- Pew: Millennials No Less Trusting (or Distrusting) of News Sources (3 min read)
- TechCrunch: Google Photos Reminder: Smile, It’s Free — You’re The Product! (5 min read)
- Nieman: The scariest chart in Mary Meeker’s slide deck for newspapers has gotten even a little scarier (3 min read)
- Reuters: Vladimir Putin’s censorship agenda targets online giants (5 min read)
- Digiday: 5 ways Time Inc. is trying to make paywalls work (3 min read)
- Business Insider: $25 billion in media money just went up for grabs — and nobody can agree on why (6 min read)
- Guardian: Rusbridger’s farewell illustrates the huge changes to the media in 20 years (4 min read)
- Ad Age: 10 Things You Need to Know Now About Programmatic Buying (4 min read)
- AdExchanger: Please Stop Calling It ‘Currency’ (3 min read)
- WashPost: Steve Case: Get ready, the Internet is about to change again. Here’s how. (6 min read)
Category results for "Perspectives"
DCN’s Recommended Reading: Week of June 4, 2015
Member Spotlight: Edmunds.com’s Avi Steinlauf
Q: Tell us a bit about your role and the path that brought you here.
A: I’ve been at Edmunds for almost 18 years. After finishing business school at Kellogg and working as Senior Industry Analyst for Coopers & Lybrand’s Knowledge Strategies Group in New York, I joined Edmunds as the Director of Marketing and Business Development when we had just 20 employees. Now I’m the CEO and our team consists of 600 people nationwide. We had been a book publisher since the 1960s, then came online in 1994 and discontinued the print business in 2005. It’s been fascinating to be a part of the transition onto the Internet and to be involved in the growth that technology has enabled.
The way I approach my job is very hands-on and people-oriented–with both employees and clients. I interface regularly with senior level automaker executives as well as car dealers from all over the country–operations that are small and big, urban and rural, private and public. Car dealers are among the most innovative, entrepreneurial people in the business sector, and getting exposure to them is a fascinating part of my job.
Q: What is the biggest challenge for you in your role?
A: At Edmunds, we’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit and always looked beyond the norm to make a real difference for car shoppers and the auto industry. The larger Edmunds gets, the more challenging it is for us to continually innovate at that level, but that is required if we want to stay at the head of the pack. We have accomplished a lot, but we can never rest on our laurels. Finding new ways to creatively inspire and support employees and our leadership team to help them continually innovate is the toughest part of my role.
Q: What do you think is the most important aspect of your job?
A: We can’t do what we do without our amazing team of talented and 
dedicated employees. The most important aspect of my job is ensuring that we’re one of the best places to work, hiring and treasuring people with our values who can contribute to building the business for the long run. (I’m very proud to say that we are often acknowledged in this area, as you can see here.)
Q: Describe one of the most unusual or most memorable experiences in your career/current role.
A: One of the most fun elements of my job is getting regular exposure to new cars and trucks. At Edmunds, we test all the new vehicles provided by automakers on a weekly basis, and on our own dime we regularly buy popular cars and trucks for long-term testing, reporting our findings to car shoppers to help make their process easier. One week I’ll be driving a new minivan, the next a pick-up truck, then move into a new family sedan or a sports car. I really enjoy the variety, and I get a kick out of seeing my kids (none driving age yet) get excited about what I’ve brought home on any given day. My kids really love it – but my wife thinks I’m nuts for having to move my stuff from car to car every week.
I’m very proud of our editorial team’s initiative in helping car shoppers, and the reach of Edmunds’ voice. Recently our team tackled a big question: how much would it cost to repair damage done to the aluminum body of a new truck? They took a sledgehammer to a new Ford F-150 to learn the answer, and the video went viral, earning millions of views. Ford’s CEO was even asked about it on the company’s quarterly earnings call. If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can check it out at here.
Q: What are you most excited about for the future of your organization/ the industry?
A: I like to give my team the baseball analogy that even though we’ve hit some home runs, we’re still only in the bottom of the second inning or perhaps the top of the third. I see a tremendous amount of potential for us to grow within the auto industry. We are currently unrolling a new strategy to play a valued role in the used car shopping process. The used car business is four times the size of the new car business, so that alone gives us plenty of opportunities. Also, we see technology continuing to have a major impact on car shopping. Last October we made our first acquisition – the CarCode customer/dealer texting platform – and have found it to be one of the most successful endeavors in our history. (More details can be found here.) As technology evolves, we’ll be busy for generations to come.
Avi Steinlauf, Chief Executive Office of Edmunds.com, directs the company toward the goals of empowering the automotive consumer, maintaining the high quality of the workplace and building the company to thrive for the long term. He joined Edmunds in summer of 1998 as the Director of Business Development and has also headed the company’s marketing and revenue management areas. Previously, he worked for Coopers & Lybrand’s Knowledge Strategies Group. Avi earned an MBA degree from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva College.
Augmented and Virtual Reality Get Real: A Look at Media Applications Happening Now
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are getting a whole lot of press lately. From Google and GoPro partnering on a new filmmaking ecosystem for VR to Apple’s acquisition of Augmented Reality (AR) company Metaio and Oculus’ (Facebook) purchase of AR startup Surreal Vision, it looks like this pair of technologies that enhance (or supplant) what content consumers see are entering primetime. In fact, PatentVue recently reviewed the patent landscape and found more than 2,300 US patents with claims related to AR and head mounted display (HMD) platforms and devices.
Early practical developments for AR have ranged from manufacturing and engineering to retail and medicine. And brands such as Heinekin, Toyota, Dominos and Ford have already embraced AR as a way to advertise, demo products and ease the path to purchase.
Virtual Reality (VR) is also making a big splash with the marketing community, with Forbes calling it “the next big advertising medium,” pointing to the work Hearst-owned Elle Magazine did with denim designer 7 For All Mankind. Spirits brand Patron offers educational seminars and retail consumer VR experiences to provide an immersive look inside the Hacienda Patrol distillery.. And Marvel teamed up with Samsung to promote the latest Avengers movie by giving people a taste of what it is like to be a superhero.
Not surprisingly, media companies are also experimenting with ways in which AR and VR offer new ways to tell stories.
Here are a few recent examples of how media companies are jumping into the VR fray:
- Gannet Digital leveraged virtual reality in its coverage of the 2015 FIS Alpine World Ski Championship. Not only could ski fans read about the events, they could don an Oculus headset and experience heart-pounding runs with some of skiing’s greats.
- NBC used VR to give fans the experience of being in the star-studded audience at the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special.
- Vice Media released a documentary at Sundance “VICE News VR: Millions March” which takes viewers inside the December 13 rally in New York in which 60,000 protesters gathered to demand greater police accountability.
- The Weather Channel has just launched live VR weather which ”takes viewers in, and through, the science and wonder of weather.”
- At this year’s New Fronts, Conde Nast announced that it has two original virtual reality series in the works.
- ABC Family leveraged VR to market its new sci-fi program “Stichers,” by creating a smartphone app that promises fans an immersive experience.
- Turner Broadcasting-owned Adult Swim also released an app-based VR experience this month called Virtual Brainload, which boasts a somewhat more psychedelic experience.
Here are some examples of the ways in which media outlets are leveraging AR:
- National Geographic was early to experiment with AR—notably with its 2011 shopping mall experience that allowed shoppers to interact with dinosaurs. More recently, National Geographic has begun to leverage AR for educational experiences that enhance explorations of natural places.
- Disney also offers an “edutainment” application of AR with its Disneynature Explore app, which offers kids a way to take adventures in their own backyards while learning more about nature along the way.
- Disney-owned ESPN had an augmented reality-capable camera in use at this year’s NFL Draft and the company has leveraged AR in its broadcast media for some time.
- Conde Nast Traveler uses GPS data location and augmented reality in its iPhone Apps to allow travelers to find things and learn more simply by pointing their phone in a given direction.
- Conde Nast is also among several media outlets—including Time Inc., The Wall Street Journal and Warner Brothers Interactive—that are working with Shazam, which can scan physical objects for augmented reality and other enhanced content.
Virtual reality headsets and content will be “the next mega tech theme” and a market worth more than $60 billion in a decade, according to investment bank, Piper Jaffray Cos. And as we increasingly see, mega tech themes quickly become mega media themes, as the two are intertwined in the minds—and devices—of consumers.
4 Tips for Improving Programmatic CPM
The premise that the rise of automated buying and selling through programmatic technology would have a negative impact on a publisher’s’ ability to increase—or even maintain—their CPM rates is continuing to erode. Many were surprised to learn that the 2013-2014 CPM trend for social, mobile and display across programmatic ad platforms was one of growth, not decline.
As the click declines from its position as the metric of prominence, contextual data, viewability and high impact opportunities for engagement have become increasingly valued and sought after by brands. Today, marketers increasingly realize that “you get what you pay for” but they expect that price tag to come with the same scale and efficiency programmatic technology delivers. So how can publishers use data and technology to command premium pricing for the premium experiences brands want—and consumers expect?
Here are four strategies publishers can adopt to not simply survive, but thrive, in a programmatic world.
- Make your audience and contextual site data available and visible to buyers. Move beyond offering standard cookie-reliant targeting with contextual technology. Real-time, page-level contextualization of your content increases the likelihood that a person sees an ad that’s relevant to them—delighting your audiences and the buyers who want to reach them. Contextual analysis at the page-level will enable you to offer audience segments interested in that content at greater scale, beyond 1st party and 3rd party cookie pools. Contextual data can help increase yield and revenue by showing the value of inventory buyers would normally overlook.
- Upgrade your site to support more advanced ad functionality and cross-screen delivery. Large-format, high-impact ad sizes are designed to help brands get their ads noticed and have been shown to improve interaction rates, increase time spent and improve brand recall. The IAB recently released research showing that consumers find Rising Star ads more engaging and more informative than standard units. This makes them especially valuable to brands, who tend to bid higher on these formats. With an estimated 60% of web traffic coming from mobile, it goes without saying that your site should be mobile optimized. It’s worth spending the time and money to upgrade your site internally, or many technology partners can help you integrate new ad formats and optimize for mobile experiences quickly and easily.
- Understand how much of your content is viewable—and make sure you can deliver against it. Viewability is moving from “nice-to-have” to “must-have” in a buyers mind. Make sure you know how much of your inventory is viewable and provide transparent reporting against that number to clients. Publishers who can offer a pricing model that incorporates viewability (e.g vCPM) will emerge the winners, as brands will pay a premium for guaranteed viewable inventory. An easy way to get started is to ask your monetization partners if they have viewability-tracking and reporting tools to layer on your current offering—some even offer this as a value-add service.
- Adopt a “test and learn” approach to programmatic partners. Don’t accept the status quo from your current monetization partners. As the programmatic landscape matures, earlier pain points of integrating new technology partners are starting to subside as onboarding and operational processes have become standardized. There’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” programmatic partner, so don’t be afraid to test multiple providers concurrently to compare performance; leverage the real-time nature of programmatic to find the right solution that will help ensure a premium for your unique audience and content.
This isn’t the first time publishers have been forced to evolve alongside major industry change, and it most certainly won’t be the last. By 2018, more than 80% of display ad dollars will be transacted programmatically. Publishers that adapt to this new way of doing business and embrace the innovation it spurs will be the ones to reap the benefits.
Darline Jean is the Chief Operating Officer for PulsePoint, responsible for shaping product strategy focused on enhancing the company’s premium programmatic and content marketing solutions. Before joining PulsePoint, Darline was President and Chief Executive Officer of The About Group where she was responsible for the strategic direction of the business unit of The New York Times Company that includes About.com, CalorieCount.com and ConsumerSearch.com. During her tenure as President and CEO, she significantly increased the company’s revenue and led the sale of About.com from The New York Times Company to IAC in 2013. Darline has also held the title of Chief Operating Officer of About.com and Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer of the About Group.
Prior to The About Group, Darline held various financial leadership positions with Thomson Media, a division of Thomson Financial. She began her career with Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising in New York.
Verizon/AOL Deal Focuses on Mobile, So What About Content?
Something about AOL and buyouts always brings a strange sense of déjà vu. It takes us back to the glory days of the first dot-com era when then-upstart AOL bought media giant Time Warner for $164 billion in 2000. Fast-forward 15 years, and the shape of AOL’s identity is much more about ad technology—and popular content with Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget—than it is about dial-up Internet (though it still has 2.2 million of those subscribers too).
Last week, Verizon announced its plans to purchase AOL for $50 a share, in what amounts to a $4.4 billion deal. Some observers have noted that these numbers are pretty small for a company like Verizon, and that AOL continues to remain a major player online, especially when it comes to the future of online advertising: mobile and video. In fact, these are attributes Verizon is banking on to help it grow in mobile and video advertising as it builds its own mobile content collection as well.
What AOL stands to gain, however, may necessitate some soul-searching on its identity—or rather, how other parties view its services, and what those services have come to mean in our modern media environment. AOL owns several global brands such as Huffington Post, TechCrunch and AOL.com. Just like media giants Facebook and Google, it’s in the business of helping brands use sophisticated technology for online advertising. It’s also invested heavily in online video.
Spinning Off Content?
But will Verizon want to keep those content sites that have in the past been critical of the cell giant? The big rumor is that AOL has been in what Re/code calls “advanced discussions with a number of parties” to spin off the Huffington Post brand. It would bring in more money for Huffington Post, which has been expensive for AOL to maintain and monetize, especially against feisty competitors such as BuzzFeed and Business Insider.
According to Re/code’s Kara Swisher, the most serious talks were with German media company Axel Springer, as well as private equity firms. Her sources put a price tag of $1 billion on the Huffington Post group, but she couldn’t get a public confirmation of talks from CEO Tim Armstrong or others at AOL. “Sources said Verizon was far more focused on advertising tech and video and that some kind of spinoff or joint venture was far more likely for the Huffington Post,” Swisher wrote.
Ad Tech the Golden Goose
Indeed, AOL’s advertising business is showing positive signs: It’s reported a seven percent growth rate in this year’s first quarter, and as Trefis, a company which analyzes stock prices, noted, much of this growth came from its programmatic platform across the third-party advertising network. Trefis also estimated that third party display advertising made up nearly half—42.2%—of AOL’s value.
All of that is very good for Verizon, especially if it wants to take on giants such as Facebook and Google and plant its footprint more heavily in mobile advertising. As Farhad Manjoo wrote in his column for the New York Times, together those two online behemoths “control more than 55% of the $42.6 billion worldwide mobile ad market, according to eMarketer.”
All of that is very good for AOL as well. AOL honcho Armstrong said in a memo to employees after the acquisition announcement, “If there is one key to our journey to building the largest digital media platform in the world, it is mobile.” And Armstrong deserves all the credit in the world for turning around an online has-been into a digital powerhouse commanding a premium payoff.
So should AOL now be known for its brand, or for its platform? Another lingering question is what mobile advertising itself should mean now. Ads on a mobile device mustn’t just try to get a person to buy something; they must also utilize data and key information about that person to create a custom advertisement for that specific individual. As Manjoo put it, “People in the ad-tech industry said that in buying AOL, Verizon’s immediate goal may be to marry its data about customers to AOL’s capacity to serve ads to increase this sort of relevancy.” And data mining is what Facebook and Google already do so well.
Ultimately, this deal might be less about the booming AOL content business and a lot more about ways to serve mobile and programmatic ads into a lot more content.
DCN’s Recommended Reading: Week of May 21, 2015
- Washington Post: How the battle for the future of the web is shaped by economics (5 min read)
- Digiday: Kraft: Digital advertising has a serious data quality problem (20 min video)
- Folio: TheStreet Experiments With A Freemium Model For Its $50-Million Subscription Service (2 min read)
- MediaPost: It’s Not TV, It’s VAB: Trade Bureau Drops Cable, Television Too (2 min read)
- WSJ: Belgian Watchdog Raps Facebook for Treating Personal Data ‘With Contempt’ (4 min read)
- AdWeek: With Facebook’s Instant Articles, Publishers Contemplate a Social-First World (4 min read)
- Ad Age: Behind All Good Ad-Tech Is Data — and Verizon, AOL Have Lots of It (4 min read)
- WSJ: With Facebook’s Instant Articles, Publishers May Find 70 Cents Is Better Than a Dollar (4 min read)
- Jeff Jarvis: I, for one, welcome our new newsstand (9 min read)
- AdExchanger: Fraud And Data Ruptures Could Spark a Consumer Revolt (5 min read)
Making Sense of Media Acronyms with NBCUniversal
ODCR. TVE. VOD. OTT.
Doesn’t it seem like this year’s Upfront presentations were filled with way too many acronyms, making it harder and harder to make sense of them? Playing House’s Executive Producers, writers and stars Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair break down what they all mean and how they illustrate the innovation taking place at NBCUniversal.
3 steps you can take now to make the digital ecosystem safer
We’ve all seen the headlines and statistics:
Advertisers will lose $6-10 billion to bots in 2015.
More than half of ad impressions are not seen.
A quarter of all video impressions are fraudulent.
Brands are not safe from bots and invalid traffic.
As an experienced digital auditor, the Alliance for Audited Media goes behind the scenes to examine the sources and systems of the underlying issues plaguing the digital advertising ecosystem. In a new white paper series, we delve into the issues of viewability, fraudulent and invalid traffic, and brand safety and transparency. All from a side you might not have read yet—the auditor’s perspective.
Based on our research, there are steps that all industry players – media buyers, vendors and publishers – can immediately take to make the digital ecosystem a safer place. Here are three takeaways that you can put to work today:
1. Prepare for 100 percent viewability
On the surface, viewability is a logical goal that seems readily attainable. Publishers should serve ads that can be seen by a human. Reality is far more complicated, of course. Different publishers work with different vendors. And different vendors—even those that are accredited—can use different measurement methodologies. Add in issues with browsers, screen sizes, ad delivery mechanisms and things quickly get very complicated. The industry is working toward solutions, but in the meantime, here’s what you can do now to prepare for 100 percent viewability:
Media Buyers: Know where your ads are going and where they ran: Work with reputable publishers and networks. Talk with vendors about measurement methodologies to better understand discrepancies. Demand audited systems and data to ensure you’re able to transact with trust and transparency.
Vendors: If you’re considering an MRC accreditation against the viewability standards, schedule a pre-audit engagement – now required by the MRC – with an independent third party to cost-effectively prepare your technology and processes for compliance with industry standards.
Publishers: Evaluate the advertising real estate on your pages and optimize placement for the best opportunity to be measured and seen. Disclose to clients which viewability solutions you employ and prepare them for possible discrepancies and reconciliation methods.
2. Recognize that not all invalid traffic is fraudulent but all fraud is invalid
There are several very good reasons a website may have for generating invalid traffic including internal traffic or test environments. But there are many more ways a site can generate fraudulent traffic, here’s what you can do to combat it:
Media Buyers: Ask your media partners how they detect invalid traffic. Only use vendors and technology partners certified to industry guidelines. Agencies should take the additional step of following the IAB’s best practices for workflow, campaign set-up, site tagging and measurement processes.
Ad Networks and Exchanges: Vet your inventory and continuously monitor it for changes. Provide advertisers with site-level information about where ads are running and who is seeing them. Become certified to IAB guidelines. Build brand safety technology into the ad server or domain engines that participate in RTB.
Publishers: Use internal controls to monitor traffic increases and implement ad tech solutions that are certified to industry standards. Perhaps most importantly, become certified against the IAB Quality Assurance Guidelines, which offer a framework for brand safety and trust throughout the industry.
3. Eliminate the bad players hiding behind good technology
Programmatic media buying has allowed advertisers to more precisely target audiences while helping publishers sell more inventory. It’s also created another avenue for potential fraud in the digital ad supply chain. Here’s what you can do to stop fraud:
Media Buyers: Only use exchanges that work with legitimate, validated publishers and take steps to refuse buying low-quality inventory. If the price seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Vendors: Get audited to IAB guidelines. Those vendors that comply with IAB measurement guidelines believe in providing accurate, reliable and consistent measurements every day.
Publishers: Avoid the temptation of buying undesirable traffic to fulfill commitments to advertisers. “Cheap” and “quality” traffic rarely go together.
The fact is that there’s no single answer to the issues facing digital advertising—but accountability and transparency are the foundation of any solution. Know your vendors and media buyers beyond just a name on a screen. Have a conversation and reach an understanding before a campaign begins. Support the work of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) to add background checks and weed out the bad actors before they gain entrance.
Each of us can and must play a role in bringing transparency to the digital media ecosystem. If all sides of the industry come together against those that are infecting the system, we’ve got a real chance of creating a safe marketplace where everyone can transact with trust. Read AAM’s entire digital white paper series to learn more about the industry initiatives at play and find your role.
Guenther is vice president of digital auditing services at AAM. As a founding partner and vice president of ImServices Group—an Alliance for Audited Media company—he has more than 25 years of experience in digital technology auditing. Guenther has been instrumental in helping develop many of today’s key standards and practices for the interactive advertising marketplace including the IAB’s Quality Assurance Guidelines, various IAB Measurement Guidelines (including the MRC Viewable Impression Guidelines) and the IAB’s Ad Campaign Measurement Process Guidelines to name a few.
In 2014 AAM and ImServices merged. Guenther leads the integrated digital audit team in helping clients address fraud detection and prevention, ad delivery verification, viewability and brand safety through platform certification audits, independent validation through the IAB’s Quality Assurance Program (QAG) and MRC accreditation support that includes pre-audit assessments, a step now required by the MRC.
Bad Ads: Research Shows They May Cost More Than They’re Worth
No one likes to click a link on a tantalizing bit of content only to be assaulted by a barrage of intrusive and annoying advertising. That fact is as in your face as a blinking pop-up ad prompting you to punch a monkey to win an iPad. And unless it’s the result of fat fingers, you aren’t clicking these annoying ads; you are hitting the back button as fast as you can to find a more pleasant place to consume content. And here’s the part that should send a chill down the spine of premium content publishers: Microsoft research has found that they’re not just bad in customers’ eyes; there’s also a high cost to be paid by the publishers that run them.
The research, The Economic and Cognitive Costs of Annoying Display Advertisements, set out to better understand the cognitive impact of annoying ads on users, and also to quantify the economic cost of annoying ads for publishers. Let’s just say their findings are more than a little jarring. The research shows the economic cost of “annoying” ads is about .153 cents each (for the revenue wonks, this works out to a $1.53CPM). Given that Turn reports that more than 53% of all online ads sell for between $.10 and $.80CPM and we know premium publishers typically earn around $1.35CPM from open exchanges, a little math paints a disturbing picture. We’ve always known digital ads can impact users and the bottom-line but not in the wrong direction.
If you believe the research—undertaken by an impressive team of researchers whose experience includes work for Yahoo, Google and Microsoft—then publishers need to know that running ads which site visitors find to be irritating, annoying, inappropriate or offensive has a significant net cost, both to brand value and the bottom line. Private marketplaces reinforce this need for brand safety for all. Chasing page-views and impressions at scale has diminishing returns and makes a sites more vulnerable to bad ads. What this means is that by running these ads, often to maximize sell-thru rate of your inventory, you’re actually chasing short-term revenue rabbits without understanding where that rabbit hole leads.
The Microsoft researchers conclude that “the practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it earns.” That’s right: a site might be better off not running ads at all because of the net loss they will incur if some or all of their ads are perceived as bad by their users. A site or app actually needs more quality content and premium ads to make up for the economic loss from bad ads.
As is the case with bad advertising, we all know great ads when we see them. And research shows that there is a “halo effect” to advertising that is positioned within the context of a strong media brand with quality content, so it only stands to reason that the reverse would be true: that there would be a negative effect to a media brand associated with bad advertising. Microsoft’s research confirms this, finding not only that people notice annoying ads and complain about them, they are more likely to abandon sites on which they were present. Interestingly, in the presence of annoying ads, people had to work harder to understand content that contains annoying ads. In other words, they’re distracting and a general nuisance to user experience.
Again, it’s very important to note this isn’t simply about low-quality dating ads, yellow-teeth and belly-fat ads. Media companies need to consider the subtle and long-term effects that any ad running on their sites may have on user retention and revenue. The alarming rise of Adblocking software adoption makes clear that customers are fed up with poor advertising experiences. And once customers are driven to this extreme, they are taken out of the ecosystem for everyone, good and bad advertisers alike. Already 41% of 18-29 year-olds in America have opted-out of digital advertising altogether by installing an adblocker.
But we can’t simply take the lazy position that “people just hate ads.” It simply isn’t true. And the Microsoft research backs that up. We can also clearly see examples of superior advertising and content experiences on Vox and Conde Nast sites, among many others. Premium publishers like the members of DCN who focus on high-quality content, premium, well-lit experiences and brand-safe environments should be well-served as this all shakes out because they are laser focused on creating great customer experiences that are only enhanced by the relevant, quality advertising experiences that support all of the terrific content that they enjoy.
DCN’s Recommended Reading: Week of May 14, 2015
- AJR: Ad Blocking Poses a Growing Challenge to Media Companies (5 min read)
- The New Yorker: Tomorrow’s Advance Man (1h read)
- Politico: N.Y. Times accelerates digital-first effort (2 min read)
- eMarketer: Marketers Share Data Externally, Whether or Not They Want To (2 min read)
- Microsoft: The Facebook “It’s Not Our Fault” Study (5 min read)
- AdWeek: Marketers React to Mobile Viewability Criteria, as Challenges Loom (3 min read)
- NYT: For Verizon and AOL, Mobile Is a Magic Word (7 min read)
- TheWorldPost: Facebook Said Its Algorithms Do Help Form Echo Chambers. And the Tech Press Missed It. (7 min read)
- Vox: Cable news is in trouble, and it’s more about the news than the cable (4 min read)
- CNET: Feds to cable industry: Embrace broadband competition, or else (6 min read)
Accounting for Attention Minutes as a Currency
Time-based metrics are of considerable interest to online publishers. There seems little doubt that “attention minutes,” in one form or another, will be a tool used by both marketers and media. DCN has identified many of these possibilities. But it’s far from clear whether these metrics will, or should, displace more conventional measures of audience size. To consider the strengths and weaknesses of time-based metrics as currencies, we explored the relationship between the time people spend with websites and the popularity of those sites.
Do attention and popularity measure different things?
There is a long-standing law of consumer behavior called “Double Jeopardy” (DJ). It stipulates that popular offerings enjoy more consumer loyalty than unpopular offerings. DJ in television has meant that channels with high ratings have higher levels of time spent and repeat viewing. The only meaningful exception has been the “small-but-loyal” audiences of foreign language channels. So on the web, it’s possible that the most popular sites (as measured by UVs) also rack up the most attention minutes. If popularity and time spent are highly correlated, either metric would produce the same winners and losers.
To see if that’s true, we used comScore data to test the correlations among several metrics. We looked at three-month aggregates from October to December 2014 across 1,067 news sites. The time-spent measures, which included “average minutes per visit,” “average minutes per page,” and “average minutes per visitor,” were highly correlated.
However, there were only weak correlations between time spent and audience size. You can get a sense of this in the chart below. Most outlets with small-but-loyal audiences were, like TV, non-English sites. So there were no DJ effects. More importantly, it seems that time-based metrics are tapping into something quite different from popularity. So which is better suited to be a currency?
What do attention minutes tell us about content?
DCN and several others have suggested that attention minutes might be a good measure of audience engagement and quality. As such, attention minutes could be useful for developing content – which, in turn, could build audience loyalty. But currencies typically reflect the needs of advertisers. Do time-based metrics offer advertisers something of value that they can’t get from measures of popularity?
At a minimum, attention minutes can help authenticate exposure to an ad, serving as an extension of viewability standards. Beyond that, it’s harder to see why an advertiser would put a premium on the audiences’ engagement with a publisher’s content. One possibility is that an ad becomes more effective when it’s surrounded by content that has truly engaged readers. But here, the evidence is mixed. There’s some indication that the benefits of engagement in content bleed over to advertising. For example, a 2012 comScore report concluded that content engagement is more strongly correlated with advertising effectiveness than clicks or total impressions. Additionally, a 2009 experiment found that user engagement and advertising effectiveness are positively associated. On the other hand, consistent definitions of engagement are elusive. What’s more, a 2013 Nielsen report suggests that it’s the medium, rather than the content, that most greatly affects advertising efficacy.
If advertisers are convinced that engaging content benefits their ads, premium publishers might be able to profit from that association. But programmatic buying is gaining ground in online advertising, and that potentially divorces ad placement from its surrounding content (though the number of private marketplaces is growing). Some advertisers don’t care about content apart from its ability to deliver the attention of prospective customers. It’s the characteristics of the people being delivered that are likely to matter most for any currency.
What do attention minutes tell us about visitors?
Advertisers typically use metrics to describe and target audiences. Historically that’s been age and gender, but with all the digital exhaust users leave behind, it now seems the sky’s the limit. You could identify those users who are engaged by time spent measures, then add them to the targeting mix. But it could backfire. Our findings indicated that individuals who spent large amounts of time on news sites tended to be heavy web users. In other words, they spend a lot of time online. In a world that’s driven by programmatic buying, the heaviest users are the easiest for advertisers to reach. The laws of supply demand suggest they’ll be of less value to advertisers. And this just might turn the A in attention minutes into a scarlet letter.
James G. Webster is a professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He’s the author of The Marketplace of Attention and Ratings Analysis: Audience Measurement and Analytics.
Jacob L. Nelson is a doctoral student in Northwestern University’s Media, Technology, and Society program. A former journalist, his research looks at news consumption and media metrics.
NewFronts 2015: It’s All About the Video – and Tech
There was a time when the NewFronts were considered a side show to the Upfronts, almost a joke. What’s the point of buying digital ads “ahead of time” when there is infinite inventory online and no real schedule?
But things have shifted considerably in the past few years. The NewFronts, now in their fourth year, were a serious blow-out party, with 33 presenters – up more than 50 percent since last year – threatening to outshine the Upfronts. And what has been the catalyst? Video, of course. Because now everyone from Yahoo to WSJ to Vox has their own video shows. So that makes the NewFronts much more like Upfronts, with seasons for shows – even if those shows can be binged instantly, in some cases.
And the numbers can back them up. Numbers always help. For instance, more than 68 percent of marketers and agency executives expect their digital video ad budgets to increase in the next year. And guess where that money is coming from? That’s right, from the Upfronts, with money moving away from traditional cable and broadcast television. But IAB honcho Randall Rothenberg argues that it’s our understanding of and relationship with television that’s changing — not “television” itself.
“The princeling that’s replacing television … is television,” he wrote in a piece for Adweek.
“Linear TV” and “Internet TV” may be two sides of the same coin, but a definite theme coming out of this year’s NewFronts is that digital is a “better ad buy” than ordinary television, especially among the coveted millennial audience. Research firm eMarketer expects digital video-ad spending to grow by 30 percent and hit $7.8 billion in 2015.
Original Shows and Tech
So just like at the Upfronts, many NewFronts presenters announced new series – a whole lot of them. Time Inc., for example, announced four new streaming-video series. And Yahoo announced 18 new series, in part to help attract interest to its digital magazines, which have lots of native advertising. Conde Nast also announced plans to release more than 2,500 new original videos in the coming year. Even Vox Media announced several new digital video series, as well as a few renewals for current popular ones.
It seems the key to monetizing digital video is to first have enough of it before you can really reap the benefits. But Vox went further, licensing its content management system — already well known in media circles — for outside use. That’s a huge incentive for an agency like DigitasLBi, which announced both a production partnership with Vice and a deal with Vox that will allow it first dibs on Vox’s native ad platform, Chorus for Advertisers.
Native Ad Ideas
But it’s not enough to just to sell shows. Many publishers also pushed their native ad tech solutions. Yahoo talked about its native-video ad program that can help it “integrate sponsored-video segments into its homepage, digital magazine and apps.” Yahoo also announced video-app install ads through which marketers and developers can promote apps — both on Yahoo and thousands of other apps.
Meanwhile, BuzzFeed announced its new technology, Pound, aimed at demystifying social sharing habits and how content goes viral. As BuzzFeed wrote in a blog post about Pound, “traditional web analytics are fundamentally unable to capture what actually happens on the social web today.” Not only would Pound help BuzzFeed better figure out stories you’d share with your friends and families, and the stories they’d be most likely to share, but it’s also a chance to see how the data collected from Pound could help produce more shareable sponsored content.
And maybe that’s the approach that will really set apart the NewFront digital folk from the Upfronts – offering not just some original web shows, but also the technology to help advertisers reach and engage those audiences. TV isn’t dead by any means, but the digital upstarts are making serious inroads.