Media owners may feel like their cups are half empty. Admittedly, it’s a tough business to be in right now. Certainly, the advertising industry is in the middle of a “Great Reset.” However, we must remember that change also means opportunity. Like most businesses, media owners don’t want to guess about the future and they don’t want to make directional bets that could leave their business in dire straits. The good news is they don’t have to.
Although media owners aren’t fortune tellers, they don’t need a Magic 8-Ball to see that they have a wealth of choices as they move forward. Upheaval driven by the deprecation of the decades-old technology of cookies, a global pandemic, and new regulation focused on consumer consent and transparency have all enabled a tremendous amount of innovation in our industry. As a result, tools for media owners are rapidly becoming more agile and more privacy forward. They are also becoming more effective.
Now, you can target in context. You can target in real time. You can target on first-impression. And you can target across devices, sequentially, with managed frequency, with your own data, with second-party data, with enriched data.
Diversify to thrive
Diversification is key for media owners as we continue into this new era. Marketers want and need options. Many publishers are leaning into contextual as a response to the changes in our industry. While context is a fine option to realize the value of publishers’ great content, it’s not the only lever you can pull, nor should it be.
Marketers agree. In fact, two-thirds of marketers are not confident that contextual targeting alone is a sufficient replacement for audience targeting. That’s a significant percentage of paying customers looking for alternatives.
Media owners, marketers are looking to you for those alternative solutions. Are you comfortable putting all your eggs in one basket and one that appeals to a fraction of your customers?
No one said change would be easy. However, media owners have the tools and partners available today to compete. Google is only part of the story — but you shouldn’t let them be the only story.
Yes, the Chrome browser is important. However, when you zoom out, there are multiple browsers in common use; tablets and phones that are proliferating in the billions; connected televisions, and a vast proliferation of connected devices, spanning the globe. There’s a prodigious open web opportunity up for grabs. Consumers are hungry for your content and willing to pay good money for it.
Real solutions
Google may not embrace identity within its walls (except on its own account, of course) but identity solutions are plentiful across the open web. The walled giant may try to woo you with dumbed down tools. However, you can be sure that, for their own marketer clients, they’ll be surfacing all the sophistication attendant to the rich wealth of data that they have for their own clients. Don’t force your buyers to reprogram dollars to those walled gardens. (And by the way: Enriched data can still be activated via Deal IDs, even in Google.)
It would be wise to fill your cup up with solutions designed for you. From deterministic to probabilistic and everywhere in between, there are smart people working hard to ensure your content, your employees, your business can gain an advantage. So, give them a chance to show you what your options look like.
Deterministic will help you drive your known customers to repeat purchases, while probabilistic will fill the funnel with the other 80-90% of customers that you don’t know or can’t recognize. New privacy regulations are driving better tools for consent and transparency — not the reverse. You’ll be surprised how motivating consumer privacy is for many in the industry. Remember, we’re consumers too. This is the time to test, test, and test again. It will get easier with each test and iteration.
The current climate may seem rough and complex, full of new regulation and uncertain tech modes; however there is no shortage of solutions. There is an extensive buffet of partners and technology that can make identity frictionless in a regulated world, so you can focus on results and not painful implementations. Have your cake and make room for more!
At long last, it seems there may be an end in sight for the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. Leaders of states and municipalities that have had some of the strictest lockdown and quarantine measures are announcing their reopening dates. Vaccines aren’t just readily available, you can pretty much walk up and get one now. And, in a move that was a shock to some and a relief to others, the CDC has announced that with a few exceptions, vaccinated American adults can resume lifestyles that they’d think of as “normal.”
Getting back to life as usual means getting back to business as usual. But for those of us who work in the media industry, some things have changed permanently. We just don’t necessarily know what they are yet.
One of the biggest unknowns for our industry is streaming video, which experienced a massive boom as consumers found themselves encouraged to stay at home. That left them with new blocks of free time resulting from a lack of social gatherings, commutes, and leisure activities. But industry analysts predicted, too, that much of this would be temporary. Once lockdowns lifted, they cautioned from the start, trends would return to a baseline.
Attention
Now, with full reopenings unfolding in real time, here’s the question for marketers: How should we prepare for consumers’ post-Covid habits? The answer may be simpler than you think. Corporate mergers, tech and device launches, and subscription churn (often fueled by hit shows) will invariably have a collective impact that we can’t quite predict. What we can count on is that the real variable is attention.
In the ad industry, we know our business has always been all about attention (or at least we should). But right now, as we exit an unprecedented surplus of attention thanks to a year of quarantines, lockdowns, and stay-at-home orders, the streaming wars are getting more heated than ever and consumer viewership trends could go in any number of directions. There’s never been a more important time to invest in quality content and experiences.
Boom
Where to start? First, we really have to grasp just how massive streaming growth was last year. Subscriptions to streaming services, already on the rise, reached 1 billion worldwide; over 25% of consumers in the U.S. subscribed to at least one new service during the pandemic. With many live sports canceled, many consumers reevaluated why they were keeping a traditional cable subscription around. And quite a few of them decided it wasn’t worth it, as “cord-cutting” hit record highs. Sales of connected TV devices also shattered records, with a spike over the holiday season.
As for advertising? In spite of the fact that many of the biggest streaming services have no advertising, ad-supported services increased their share of the market during Covid, from 28% to 34%.
In other words, when COVID-19 hit, the streaming industry was gifted with unprecedented access to consumer attention — probably more of it than we deserved. Now, there’s renewed competition for that attention, with Americans eager to finally travel, socialize, and spend time with loved ones in person rather than over Zoom.
Whether they’ll ditch one streaming service for another (and if so, which ones) is a big question mark. But consumers will be more discerning with their time and attention, and more than ever, they’ll spend time where their attention is respected.
Respect
What does that mean, specifically?
First, attention is up for grabs.
When Covid hit, streaming was already experiencing both skyrocketing consumer growth and some seismic shifts on the business side that gave users even more options for where to spend their attention.
Devices like the PlayStation 5 debuted; services like HBO Max and NBC Universal’s Peacock launched. The announcement of WarnerMedia and Discovery’s $43 billion merger is a reminder that upheaval in the industry — and hence, the potential for changes and upgrades in consumer offerings — is far from over. High rates of subscriber churn mean that loyalty is still anyone’s game.
Second, the connected living room is here to stay.
Some of the most confident predictions about post-pandemic consumer habits have indicated that once people switch from linear TV to streaming, they are unlikely to switch back. Covid cord-cutters, for example, probably won’t resubscribe to their cable bundles (especially since live sports’ presence on streaming continues to grow). And while both linear and connected TV usage rose during the first few months of the pandemic, ComScore found that virtually every household streaming device continued to grow in data usage even after initial lockdowns began to lift. The biggest growth? Smart TVs, which many households had at home but weren’t even using for streaming before.
This is great news for marketers because, to put it simply, connected TV is great at getting consumers’ attention. Our research at true[X] has found that compared to desktop and mobile, an ad on CTV drives more brand lift at every stage of the purchase funnel. But there’s a catch…
Third, the winners will be the ones who respect that attention.
Streaming is the inevitable future of TV, but that doesn’t mean just being on CTV is enough. Subscription churn is still heavy and consumers have many options —including plenty with no ads at all. With time in front of the living room TV facing new competition for attention as the Covid crisis comes to a close, consumers will be more discerning about what they’re willing to put up with. They already didn’t want their attention to be exploited or wasted, and that will only be more pronounced now. That’s why streaming advertising needs to be better — more relevant, less intrusive, and with less volume — than linear TV and desktop and mobile video advertising. Just being on a bigger screen where people tend to sit down and commit to longer content isn’t enough.
Opportunity
If you work in digital media, whether on the advertiser or AVOD publisher side, and you want to keep capitalizing on the streaming boom, this should be what you care about. Are you confident that your ads work, so that you don’t have to rely on high frequency (and annoy viewers in the process)? Do consumers have an experience that they don’t hate? This is the time to answer those questions, and make it more likely that consumers will lend their newly scarce attention to you.
The innovations in marketing technologies and platforms over the past decade have been transformational for the marketing industry. For publishers, the latest and greatest in MarTech and software can be both groundbreaking and challenging. Innovations in marketing automation have revolutionized the order-to-cash process for media organizations across the industry. However, other modern marketing tech — like most marketing cloud platforms — have posed challenges for marketers in the publishing world.
Helping publishers or marketers
But why are these innovations so helpful to general marketing teams yet so challenging to publisher marketing?
In simple terms, many of the marketing platforms today are not built to accommodate the needs of publishers and their marketing teams. Lack of speed, minimal out of the box capabilities, and antiquated features and UX pose a challenge to publishing organizations in terms of marketing cloud set up, cost, reporting and continuity.
It is those that allow media org marketers to follow the current marketing cloud best practices for publishers that are assisting in publisher marketing success.
Choosing the right platform
In simple terms, many of the marketing platforms today are not built to accommodate the needs of publishers and their marketing teams. For instance, most marketing cloud platforms are created to host one main brand. However, media companies often have a dozen or more brands, under their parent company umbrella. These need to be housed together though they operate separately. This poses a challenge in terms of marketing cloud set up, cost, reporting and continuity.
Many of the big names in marketing cloud software today cannot be used by media brand marketers without a stifling amount of customization in-terms of platform setup and integrations. Even with full scale custom integrations, most do not satisfy the needs of publishing organizations. The fact is that they can be somewhat antiquated and not optimized for the speed most publishing companies require.
However, it is important to note that there are marketing cloud platforms (like Saithru) that are configured to host publishing and media brands with ease. When selecting a marketing cloud platform, it is imperative to choose one that is built to allow media industry marketers to follow the current marketing cloud best practices for publishers.
Curated content capabilities
One of the most crucial aspects for marketers is publishing curating content. The ever-growing consumer demand for digital content has bolstered the need for publisher brands to aggregate their original content with curated content from reputable sources. This provides readers with the content they demand and develops trust between them and the publisher brand.
Developing a strategy for curated content is a cornerstone for media brand marketing teams. However, it cannot be done without proper planning and technology that includes content curation capabilities.
Excellent audience segmentation
Audience segmentation is a critical component of marketing strategies for all marketing teams. Yet this is even more true for publishers. Because of the breath of their brand audiences, marketers in publishing companies have another layer of segmentation to consider. This means that marketing cloud tech they employ must allow for in depth segmentation. It must also have the capability to automate that segmentation consistently.
Yes, audience segmentation enables marketing teams to create appropriate messaging. However, it also informs curated content, customization, and engagement strategies for both the publisher and their advertising clients. Without properly executed audience segmentation strategies and the marketing technology to enable it, publishers cannot succeed.
Customization is crucial
Just as important as segmentation is the customization that derives from it. As best practices go, customization has ranked in the top five for all marketing teams for years now. Enabling a customization strategy has become more and more crucial as customers inboxes and feeds become more and more cluttered.
In simple terms, aggregating customized messaging is the best way to bolster engagement with audiences. And that is the goal of all marketers. For publisher brand marketers, this is exponentially more important. That’s because they are striving for engagement of their brands for their parent company as well as their advertising clients. In other words, engagement by way of customization is at the heart of multiple ROI streams for media organizations. Ensuring the ability to plan, curate and implement customization strategies efficiently through marketing cloud technology is more important now than ever.
Drip campaigns for consistency
Constant and consistent messaging is another best practice for marketing teams in the publishing world. The amount of content, both editorial and media, that publishers output lends well to drip campaigns. This approach enables ongoing communications with audiences and increase user engagement. The difference between a drip campaign in the media industry and a standard marketing org is the sheer volume.
Tying directly back to the numerous child brands publishers house, advertising clients, curated outside content, and original content, the volume of drip campaigns publishers must output daily can seem staggering. It is imperative that the selected marketing cloud platform can handle the daily output. It also needs to simplify the process via automations and enablement of standardized, consistent template systems.
In summary
For publishers using marketing cloud technologies, there are key components that must be considered to ensure success. From tech platform selection to curated content, audience segmentation, customization and engagement, the best practices for publishers are more complex and crucial than ever before.
As concerns about media transparency rise, marketers are becoming more selective about where they place their media investment. They are asking questions like: Where are my ads being shown? Are they being served to humans or lost to fraud? Are they delivering maximum ROI?
The industry has developed several solutions that bring greater transparency to the supply chain. This also helps marketers identify publishers that provide quality advertising platforms. When layered together, each of these complementary solutions offers more comprehensive protection. They also minimize fraud risk and assure marketers that their ads are being seen by humans.
Here are a few ways publishers can use these solutions to optimize their websites, improve system performance, and minimize fraud risk.
1. Implement Industry Tools
It is important for marketers to understand how their digital ads move through the supply chain. The IAB Tech Lab develops standards and solutions to increase supply chain transparency. IAB Tech Lab tools such as Ads.txt, App-ads.txt, sellers.json, and OpenRTB 3.0 (Ads-Cert) give marketers insight into the buying process by identifying authorized sellers of inventory. It is helpful for publishers to implement these solutions. However, they should also be sure to incorporate other IAB Tech Lab tools into their websites as they are released. In fact, implementation should not be considered a “one and done” process.
Once these tools are implemented, it is important to regularly update and edit these files to ensure accuracy. Publishers can analyze their site to learn who is selling their inventory with this new resource, Sellers.guide. Providing buyers with up-to-date information makes it easier for them to see who is authorized to sell your inventory as they compare your list with their ad tech vendor’s sellers.json file.
2. Follow Standards and Guidelines
As digital ad fraud became more widespread, the industry recognized the need for standards and guidelines to help disrupt the cycle of fraud in the marketplace. Organizations such as the Media Rating Council (MRC) set standards to define and measure invalid traffic.
The MRC also created a process to gauge a vendor’s adherence to these standards through accreditation. Using an MRC-accredited ad server is one step publishers can take to minimize fraud risk. By partnering with accredited vendors, publishers assure advertisers that they are doing everything possible to provide accurate metrics that meet or exceed industry standards.
3. Take a Proactive Approach
Publishers can also demonstrate their commitment to quality by being proactive in other ways:
Regularly update website content and social media channels
Track and monitor all traffic sources for IVT
Familiarize your team with industry guidelines and best practices so these standards are followed throughout your organization
Participate in a third-party website audit. This demonstrate to advertisers that you are providing them with a quality platform and a valid human audience
Following industry guidelines and best practices helps minimize fraud risk. It also proves to advertisers that you are providing them with a quality platform that delivers a real audience and results. Publishers must talk to advertisers to make them aware of all the steps they have taken to protect their investment and deliver results. The more advertisers realize the advantages of partnering with quality media, the more ad revenue they will direct toward legitimate publishers.
The Covid-19 pandemic served as a catalyst for massive subscription growth, in part because consumers sought quality journalism to get accurate information about the virus. It also accelerated content consumption trends that were already happening. Let’s explore the main highlights across digital engagement, retention and conversion during a year of increased appetite for news content. We’ll also unpack how publishers can use this data to prepare for future shifts in consumer demand.
Paid trials convert to full price more often than free trials
According to our Subscription Performance Benchmark Report, approximately 17% of new monthly subscribers in January 2020 signed up using a free trial as the pandemic spread around the world. By December 2020, only 5% of new subscribers signed up on a free trial. This indicates that publishers became more confident with their pricing and smarter about promotional strategies as the pandemic raged on.
Free trials can attract a lot of new users upfront. However, they make less financial sense when there’s high demand for content. At the same time, there’s much lower lifetime value gained from users who subscribe on a free trial offer. On average, you’ll lose over a third of free trial subscribers to churn before those users are required to make their first payment. It generally makes more fiscal sense to use paid trials in acquisition campaigns since you earn a little money upfront and retain a higher volume of users over the long term compared to free trials.
Onboarding post-pandemic subscribers is crucial for retention
As many new users subscribed to online publications for the latest news about the pandemic, the strategic focus for media publishers had to shift from acquisition to customer engagement and retention. Convincing people to subscribe is only half the battle; encouraging them to continue subscribing is the other half.
If new subscribers don’t engage with your website early and often, they’re far more likely to cancel the subscription at the first given opportunity. There’s also the risk that they could become “sleepers,” which are subscribers who haven’t visited your site in the past 30 days. According to our benchmark research, an average of 40% of subscribers on media sites are sleepers.
To minimize the number of sleeping subscribers on your site, you need to act fast. Over half of your annual subscribers and nearly two-thirds of monthly subscribers will cancel in the first year if they become inactive. Your mission as a publisher is to incentivize those subscribers so they remain engaged. That’s why onboarding programs are so helpful to minimize churn and boost customer lifetime value. Use programs like guided tutorials and onsite benefits promotion to showcase all of the capabilities a new subscriber can access using their account. These programs not only drive user engagement, but they’ll also create habitual patterns that keep subscribers engaged on your site.
The Covid-19 retention bump endured thanks to annual subscriptions
Given the volume of new subscriptions early in the pandemic, many publishers expected lower retention rates and higher churn as the year went on. However, those fears never materialized. We found that users who became subscribers between March and July of 2020 retained at much higher rates than those who became subscribers prior to the declaration of the pandemic.
In an effort to maintain higher retention rates during the second wave of the pandemic, many media publishers made a concerted effort to increase annual subscription rates across their websites. Annual subscriptions retain much better than their monthly counterparts, and they subsequently carry much higher lifetime value for brands and publishers.
Throughout Q4 2020, many publishers used special promotions and smart pricing strategies to increase demand for annual subscriptions. Publishers used special events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday to create short-term offers for annual subscriptions that, in many cases, more than tripled conversion volume.
Lessons learned
The Covid-19 pandemic continues to be a prominent and dynamic world event. Publishers should use this time to assess how user behavior impacted their subscription models in 2020 to make more strategic business decisions for 2021 and 2022. It is critical to:
Determine when and how people were most likely to subscribe
Analyze conversion rates, churn rates, special offers and trials to understand more about audience behaviors
Optimize websites with targeted messaging and personalized content that incentivizes greater onsite engagement
Maximize revenue opportunities with paid templates designed to boost conversions
By understanding these patterns, your business can make strategic decisions that will boost retention rates and, by extension, lifetime value. This will help you improve growth and develop a sustainable subscription business beyond this last year of high consumer demand.
When looking for ways to add value for premium subscribers, Harvard Business Review dug decades into the past. As Nini Diana, HBR’s director of consumer marketing put it, “Our archive is gold.”
For 100 years, Harvard Business School has created case studies that bring real-world business dilemmas to life for students, entrepreneurs, and professionals around the world. These case studies dissect real-life situations in which managers have to make key decisions. Often, they must do so despite having incomplete information, conflicting priorities, or the pressure of ticking clocks.
Harvard’s case studies often make their way into college lesson plans. Educators can access course packets to use in their teaching. “It’s an entire collection of solutions to almost any type of business problem,” Diana said.
Turns out that Harvard’s 640 ebooks and thousands of case studies provide such a valuable selling point that one in five subscribers opts to pay 50% more to access them. “Despite being written eight or 10 years ago, they still have relevance,” Diana said. “A superuser of our content can benefit from any of them.” And HBR has found it wise to focus on the needs of the superuser.
A valuable collection
Individually, most Harvard case studies sell for $8.95 per PDF and $15.05 for a printed copy. Ebooks are typically priced at$19.95 each. A five-ebook series on effective management — with titles including Getting The Right Work Done and Making Every Meeting Matter — sells for $90.
Certainly, some users are looking to solve a single issue, or for a very specific topic. However, HBR audiences generally face a wide range of business challenges and are interested in learning more. So, for just $18 a month or $180 a year, 20% opt for HBR’s highest-priced subscription tier. It’s the only one that includes access to a curated collection ofcase studies and ebooks. That price also includes HBR’s print magazine, full digital access, and full access to HBR.org’s archives.
Compare that to HBR’s entry level “digital” subscription, which offers access to HBR.org and its archive for $12 a month or $99 a year. For $12 a month or $120 a year, subscribers get full digital access to HBR.org along with six issues of the print magazine — but no case studies or ebooks.
The premium tier offers a superior value for the type of audience that has the greatest affinity for HBR. In fact, Diana said the offer has been appealing enough to convince 20% of new subscribers to ante up for more. The offer has been particularly effective for driving subscriptions outside of North America, according to Diana.
“As an institutional philosophy, we value print a great deal,” Diana said. Still, consumers who start with lower-priced digital-only subscriptions tend to skip the mid-tier offering when upgrading their plans demonstrating that it’s not print that’s the selling point. Rather, it is those case studies and ebook collections.
Updates and value building
While premium subscribers don’t get access to every Harvard Business School case study and ebook, editors regularly update the selection that is available to reflect current corporate conversations. Recent topics of focus have included Blockchain, Black business leadership, and building workforces for the future.
A new ebook is made available to premium subscribers each quarter. Premium users are able to access each title for a full year or until their subscription runs out.
Subscribers currently can’t choose their own ebooks. However, that is a potential change user feedback has put on the team’s radar. “We’re always trying to rethink the product mix without upsetting the customer experience,” Diana said.
HBR learned how much its audience values ebooks and case studies through extensive user research, Diana said. Case study and ebook access were the two benefits users said would be most valuable to them — and most likely to convince them to pay more for an HBR subscription.
They are “that thing Harvard can offer that no one else can,” Diana said.
We have all purchased some sort of insurance to protect against the risk of an accident or a total loss. We often do this with little consideration because we all want to be able to sleep soundly at night. Yet few of us think about applying the concept of insurance to the tech that is mission-critical to a company’s revenue. As the dominant big tech players expand the control they have through their browser and ad tech ecosystems, publishers are rapidly losing flexibility. This means the time is now for media owners to think about what their “insurance policy” should cover.
In my last post, I mentioned there would be a lot of uncertainty when operating within multiple sandboxes (aka monopolistic platforms). Frequent rule changes and regulations imposed by the big tech platforms challenge media owners’ core business. And, as publishers must operate their sites or apps to survive, it is important to explore alternatives.
This new dynamic means publishers will need to change strategies to navigate and extract the most value for themselves. The key to success is remembering that each sandbox, privacy rule, etc, is but one element of that sprawling big tech ecosystem. And the ecosystem itself is where publishers should heighten their focus.
Is your tech stack creating risk?
The technical stack is the beating heart of any media organization’s revenue production. While it is a necessity, if left as the sole engine for driving a majority of your revenue, it creates the biggest dependency and single point of failure for any media owner. Why? Simply because the big tech platforms control the browser, the buy-side tech, the sell-side tech, and the identity tech… Talk about being a superpower. They own the whole ecosystem. And this has created an imbalance of control. This intentionally manufactured dependency allows big tech to generate vital revenue streams for their benefit first. It also poses a significant risk of revenue loss for publishers.
Operationally, it is possible to switch tech providers, but the stack isn’t easily replaced. I’m not advocating an outright replacement, as that is not the answer for most publishers. A singular tech stack may have worked in the past. However, it’s no longer tenable to depend solely upon a single company acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Publishers must be ready and willing to mitigate risk through diversification. A singular stack will no longer offer rules to monetize all types of traffic.
Protecting against loss
If the future means navigating a world dominated by the big players, the best way to protect your interests is to understand how to work with multiple providers. To start, one should use the main tech stack to extract the most value from what that stack will deliver. For most publishers, GAM serves as the main stack and requires publisher data to feed it. As long as consumers provide consent, revenue should remain intact. However, with the rise of consumer privacy regulations, we will see an ever-growing pool of users who won’t provide consent.
Without consent and data, a secondary tech stack can complement a publisher’s monetization efforts. Additional value can be unlocked through options for targeting non-consented traffic. In instances of no consent, these impressions can be paired with semantic contextual targeting to help ensure ad delivery. Additionally, this helps protect against potential revenue loss.
Insurance policy: a second stack
A secondary stack may also provide rules that complement the rules of the main stack. For example, content classified with an R rating that gets excluded from one platform can be monetized by engaging another tech provider. The same can be true for niche advertising categories, such as cannabis. As more states legalize cannabis, depending solely on a provider that limits access to sensitive categories can have a large impact on revenue. Diversifying the stack also offers better monetization options for different ad formats and can provide access to different regions. So, while it may seem counterintuitive to operational efficiency, leveraging the respective strengths of multiple tech providers can result in greater efficiency and decreases your dependency on a single platform. Understanding what each offers can help you tailor a solution that best protects your interests and insures you against potential risk.
Around Halloween 2019, I was catching up on politics on a major news publisher’s site when an image in a 970X90 banner ad stopped me dead in my scrolling. I flashbacked to anatomically accurate depictions of female genitalia shown in junior high sex education class. Except this genitalia appeared to be sitting on top of a person’s neck.
This mask was graphic. But I could not look away or resist the urge to click. Yes, I took the risk that the same ad might follow me across the web for weeks. (Beware: the retargeting curse…)
“Full-head clam shell mask” blared the landing page title. A side angle revealed a harmless sea shell that someone was wearing atop of their head. Front and center, however? Female anatomy, and definitely an intentional resemblance.
At the risk of being called a prude, I can’t imagine most people would enjoy being subjected to a “clam shell mask” ad while perusing the news. And I know publisher revenue folks would be horrified if this image appeared in front of their audiences. I can just imagine the screams from the editorial team.
Out of publisher control
Brand safety conversations too often focus on advertiser concerns when publishers are trying to shield consumers from offensive or harmful creative. As this ad proved, a premium publisher was serving me a tasteless ad. Yet, my curiosity was piqued—how did this explicit mask end up in front of me? If that was targeted advertising, what ever did I do online to make an advertiser make me think I’d want to purchase that?
The ad had been served by a well-known retargeting firm, though I’d never visited the site in question. Investigation revealed the same site also sold a variety of guitar equipment, something for which I’m very much the target market. So I was most likely part of a lookalike pool .However, the advertiser or its DSP had been careless in selecting relevant creative.
Which brings up the conundrum—did the publisher have any control over the creative in that situation? Thanks to real-time bidding, no one on the revenue team had any clue that specific creative was going to give me nightmares.
Sure, advertisers can use the IAB Content Taxonomy to pre-declare ad content. But if you’re serving a huge amount of creative dynamically—like a clam shell head mask—are you really going to spell out what might offend the end user?
Publishers and supply-side platforms are forced to have a lot of faith that their upstream partners (DSPs and buying platforms). The assume they are looking out for their best interests and complying with their acceptable creative policies. All too often, that faith is unwarranted and unwanted creative sails through the programmatic pipes. Publisher reputation and user experience is damaged, but the ultimate victim is the end user.
Brand safety goes both ways
I thought about the clam shell mask when I was reading the new brand safety report from the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a World Federation of Advertisers initiative. Analyzing content across seven major social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, GARM discovered that more than 80% of the 3.3 billion removed posts fell into the categories of Spam, Adult & Explicit Content, and Hate Speech & Acts of Aggression.
That’s certainly alarming, but it’s only one side of the coin. When the ad industry talks about brand safety, it’s accepted that we’re referring to advertiser concerns about offensive web content.
However, publishers are brands too. Also, keeping publisher brands safe from offensive advertising is also protecting consumers. This is particularly important when publishers monetize through the open programmatic marketplace. In this case, they have limited control over the kinds of creative that shows up on their sites. (E.g., disturbing clam shell masks!)
Categorically bad ads
Of the 1 million-plus sensitive creatives identified by The Media Trust, more than two-thirds were Adult and Provocative ads.
The Year in Sensitive Creative, a report from The Media Trust analyzed objectionable ads between March 2020 and February 2021. It reveals that nearly two thirds of the over 1 million creatives singled out were Adult (nudity, sex toys, adult entertainment) or Provocative (sexually suggestive content, profane language) ads. Other high risk categories include Alcohol and Political (big spike in inflammatory ads in October 2020). Another is Weapons, which has been on a disturbing incline since the November 2020 elections.
Bad creative goes beyond serving someone an ad with nudity or inflammatory subject matter. According to the report, nearly half of the ads related to coronavirus over this period were outright scams. These ranged from price-gouging on PPE to false or unverifiable claims about masks, air filters, and sanitizers. That isn’t just a risk to user experience. It’s also a safety concern for consumers being preyed upon by bad actors. On top of that, publishers face legal liability in heavily regulated categories such as Medical or Pharmaceutical.
Overall, scams made up 47% of all coronavirus-related creative, but during summer 2020, that share was closer to two-thirds, putting consumers at high risk.
Publishers have long been the last line of defense in protecting consumers from bad ads—particularly when it comes to malware and malvertising. DSPs and buying partners have shrugged off their responsibility in keeping consumers safe from objectionable ads and outright scams, all while watching revenue roll in.
Embracing responsibility
The good news is that many upstream partners like DSPs are starting to recognize the importance of complying with publisher creative policies. They are also realizing their responsibility in protecting consumers. Ensuring a high-quality ad experience is increasingly seen as good for business for buy-side platforms. So, they’re using AI-powered categorization systems to identify potentially offensive creative at scale.
The amount of creative violations detected in the second half of the period analyzed in “The Year in Sensitive Creative” was markedly lower than the first half. In particular, the amount of Adult creative has fallen 73% since November 2020. This suggests that advertisers either switched tactics or moved onto less stringent platforms.
But that’s still a problem. Too many unsavory AdTech providers are willing to look the other way on publisher brand safety. Leaving consumers vulnerable to offensive and manipulative ads should be unacceptable. This is particularly true given that technology to identify sensitive creatives at scale is readily available. It’s time all upstream AdTech companies are held accountable for the creatives they let loose in the programmatic ecosystem—such as disturbing full-head clam shell masks.
I’m afraid I can’t find the screenshot I took of that graphic mask… But trust me, you don’t want to see it.
