels ladders up to the branding objective for that channel.
Even though mobile resonates with younger audiences, Millennials (and the emerging Gen-Z (audiences under 18) still lean to laptops for lower funnel purchase behaviors. Continued expansion of and investment in the PC/laptop consumer journey is still essential in achieving maximum digital ROI.
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Note: Millennials: Born after 1980 (18 to 34); Gen X: Born 1965-1980 (35 to 50); Boomers: Born 1946-1964 (51 to 69)
Joline McGoldrick is a Research Director at Millward Brown Digital. Joline was an early member of the Dynamic Logic Team, beginning in 2001 and is well versed in studying how audiences respond to Digital advertising. Joline is a product designer and marketer and a frequent speaker and panelist on understanding the digital audience experience. Joline’s work has been featured in Forbes, Adweek, AdAge, the Economist, Media Post, and Mobile Marketer and she has spoken at conferences including the ARF, MRIA, OMMA, MRMW, the Market Research Event and AdTech.
Joline is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Carnegie Mellon University