If history has taught us anything, it’s that there are always lessons to be learned and mindsets to be shifted. If you’ve been in the digital advertising industry for any length of time, you’ll likely know there’s no shortage of lessons to go around.
The world of advertising has rapidly evolved over the years keeping publishers, advertisers, and adtech partners alike on their toes every step of the way. The latest evolution is that of user targeting and how we can continue to properly identify and address who our audience is in real and meaningful ways.
Identity in perspective
This brings us to the era of privacy and transparency, where identity was ultimately born. Although they emerged circa 2017, identity platforms are still somewhat of a foreign concept when it comes to overall strategy. Conveniently enough, there have been a number of postponed deadlines making it easier to rationalize resisting the adoption of said identity solutions. However, that mindset is worth debating. While we’ve been given a bit of a reprieve, it’s time to get started.
An important moment in history we can all gain perspective from is when Facebook changed its algorithm to prioritize content from family and friends while shying away from news publishers and brands. The problem with that sudden change was that publishers weren’t properly warned and consequently, weren’t able to properly prepare. Those that had all their eggs in one basket (who relied primarily on Facebook as their main or only traffic acquisition source) were quick to feel the impact of change. Within a month’s time, there were a number of publishers closing their doors or handing the keys over to a new buyer.
This story isn’t meant to instill fear, but rather share the importance of taking advantage of this privileged time to find where best to move your eggs. Just as you would with any other programmatic advertising strategy, that of identity needs proper time to ramp up allowing for testing and adjustments where needed.
Time to start
For publishers, this means finding the right identity solutions to begin testing with to secure what your favored identity stack looks like. In other words, think about who you’ll be working with and how you’ll be working with them. It also means giving buyers time to adapt and adjust. Just as buyers’ algorithms need time to adjust to changes in ad layouts, ad placements, ad stacks, and new users, buyers need up to eight months to adapt to new identity solutions as we transition into a post-cookie world.
Securing an identity platform alone isn’t enough. There needs to be a clear plan of action in place from initial integration to ongoing optimizations. You will need to ensure you have coverage for both authenticated as well as unauthenticated traffic. You’ll want to confirm that the partners you currently have running in your ad stack are compatible with the identity provider you’re working with so there’s no missed connections. And you should evaluate and re-evaluate what sort of audience segmenting you have in place and what it is that makes your users valuable. This is why you must do your due diligence and look into what each provider has to offer ahead of time.
Remember that this is very much so a team effort as we collectively migrate into the new world of identity, with publishers leading the charge. The sooner publishers fully roll out and adopt identity as the new currency, the sooner buyers can finesse their bidding logic. Each player has their own unique responsibility when it comes to fully scaling out efforts and getting this right, with the power falling into the publisher’s hands.
Yes, we’ve gotten the luxury of notice, and a bit more time. But don’t waste it. Preparation is critical and collaboration is necessary. If you’re not sure where to start, begin by taking stock of your current dependencies, evaluate the market, and identify a handful of providers to start integrating with. Once in motion, the rest is history!
The adtech ecosystem hasn’t always been easy for publishers to navigate. Managing complexity around data privacy, dealing with opaque fees, and working around anti-competitive behavior has become standard operating procedure. And 2021 brought no relief with more change than ever introduced into the ecosystem.
Big players have caused big waves
Last year, publishers had to deal with Apple implementing their ATT framework under iOS 14.5, which changed the way apps collected data about end-users and shared it with other companies for tracking purposes. This major move had a strong impact on IDFA tracking. It resulted in lower opt-in rates, less ability to serve personalized ads, and a shift in spending from iOS to Android where lower CPMs were available. All of this led to a decrease in revenue from iOS users.
Google followed with their announcement to postpone cookie deprecation after they were challenged by both the UK competition authority and GDPR to release their privacy sandbox. And, revenue was further impacted with European authorities taking a stronger approach to enforcing GDPR. We saw consent rates drop from 94% to 85% after the French data privacy authority (CNIL) required websites to ask users to accept or decline consent at the same level.
With each of these changes, publishers were forced to relinquish more control and adapt. In this climate of uncertainty, publishers are left questioning who they should trust. But that may be about to change.
The tipping point
As the industry awaits the resolution of ongoing legal battles—such as the Google antitrust lawsuit filed in Texas—we’re set to reach a tipping point. While any outcomes are impossible to anticipate, we can look to what’s happening in Europe for hints of what to expect.
Last year’s ruling by the French Anticompetitive Authority resulted in Google sharing a set of commitments focused on increased access to data and transparency. This opened the door for publishers to partly regain their choice of tech partners without compromising revenue. Google also agreed to a test run with a select group of French publishers to validate their commitments. These tests are currently underway and the proof points are expected to be released soon. This could provide additional confidence in the increased level of control they have promised. However, we will have to wait and see.
In addition, publishers have historically innovated to create solutions when faced with roadblocks. A perfect example is the evolution of header bidding as an industry standard in response to pain points imposed by Google. As publishers began looking for additional ways to make the most of their non-consented traffic last year, we saw new targeting solutions emerge. We expect these to become more widely adopted in the year ahead as they allow for even greater revenue and control over content, data, and audience relationships.
What’s a publisher to do?
There’s still a lot of uncertainty around what lies ahead when it comes to the industry as a whole. But those who are ready to embrace change have never been in a better position to thrive with all of the independent players and options available to help take ownership of first-party data or content, their most critical assets.
Curation is a great start for reducing reliance on a big tech walled garden. In addition to offering better brand safety, it streamlines the value chain through a more transparent deal process to offer enhanced accountability and efficiency. This means fewer intermediaries and fees. It also allows you to avoid data leakage and provides more control over your inventory through direct deals with buyers.
From there, another big step is protecting yourself from data leakage. By partnering with an independent SSP, you will be able to input first-party data in clean rooms. This safe and secure environment can serve as a basis for privacy-safe targeting with no risk of data leakage. And it can also be leveraged for audience extension and creating direct deals and PMPs. This way you will be able to leverage the full value of your first-party data and generate a new revenue stream.
Then, once you are ready to embrace large-scale change, the independent players can help you replace your full-stack to create your own private garden. This approach gives you full control of your data and revenue while opening the door for the creation of publisher networks or alliances to increase scale and better identify audiences. Independent providers can offer more innovation than the big tech player solutions. In instances where the walled gardens act as an adblocker and do not monetize non-consented traffic, an independent player allows you to provide buyers a path to targeting this traffic through performance and contextual targeting.
Change takes time. But, as the landscape finally begins evolving in their favor and more transparent solutions emerge, publishers are well-positioned to be in the driver’s seat as we enter this new era.
The last two years have been unpredictable for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. In 2020, Covid-19 and pandemic-induced shortages realigned consumer shopping behavior and caused marketers to pull or pause campaigns. These unprecedented changes had a cascading impact on publishers with millions of ad dollars lost and considerable resources exhausted to cater to the shifts.
Unfortunately, the coronavirus continued to wreak havoc on CPG well into 2021. The second half of the year — and the holiday period, in particular — was hurt by supply chain challenges. Long, unpredictable delivery times, and low inventory left brands and consumers scrambling. To complicate the situation even further, all of this occurred while overall consumer spending was on the rise, widening the gap between supply and demand.
As we embark on what is sure to be another challenging year, MediaRadar wants to understand market headwinds for publishers who rely on ad dollars from CPG brands. So, we looked at our U.S. data, and here’s what we found.
How did the CPG market shift in 2021?
As a result of the pandemic, online shopping for groceries and toiletries — staples of brick-and-mortar convenience stores and drug chains — has normalized. Significantly, an impressive 45% of consumers report shopping online for groceries. That trend will only continue, driven by convenience and safety on the consumer side.
“Ecommerce will be the key battleground for CPG brand growth over the coming years,” says Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at Zenith, and the numbers are bearing this prediction out. Another driver of increased online shopping is CPG brands getting into more direct online sales. Clorox, Nestle, Ocean Spray, and others are launching or investing in web-based DTC offerings amid the pandemic. These same CPGs are also increasing their social activations with live streaming and live shopping options in the U.S., to build direct relationships with a growing cohort of online shoppers.
Where are the ad dollars going?
With more CPG brands shifting focus to ecommerce sales versus brick-and-mortar channels, our analysis reveals that ad spend is following. Comparing media spend in 2019 to 2021 through November, here is what we saw:
Print spending is down by over half (53%), totaling $970 million in 2021 versus 2.08 billion in 2019. TV is also down by 16%. Spend totals topped $3.1 billion in 2021 compared to roughly $3.7 billion in 2019.
Digital, however, grew like gangbusters and is up an eye-popping 742% over the last two years. Spending last year approached $1.6 billion ($1.59 billion) while 2019 saw investments sit at just $189 million. The growth speaks to changing strategies for CPGs, who are investing more and more in online sales.
CPG ad spend has fallen
Even with the exploding online spend, CPG ad spend has steadily decreased since 2019, and is now down 6%. Digging deeper, we see that 2021 CPG ad spend is down ~1% from 2020 to $5.7 billion, while 2020 dropped 5% from the previous, pre-COVID year. Pandemic-driven sensitivities and supply chain challenges are likely the causes of this downshift, as advertising adjusts to stay in line with available supply — or adapts to mitigate shortages.
Unsurprisingly, TV stays on top
Overall, spendings on TV ads still tops other media and remains hugely popular among CPGs for brand lift. Even as consumers spent more time with entertainment apps, TV still owned 55% of all ad spend in 2021 at $3.1 billion. However, digital overtook print as the second most popular medium, with spend at $1.6 billion.
Changes in monthly ad spending
Note the month-to-month changes as there were decreases with ad spend in February (-16%) and November (-18%) and increases in April (+16%) and May (+13%) as a result of CPG companies reacting to supply chain challenges and leveraging data to react to consumers’ needs.
The top CPG advertisers
According to our analysis over the last three years, the number of CPG advertisers grew annually: 9,329 in 2019; 9,666 in 2020; 12,300 in 2021. This rise was due, in part, to companies who didn’t advertise previously starting to advertising in 2021. (Such as Beautcella offering DERM iNSTITUTE and The Naked Bee.)
Top spenders remained unchanged from pre-pandemic all the way through 2021: L’Oreal, The Hershey Co, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever. These companies account for more than a quarter (28%) of the overall 2021 category spend. While each brand’s total spend is down YoY, they all experienced growth in digital. L’Oreal, Hershey and Unilever saw increased digital advertising more than 100% YoY. With each, we witnessed large video and Facebook buys adjusting to consumer buying patterns.
What’s next for CPG in 2022?
We believe that CPG companies will continue to reshape portfolios with DTC offerings and investment. They’ll also continue to zero in on health-conscious lines to support changing consumer demands. Ad spend distribution will likely shift in tandem, with more budget allocated to digital and social media. To win those open web dollars and compete with the walled gardens of Meta, Google, Snapchat, Pinterest, and TikTok, publishers should emphasize in-demand formats like video and OTT. As livestreaming continues to grow, advertisers are reconsidering how they can approach their marketing efforts through this medium to help create brand awareness and increase sales.
Overall, there have been many changes within the CPG advertising space. These include navigating external factors like supply chain issues as well as a changing marketplace. Ecommerce and digital advertising are a necessity within this space as consumers shop online more than ever before. While top CPG advertisers remain the same as in previous years, their tactics are shifting. Publishers need to keep a close eye on these trends to understand how to best serve the changing needs of these potential advertisers.
Online news organizations have had a rough go of swaying audience behavior. First you had to get them to click. Then you had to convince them to stay. Now you have to keep them coming back. And with any luck, they’ll tell you who they are while they hang out. But the question that needs to be answered to get them past any of these thresholds is: Why should they?
The biggest barrier in converting anonymous users to known community members isn’t a reluctance to hand over data. Because despite waning trust in Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018, social media platform still counted 1.93 billion daily active users in its third quarter of 2021. Elsewhere, a study conducted by data privacy company Entrust shows that almost 64% of consumers are quite willing to let companies know who they are if they feel they’re going to get “relevant, personalized, and convenient services” out of it.
Experience matters
There’s the rub: relevance, personalization, and convenience. Relevance can cut both ways. It can be about the content you produce, but it’s also about the interactive environment you create and how essential it is for your user base to get the most out of your platform. Personalization can be a provision for registration. (If you sign up, we’ll make sure you only see the things that interest you.) Convenience is about having fewer hoops to jump through to get to the things you’re interested in. All three are experiential conditions.
So, what does it look like to provide an experience that leads to registrations? First, tackle convenience with a simple sign-up process. Then, start hosting engaging, community-led features on your owned platform that make sense not just for the content you produce, but for the types of interactions people want to have around that content.
A perfect example is The Independent, the national U.K. publication that went fully digital in 2016. It implemented different engagement solutions, including live blogs for breaking news, live AMA series on current events, and automated comment moderation. One popular AMA series is hosted by travel correspondent Simon Calder, who answers questions about ever-changing travel restrictions due to Covid-19. Part of a recent strategy was to make the UI of their engagement solutions simpler for users.
Otherwise, users who want to participate in any discussion on The Independent’s platform have to sign up, and boy, have they ever! Over 12 months, The Independent reported a 100% increase in registrations, with over 2,000 monthly registrations driven just by the comments section. The newspaper attributes 1 million article views from AMA content, and reports 15 times more time spent on the site after a user registers.
Gametime
Meantime, the Philadelphia Inquirer ushered in Gameday Central in September 2021. Its goal is to create excitement around Philadelphia Eagles games. From the Gameday Central hub on the Inquirer’s website, viewers can watch a live pre-game video that’s also streamed on social media. During a game, users can interact on the Inquirer’s platform with a live blog, polls, comments and pinned comments. Managing editor of sports Michael Huang recently told Digiday that Gameday Central has attracted thousands of users.
It’s not surprising that a major sporting event would attract this much attention. But what’s interesting is that the Inquirer combined several experiences at once to keep users hooked.
Engaging solutions
Our own research shows that it only takes a few engagement solutions to make your users spend more time on your website, and when they do that, they’re 25.4 times more likely to register. Features like sharebars, email notifications, trending carousels, and personalized newsfeeds generate more page views and considerably increase dwell times. In fact, a user that clicks on a personalized newsfeed profile spends on average 42 minutes more per month on a news website than an anonymous user.
It also can’t be understated just how significant a well moderated comments section can be, because when it’s safe and generates civil discussions, even users who don’t necessarily contribute will spend time reading the comments. When we culled the data from 5 of our media clients, we found that both registered and unregistered users spent an average of over 1.6 million minutes in the comments.
So, you can try to convince your audience verbally that registering is a good idea, or you can incentivize them with a rich experience they won’t want to miss out on. A live blog during a major sporting event, an AMA about a hugely unpopular policy: these are things people are talking about on social media already. What if they were talking about it on your troll-free platform instead?
It was a fourth quarter to remember…and a fourth quarter to forget. The main reason to remember is so other Q4s will look positively luminous in comparison. I’m not just talking about the wrath of Omicron, which ruined holidays for countless families and continues to cause illness, death, and emotional distress across the globe. I’m talking about an alarming rise in malvertising that endangers publisher revenue and consumers’ online safety.
As publishers struggle more than ever to balance user experience and monetization, the perils of the open programmatic marketplace require higher levels of vigilance, lest audiences be lost in a storm of malware. Let’s explore the factors behind the rise in malvertising and what publishers can do to combat its impact.
Malware incidents on the rise
While malvertising typically subsides in the fourth quarter with higher inventory prices, Q4 2021 malware levels were disturbingly high.
In the digital ecosystem, The Media Trust detected a 64% increase in malware incidents during the final quarter of 2021 — which can account for thousands of impressions or hits — as compared to the same time period in 2020. And 2020 levels were already high as the programmatic marketplace struggled to snap back during the early days of the pandemic.
Malvertising levels this high at the end of the year are unusual. It typically subsides a bit in the fourth quarter. Because increased advertiser demand enables publishers to increase CPMs and raise programmatic floors most malvertisers are priced out of the market.
However, Q4 2021’s record malware numbers weren’t the result of a few blanket attacks. The industry was assaulted by a wide variety of malicious code and content:
Redirects peaked in October, growing 170% over the course of the year.
In November, Digital media was awash in FizzCore, a notorious form of malicious clickbait that employs cloaking technology to hide its devious content. The amount of FizzCore detected grew 9X over two months.
An outbreak of fake antivirus/software update ads also hit hard in November, marking a 50% rise since the beginning of the year.
E-skimming typically increases in Q4 as bad actors hunt for consumer credit cards, but the amount detected in Q4 2021 was 63% higher than the year prior.
Scam ads, which surged in 2021 and made up nearly a third of malware in the space, stayed high and ticked up an extra 9% in December — nearly exceeding the summer peak.
A most malicious year
While 2020 saw a surge in malvertising caused by advertisers’ pandemic pullback, the amount of malware in the digital ecosystem in 2021 has been dramatically higher.
Unfortunately, these numbers are representative of 2021 as whole, where malware simply exploded. The Media Trust’s Digital Security and Operations team managed an average 2,210 malware incidents daily. That’s a 64% increase over 2020 and well above the ~1,000 historical average. During the summer — the height of the 2021 malware blitz — average daily malware incidents stayed above 3,000.
Overall, The Media Trust identified 26,664 new malware incidents in 2021, a ~30% increase over the number cataloged in 2020. And our creative blocker, Media Filter, halted four times more malware than in the year prior.
The proliferation of malvertising is simply breathtaking.
What’s behind the rise in malvertising
Certainly the 2020 surge in malvertising followed advertisers’ pause in spend; bad ads flooded the programmatic advertising space as publishers lowered floors to grab whatever revenue they could. But even as the pandemic drags on and on, programmatic markets seem to have rebounded. So, what’s behind this incredible 2021 surge in malware?
First, from a programming perspective, the malvertising barrier to entry is very low. The dark web is full of malware kits for sale including turnkey phishing solutions and the ever-popular ransomware-as-a-service. There’s a whole black market ecosystem for selling pilfered data and access to infected devices — and often no legal repercussions for bad actors (though there were some impressive arrests in 2021).
Secondly, research from eMarketer found that private marketplaces account for more RTB spend than the open programmatic marketplace. With $15.4 billion in advertiser spend in 2021, private marketplaces made up 56% of all RTB-transacted dollars. The open marketplace sat at $12.3 billion and had a 44% share.
According to eMarketer, the shift to private marketplaces is only going to accelerate in 2022. Spend is predicted to increase another 21% and make up 59% of all RTB spending. However, the open marketplace will only grow 5% and dwindle to a 41% share of RTB spend.
We also see premium advertisers are investing heavily in connected TV (CTV) — although they’re struggling with campaign measurement — direct, and programmatic. These advertisers shifting their buying power away from the open marketplace is likely depressing CPMs. It is also making more room for bad actors to spread a variety of malicious wares.
Is it time to give up on open programmatic?
So, if the open marketplace is suffering from a rapidly growing malware infestation, am I suggesting publishers turn off their open programmatic pipes post-haste? Heavens, no! That’s not really an option for most digital publishers. Can you imagine the amount of revenue left on the table? All the unfilled inventory?
It’s obvious why private marketplaces are increasingly attracting advertiser dollars: high viewability, actually engaged human beings rather than bots, and impressions on well-respected publications. We’ll see top-tier publishers layering in high-impact audience segments that will likely outperform third-party cookies.
But the challenge with private marketplaces has always been getting them to scale. I still hear publishers lament long-lingering Deal IDs with laughable fill rates. Truly getting private marketplaces to hum requires time and resources, something many publishers in the “fat middle” struggle with.
Premium advertisers will keep buying in the open market. This may be to cherry-pick super-cheap inventory on premium publishers or for prospecting purposes. Smaller advertisers may find it easier to reach target audiences across a wider crop of publishers. Publishers also use the open marketplace to find new advertiser prospects and evaluate the market value of various types of inventory and audience segments.
Your best defense against malvertisers is high quality data
The open programmatic marketplace may be getting seedier but diligent publishers can still drive a ton of revenue. It’s just going to take more work to keep audiences safe from all the fraudsters spread across the programmatic pipes.
Having a page/app-level creative blocker to bat away malware before it hits your property is table stakes. But with this massive expansion of malware in open programmatic, the quality of data fueling your blocker is more important than ever. Publishers can’t go cut-rate. Their ad-quality provider should be pumping data into the blocker in real-time from an in-house team of malware analysts. Third-party malware data isn’t going to be fresh enough. It may also lead to revenue-bleeding false positives.
And finally, publishers need to be a lot more discriminating when it comes to their open marketplace partners — and by extension, those partners’ partners. Especially during the pandemic, publishers have been willing to install most demand sources that might give them an edge with bid density. But open programmatic is getting too dangerous to be carefree about the companies you monetize with. Ensure all your demand partners are scrutinizing both tags and landing pages (preferably from a variety of device and geographic profiles). And if a high percentage of the ads they bring you get shot down by your malware blocker, maybe they’re not the right fit for you.
Open programmatic is definitely becoming a more dangerous place for monetization. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the revenue. With the right tools and policies, publishers can make bank — and keep their audiences safe and happy.
Americans spend nearly 8 hours a day on digital devices, according to a new report from eMarketer. Yes, that means time spent on devices now rivals how long people sleep. However, according to Harvard Business Review, for consumers to be affected by advertising messages, they need to be paying attention. This may seem obvious but capturing consumer attention can be challenging.
User attention has become more fleeting in the internet age. A Microsoft study states that the human attention span has dropped to just 8 seconds – shrinking 25% in just a few years. With users seeing thousands of ads per day, and privacy changes affecting how we measure performance, how can the industry determine whether an ad was seen by someone who is actually paying attention?
The opportunity in attention measurement
The rise of the internet set up the reach and quality metrics that everyone is familiar with today, but a lot has changed since then. In pursuit of optimal performance, advertisers gained interest in additional ways to measure and categorize impressions using brand suitability, contextual relevance, viewability and fraud. While these metrics have improved advertising performance immensely, none of them effectively measure attention.
Specific, industry-accepted metrics to measure attention are still being defined. They are also impacted by increased pressure to ensure privacy-friendly measurement. Some solutions rely on eye tracking and other technologies that are based on sampling.
Pay attention to measurement criteria
Our approach to attention measurement is a more complex endeavor that includes a combination of over 50 exposure and engagement signals that help us understand whether a user’s attention is or isn’t captured by an ad. Exposure signals include an ad’s entire presentation, such as viewable time, share of screen, audibility and more. The engagement side focuses on user-initiated events while the ad creative is displayed, including user touches, screen orientation, video playback and volume control, among others. These signals give advertisers and publishers helpful information about ad performance for both campaign and inventory optimization.
Rising use of attention metrics comes at a time when performance is getting harder to measure directly due to privacy changes across the industry. Behavioral targeting enabled by third-party cookies is giving way to other methods for measuring ad performance. For many advertisers, combining attention and quality metrics is a way to utilize new KPIs that can effectively improve performance over time.
People have grown increasingly savvy, avoiding or ignoring intrusive and non-relevant ad placements, so publishers and marketers must evolve to improve experiences and performance. Attention is a way to use privacy-friendly data to measure ad impact without using third-party cookies to track or measure data from the user.
How publishers benefit from analyzing attention
These insights enable more effective media buying, but how can publishers better understand attention as it relates to their inventory? First, we need to understand how attention is measured.
Attention is understood through a mix of exposure and engagement. Exposure is measured by looking at how long an ad was viewed by a user, how it was presented and what share of the screen did the ad take up. Engagement is measured by checking if a user is present and looking at whether they interacted with the ad. This includes actions such as clicks, hovers, volume adjustments, screen orientation, etc.
Key attention themes to watch for in 2022
Exposure: Brand awareness can be driven by measuring exposure to better understand how insights such as time-in-view, share of screen or quartile completion correlate with brand favorability and recall improvements over time.
Engagement: Metrics such as hover, click and mute rates show how optimized engagement can directly lead to increased conversions.
Cost-Benefit: Publishers that use attention to increase ad engagement can demand higher pricing from existing placements.
Understand Creative Impact: Advertisers can begin building better creatives based on knowing when and where to place messaging for maximum impact.
Analyzing attention gives publishers an opportunity to better understand how to package premium inventory in new ways. Advertisers value the increased conversions and brand awareness that comes with placements that result in higher attention rates. Similar to packaging inventory based on quality, this inventory can garner higher CPMs. With the right analytical tech stack, attention measurement enables publishers to understand their inventory in new ways, helping to drive yield.
It’s still early days for attention measurement, but signs are growing that it’s here to stay. Like any new set of metrics, the industry must come together to agree on standards that allow for interoperability and simple communication between buyers and sellers. Ultimately, it’s important to remember that attention is a way to better understand users and the impact of advertising, which is why the industry must evolve alongside new behaviors with the help of new data and analysis.
In May 1961, President John F Kennedy declared that America would put a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth and his vision took the world to new heights. Sixty thousand companies in 70 countries invented five million parts and 400,000 of the world’s greatest minds collaborated to achieve a giant leap for mankind. That’s what you call a moonshot.
There is a rising groundswell that the time is now right for a Media Moonshot: one that recasts the industry to blend trust with technology and a new commercial model that can last. The good news is that for those willing to embrace change, it’s not that hard.
A billion dollar opportunity
I have spent the past 15 years working in premium publisher video. I believe a relevant video in the right place in the right article lifts the quality of reporting, and improves the news experience for readers. This is now being recognized by ad agencies who are increasing spend in this sector.
To measure this, we at Oovvuu have been working with the Tribune Content Agency over the past year to match videos to articles from hundreds from America’s largest publishers. Those articles are read 93 billion times a month. Significantly, our data showed only 7% featured video, even when it was available.
Unfortunately, just 1% of the videos that were embedded were relevant. And, unfortunately, the least relevant videos of all were the most likely to be autoplay and contain low yielding bottom of the funnel programmatic advertising. However, our research showed that putting the contextual videos in priority positions, and making them click to play, was popular with news consumers and advertisers who would pay premium CPMs.
We used journalists, along with our own matching tech, with 100 global wires and broadcasters in the TCA project to ensure the highest levels of contextuality. The evidence was compelling according to Wayne Lown, Vice President of Tribune Content Agency, part of Tribune Publishing.
The Tribune News Service syndicates hundreds of daily articles read by millions and across the most trusted brands from Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post, St. Louis Post Dispatch, and Chicago Tribune.
“We were able to match 86% of articles in the Tribune News Service with relevant video across news, sport, lifestyle and multiple other genres,” Lown said. “It proved relevant video was there and could be simply matched, revealing a major new revenue stream for publishers who get it right.”
A timely solution
Display advertising is in freefall and subscriptions nearing saturation. The good news is that premium video – which fetches $40 CPMs – offers a way to capitalize on billions of page views and reset publishers’ earnings.
Last month, the world’s largest ad agency GroupM released a report that showed global ad spend was predicted to exceed $1 trillion in 2025. Of that, premium video will account for 19.6% of spend in 2022.
Mark Lollback who served GroupM CEO in Australia and New Zealand before joining Oovvuu believes that “Publishers are perfectly placed as they have massive engaged audiences. And the big global agency groups are openly talking about supporting publishing.”
At the same time, he pointed out that the biggest spending brands are looking for trusted locations for their messaging. Premium publisher video opens a whole new marketing channel for them, but it needs to be done right.
“Publisher video must be click to play, sound on, highly contextual and get premium positions in premium brands. When it does, it taps into users’ attention and delivers the high performance metrics that marketers are demanding,” according to Lollback.
He recently presented research to the IAB showing publisher video delivered double digit performance boosts compared to YouTube on viewability, completion rates and click throughs.
Publishers must act now
The benefits to publishers to grow revenue couldn’t be clearer. Unfortunately, 99% of US articles today feature machine-matched autoplay video with low relevance that attracts low yielding programmatic $7 CPMs. However, The TCA trial has proven that relevant video is available for 86% of articles and premium pre-rolls command $40 CPMs when they are click to play, sound on and highly contextual.
Autoplay should now be outmoded by the smart publishers so they can tap into the opportunity to shift ad spend from YouTube back to publishing. That is the Media Moonshot
Undoubtedly, the emergence of large video syndicators, powerful matching technologies and premium advertising support means it will play an increasingly important role in publisher earnings going forward. The good news is that publishers who do this will be poised to meet customer demand for video, increase engagement and performance metrics across their sites and open access to the largest premium advertising budgets on offer.
The pandemic era has altered consumer behavior like never before. With lockdown restrictions mandating stay-at-home orders and closing physical stores, every company — big and small — had to rethink its customer engagement strategies. This digital transformation and the mobile shift were quicker than expected. But consumers’ expectations have also radically changed in that time frame.
In an instant, consumers wanted brands to offer an enhanced user experience, especially when it came to mobile usage and ecommerce. To meet this demand, they expect companies to know who they are, what they like, and everything in between, regardless of which channel they came from. This anticipation of a more value-added exchange will only continue to rise. It’s therefore paramount that brands are ready to deliver a more personalized experience — and that publishers are empowered to help them deliver.
Start with first-party data
With first-party data, a more personalized experience can become a reality. The average buyer is becoming increasingly aware of how companies collect and use their personal data. However, they’re also demanding the highest level of privacy and security. And this trust is crucial in maintaining customer loyalty and retention.
When deciding on which brand to choose, 55% of consumers say trustworthiness and transparency are the most critical factor. Finding the sweet spot between convenience and privacy is therefore important to nurturing that relationship for a long-term future. After all, 48% of consumers appreciate the convenience of personalization as long as their data isn’t compromised.
We know that third-party cookies and comprehensive third-party data collection will most likely become obsolete. As a result, the businesses that invest and implement first-party data strategies will stay ahead of the pack.
But this isn’t necessarily straightforward. The average person touches their smartphone 2,617 times a day. They switch between an average of three devices to finish a task. And, 86% of shoppers regularly hop between two channels. However, with data silos and poor infrastructure, the necessary context to bridge these channels and build a more complete picture is missing.
Personalization for omnichannel experiences
Fuelled by the pandemic, omnichannel shopping grew by 50% in 2020. This means that consumers have become more savvy about where and how they shop online than ever before.
Nielsen also found that consumers use online channels to purchase goods, research and identify physical stores. When examining levels of engagement across channels, 56% of online shoppers put careful consideration into each purchase at the point of sale in September 2020, compared with 51% of brick-and-mortar shoppers. In addition, the average buyer is now more used to going between the physical and digital world.
Consumers now expect a seamless transition across every touchpoint they have with a company. Therefore, prioritising creation of an omnichannel experience will help increase overall ROI. This is especially true when behavioral data is used. Behavioural data provides a more personalized experience online and offline, as well as giving a boost to brand loyalty and engagement. By tracking online data and leveraging it across all channels, a better user experience is entirely possible.
Enter data management platforms
In an increasingly privacy-driven and restrictive data collection environment, the proper data infrastructure can supercharge a company’s first-party data, all while staying privacy compliant.
This is where marketing needs to get deeper into single properties. For example, richer, more granular profiles for audience targeting allows for better personalization. So often, when we do a data interview with customers at 1plusX, we realize that typically they only have robust, deterministic data or attributes that are targetable for a fraction of their use. A data infrastructure with intelligent AI and predictive capabilities can enable brands to enrich and enhance their first-party data.
By expanding their dataset, companies can better personalize services and experiences. They can offer better advertising. They can understand which user might want a subscription or be more inclined to add a product to the cart. This behavior then feeds back to brands to better understand their customers. These data insights will prove valuable to optimize and enhance their marketing efforts.
Prioritizing personalization for the future
When companies use a data management platform that puts the control of user data in their own hands, they empower the consumer. This helps build the trust and transparency needed to maintain loyalty and engagement.
As a result, companies that can bring a more personalized experience to their customers without compromising privacy will thrive. Those that don’t will inevitably fall behind.
Digital publishers may want to move to a model that relies on subscription content and direct consumer revenue. However, advertising remains a critical piece of the media revenue equation because it supports consumer access to freely available content – a critical lifeline to information. The last few years have been particularly difficult for digital publishers reliant on advertising, between media budgets getting cut at the start of the pandemic to brands pulling back their spend during our nation’s recent political tumult. According to Pew,digital ad revenue declined 32% in 2020.
User privacy laws serve a huge benefit to consumers, but they represent another significant challenge for digital publishers because brands have become accustomed to buying cookied audiences with increasingly detailed targeting. As users opt-out of cookies on publisher sites, prices for their inventory have plummeted. And brands have moved spend to User Generated Content (UGC) platforms such as Facebook, where user privacy is not a constraint due to the scale of users who have opted in to allow unbridled tracking in exchange for access to their personal network.
Consumers may pay with their privacy. But these placements don’t come cheap for buyers either. One study estimates that you’ll pay a $3.12 CPM for Google Display Ads vs. $8.60 for Facebook Ads.
Feasibility of maintaining addressability
Digital publishers have been trying to find ways to recapture user identities and extrapolate audiences based on the remaining addressable audience through technologies such as Universal ID, Google Floc and by capturing and passing first-party data. However, many of these tactics run the risk of degrading user trust. And the users who can still be targeted with cookies are expected to be of diminishing value. At best, these efforts stave off the inevitable for a time. But if digital publishers are going to survive, they will have to find new ways to make their inventory attractive to brands.
Capitalize on publisher’s audience insights
Digital publishers who have invested in building a deep understanding of their audience should be able to capitalize on what they do best: creating relevant content with integrity. They can use their expertise to help brands connect based on what an audience cares about rather than using the false precision of demographic targeting as a proxy for buying intent.Private marketplace deals are a great way to reframe a conversation with a brand in terms of what differentiates the audience of a particular publisher which is why PMPs have surpassed open RTB spend because they enable publishers to make specific inventory available to specific buyers based on content/brand alignment.
Leverage data science
To demonstrate the value of their inventory, publishers will need industry-level data science to show connections between product interests and content affinity. They will also need technology that allows them to guarantee brand outcomes on non-addressable campaigns.
Yieldmo currently uses data science models to target campaigns at impressions most likely to meet an advertiser objective (i.e., click-through, video completion, etc.), and the IAB Tech Lab’s Audience Taxonomy has space to capture and pass purchase intent (i.e. is a car intended for the person watching car videos). If a publisher has access to scaled research to show how consumption of specific content relates to product interest and conversion, they can tell the full story.
Earning audience trust
When a user trusts a publisher’s content, they will view their in-context ad experience as trustworthy and relevant, which should be exciting to brands. If brands seek out publishers and content that align with the brand’s values, their message is amplified.
Beyond reach
Publishers will need to produce new metrics around their creators and content. Today brands evaluate UGC based on reach (i.e. social follows and unique impressions). Instead, publishers should bring forward how the audience feels about the content and creator as these impact how the brand’s message is received.
What brands can you amplify
Brands waste a lot of cycles on brand safety strategies to avoid content that could lead to a negative association with their brand. Instead, they should be seeking out opportunities for adjacency to content that will create a positive association with their brand or product. Audiences who feel their privacy has been respected are more open, and audiences consuming content that engages them will be more engaged with adjacent messaging.
Social dysfunction
Cookies and granularly-targeted social ads appeal to buyers because they seems like an obvious solution to reach a specific audience. However, the impression is arguably less valuable because users encounter the ad in a busy environment that kind of stresses them out. Like so many things on social, once you dig beneath the surface, the reality leaves much to be desired.
If brands weigh the “influence” of a social following against the influence of a trusted context, they will probably make a different buying decision. So, for media companies to continue to deliver value to readers tomorrow, they must evolve by making their content more attractive to brands within the trusted environments they’ve curated.
Premium value proposition
To effectively present their inventory and get the best price, here are some things to try:
Identify and build relationships with brands who will get the greatest benefit from with your content.
Package your content into PMPs that will support specific brand objectives and make it clear in your pitch.
Sell based on the strength of your audience.
Share page analytics and social listening metrics with your buyers.
Use data science to find relationships between the content you publish and other user interests.
Find a tech partner that enables you to target desired behaviors and advertiser KPIs.
Realistically, publishers can’t compete with the social juggernauts on low level targeting. Therefore, they will need to win on the basis of their unique audience insights and user trust. I’m excited to see publishers create new strategies and leverage data science for better brand outcomes — and better revenue.
About the author
Elizabeth Petro joined Yieldmo as Vice President of Publisher Products in June. She is currently focused on helping publishers thrive in the transition to user privacy by enabling publishers to curate their inventory for the best-suited buyers and by giving them more insights and control. She has also held leadership positions at Pandora and Razorfish.
During this season of giving, gift cards and gift subscriptions have made sharing what you love easy and rewarding for givers, receivers, and digital media companies alike. This is important because today there are over 200 streaming subscriptions available for consumers—a daunting number of options that can lead to decision fatigue.
On top of that, the average consumer spends about $273 per month on subscriptions according to a recent study about America’s relationship with subscription services. (In fact, after internet and phone connections, streaming and digital content subscriptions make up the next largest categories.)
In the crowded — and competitive — digital subscription market, you need proven ways to stand out and retain more users.
Gifts that keep giving
Gift cards are an easy, reliable way to give someone a subscription to try out your service. For starters, offering gift cards enables your existing customers to share their favorite and vetted subscriptions with friends and family members. Also, gift cards are branded and can be used only at the issuer’s site. This removes choice paradox for receivers, replacing decision fatigue with a positive and trusted experience.
According to Digital Commerce 360, digital gift card sales increased 100% during December 2020. Gift cards proved effective at helping businesses like restaurants, nail salons, and more stay afloat during the pandemic.
Notable brands offering subscription gift cards include The Wall Street Journal, Netflix, Spotify, Roblox, and Twitch. When used on top of discounts, gift cards provide consumers with an extra incentive to purchase.
The gift card conundrum
Automatic renewals are standard operating procedure for most subscription services. However, gift cards contain limited funds. While it may seem counterintuitive, limited funds encourage trial and adoption by providing just enough to get a taste of the experience. Controlling the sampling experience and how much the user is allowed to spend can actually help subscription brands entice users to stay engaged longer.
This was the intent of paywalls—a common tactic media companies use to provoke signup. What many paywall designers fail to realize is that the snippet of content usually available for 5 seconds is not enough to entice potential subscribers to subscribe. Particularly if the only perceived value in the moment is to read that article. More often, paywalls cause potential subscribers to become annoyed and exit. Unfortunately, that makes this interaction nothing more than a web impression with no way for the media subscription to reach out to the reader and re-engage them. Overall, that’s pretty ineffective at converting the reader into a subscriber.
Gift cards, like free trials but more effective, can inspire loyalty. First, a gift card removes the burden of making a decision, since the giver already made that important choice. Second,with a gift card, someone can sample the full subscriber experience, rather than a more limited trial. A recent study by InComm Prepaid Trends found that 85% of people who’ve received a gift card would likely go back to that brand and become a long-term customer.
Cash, but better
For a digital subscription, issuing gift cards is like printing cash. By offering a distinct and universal way to pay, digital media companies can reach more customers. Consumers also get the flexibility to use a gift card instead of signing up for monthly billing.
Can a company print too many gift cards? Is this like a country printing money and causing inflation? The answer is no, because the funds in gift cards are scanned and activated at the time of purchase. So, companies do not lose potential revenue if they print more than what is sold. When a consumer redeems a gift card, your billing platform recognizes the revenue, and the full value of the gift card purchase goes directly to your company.
See the tall stand of gift cards by almost every cash register in your grocery stores? Brands of all kinds leverage gift cards to collect revenue from physical storefronts and to facilitate the gift-giving purchase behavior specifically nurtured by physical retailers. Yes, most subscription gift cards are valid for digital experiences. However, offering them in-store ties them to real world experiences.
The bottom line: Gift cards are not merely another way to pay for media subscriptions. They give existing customers a way to support and share the brands they love, and in return, provide digital media companies with valuable new subscribers.
To succeed with this model, choose a subscription billing platform that combines the best of both worlds: gift subscriptions and gift cards. If you are looking to get in on the seasonal shopping boom — and add another inroad to building your potential subscriber base — it’s time to give gift cards a look this holiday season … and all year long.
Seems like everyone is a podcaster these days. There are millionaire teens on TikTok and it seems like every yoga instructor has a million subscribers on their YouTube channel. You see big media companies rejoicing about their fan following on Spotify, YouTube etc.
These platforms share their audience, advertising revenue, and subscriptions revenue with the original content creators. They allow publishers and creators to grow their following and create their fiefdom of anonymous fans. Most of these platforms have started accepting voluntary contributions and passing back a portion of the contribution to the creator. Twitter calls it Tipjar, YouTube calls it Applause, Twitch has Cheer, TikTok has Gifts. However, this fiefdom is limited within the walled gardens of the platform. There is absolutely no way for a publisher or creator to port over their fans to another platform or build an email relationship with the platform’s audience.
The winner-take-all dynamics are just as prevalent on these platforms. Very few pieces of original content will garner outsized views or listens, enough to justify significant monthly payouts. Having spoken to 100s of creators and media companies, we have learned that the platform payouts and terms of revenue are riddled with opaqueness. It’s just like how Heinz (analogous to original content creator) does not have any control over their revenue terms with Walmart (analogous to platform). For most creators their primary source of income is actually through sponsorships; either as influencer marketing campaigns, podcast readouts, or mid-roll video placements.
Relationship business
In all of the above scenarios the original content creator does not own a direct relationship with the platform’s audience but rather with a non-traceable user of the platform. Some creators try to link-out from these platforms in an effort to build a direct relationship with the user and start building a reader revenue stream.
Some of the most common Link-In Bio companies like Linktree (Linktr.ee), Later (Linkin.bio) or Buy Me A Coffee provide a landing area for creators to start building a direct reader revenue relationship. On the flip side, almost all platforms curb the use of external links primarily to restrict monetization inside the walled gardens of the platform. Instagram for example does not allow web-links in posts. Creators can have only one link in their Instagram bio. In late 2017, YouTube tightened rules around videos with external links.
In the context of audio and video content, few publishers and creators have dared to branch out and go direct-to-consumer (D2C). Beyond plugging in standard advertising revenue options through various ad-networks, the D2C decision hinges on sustainable reader revenue potential. This has intensified in light of the ongoing regulatory discussion around solving for “dark patterns” or subscription traps. Globally, regulators (Federal Trade Commission in the US; Competition & Markets Authority in the UK; Reserve Bank of India in India) are revising consumer protection policies around recurring payments and mandating subscription renewal reminders with one-click cancellation options.
The business of engagement
This would bring mayhem for direct-to-consumer publishers and creators whose subscriber base is filled with zombie subscribers. Almost half of U.S. podcast listeners are lighter, casual users who listen to less than 3 episodes (across podcasters) in a month. This raises concern over their propensity to subscribe to a paid podcast subscription. A recent study by Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center shows that:
49% of digital subscribers do not access their paid subscriptions even once
54% have accessed their paid subscriptions just once in one month
Given the regulatory headwinds, it is becoming crucial for publishers to diversify reader revenue sources beyond all-you-can-eat subscriptions. One of the top five reasons subscribers cancel their subscriptions is because of the inability to consume all the content their subscription offers. So, while reader revenue is on everyone’s mind, subscription alone will not suffice. Unbundling audio and video for pay-per-content requires sophisticated technology.
Every publisher and creator with quality audio or video content starts off with piggybacking on platforms. They consider sponsorships as their main source of revenue. But the moment of truth comes when the sponsorship gravy train stops and platform revenues do not add up compared to the cost of production for quality audio and video. That’s when a clear direct-to-consumer and reader revenue strategy takes its rightful place in the limelight.
About the author
Abhishek is a Co-founder & CEO of Fewcents, fintech-for-publishers, that brings incremental reader revenue from “Never-Subscribers.” He is a seasoned business leader and technology product manager. He has worked in management consulting with PwC and Altman Solon in Boston, USA before moving to Singapore permanently. In Singapore, he started his own venture, Shoffr, a digital marketing solution that provides online to offline attribution for digital marketers. In 2019, Abhishek sold Shoffr to Affle, a publicly listed ad-tech company in India. After solving the advertiser’s offline attribution problem, Abhishek has now set his eyes on solving the content monetization problem for online publishers.
Residual effects of the pandemic on consumers are driving many trends within the advertising and media operations industry. For companies with an advertising revenue stream, it is critical to evolve with these trends in order to better serve advertisers and prepare for 2022 and beyond.
Today’s consumers respond to deeper personalization and more nuanced marketing campaigns. So, to cater to these needs and evolving advertiser demands, media brands must adjust their strategies. From adopting performance-based offerings to enabling fully compliant data and integrating automation to streamline workflows for scalability, here are some of the top trends in media operations and advertising that media companies should be taking note of as we look ahead at 2022.
Adapting a performance mindset
While performance metrics have long been a part of the media buy, the way that they are viewed and the depth of their impact on media spends has rapidly shifted over the past two years. In the past, top-of-funnel metrics like brand awareness and views were center stage. Now, the industry is taking a deeper look to correlate media buys with bottom of funnel metrics like pipeline scale and sales growth.
As a result, the pressure is on for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ad spending. This, in turn, is driving more publishers and media streaming brands to look at and present their media offerings in a more performance-driven way. This may seem like an unwelcome change. However, those that can connect their offerings to impacts on bottom funnel KPIs are sure to stabilize and scale revenue streams while ensuring higher rates of business renewal.
This shift just starting to take hold of the advertising and media industry. So, we are sure to see a rapid development of methodologies used by publishing and streaming media companies to connect their media buys to key performance metrics. One such strategy that has begun to emerge is the integration of first-party purchase intent data into media buy targeting.
Leveraging automation to manage scale
Advertising and media operations are becoming more complex and nuanced in the post-pandemic modern marketing landscape. As more sophisticated advertising emerges at scale within the media industry, so do the pain points that come along with streamlining processes like order-to-cash (OTC) to fulfill the needs of the industry and prepare for future growth. This is where we are seeing automation come into play.
For many media brands that rely on advertising as a revenue stream, the manual aspects of operational workflows have long been an issue when it comes to scalability. This rings particularly true within their order-to-cash processes. As the demand of the industry forces advertisers to adapt to growth and prepare for scale, many look to automation solutions to help streamline the redundant elements of their workflows. The goal is to optimize today and build for tomorrow. Meaning ensuring scalability, significantly reduce error rates, increasing ROI and, of course, free up internal teams to focus on other growth elements of the business.
This may seem like a daunting task to many publishers and streaming media brands. However, the rewards to be reaped by taking the time to enable automation into their processes are numerous. The shifts we have seen towards more complex and customized advertising won’t slow down anytime soon. In fact, they will become even more intricate and nuanced over time.
Automation solutions not only allow media brands to optimize for current business, but they allow organizations to be ready for growth. An agile solution will accommodate whatever the future of advertising and media operations has in store for the publishing and streaming industries.
Adapting data strategies to meet market demand
Constantly evolving data compliance regulations coupled with the privacy changes brought forth by Google and Apple are changing the way data is viewed and leveraged. These changes are especially prevalent within the publishing and streaming industries where leveraging customer data as a selling point is the standard.
To adapt, many marketing teams are leveraging customer data platforms (CDPs) to streamline their data collection and management across all of their data sources. Publishing and streaming companies need the ability to provide their advertising clients connectivity to data without oversharing or putting privacy at risk.
Some larger walled gardens have developed solutions for this via “CDP Adjacent” systems. However, we are still in the early days of developing an overarching solution for the wider publishing and streaming industries. The imminent demise of the cookie is a driving force towards building solutions. The development of data connectivity systems and similar technologies will allow companies to connect and match data sets in a controlled and privacy-compliant way.
The bottom line
The ever-evolving demands of the modern consumer market are a driving force for trends we are seeing across the advertising and media operations landscape. While these trends are not new concepts within the publishing and media streaming communities, the pace at which they accelerated certainly is.
It is imperative that brands investing in advertising as a revenue stream are not only watching these trends but reacting to them. Working to optimize their current processes, while building agile foundations to prepare for the future. Pivoting to a more performance-based models, integrating automations to streamline processes and developing more robust and data privacy compliant technologies will do just that.
