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.
Re/code’s Peter Kafka interviews Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer of Facebook. Photo credit: Asa Mathat for Re/code
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
The never-ending quest to find millennials in their native habitat has led to many strange bedfellows for publishers. Count Snapchat as another one, but this one has massive numbers: more than 200 million monthly active users. The service is best known for temporary content that disappears after it’s been sent, giving everyone license to sext to their heart’s content. But because the service has such a treasure trove of wired, young millennial users, many content players couldn’t resist the chance to be part of the service’s new ”Discover” zone with specially produced photos, text and video. The question is what role content will play in a hyper-personal, temporary space such as Snapchat.
So far, 11 different media partners, including National Geographic, ESPN, Vice and CNN, are on board. Discover works by allowing these different companies to release new content every 24 hours on their own specific channels within the messaging app. With each new update, previous content vanishes. Utilizing Discover is not only an opportunity for content outlets to reach new audiences on the Snapchat platform — particularly the coveted younger demographic who eschew traditional media and are even fleeing Facebook — but it’s also a chance for advertisers to take advantage of the service. Brands can buy advertisements that appear alongside Discover content after every three or four swipes. In effect, Snapchat now breaks through the parameters of what we might consider “social media” — it’s now a messenger, social network and media network in one mobile platform. And publishers are buzzing about potential reach.
”I can’t tell you what the numbers are, but they’re fucking incredible,” one unnamed publishing exec told Digiday, which ran a rundown of what publishers are doing there.
So what are publishers doing? CNN serves up a mix of news photos, video and even interactives. NatGeo has experimented with original quizzes. ESPN has stuck mainly to short-form video clips and stories. Some publishers have sponsors and others are working on it.
Unlike other social networks where publishers have to depend largely on people to share stories into feeds, Snapchat’s content is controlled entirely by publishers in a ”walled garden” or ”portal” type setting.
The question remains: Will users buy in? The beauty of Snapchat originally was that the ephemeral messaging service actually made the platform a preferred destination to keep in contact with friends, as opposed to say Facebook, which has become inundated with ads and links users want to share with their networks. Snapchat, in comparison, was simple because it focused on messaging. But that simplicity is now itself disappearing, and the service has upset a large chunk of the user base.
“This is like Snapchat’s wannabe version of Flipboard and I really don’t see what this offers that makes it beneficial to the user or utilizes Snapchat’s core functionality,” the user Vallsurf commented on The Verge.
More hurtful yet was a student at Butler who told the student newspaper: ”I also don’t like the Discover thing. I will never use it.”
Of course, people were up in ams when Facebook initially launched the News Feed, but that didn’t last long. A bigger problem might be that Snapchat currently makes it impossible to collect data on user behavior to enable targeted ads. Any information that might assist with that never stays on Snapchat’s servers.
The new Discover app, perhaps tellingly, also doesn’t allow users to share content outside of Snapchat. So even though publishers are excited for it and people are anticipating how Discover might change mobile news consumption, there are still a few key concerns. Among them: Will users make a habit of the Discover section? And will Discover lead to more consumption on publishers’ own domains? It’s really a long-running question that extends to any content distributed on social networks. As Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram put it: “The main beneficiary of this deal [between Snapchat and publishers] is the platform itself.”
But then again, if the content is monetized on the network, as it is on Snapchat, does it really matter as long as it’s more revenue in the pockets of publishers? We will keep a close eye on Snapchat… until it disappears.
Citing contextual relevance as the main benefit, 63% of marketers plan to spend more on native advertising over the next year according to the ANA’s (Association of National Advertisers) 2015 survey report “Advertising Is Going Native.” Eight in 10 marketers surveyed by the ANA employ native advertising via articles, and roughly six in 10 use native video and photos. Consistent with earlier DCN research among media companies on best practices in native advertising, the ANA found that “Disclosure and transparency are major concerns about native advertising that keep respondents up at night.”
According to the ANA:
Two-thirds of respondents agree that native advertising needs clear disclosure that it is indeed advertising. Only 13 percent feel that such disclosure is not needed.
Both the publisher and the advertiser have a responsibility to ensure disclosure.
Three-fourths of respondents feel that there is an ethical boundary for the advertising industry when it comes to native advertising.
Thank you for your attention. I should be grateful for it, given that the average human attention span is now 8 seconds, 1 second less than a goldfish. I’d say let that sink in, but I may have already lost you.
I came by this remarkable statistic by way of Rhonda Crawford the Vice President of eCommerce at Delta Air Lines, a speaker at Digital Content Next’s annual member Summit, held January 21-23 in Miami, FL. She faces the daunting task of creating a content experience that meets the needs of her audience—travelers—during each phase of their journey. While her content perspective differed from many of the event’s speakers—who hailed from The New York Times, ESPN, Business Insider, NBCUniversal, The Daily Beast, among others—her goldfish statistic hit home with everyone. It also elegantly reflected the theme for DCN’s 2015 Summit: The Attention Economy.
In today’s Attention Economy, as DCN CEO Jason Kint put it in his opening remarks, “we are competing for attention with individuals, institutions, and brands… Media companies used to hope for 30 minutes of focused attention every day or maybe every week. Now, it is more like hoping for a few minutes every day. The goal, of course, is to improve the quality of that time.”
Brendan Spain, US Commercial Director at the FT & Tony Haile, CEO of Charbeat
In an Attention Economy, quality rises to the top—and not just as a measure of traditional media engagement. For example, Tony Haile, CEO of Charbeat said that a number of brand recognition studies report that good creative is one of the best predictors of advertising success. Haile is one of a growing number of advocates of moving away from click metrics to time spent as the way to measure ad impact. Brendan Spain, US Commercial Director at the FT, echoed this sentiment and emphasized that brand marketing must be outcome-oriented and “optimized for attention.” This is in line with his publication’s editorial strategy as well, which focuses on the connection between great content and reader attention.
This theme was consistent throughout the event, whether the speaker was a media or marketing executive. As Julie Fleischer, Director of Media and Consumer Engagement at Kraft put it, “They only call it branded content when it’s lousy. Otherwise, they call it content.” She called for constant innovation in marketing creative and distribution, going so far as to suggest that media companies rethink who they bring to sales meetings and include “the dev guy and the product people. Progress happens when we stop thinking about packaging and build something new.”
Julie Fleischer, Director of Media and Consumer Engagement, Kraft
R “Ray” Wang, author of the forthcoming book Disrupting Digital Business said that “good content rises above all the noise” and urges businesses of any type to focus on “transformational innovation.” The future, according to Wang, is about “the fan experience and mass-personalized journeys at scale for an audience of one.”
Fleischer from Kraft said that all organizations must “Know their customers on a proprietary level,” which leads to content and experiences that truly engage. And content creates a two way street with customers; she finds that “we learn an incredible amount from our consumers based upon their interaction with our content.”
So has the FT, particularly when it comes to ad impact and what Spain calls “the new currency of the web: time.” In its studies of the impact of exposure time on ad recall, the FT found 17% recall in ads viewed for under 5 seconds, and an almost 80% increase in recall for ads seen for over five seconds. According to Spain, they’ve already shifted their internal sales conversations from quantity to quality, focusing on the value of attention. And from what was heard at the 2015 DCN Summit, the larger industry conversation will be moving that direction as well.
In case you missed it, Truste released its 2015 Consumer Confidence Index this week. We’ve been one of the louder voices on the importance of trust among consumers, marketers and publishers. We even baked it into our DNA by crafting our Trust Principles. Consumer and marketer trust is the basis of our members’ businesses and we must constantly strive to build and maintain it.
Unfortunately, that trust is a fragile thing and there is much taking place online that undermines it. For example, consider the rampant, untethered growth in the digital supply chain causes a daunting amount of tracking activity like this to happen. It seems likely that this level of tracking and data collection without more meaningful choice will undermine consumer trust
We are clearly not alone in our concern about consumer trust online. Truste calls it “a hot button issue for Americans with 92% concerned about their privacy when using the internet and 42% more concerned than a year ago.” Other of the key data points and takeaway from the Truste report include:
Lack of trust harms publishers: 77% of consumers moderated their online behavior because of privacy concerns. 51% of consumers have not clicked on an online ad because of privacy concerns.
Lack of trust harms advertisers: 86% of consumers took active steps to protect their privacy including deleting cookies, changing settings, turning off location tracking.
Consumers may be confused, but their behavior is telling: 63% of consumers deleted cookies in order to protect their online privacy but only 10% opted out of behavioral ads. Why the difference? Is it because consumers don’t know that they can opt out? Is it because opting out is difficult to do and reliant on cookies?
I hope this data makes everyone stop what they’re doing to think about how we actually grow trust across the media ecosystem. We need to ensure that the consumer and marketer trust in premium brands remains strong. We need to focus on building the future of trusted content, a future in which brands can stand the test of time because we have built a sustainable model based on a foundation of trust.
