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Industry-Research | Perspectives

What 2016’s most engaging content teaches us

From the U.S. Election and Brexit to the summer Olympics; from terrorism to the deaths of David Bowie and Prince, 2016 was filled with stories that 2016 captured our attention.  But everyone wants to know what type of content captures the most engagement.

It is heartening to see that it was quality journalism from well-established media outlets, not fake news, that people engaged with most. Chartbeat’s Most Engaging Stories of 2016 ranked the most captivating articles of the year from quality publishers as defined by Total Engaged Time — the total amount of time visitors spent actively engaged in content.

The Chartbeat Most Engaging Stories of 2016 were selected from over 46 million articles on over 50,000 global sites, and registered over 2.5 billion minutes of active engaged time.

From 538’s General Election predictor, which received more Engaged Time than the top five stories of 2015 combined, to personal narrative, longform and interactive, the top stories span categories and formats. More importantly, they teach us many lessons about how news is consumed and shared.

  1. Interactive, data-rich storytelling is alive and well. It’s no surprise that the topic that garnered the most amount of Engaged Time during 2016 was politics, which had nine of the top ten stories. In many ways, this was also the Year of the Interactive. Election prediction pages, live results pages and interactive maps from the likes of 538, BBC, Fox News, CNN and the NY Times captivated our attention and drove billions of engagement minutes.
  2. First person journalism resonates and gets shared. From major investigative pieces rooted in undercover work to the moving letter from a Stanford student to her assailant, first-hand accounts affecting personal and societal rights captured attention as well as empathy. (See “A sexual assault victim’s powerful message to her Stanford attacker,” a first-person narrative from The Washington Post). These powerful, personal narratives were strongly driven by social traffic, demonstrating that when we emotionally connect with a story, we’re more apt to share and discuss it with our network.
  1. The context of premium publisher environments matter.
    The articles that made the list and came out on top, regardless of topic, were those that stayed true to a publisher’s voice and audience. According to our research, readers that came direct to a publisher’s site were the most loyal and engaged in terms of time spent. Those who came from social and search were less engaged. In other words: All impressions are not created equal.
  1. Promoting articles is not just an art; it is a science.
    It is not enough to just write compelling content anymore. Consumer reading behavior varies by device, time of day and referrer channel (i.e. social, search). It also demonstrates specific patterns based on content type (i.e. breaking news vs longform). For example, as we’ve seen in previous Chartbeat research, in times of breaking news like the election, consumers use search first to find what they are looking for, then after the event, they turn to social to interact and share.For publishers producing quality content, it is critical to understand these audience platform patterns across social and search and how best to promote your stories.
  1. We expect consumer engagement around quality journalism to continue well into 2017.
    Publishers didn’t shy away from covering the truth in 2016, and if the early stories of 2017 are any indication, we expect this to continue. In fact, readership so far in January (of politics in particular) is seeing extremely high pageview and concurrent levels, indicating that consumers value quality journalism more than ever.

Terri Walter, the Chief Marketing Officer of Chartbeat, works every day to ensure that publishers and newsrooms have the tools and insights they need for quality content to thrive. A digital marketing veteran of 20 years, Terri has worked over the course of her career to position high potential brands and spearhead thought leadership in media and analytics at companies including DoubleClick, Razorfish and Microsoft Advertising.

Perspectives

Speculation over Spectacles: Snap’s IPO and its mixed value for publishers

Snap Inc., the parent company of the millennial-loved Snapchat app and makers of camera-equipped sunglasses, Spectacles, recently filed paperwork for an initial public offering, targeting a valuation between $20 billion and $25 billion. With a coveted core base — the app claims to reach 41% of all 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. on a given day — and a business model matching the advertising industry’s ongoing shift to mobile, the five-year-old company remains a media darling in an environment dearth of other significant offerings.

Snap wants to raise at least $3 billion, but it has yet to turn the kind of profit that justifies such an expensive offering. Closer inspection on the company’s revenue sources, losses, competition and stagnating growth rates shows that despite the attention, the company might present challenges to investors — and publishers who are investing time and money in the platform. The company lost $514.6 million in 2016 and has warned prospective shareholders that it “may never achieve or maintain profitability.”

The Pluses for Snap — and Publishers
But Snapchat has certainly made hay with its walled garden, Discover, showcasing content from premium publishers eager to get daily content in front of that juicy core audience. And the New York Times recently signed on to deliver its Morning Brief for Discover, citing Snapchat as the “ideal place” to deliver “smart, visual digital journalism” to younger audiences. According to new research from eMarketer, nearly half of Snapchat’s revenues last year — 43%, to be precise — came from ads on Discover.

Unlike the 30-second standard ads for television commercials, or even YouTube’s 15- or 30-second pre-roll ads, the quick and easy 10-second spots on Discover are just right for an audience used to on-demand television. And advertisers must tailor their creative to the audience, in order to drive swipes and attention. Plus, eMarketer projects that Snapchat’s total revenues will more than double in 2017, from $348 million to $804 million, while the company says it is aiming for $1 billion in revenues this year.

The Downfalls for Publishers
That’s great for Snap but not so hot for most publishers, who have received little more than tepid gains from their work on Snapchat, according to research from Digital Content Next. DCN found that their members surveyed reaped the least revenues from Snapchat in the first half of 2016 — $192,819 per publisher, compared to $773,567 earned on YouTube, $560,144 from Facebook and $482,788 on Twitter. DCN publishers also cited Snapchat as the most difficult company to work with.

While Snapchat has alluded to future offerings of better metrics for advertisers, and announced a pay-up-front licensing model that may help publishers monetize on Discover more effectively — a model akin to what TV networks use when purchasing programming — that’s not exactly a foolproof profit plan, at least not yet. While Snapchat has managed to avoid the onslaught of fake news that’s polluted other platforms, publishers would be right to continue to be wary of giving complete control to the platform — even a hot one like Snapchat with a lock (for now) on millennials.

The Stresses of Being a Hot Commodity
Of course, Snapchat’s biggest rival, Facebook, isn’t standing still. Like Snapchat, Facebook also wants to be the next TV, and a much more visual network. From Instagram Stories to tests of disappearing messages on Messenger, Facebook hasn’t been discreet about cloning Snapchat, and this intense competition may prove difficult for the upstart in the long run. (Note that Snap rejected a $3 billion buyout offer from Facebook previously.)

In its prospectus, Snapchat cited “increased competition” as one of the key reasons user growth slowed considerably at the end of last year, a trend that prompted comparisons to Twitter — another company with a hot IPO that’s failed to attract new users and growth. And unlike Facebook — which has grown to be the most powerful network in countries like India, where mobile connectivity is the de-facto way users access the Internet — Snapchat’s reliance on strong mobile infrastructure and cheap bandwidth costs means that its international growth is limited. It also faces competition from regional apps like Asia’s Snow.

Then there’s the concern that Snapchat will fail to reach users over the age of 30, whereas Facebook has proved to be friendly for multiple generations. Better ad targeting and deeper engagement, therefore, is crucial for Snapchat. But it’s running neck-and-neck with Instagram when it comes to being an important network for teens, according to a fall 2016 survey by Piper Jaffray, with 80% of teens using Snapchat to 79% opting for Instagram. Not only that, but one in three users on both Instagram and Snapchat said they hardly noticed the ads on their platform of choice, according to eMarketer.

Snap certainly has some tall orders to fill if it wants to match its valuation hype, as the buzz builds around its IPO. Publishers, especially magazine and digital native outlets, will continue to shower attention on Snapchat and get a payoff, but for the platform to really reach beyond its core millennials, that will take more time and investment.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Programmatic native: a nascent and growing category

For many advertisers, programmatic native feels like the holy grail. It brings the transactional efficiency, audience targeting and scale of programmatic to in-feed native units that match the look and feel of a publisher’s content. Additionally, publishers benefit by simplifying native ad sales, with instant access to demand sources through programmatic exchanges. Programmatic native offers real benefits to both sides – buyers and sellers.

However, with so much promise, what does the market look like today?

To find out, we at MediaRadar, took an in-depth look at what programmatic native advertising spend looked like in 2016. For the report, we analyzed programmatic native adoption over the last 12 months, identifying the number of brands buying programmatic native ads through popular exchanges, like Nativo, TripleLift, Sharethrough, Unruly, and Bidtellect.

Here’s what we found.

  • More Than 4,000 Advertisers: Last year, almost 4,200 unique advertisers placed programmatic native campaigns across the native exchanges we analyzed.
  • Adoption Grew 86% by Year’s End: Programmatic native surged throughout the year. In fact, the total monthly brands buying campaigns increased by 86% – from 593 in January to 1,133, by November. In Q1 2016 an average of 726 brands placed campaigns each month and by Q4 2016 the per month average leapt to 1,094 brands. This is meaningful growth over just a 12-month period.
  • Still, Penetration Remains Low: In 2016, 50,605 advertisers placed online ads on just the top-200 largest publisher websites alone. As percent of that 50,605, fewer than 10% ran on native exchanges. This means that for all the significant growth last year, there is significant headroom for expansion in 2017.

Takeaways:

There has been a lot of attention given to sponsored editorial and programmatic native in the press in the past year. While the programmatic native market is still small, relative to the overall spend in the digital market, it is expanding and at an accelerated pace. Renewal rates and advertiser feedback are positive, mostly.

That’s not to say that challenges don’t exist (The Wall Street Journal tackled these issues recently), but we observe that the market continues to be a legitimately bright spot for publishers. We forecast a positive outlook for it in 2017.

Todd Krizelman (@ToddKrizelman ) is Co-Founder and CEO of MediaRadar (@MediaRadar). Growing up near the epicenter of technological innovation in Palo Alto, California encouraged him to become an entrepreneur and co-found of one of the world’s first social media sites, theGlobe.com. Krizelman also held leadership positions at Bertelsmann’s Gruner + Jahr and Random House. With his expertise in ad sales and innovation, Krizelman joined veteran web architect, Jesse Keller, to found MediaRadar in 2007.

Perspectives

1st, 2nd, and 3rd-party data walk Into a bar…

Learning more about your audience is key to any successful data-driven advertising campaign, and using data, whether it be 1st, 2nd or 3rd party, is an important driver in making that happen. But not all data is created equal.  When you are managing an advertising campaign, it is important to know the differences between each type of data and how you can leverage each to fit your business needs and goals.

First Party Data: The Ring Leader
Let’s begin with what is considered to be the most valuable form of data: first-party. First-party data is the data that you own and have gathered directly from your customers, and can include actions or interests demonstrated across your websites, social data, offline data, mobile data, and even TV data. First-Party data is the ring leader in your group of friends at the bar. Everyone wants to get a piece of him or her. People generally look to first-party data for guidance—it’s valuable, free, and trusted.

So why is first-party data so amazing? First of all, first-party data is yours, and it will always belong to your brand. Your company owns that data set (unless you choose to sell it, which demonstrates its value). Second, because you gathered it straight from the source, it’s accurate, and relevant; there’s no question of quality. And third, it is unique. Your first-party data is different than anyone else’s, no matter how alike you are in brand and awareness strategies. Lastly, it is less regulated than the other forms of data. No rules, no expectations. Nobody can tell you what to do with your data, because it’s yours.

So what are the limitations of first-party data? It’s finite. It is only as large or broad as your brand footprint. For example, if your site produces fitness news, your first-party data will only consists of the fitness behaviors that occur on your page. If you are looking to target more people with different interests, you may not have those other interests in your first-party data. There is no such thing as extending your first-party data, especially for free. And that will come at a cost.

Third-Party Data: The Party Animal
Third-party data is the friend who may not be the most trustworthy, but they sure know how to gain a following. They are friends with everyone, and no one can match their reach.

Third-party data refers to the customer data that is ingested from an outside (or “third”) party, at a cost. It is generated on other platforms and often aggregated from many data providers, while the original source is left unknown to the data buyer. For example, a third-party data provider will choose to pay certain publishers to let it collect information about their visitors (essentially, the publisher’s first-party data). The third-party data provider will then aggregate all those data points and organize them into a broad behavioral hierarchy, ranging from automobiles to recipes, and beyond.

Typically, third-party data falls into large, industry-standard categories based on attributes ranging from behaviors and interests to age and gender. This data is housed in dozens of marketing and ad tech platforms and can be sold to advertisers who are looking for help in targeting their advertisements. As readily accessible as it may be, third-party data is sometimes considered less valuable than other types because it is a) very readily available in many places – including to your competitors, and b) you can’t be sure where it came from.

Let’s not throw third-party data under the bus though. It is great for demographic, behavioral, and contextual targeting; and because of its scale, it plays a critical role in solutions like audience targeting and reach extension. When you don’t have enough first-party data to fulfill a campaign, many people turn to third-party data to save the day.

Second-Party Data: The Peacekeeper
This three musketeer group at the bar wouldn’t be the same, however, without second-party data. Being the middleman of the group, and at most times the peacekeeper, second-party data is all about relationships.

In essence, second-party data is another company’s first-party data they sell directly to you, rather than through a data exchange. Through this direct, transparent relationship, you are able to define exactly which segments are being bought or sold, the price of the data, and any other important terms you may require, allowing you to be fully confident in its quality.

For niche brands, second-party data can be a powerful option. For example, a 5-star hotel might want to partner with a travel website to gain location information about certain buyers. The hotel can serve specific ads to consumers who have searched flights in a specific location. In turn, if a consumer books a hotel first, the travel site can send ads for good deals on flights. Through a second-party relationship, each company involved can access a new type of audiences, providing both with scale and precision.

Second-party data is the new kid on the block, and not all publishers have embraced it. Although many believe it is higher quality than third-party data (as it’s coming directly from the source, and not available on the open market), it’s also harder to get your hands on. Often this is because a buyer doesn’t know where to go if they don’t already have personal relationships with other publishers or brands.

Rather than managing this exchange, a shared cookie environment (such as a DMP) can help foster your data and the privacy requirements that go along with it. A DMP serves as the “middleman” organization that both parties can trust to help with the syndication of their data, especially in a privacy-friendly manner.

Obviously not all data is equal. Just like the three uniquely different friends at the bar, first-, second-, and third-party data comes in various forms. Data-driven marketing campaigns wouldn’t exist without the data to run them, but thankfully there is an almost unlimited amount of it available for marketing campaigns. Truth be told, there is a place for each type of data in the digital marketing/advertising world. The key is to know the ins and outs, strengths and weaknesses of each type, and use them accordingly.

Haley Adam is fascinated with all things sitting at the intersection of technology, digital, and advertising. She is an integral part of the Lotame marketing team, participating in product marketing, social, events, and corporate marketing efforts. When she’s not talking data, Haley spends her time traveling the world or playing soccer. Haley holds a BA in Public Relations from Wilkes University.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Could in-image ads be an answer to ad blockers?

With increasing competition across various verticals, digital brands are always looking for ways to engage potential customers. However, the average online consumer often feels bombarded with ads and intrusive pop-ups on both their desktop and mobile screens. Tech savvy users simply download ad blockers to streamline their internet browsing experience, a move that has been increasing in popularity in recent years.

According to a report conducted by ad-recovery startup PageFair, “The number of consumers using ad blockers in the U.S. increased 48 percent during the last year,” referring to 2014-2015, which resulted in a loss of more than $20 billion in advertisement revenue for publishers on desktop computers alone.

Today, advertisers aren’t just focused on creating and disseminating their ads across various channels. This is simply not enough given consumers’ low tolerance for interruption and considering the viewability and engagement demands for their
ads.  Publishers must act in order to tackle the reasons why they are “blocking ads and tailor their messaging accordingly,” according to the head of Condé Nast’s Food Innovation Group’s Eric Gillin. Meanwhile, Mike Hofman, Executive Digital Director of GQ claims that people are increasingly looking to control the time they spent on a website, which provides a challenging environment for ads to sprout across screens.

With all these points in mind, publishers have to be increasingly creative in order to monetize their web and mobile sites. One way of going about this is to focus on creating personalized and relevant ads, ones that will remove the desire for adblockers in the first place. According to James Avery, CEO of Adzerk, “If we want to stem the growth of ad-blocking installations, we have to deter people before they click the install button.”

In-image advertising technology steps in
But one of the newer and more innovative monetization solutions for publishers directly helps them meet the needs and demands of both advertisers and users, namely in-image advertising technology. According to Optimind Technology Solutions, “Articles with images get 94% more views,” and this technology could help address the challenge posed by adblockers, as it addresses personalization and relevance, as well as engagement. Based on user behavior and contextual analysis, it provides users with a more natural exposure to advertisements rather than an impersonal and intrusive experience.

The reason that in-image ads can be very effective is because they are superimposed over prominent images on web pages that attract the most attention from users. Because in-image ads are personalized for their audience, they are typically more relevant to what the audience members are interested in. In turn, this means these ads are far less disruptive than traditional display ads and more engaging.

As such, in-image ads provide users with a natural experience and highly targeted ads, thus reducing the incentive to even download ad blockers. Below is an example advertisement on a publisher’s website from a leading in-image ad platform Imonomy. It offers a more compelling option to users as well as to advertisers.

Additionally, by exposing users to highly engaging and contextually-relevant images, such technology increases ad viewability and provides additional monetization opportunities (for instance, by triggering CTRs) for publishers.

While the world of advertising will always be a complex business, publishers will need to play a major role in bridging the gap between advertisers and tech savvy users that are always short on time. To help in this process of countering adblocking technology, publishers need to focus on improving the user experience by providing an added value for both users as well as advertisers.

For instance, by encouraging users to continue with the browsing experience in the most natural way, while simultaneously exposing them to advertisements that are cleverly embedded as in-article images, publishers can meet the needs of all parties, while creating additional monetization channels resulting from improved viewability.

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Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of January 26, 2017

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

 

 

Perspectives | Video

Facebook shifts focus from live-streaming video to long-form

Although Facebook paid millions to the likes of the New York Times and BuzzFeed to live stream a certain number of videos — a $50 million investment altogether — publishers now say Facebook is talking to them less about live video and more about premium quality content, according to Recode’s Kurt Wagner.

“Our goal is to kick-start an ecosystem of partner content for the tab, so we’re exploring funding some seed video content, including original and licensed scripted, unscripted and sports content, that takes advantage of mobile and the social interaction unique to Facebook,” Facebook’s Ricky Van Veen said recently in a statement regarding original content.

While the one-year contracts haven’t yet ended, and there’s no official word from Facebook about them, it appears that they may have been a short term strategy for the platform. It also turns out many publishers aren’t interested in renewing these one-year Facebook Live contracts either. Some told Recode that Facebook’s compensation wasn’t enough to justify the time and resources needed to produce the live streams. So what’s the future of live-streaming on Facebook, and how can publishers get on board the new push for long-form video?

Live-Streaming Is Here to Stay
While some may interpret the news as Facebook admitting that live-streaming was never a profitable prospect, all arrows point to live-streaming’s staying power. Live viewership among Internet users decreased slightly in the second half of 2016. YouTube and Snapchat experienced small declines in market share of live-streaming, but Facebook’s market share actually rose from 14% to 17% between June and November of last year, according to eMarketer, suggesting that Facebook is emerging as a leader in a market that’s still in its infancy.

Meanwhile, Facebook has announced a slew of new tools and features for Live: a video tab on the Facebook app that makes spotting live videos easier (which helps fight against the algorithms that might keep viewership at bay); the ability to broadcast onto Facebook straight from a web browser (which is sure to keep Facebook competitive against the video bloggers doing this on YouTube); a “Live Contributor” role Page admins can assign people to broadcast live from the page; and enhanced live video metrics for people with at least 5,000 followers. Facebook is also planning to introduce mid-roll advertising, which will finally offer some payoffs for publishers who haven’t yet profited from these video streams.

Mediocre Content from Publishers Can’t Match Viral Hits
So it’s not necessarily that Facebook doesn’t believe publishers will now stay clear from Live altogether. In a breaking news moment, Live is the best way to reach as many as 1.7 billion viewers at once. Think of last year’s coup attempt in Turkey, or when House Democrats staged a sit-in to push for gun control.

Let’s also not overlookthe shooting of Philando Castile by police, and his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook Live stream in the immediate aftermath. Or even Chewbacca Mom, laughing in the glory of her own happiness, and the subsequent viral sensation she became.

When publishers slog through Facebook Live like it’s a chore, it shows. Hosts wear their ambivalence on their faces, and the quality is mediocre at best. With the abundance of competing content, users have no incentive to watch a live-stream. When individuals take to Facebook Live, however, it’s different. There’s no ambivalence. There’s the necessity that comes from immediacy. And the result is connection.

Brands Are Already Succeeding with Long-Form Video
Connection is the reason why some brands would prefer long-form video anyway. It often seems like Facebook is calling the shots these days when it comes to influencing media. But on-demand video services and live streaming are already pushing marketers to think beyond short 30-second ads, and toward advertising that is, essentially, stand-alone entertainment that connects with the viewer.

Case in point: Luxury brands like Burberry and BMW. Short commercials, which helps boost brand recognition, aren’t as important to them as it is to lesser known companies. They have loyal customers who are more concerned with the identity of the product — and identity comes from the perspectives, narratives and dramas you can present in what are basically short films. It’s a shift within marketing — “being” becomes more important than “having.”

Meanwhile, remember that ad blockers are some of the most popular mobile app and web extensions, with one out of every five smartphone users blocking advertising on web browsers, according to PageFair. Again, it goes back to the cable industry analogy. Just as viewers make time for premium long-form programming, getting them to turn off ad blockers requires making quality advertising! Because web advertising has become so targeted, there’s also more potential to experiment with advertising lengths.

So even though live-streaming on Facebook has been hit-and-miss so far, these could just be growing pains: Publishers will likely continue efforts with live-streaming and creating their own long-form video for editorial—and let’s not forget their focus on monetizing, regardless of format or platform.

 

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Viewability measure standards a good step, but issues go beyond measurement

If a mobile ad is displayed, but not viewed by a human or simply not rendered properly, does the advertiser pay? The answer is yes, but two top advertising trade groups are working to establish a standard that will address this wastage and ad fraud through a uniform means of tracking whether ads can be seen in mobile apps.

Viewability is a huge headache on mobile – where the variety of ad formats and the way consumers interact with them (scrolling in a newsfeed, not clicking individual banners, for example) makes it a difficult one to call. To complicate matters, both Flash and cookies – URL referrers and trackers that are ubiquitous across all major desktop browsers – are completely absent from mobile.

Moreover, the mobile ad ecosystem of buyers and sellers is, in itself, a bottleneck. While ad buyers insist on purchasing only mobile ads that people can actually see, many publishers are less eager to lift the lid on this data. Their reluctance can be linked to that fact that impressions (CPMs) not click-throughs (CTRs) are the measurement that defines their business and their bottom line.

Currently, tracking ad viewability on mobile apps is a complicated process as app developers and publishers must integrate software from multiple third party providers. It’s a process that costs resources and – more importantly – can slow down the app. This is critical as a recent HP- sponsored study by Dimensional Research shows that most consumers quickly lose patience, and will even delete, apps that take longer than 2 seconds to load and perform its actions. The result is a trade-off between viewability (for the advertiser) and usability (for the consumer).

Source: Failing to Meet Mobile App User Expectations: A Mobile User Survey

To strike a needed balance the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) have thrown their support behind an open source initiative aimed at standardizing viewability measurement for mobile apps. The goal is to jointly develop a single code base that mobile publishers can plug into their apps, letting advertisers pull data on viewability in a standard fashion, Joe Barone, managing partner of digital ad operations for GroupM and chairman of the 4A’s Digital Operations & Technology Committee, told the WSJ.

The organizations will oversee efforts to develop a standard tracking code, with the input of various constituencies from across the ecosystem. “This will be a very regimented, very democratic process,” Alanna Gombert, general manager of the IAB Tech Lab, told the WSJ.

The initiative comes at a time when concerns about ad viewability and accountability in the industry are high, magnified by a string of serious miscalculations by Facebook. The mobile ad giant has publicly admitted to overstating or understating the metrics that publishers and advertisers use to measure ad effectiveness on the platform and the value of Facebook ads.

It’s important to have Facebook and Google, which account for 85 cents of every new ad dollar spent on digital, on board, but it remains to be seen if thy will adopt and implement third-party tracking code of any kind.

While there is growing need for a consensus on viewability tracking, and a single code to enable it, change may come slower than we think. Many ad buyers and publishers prefer to work with their preferred vendors to track and calculate ad effectiveness. Moreover, the vendors behind these technology solutions worry an open source approach would effectively replace their proprietary tracking code and potentially devalue their companies.

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. 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.

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Perspectives

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

Our picks of the must-read stories from around the web:

Perspectives

4 Signs of life for Twitter

Many people consider Twitter to be on death’s door, almost flatlining and barely breathing. But, in the words of one Monty Python character: “I’m not dead!” Well, at least not yet.

Twitter had its shares of missteps in 2016, including an exodus of executives, including its CTO and COO, and a failure to sell itself in a highly-publicized bake sale. One of the reasons that sale fell through was the problem Twitter has with trolls and abuse, which has driven off many high-profile users. And its CEO Jack Dorsey is only part-time on the job, as he’s also CEO of Square.

So why am I confident that 2017 will breathe some new life into Twitter, besides our new Troll-in-Chief taking office soon? Let me count the ways…

1. Jack Dorsey’s Listening Tour

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey certainly showed his interest in taking public commentary seriously when he issued a public call for feedback at the cusp of 2017, asking what the microblogging service ought to be doing better. His request drew hundreds of responses circulating around four themes: curbing online abuse; allowing an edit function; providing users better management of topics and interests; and offering easier ways to track conversations.

His tweets on the four requests — brief, of course, given he was limited to 140 characters — show where Twitter may put more emphasis this year. He said that following topics was the strongest request and that being more topic- and interest-focused “opens up a lot.” He also noted that conversations, while a huge part of what makes Twitter magical, are simply very difficult to follow, and promised to make that easier. So it looks like we can bank on anticipating more ease in those departments.

The others are a bit thornier. It’s one thing to offer a quick fix to edit errors, for instance. But if the President of the United States uses Twitter in such a way that his account becomes the most powerful publication in the world  — and it’s a guarantee that his tweets will be included in news stories — Twitter is no doubt part of the public record. It’ll have to do more development to ensure accountability if it chooses to steer toward an edit function.

2. Fighting Abuse

When it comes to abuse, meanwhile, Dorsey acknowledged that a ton of work is necessary ahead and that the “biggest ask” was for greater transparency around its actions. And then, as if on cue, Twitter swiftly shut down the account of pharmaceutical executive and Trump supporter Martin Shkreli after he targeted freelance reporter Lauren Duca — who penned “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America” on Teen Vogue. You could see that Twitter was at least trying, even though it missed the opportunity to showcase full transparency by only giving a one-sentence response to justify shutting down Shkreli’s account.

That aside, the fact that this occurred on Twitter — followed by chatter around it on Twitter — only to be followed by news about it generated again, on Twitter — shows the company excels at a certain kind of rabid engagement among its regular users.

3. Brands Experiment with Twitter Moments

In fact, it could have been a Twitter Moment, something that marketers and publishers are also experimenting with on the platform. Moments, with its curated tweets, are an ideal product for casual users who don’t want to be on the platform all day but want to know the Twitter gossip around a particular event or story.

From a brand or company perspective, they’re also inexpensive to produce and take advantage of the real-time marketing that Twitter also offers — hence why clients as diverse as Lime-A-Rita, YouTube and Newsweek are all jumping into the fray. It would come as no surprise if more news clients and marketers followed suit in 2017, or if Twitter did more to enhance the feature — after all, Moments is already a solution to help people follow a topic or interest.

4. Twitter Remains an Important Source of News

Indeed, while Twitter may never be able to scale the way Facebook has, it has been leaps and bounds ahead of its rival when it comes to hiring editors, working with news publishers and generally positing itself as a media company. Unlike Facebook, whose recent hire of Campbell Brown to lead news partnerships seems more like a hire of a marketing rep rather than a public editor or editor in chief, Twitter is looking to hire editors and an associate producer.

And let’s face it: News breaks all the time on Twitter, whether by eyewitnesses at the scene, or journalists giving inside dirt, or celebs and sports stars posting what they shouldn’t. Twitter has also been testing breaking news push notifications along the lines of the Associated Press and New York Times, and has moved from the “social networking” to the “news” category on Apple’s App Store. Not only that, but Twitter’s push into live video, including its deal to air NFL games live on the platform, is a much more elegant maneuver than Facebook’s own insistence on Facebook Live (which, with its conspicuous sponsored posts on Facebook and enormous banners on buildings, seems much more desperate).

Twitter may have trouble growing its user numbers and stock price, but its relevance keeps rising. Let’s see what 2017 brings. And remember, when you hit rock bottom, there’s only one way to go: up!

Advertising | Perspectives

The Big 10: Media executives call out the industry’s biggest challenges

While it is appealing to start off a New Year with rosy predictions, it is also important to take a clear-eyed look at the road (and roadblocks) ahead. We asked a few of our members what they see as the biggest challenges the digital media industry faces today.

Here’s what leaders at ten diverse media companies see as the biggest challenge in the year to come:

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Scott Bailey, President, TEN Automotive Division
@TENenthusiast

Monetizing scaled social audiences and the content made for these channels is a challenge. We see the benefit of being a first mover and building a large social audience. That said, the benefit today lies heavily in the marketing value it provides in driving traffic to our sites and leveraging it to convert fans into paying customers through subscription offerings like Motor Trend OnDemand. We are able to monetize through advertising, but the nature of the monetization on social is more challenging to do at scale, as it requires a more custom approach compared to more traditional, turnkey placements/buys.

Jordan Bitterman, Chief Marketing Officer, The Weather Company, an IBM Business
@JordanBitterman @weathercompany

Our industry must build a parallel world adjacent to the current one dominated by Google and Facebook. This new world must be scaled, intelligent and open. Currently, 85 cents of every new dollar are going to the two biggest players because they have been solving for scaled and intelligent – and have done a great job doing so. But, an open garden is increasingly becoming a requirement for sophisticated advertisers who want partners who are flexible on data and transparent on pricing and performance.

Jim Brady CEO & Founder, Spirited Media
@jimbrady @spiritedmediaco

It’s hard to pick a “biggest” challenge, as there as so many. But, to me, refining user experience remains a crucial one. There are still way too many sites alienating readers for a quick buck by hammering them with pop-ups, unnecessary slideshows, pagination, interstitials and more. Yes, we need to make money. But gouging readers to the point where we drive them away is an abysmal long-term audience strategy. Treat your audience like you don’t care about them, and they will surely return the favor.”

Steven Smith, President of Digital Media, AccuWeather
@accuweather

In 2017, we continue to hurtle toward a ubiquitous global user audience, accessing data from every imaginable kind of device with a greater focus on personalization, localization, service and mobility. Content providers are going to have to step up to meet the needs of an audience that wants fast, relevant, and localized—and provided consistently regardless of device, from smartphones to connected refrigerators. That makes strong partnerships with vendors a necessity, from Cloud storage providers for scaling data to meet demand demands to robust content management solutions to help port news from format to format and device to device. And of course, the audience will continue to demand content that is more timely and relevant than ever.

Joy Jones, Vice President, Global Products, Associated Press
@AssociatedPress

The biggest challenge we face is building diverse streams of revenue that support innovative storytelling. In 2017, digital media companies must bridge the current divide between creating compelling stories that attract interest and attention, and the opportunities for monetization that are increasingly concentrated on just a few of the largest platforms. The industry is not going to be successful if there’s too much focus on trendy stories that spin up on a one-off basis or so-called native ad content that lacks authenticity. We need immersive and captivating high-quality content that engages diverse audiences and creates a wide fan base across emerging media platforms. That diversification of revenue will be critical to building and maintaining a sustainable engine for digital media innovation.

John Kosner, EVP, Digital & Print Media, ESPN
@JKosner @ESPN

Establishing timely and trusted cross-media measurement is an enormous challenge — but a critically important one. People consume media on an ever-growing number of platforms and devices and we must establish accurate ways to measure the total audience we reach and their engagement with content. That means having clear, trusted standards and metrics — which measure across TV, apps, web, OTT and more — and do so both in- and out-of-home. The connection people have with digitally-delivered content and advertising continues to grow enormously. But so does fake content and ad fraud. Trusted and transparently-measured environments will become ever-more valuable.

Beth Lawrence, EVP of Digital Ad Sales, Scripps Networks Interactive
@ScrippsNet

A big challenge in digital in 2017 will be the ability for clients and consumers to separate the wheat from the chaff. We all know digital is here to stay and continues to be a more important revenue driver every year. But the quality of digital content has been under the radar, and in the final analysis, marketers care what brands they associate with. Period. Content matters; quality content rules. It will be a year of cleaning up, properly measuring and delivering great results in digital.

Matt Minoff, SVP, Digital Platforms and Strategy, Meredith Corporation
@mattminoff @MeredithCorp

The biggest challenge will continue to be capturing consumer attention as existing platforms grow and new platforms emerge.

Vikki Neil, SVP/GM of Scripps Lifestyle Studios
@ScrippsNet

In digital, you must stay open to all ideas that come your way, but disciplined enough to say no to many. You must move quickly and not wait for perfection, but perfect what you do daily. There’s not time to develop a long-range plan like a traditional media business offers. From my seat, the biggest challenge is a combination of making the right bets, and moving as fast as humanly possible to understand the space before your competitors, so that you can build the best offering for consumers and advertisers. It’s impossible to be everywhere across all opportunities, so choose wisely, go quickly and iterate daily.

Alex Skatell, Founder and President, Independent Journal Review
@AlexSkatell @TheIJR

The biggest challenge for media is building community. The strategies that have propelled many digital media companies into large audiences are largely commoditized, so you need to figure out how to connect your content and communities together in a deeper and unique way.

Brendan Spain, VP, Advertising – Americas, Financial Times
@spanishbrendan @FT

The biggest challenge for digital media in 2017 will be for quality publishers to cut through the noise – of ad fraud, fake news, and non-human traffic – to command fair market pricing for their trusted brands and influential audiences. Evaluating and leveraging these trusted environments will continue to be both important and difficult as the market weighs chasing scale and audience against quality and transparency.

Domenic Venuto, General Manager, Consumer Division, The Weather Company, an IBM Business
@dvenuto @weathercompany

As we look at the 2017 media landscape, there is potential for a massive upheaval on multiple fronts with the forecasted political uncertainty. The industry is resilient and adaptable, and we must remain focused on building great products for fans. And perhaps anxiety is unwarranted.

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Perspectives

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

Our picks of the must-read stories from around the web:

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