Login
close
Login is restricted to DCN Publisher Members. If you are a DCN Member and don't have an account, register here.
Search

Digital Content Next logo

Menu

Category results for "Perspectives"

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

The state of programmatic native in 2017

Over the past year, advertisers have devoted more dollars to programmatic native than ever before. And it’s easy to see why. Programmatic native gives native scale, while bringing more efficiency and data-targeting into the equation. Nativo, TripleLift, Sharethrough, Unruly, and Bidtellect are some of the most well-known players/programmatic native exchanges in this space.

To get a clearer picture of today’s programmatic native ad market, my company, MediaRadar, pulled together some of the most pressing trends on the year so far.

It’s a growing market

The number of advertisers placing native in Q1 2017 was nearly identical to Q1 2016 (2,318 vs. 2,326 brands). However, there was a sharp increase in Q2 2017, where the number of advertisers grew 42%, from 2,100 to 2,981 native programmatic advertisers. Why the surge? Good performance. As I have shared previously, programmatic native is generally evaluated on the same KPIs as display. In a contest against most standard IAB ad display units, programmatic native scores well with high click-rates and engagement. And it can scale.

Penetration is low

Despite the fast rise in programmatic native, 122,241 brands were buying advertising online in the first half of the year. This means that as a% of total, only 2.5% of those brands buy native programmatic. We are only scratching the surface here. Even though large national brands make up the early adopters, there is still significant room for programmatic native to grow. This is welcome news for native exchanges that sell this kind of advertising. They know the opportunity is poised to grow substantially.

Renewal rates are mixed

While total numbers are strong, quarterly renewal rates on programmatic native remain challenged, with only 20% renewing. Specifically, the brands buying in the first half of 2017 share just 20% of the same brands from the first half of 2016. So, for programmatic native to continue its expansion, brands will have to recognize its benefits and make a long-term commitment to the format.

Campaign duration varies

Campaign duration remains short, with most native campaigns lasting a median of one month. In Q1 and Q2 2017, 14% and 20% of advertisers ran multi-month campaigns, respectively. During this time period, renewal rates on longer campaigns were much higher than shorter-term campaigns. This is why renewal rates and campaign duration are often tied together tangentially. Longer campaigns mean more of an opportunity to tweak and amend programs, which feeds into higher renewals.

Programmatic native is on the rise. And while there are some challenges – namely measuring performance of programmatic native and no definitive, standard set of metrics, as well as some market confusion about what programmatic native can offer – the benefits outweigh them. Yes, the market is still in its infancy – relative to its potential – but it’s becoming increasingly popular. And it has a lot of room to grow.

Innovation | Perspectives

True digital transformation requires a customer-first perspective

Over the past 20 years, the “digital transformation” of the publishing industry has been—for the most part—a slow, incremental process. For too long, the publishing industry was mostly concerned with digital replicas, ebooks, and other superficial “transformation” efforts which, in fact, didn’t so much transform the business as copy legacy models in electronic form.

Suffice it to say that legacy media models are oriented around the process of producing a book, magazine, or newspaper and not necessarily based on the experience and circumstances of the digital consumer. As digital transformation enters a new, more advanced phase, many publishers are recognizing they have an opportunity to provide products that raise the value proposition to customers.

What does it all mean?

The term digital transformation can be defined as a multitude of activities and attitudes that a business could potentially pursue. But what digital transformation really requires is that business owners adopt the customer’s viewpoint and change their business philosophy accordingly – from a process orientation to one that is customer-centric.

Publishers in education, reference and professional segments are beginning to execute operational change which supports this evolving viewpoint. And of course, there are “born digital” media organizations that aren’t wedded to legacy models. However, some of the best examples come from sectors outside media. Amazon.com is frequently cited as a proponent of the customer-centric view and their willingness to continue to rethink their operations from the customer perspective results in initiatives such as ‘one-click’ ordering to their recently announced wireless checkout process. Payment is made automatically via the Amazon app as the customer leaves the store. And we’ve seen what Amazon-owner Jeff Bezos has done in terms of transforming processes at The Washington Post since he acquired it.

Creating an environment where change can occur is no easy thing. Detailed and comprehensive change management activities need to be adopted to help guide an organization through this process. By definition, a legacy business model carries with it deeply entrenched legacy processes that need to be changed, adapted, or discarded in order to forge a new environment for success. Engaging in a formal digital transformation initiative endorsed and supported by the highest level of management is a requirement, and nothing less will suffice if the business is going to succeed.

Where to start

Before this can happen, though, it’s important to understand your starting position. A complete review of the current state of the business is critical to defining your future objectives and targets. Digital transformation is a process that takes place over time, along a spectrum of capability, where the endpoint is a business (or a product line) that has been digitally transformed. Points along that spectrum should be predetermined, well-defined objectives, which also serve as opportunities to reevaluate and reassess whether the business is going in the right direction.

Recently, I was asked to conduct a workshop with an educational publisher that recognized the business imperative of digitally transforming their business. This is not an unsophisticated publisher; they realize they are still too far removed from the consumer experience and must establish new business processes, product development strategies, and distribution/access models to remain competitive over the next 20 years. That’s a tall order for any organization, which is why the digital transformation process needs to be embedded into the organization in a consistent and repeatable manner. So, I took a team of senior executives through a day session to explore how this transformation process could be executed within their organization. An important takeaway from our meeting was the recognition by the group that taking on too much to quickly will doom a transformation project before it has started.

On a project I worked on several years ago, we avoided this trap in three ways. We:

  1.  recognized that our content and editorial workflow needed to become digital-first;
  2. identified three to four workflow products to implement early in the transition; and
  3. implemented a number of quick wins such as metadata improvement, copyright clearance integration and the implementation of process improvements with our distribution partners.

Doing the first brought uniformity and control to the creation and management of content, while the second enabled the team to learn by experience. The third built confidence in our ability to execute. During the first and second year of this project, as progress was made on these initial initiatives, the team gained the time necessary to test their market and product assumptions directly with customers.

As a result, toward the end of the third year, the publisher had established and expanded range of integrated products combining traditional textbook and reference content with assessment, collaboration, and other tools that improved their effectiveness and established a sound foundation for further digital growth. Across a variety of products, they had begun to adopt a customer-centric publishing model with revenue models to match.

Leading long-term change

Generally, the critical components driving the success of the transformation effort will be collaboration, resources, leadership, a clear understanding of business value, creativity, and a deep understanding of customer wants/needs. No one person can affect all these factors. Therefore, a strong statement of intent from senior management, ownership of the process by the senior leadership team for the business unit, measurable performance factors, quick wins and identifiable success stories are critical to creating an environment for transformation success across the business.

Securing executive buy-in to support this transformation effort (led by the CEO reporting to the board) must be a given. The imposition of technology on businesses today is so vital to medium- to long-term business viability that this effort demands the active support of senior management. An effective tool in this process is the establishment of targets and key performance measures tied to the desired improvement in the customer experience. To drive change, these objectives should represent significant “step change” performance improvement. Setting these out clearly helps prevent back-sliding and guards against good-enough results masquerading as real change.

Taking an organization’s senior management through a workshop like this one is the first step in a good first step in driving a true digital transition process. But because digital transformation will ultimately touch every part of the organization in some way, all staff must be included in the process. All employees must understand the importance of the effort to the success of the business, how the process will unfold, its impact on their work and what their contribution will be.

And remember that a digital transformation effort is never over. In a truly customer-centric organization, the business will always be anticipating changing behavior, rapidly adapting, expanding capabilities, and building new and better customer solutions. Increasingly, legacy processes do not allow for that type of flexibility and that’s the imperative for digital transformation.

Michael Cairns has served as CEO and President of several technology and content-centric business supporting global media publishers, retailers, and service providers. He blogs at  personanondata.com and can be reached here.

Perspectives Image
Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of October 12, 2017

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Industry-Research | Perspectives

How to build an app subscription model that works

A year after Apple announced the arrival of the subscription app model as part of a wider sweep of changes it made to its App Store policies, the size and scope of this new app category is exceeding analyst expectations. It is also paving the way for content companies to grow audience numbers and engagement.

Content companies that embrace the model can plan their business with high confidence that they will attract high-value users and generate a predictable cash flow. This is because consumers who buy into subscriptions commit to a recurring fee and – generally speaking – stick to their decision. Their resolve is inextricably intertwined with a concept known as the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Simply put, people who have invested time or resources in something don’t want to see it go to waste. Think of the times you rented a movie and, even though it wasn’t great, you watched it to the end. Now you’ve got the gist.

Consumer commitment colored by this fascinating bias bodes extremely well for companies that offer subscription apps. In fact, as far back as 2014, research found consumers would buy into subscription apps if the price was right. Specifically, the Branchfire research into consumer attitudes toward subscription apps found that “$10 a month is the sweet spot for subscribers.”

Are subscriptions right for you?

Fast forward, and the range of subscription apps has expanded to include much more than streaming media providers like Netflix and Spotify. Data provider App Annie reports that “in-app subscription revenue from non-game apps, particularly within the media streaming, news and dating categories, is rapidly increasing.” Overall, App Annie forecasts revenue for non-game apps to grow at an incredible rate of 25% – reaching $33.8 billion in 2021.

It’s good news that subscription apps are gaining traction. But not all media companies that can offer their app as a subscription model should do so. If you’re asking users to open their wallets, you need to offer value for money.

A crowd-pleaser across the board is fresh and relevant content. Obviously, media companies do this by definition. That said, in order to merit a monthly recurring cost, the content must be exclusive, or engaging – or both. Regularly releasing new features is also a plus.

Finally, apps that remove the friction from navigation, or help users accomplish important tasks (book a reservation, register for more information, streamline sharing) are also a hit with time-crunched consumers and multi-tasking mobile users.

Do your homework

Before you decide to release a subscription app, do your homework to make sure your audience engages frequently, and deeply enough, to merit the investment in the first place. This is where audience measurement data around the who, when and why of app usage in the form of behavioral data and insights is a must. Even better if this data spans all the platforms that encompass consumers’ daily routines.

Finland’s Verto Analytics focuses on precisely this, quantifying the user journey from one device to another and measuring from the point of consumer interaction across all platforms, media, content and devices. In April Verto posted high-level research into news access and engagement across platforms, highlighting how (and when) valuable audience segments engage with news content.

The day-in-the-life data and visualization underscores the importance of offering content to consumers on their terms – and across all platforms. But it also reveals interesting “windows of opportunity” during the day when content companies might use their presence to interest consumers in a subscription offer.

Raising awareness of your app is an important top-of-the-funnel activity. However, you also need additional data to plan your app marketing and acquisition campaigns – and ultimately benchmark your performance against your peers.

You must also consider several important criteria, which are raised in the 2017 Subscription Apps Report, such as: What is the proper price range for a subscription app? How long is too long to wait for a user to convert and commit to paying a recurring cost? When are the best months to reach and engage potential users?

Compare costs and contexts

The report finds that it costs $161.38 the cost to convert an app user into a subscriber. However, the number may skew high since the subscription app category Liftoff tracks includes Dating Apps, Utilities, and Finance. These types of apps vary significantly in the value they offer and the monthly subscription fee they charge.

It is essential to remember that subscription apps (and their users) are about long-term gains, not short-term bargains. Granted acquisition costs high, but media companies can also increase conversion rates by using all channels at their disposal – including email, push notifications and print ads in their own media properties – to reinforce their value proposition.

Provided they are powered by appropriate messaging and effective targeting, subscription app campaigns can engage and re-engage audiences all year long. This is very different to other categories, such as commerce, which take their cues from seasonal triggers such as holiday sprees or back-to-school shopping.

Companies that offer subscription apps have a huge window of opportunity in which to run campaigns and hit targets. Liftoff also finds that there are some stand-out months, such as September and March, when the “cost to acquire a user who subscribes to the app pays dividends beyond the promise of a more predictable business model powered by more sustainable revenues.”

Above all, keep in mind that driving high conversion rates for your subscription app a journey, not a destination. Regardless of your app subcategory (news, lifestyle, sports) or your campaign objective, your results will be determined by your ability to orchestrate all of your channels to take advantage of all the opportunities to communicate with consumers in ways that are easy, engaging and effective.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. Full disclosure: She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Perspectives Image
Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of October 5, 2017

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Innovation | Perspectives | Video

If you’re pivoting to video, do it right

The phrase “pivot to video” has become something of a cliché in the media industry. Lately, the mere mention of this phrase triggers a slew of mean-spirited tweets, resentment and existential mourning for the written word among those who wonder what publishers are thinking — and where their strategy lies.

And that’s the rub when it comes to pivoting to video. Mashable, Vocativ, Mic, FoxSports, Vox, Vice Sports, and BuzzFeed, among others, have all jumped on the video bandwagon in the past couple of years. But just as they differ in how they restructured staff and resources, so too does the quality of video produced.

It’s easy to feel the schadenfreude when hearing that web traffic dropped at a video-pivoter by 88%. Wow, how stupid was that move? But the reality is that pivots to video are not about pageviews at a website, but about serving up quality video that moves the needle on revenues, and engagement. They can be done right – or very, very wrong.

The premise – and pitfalls – behind the pivot

With the Facebook-Google behemoth eating up nearly all of the growth in the U.S. digital ad industry, publishers are under pressure to somehow make money from ads — and banners and programmatic advertising aren’t doing it alone. In comes the promise of video advertising dollars, which are expected to generate more than $18 billion by 2020, according to eMarketer (nearly double the $10 billion in 2016). A survey by IAB of more than 350 advertisers found that advertisers would spend an average of more than half — 56%, to be precise — of their ad budget on video.

Mashable was an early mover in the pivot to video last year when it laid off a slew of text reporters to double-down on video. More publishers followed this year. A major risk when pivoting is over-reliance on distribution platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat, which run these videos according to their enigmatic algorithms. Essentially, publishers relinquish control to third parties that have their own objectives and often provide poor and inconsistent metrics. Topping that off is data from Pew Research showing that millennials (often the target audience in these advertising goals) still prefer to read news in text.

Heidi Moore, writing at CJR, has called these pivots an outright failure:

“There are four reasons the pivot to video has failed: faulty metrics for measuring the audience; trusting other platforms, like Facebook, to do the hard work of distribution; low-quality video production and weak technological support for video content; and, ultimately, a failure to effectively turn video views into either higher readership or ad dollars.”

While she might be a little heavy on the hyperbole, she’s right when she says the main problem is that the video being produced by some publishers are all flash and no substance.

Mashable, Vox and BuzzFeed: A tale of three strategies

Obviously, traffic isn’t the only measure for success for publishers, so traffic drops aren’t always a dire sign. Pioneer pivoter Mashable says it actually grew its revenue 36% in 2016 while increasing the traction of its videos on Facebook, YouTube, and other distribution platforms. It’s now facing a potential sale. And, while nothing has been confirmed, its valuation — likely at more than $300 million, based on trends — suggests there may be something to their pivot. Any smaller valuation would signal more skepticism.

Meanwhile, publisher Melissa Bell has argued that Vox’s pivot, which includes four new shows on Facebook’s Watch tab, is much more of a “leaning in” strategy. That doesn’t mean Vox will relinquish a priority in text based content. “As a robust and dynamic media company, we have to leverage our talent and our expertise across all formats,” she wrote. “We do not believe video comes at the cost of our journalism or people with non-video skillsets. Writing is a crucial component of what we want to offer our audiences – as is photography, video, sound, graphics, and illustrations.”

Meanwhile, BuzzFeed, which restructured last year in order to generate more video for its entertainment and news divisions, recently launched an original live-streaming program, “AM to DM,” on Twitter. In the same vein as Vox, BuzzFeed hasn’t shied away from admitting much of its strategy comes from trying and potentially failing. But unlike several other media outfits that have tried video, BuzzFeed has the resources to back up its editorial focus. “Video is an extension of what we do, not a liability or a threat to our journalism,” BuzzFeed head of U.S. news Shani O. Hilton wrote in a post.

While much outcry has surrounded the traffic decline experienced by some of the publishers that have pivoted to video, it’s worth remembering that this is a correlation, not a causation of the pivot. It’s important to note that the publishers moving to video were looking for increased revenues and not pageviews.

Among publishers, there’s a flight to subscriptions and paid content, as well as video – and they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. But for those going “all-in” on video, they better make sure the strategy pans out, attuned perfectly for social platforms, and for audience members. Not all video pivots will work, but not all video pivots will be flame-outs.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Buyer beware: Programmatic advertising report emphasizes the importance of brand safety

For the past several years, marketers shifted digital ad budgets “gleefully to programmatic engines that promise efficiency and hands-off effectiveness.” These days, as much as 80% of all online display activity is transacted through technology-based exchanges that offer promises to “hyper-define, hyper-target and hyper-engage with minimal human monitoring.”

In retrospect, it all seemed to just a little bit too easy: superior targeting, engagement and tracking—and all for lower costs. However, in response to significant concerns around fraud and brand safety, the advertising industry is taking a collective pause on programmatic.

That’s not to say programmatic won’t continue to play a meaningful role in the advertising ecosystem, but its flaws have been exposed. There is a dark underbelly associated with with programmatic advertising (see: the 2016 US president election and Facebook-fake news aftermath. So, today many big brands, experienced marketers, and agencies are in the process of carefully reevaluating their adtech-enabled digital media buying strategies.

During the summer of 2017, the CMO Council interviewed hundreds of brand leaders to gauge their thoughts about these issues and recently published Brand Protection From Digital Content Infection report.

Here are the key findings that media executives and marketers need to be thinking about:

 

Digital can be a dangerous place

“Buyer Beware” might be the best sign to hang outside of the digital advertising gates. Of the marketers engaged in programmatic advertising buying, more than half (52%) are focused on risk and reputation management across ads placed on social media sites. Marketers are also aware that issues like ad fraud plague brand safety.

Guilt by association

The overwhelming majority of marketers believe that inadvertent association or negative adjacency has had a direct (and negative) impact on their brand. Some 78% of respondents say that unintended associations with objectionable content, images, topics, audience or conversations have hurt their brand’s reputation.  

Reputation management problems lead to  lost dollars

Brand safety and integrity in advertising are not simply reputation issues anymore; they can directly impact the bottom line. When consumers were asked about their reaction to seeing the brands they love being associated with inappropriate or questionable content, the answer was clear: Customers will walk away with their wallets—even if it means walking away from their most beloved brands.

Marketers not waiting for industry solutions

Marketers are taking specific steps to ensure the integrity of digital ad placements and, by extension, the integrity of the customer’s experience. First and foremost, marketers are developing stronger digital advertising guidelines for agencies and buying networks to adhere to. And many are choosing to move to programmatic direct buys and private exchanges rather than having their programmatic dollars spread across open exchange networks.

Core recommendations focused on proactive governance & adjusted KPIs

Marketers are taking specific steps to ensure the integrity of digital ad placements and, by extension, the integrity of the customer’s experience. First and foremost, marketers are developing stronger digital advertising guidelines for agencies and buying networks to adhere to. And many are choosing to move to programmatic direct buys and private exchanges rather than having their programmatic dollars spread across open exchange networks.

The programmatic advertising train has left the station and there’s no risk of stopping it or even slowing it down in a meaningful way anytime soon. The actual and perceived benefits are simply too powerful. As well, with deep-pocketed and influential behemoths Google and Facebook so thoroughly dependent on the category’s health to grow and be successful, its likelihood of continuing as a force for years to come is practically guaranteed.

But it’s emerging from the shadows, and marketers are getting more sophisticated about how they assess its performance, and how they plan its role in broader strategies moving forward. While this trend should cause companies like Google and Facebook to at least pause, it’s hard to imagine how it doesn’t translate positively to both tightly controlled ad buying networks and premium publishing brands. At the end of the day, it is about targeting and engagement, where premium properties continue to hold sway.

Tim Bourgeois (@ChiefDigOfficer) is a partner at East Coast Catalyst, a Boston-based digital consulting company specializing in strategic roadmaps, digital media audits, and online marketing optimization programs.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Despite a deluge of data, most marketers still don’t have a fix on cross-platform

According to Kantar Millward Brown’s fourth annual Getting Media Right study, 40% of marketers believe their media investments should be allocated to cross-channel and cross-device marketing, rather than any single channel like mobile or television. But less than 50% of advertisers in the study had confidence that their ad dollars are currently being effectively allocated in this manner.

It would appear that despite the seemingly endless amount of data available, advertisers still feel that gaps exist in available research, hampering their ability for decision making. And one of the biggest white spaces is in cross-platform and cross-channel data, with more than half of advertisers (61%) arguing there are gaps in holistic measurement.

Almost every marketer queried (90%) said that while their digital strategies are integrated into their overall brand strategy, most still don’t understand the impact of these strategies across channels. Seventy-four% say this is because it’s tough to maintain an integrated brand strategy in a fragmented media landscape.

Universal currency

For cross-channel comparison and understanding, marketers must effectively have a currency that can be utilized across all channels. But we still lack a true apples-to-apples to comparison between the old and new platforms. Traditional platforms like television and radio still primarily focus on reach and frequency metrics, while online and mobile advertising is primarily based on ROI or sales.

When it comes to measuring cross-channel performance, reach and frequency is the most widely-used metric, but it still is only used by about half of advertisers; ROI or sales is used by 47% of marketers, highlighting the difficulty the industry has had in bridging the gap between digital and traditional media.

Measuring ROI

ROI is the bane of existence for many marketers, identified for the third year in a row as the single hardest metric to get right. Though a majority of marketers feel confident in their ability to track digital channels like online and mobile, 54% have difficulty tracking traditional channels and half have difficulty tracking cross-channel ROI.

When you break it down even further, the ROI divide between traditional and digital channels is apparent. While 64% of marketers use it to measure online and half apply it to mobile, only one-third use ROI to measure TV and other traditional media.

It’s not like marketers don’t believe in those platforms. If ROI measurement improved, over half would increase spend on most channels. More than 75% would increase spend in cross-channel and the individual channels that fuel it.

It goes to show why attribution is so important and central to the overall health of the advertising industry. Accurate measurement leads to increased trust among marketers and their media agency partners, which leads to higher spends on advertising.

Digital advertising was supposed to be more efficient than television, print and radio, with technology giving marketers the ability to reduce waste by targeting only those who would want to buy their product.

But as we all know, now, the digital advertising industry has yet to fully deliver on that promise. To do so, unlocking understanding to cross-platform measurement is a crucial next step.

Perspectives Image
Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of September 28, 2017

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Advertising | Perspectives

Google and Facebook must do more for brand safety

With the great power that Facebook and Google have accumulated in online advertising comes great responsibility. For years they tried to play it neutral as platforms and not make editorial decisions. That’s now changed dramatically as they have had to take actions on many fronts, from fake news and spammy websites to Russian interference in the U.S. election. But have they done enough?

The explosion of fake news on Facebook and its potential interference with the U.S. election last November initially put the social media giant on the defensive. But now, Facebook has admitted that it found about $100,000 in ad spending from June 2015 to May 2017 on the platform connected to inauthentic accounts that likely operated out of Russia. Google too faced loads of backlash after brands realized their advertising was appearing alongside racist and extremist videos on YouTube and other sites, thereby marking them as supporters of hate.

It’s no wonder then that Facebook and Google are making bolder moves to restrict algorithmic ad targeting. However, ongoing eruptions of how their advertising is backfiring casts a stronger light on the pitfalls of programmatic and self-service ads, and the checks necessary to ensure brands maintain their safety.

Targeting racists with ads

ProPublica’s damning report of how Facebook enabled advertisers to reach audiences who had specified interests in “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or “History of ‘why jews ruin the world’” cast an international spotlight on the company, which was already under intense scrutiny. Acting on a tip, ProPublica reporters spent $30 on Facebook’s automated advertising platform to target these audiences — admittedly tiny, though Facebook did suggest additional categories that might boost the audience size. And Facebook’s automated platform approved the targeted ads within a span of 15 minutes. Facebook then immediately censored the anti-Semitic content after ProPublica informed the company.

BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz then piled on and discovered that Google allowed advertisers to target people who had been typing racist, bigoted, and derogatory terms into its search bar. It would also suggest similarly loaded racist and bigoted terms within its ad-buying tool.

Given that Google’s Adsense only monitors content at the page level and not the site level, brands also run the risk of their advertising appearing on so-called “safe” pages of extremist sites, despite Google’s efforts to monitor hate speech.

Are current restrictions enough?

The tech giants have taken action, including removing those search terms from ad targeting after those stories ran. But they are in a Catch 22, because the more they restrict, the more they become arbiters of free speech vs. hate speech. And not even they want that kind of role.

Facebook, for one, said it was adding new standards — enforced by a combination of human and automated review — to ensure fake news videos and objectionable content had nothing to do with advertising, and vice versa. Facebook has 5 million advertisers on the platform. And its newest ad opportunities will come through its new video section, Watch, as the company pivots more toward video and in-stream video advertising.

Facebook has announced “monetization eligibility standards” to offer clearer guidance on what kind of content, publishers, and video creators can profit from advertising. It has also stated that it will start releasing “post-campaign reports” to advertisers outlining where their ads actually appeared, as part of an overall effort to monitor their monetization.

Google too has insisted that a video channel now must reach a 10,000-view threshold in order for it to make money from ads. It hopes that this will better police extremist and hateful content, and calm the fears of advertisers. After BuzzFeed’s report, Google senior vice president of advertising Sridhar Ramaswamy admitted it had to step up. “In this instance, ads didn’t run against the vast majority of these keywords, but we didn’t catch all the offensive suggestions. That’s not good enough and we’re not making excuses. We’ve already turned off these suggestions, and any ads that make it through, and will work harder to stop this from happening again.”

Not to be outdone — especially since news reports revealed ad campaigns utilizing derogatory terms appeared on the platform — Twitter has also announced it has fixed what it calls the “bug” that allowed some advertisers to use racial epithets and offensive terms.

Finding the right guide

But the elephant in the room is whether these companies themselves should be doing the policing, or whether a third-party group (or even the government) needs to step in to ensure accountability. More human oversight is an obvious answer to the problems of automated advertising. But consider this: What might have happened had not ProPublica, BuzzFeed, and other news organizations stepped in to counter-check the kind of ad targeting possible? These ad campaigns would likely very well still be in use is the probable answer.

Google, Facebook and other major advertising platforms have incentives to keep themselves in the clear only when their own brand safety comes into question. Creating more collaborations with third parties, as the platforms have done in the fight against fake news, seems all the more necessary to ensure brand safety for everyone.

Perspectives Image
Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of September 21, 2017

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Perspectives

The fight for a free press continues, in the U.S. and abroad

According to a recent survey conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, more than a third of Americans can’t name any of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment (check your knowledge here). So, perhaps it’s not surprising that we are seeing a rise in negative sentiment and action against the press here in the U.S. Yet press freedom is essential to a democracy. The public must be informed so that they can actively participate in the governance of their community and country.

Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (speaking); Abdülhamit Bilici and Margaux Ewen

In his opening remarks at a press freedom event co-hosted on September 13rd by the Newseum Institute, Reporters Without Borders, and Digital Content Next, Nebraska Congressman Jeff Fortenberry remarked on the average American’s lack of familiarity with many of the foundational principals of our government. It is easy, he suggested, to become complacent and shirk the obligations that come with democracy.

“Rights are inextricably intertwined with responsibility,” Rep. Fortenberry said. He reinforced the need for individuals to take an active role in government, but also pointed to the responsibility of the media to represent the interests of all Americans and varied viewpoints in order to meet their responsibility to inform the public.

The road to destruction

Panelist and former editor-in-chief of the Turkish newspaper Zaman Abdülhamit Bilici described the disintegration of the free press in his country and offered a disturbing roadmap for how government-initiated negativity toward the press can lead to a catastrophic outcome. His paper’s coverage of the Turkish Ministry attracted the ire of President Tayyip Erdogan, who began to publicly malign the publication. When that failed to silence them, he denied their reporters access to press conferences. Then came calls to fire journalists and threats to those who advertised in Zaman. When these efforts failed to change the coverage, Bilici says that “Erdogan had to use the nuclear option.”

The Turkish President enlisted the court system to help the government take control of the paper and initiated a police raid on the headquarters. Tear gas and water cannons were used to quell protests against governmental control of the media. Newseum Institute COO Gene Policinski pointed out that Turkey was once viewed as a beacon of hope for democracy in the Middle East. “Turkey was not a perfect democracy, but it was on the way,” said Bilici. His careful breakdown of the dismantling of press freedom in his country and how it sped up destruction of its budding democracy was certainly a warning to all in the room.  

Fight for your rights
Abdülhamit Bilici, Margaux Ewen, Gene Policinski, Simegnish Mengesha, and Tim Crews

Another panelist, Tim Crews, editor/publisher of The Sacramento Valley Mirror, said that his journalists have been threatened on numerous occasions both online and in person. He has also experienced censorship and an uneven application of the law when it comes to prosecuting those who threaten or assault members of his staff.

Ethiopian journalist Simegnish Y. Mengesha, has seen many colleagues imprisoned “for doing their jobs.” She said that we must remain vigilant in protecting our rights because undermining press freedom “is a gradual process, it doesn’t happen overnight.”

Mengesha also sees that the danger goes beyond the threats to journalists themselves. “People are afraid to talk to the media; they are afraid to use their own social media accounts [to discuss news].” This, she says, strips citizens of their basic right to being informed about what is going on in their own country.

Governments in different parts of the world have shown a willingness to block social media platforms and even shut down the internet to stem the spread of information, as Margaux Ewen, Advocacy and Communications Director for Reporters Without Borders pointed out. She also noted the disturbing pattern of harassment, doxing, and outright threats made to journalists via social media channels.

Another alarming trend Ewan has observed is that “The authoritarian strong man model of government seems to be sneaking it into places we didn’t expect to find it.”

Lead by example

Bilici sees an unnerving parallel between what happened in Turkey and trends in America. In both cases, he said, “a popular elected person is putting pressure on the media.” Policinski from The Newseum reminded the audience that here, our President refers to the press as “enemies of the people.” And, as Ewen pointed out, the administration’s anti-press stance has a negative effect on journalists in other countries although she noted “I have to keep reminding myself that this didn’t happen overnight.”

“An important question we should ask ourselves,” said Bilici, “Is why isn’t the media getting the support from the public when we claim to speak in their name?”

Rep. Fortenberry said the media must carefully consider its diminished estimation in the eyes of the public. “There’s cynicism toward the institutions that uphold the idea of press freedom.” He called upon members of the press to support “an authentic dialog and public service for the good of community.”

Indeed, the participants—speakers, panelists, and attendees of Press Freedom: Lessons Learned From Around The World—would all agree that open discussion is essential to shoring up this key aspect of equitable government here and abroad. Yet even as the event was being arranged, Mexican journalist Martin Mendez Pineda, who has received death threats for his work, was denied a visa to participate. According to Ewen, the program was not deemed “important enough” to allow him to enter the United States.

 

©2024 Digital Content Next. All Rights Reserved.