In kicking off the 2016 Digital Content Next members-only Summit, CEO Jason Kint set the tone for a year marked by customer-driven innovation and a trust-based digital content industry.
“I believe that our brands at DCN are in the best position to shape what is next for digital media. Why? What’s unique about our brands? Well, as you know: We are all content companies. To be a member of DCN, you have to be in the business of creating digital content. Importantly—very importantly—we’re also not tied to one specific revenue stream. We’re not just advertising. We have the ability to adapt, to evolve over time, to test out new models and flow with digital media…”
Watch Kint’s opening remarks from this private, members-only event held February 1-3, 2016 at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami Florida:
Ad blocking has forced the publishing industry to rethink its reliance on advertising, and several digital publishers have incorporated ecommerce and affiliate links as a way to diversify their revenue streams. Now, those same ecommerce links, previously considered immune to ad blockers, are the “latest unlikely casualty of ad blocking,” according to a recent article from Digiday.
While Purch’s ecommerce or facilitated ecommerce links haven’t been tangibly impacted, ad blocking – and this particular type – is forcing all publishers to rethink monetization strategy and user experience.
The Digiday article quotes Sean Blanchfield, CEO of PageFair, a startup that sells anti-ad blocking tech to publishers as stating, “There are no privacy or usability implications to e-commerce attribution; it is a simple practice that helps websites get paid for honest recommendations of products….it causes unnecessary financial damage to thousands of independent websites.”
There is a valid point here. The impetus behind ad blocking was to prevent disruption and irrelevant noise on a page so the user could focus on the content. Yet, unlike most ads, ecommerce links are often directly correlated to the content provided on the page – and in the best cases enhance the user’s experience. Ad blockers have gone too far with targeting these ecommerce links, but this doesn’t mean digital publishers should panic. It means they should pivot – diversifying even further and providing additional value to users.
Increase loyalty by improving the user experience Publishers should concentrate on building the lifetime value of a user (the total future potential) by exploring other ways to provide a better experience to keep them coming back. Creating valuable and relevant services, tools and content that serves the overall relationship is what will ultimately sustain the industry. Publishers who take a longer view by focusing on increasing the number of loyal users instead of increasing the number of page views and maximizing the yield of every interaction will not only end up winning against ad blockers; they will end up winning over users.
Some publishers are doing this in the most simplistic way – creating a highly-engaged and loyal audience by providing real value through highly specialized content. Focusing less on scale and more on quality can engage users for the long-term, while staying true to the sentiment behind “content is king.”
Another way to increase the lifetime value of a user is to design a loyalty program that recognizes and rewards the most engaged, frequent and long-term users, who often drive a large percentage of overall revenue. Some of the more experimental publishers may even offer an ad-free or ad-reduced experience to their most loyal users – or as an incentive to share their email address. This could persuade users to turn off ad blockers, especially as they become increasingly non-discriminative in discerning what’s true content and what’s not.
Engineer an ecosystem of services to regain control of audience interactions With ad blockers ultimately dictating how a user experiences a publisher’s site, we’re likely to see the industry test new ways to regain control of how their audiences are interacting with content. Publishers specializing in travel have also excelled at this. TripAdvisor, Kayak and Bookings.com offer reviews and advice to aid their users during the research phase and when the consumer is ready, they can book everything they need, all within the confines of a single site and in a way that is untouchable to ad blockers. This model is not only diverse, but also encourages loyalty by providing a truly “sticky” service to users.
Not all of this has to be built organically. Resourceful publishers will also look for complimentary technologies or services and integrate those with their sites – or their mobile apps. Mobile apps are also a great way to re-claim control over the user experience and how ecommerce links and ads are integrated. The best part? Ad blocking apps that block ads within mobile apps have been rejected by app stores which means publishers are likely to retain control of their mobile experiences for the foreseeable future.
The future of digital publishing Our peer group – the digital influencers coming up today – are likely to redefine the industry, and probably won’t even see ourselves as just “publishers” in the years to come as focus shifts to revenue augmentation through services and alternate models.
Unfortunately, it seems likely that 2016 will be an arms race between ad blockers and blockers of ad blockers. There will be no clear winner with one clear loser: the user. Users lose as ad blockers continue to take away the very control that attracted them to their tools in the first place. The important thing is to keep our focus on the customer relationship and move toward a future where a better user experience trumps short-term monetary gains.
Phil Barrett is a Digital Marketing and eCommerce Executive with experience managing cross-channel programs where he has helped companies and brands use technology and new media to drive measurable results across the marketing mix. He currently serves as Senior Vice President & GM at Purch, where he leads the Marketing & Shopper Services teams.
With audiences widely dispersed among mobile and social apps – and, soon, virtual reality and augmented reality experiences– publishers who want to thrive must both follow consumers where they want to go and meet them on their own terms.
These were a couple of the themes that emerged from the wide-ranging conversations at Digital Content Next’s annual members-only Summit 2016 in Miami. DCN members met to explore content and business models given that consumption patterns are constantly changing, many consumers are actively avoiding advertising, and digital intermediaries are extracting much of the value out of the publishing economy. Speakers and attendees talked about changing their relationship with programmatic ad marketplaces, seeking alternative sources of revenue from subscriptions and memberships, and aggressively pursuing revenue diversification.
In his opening remarks, DCN CEO Jason Kint noted that although the Interactive Advertising Bureau recently celebrated the milestone of $50 billion in revenue generated by online advertising, more than 50% of the revenue currently goes to two companies: Google and Facebook, with premium publishers collectively garnering about 15%.
“Most of the money doesn’t actually get into your pocket to pay for the professional content, the entertainment and journalism you all do,” Kint said. DCN’s mission is “to make sure the next $50 billion is different.”
Premium publishers need to build on the trust and reputation they enjoy, rather than fighting with consumers over their use of ad blockers, Kint said, pointing out that a blockers are a symptom of consumer dissatisfaction. Smart publishers need to look at the opportunity “in the growth of this audience that is looking for content on new terms.”
“It’s a symptom of a bad user experience – users taking action on their own,” agreed Justen Fox, senior product manager for revenue products at Vox Media. Consumers are weary of pop-up and pop-under ads, not to mention advertising that contains malware. He finds that the use of ad blockers is higher with social and referral traffic, undermining audience acquisition, and said it’s also higher with returning visitors to Vox’s websites. If publishers and advertisers fail to clean up their act, the problem will keep getting worse, he said.
“Focusing on the user experience is actually the long-term solution,” Fox said. However, no publisher can do it alone because consumer impressions are formed by the experience they get across all media sites.
Sarah Frank, executive producer of Now This News, said that killing their website and forgetting about SEO is the best decision they ever made. It gave them the mandate to create content experiences optimized for different social channels so that consumers have a great experience wherever they find Now This content.
Marketers take action Meanwhile, marketers seeking to distinguish themselves from the bad actors in digital media are increasingly creating their own content to build positive customer relationships—with or without the help of publishers.
(L-R) Dave Peck, Global Head of Influencer & Social Media Marketing, PayPal; Katrina Craigwell, Director, Global Content & Programming, GE; Christopher G. Laughlin, Client Services Director, SapientNitro; and Laura Henderson, Global Head of Content & Media Monetization, Mondelez International
“We’re trying to figure out, how we stop interrupting the content and become the content,” said Laura Henderson, global head of content and media monetization at Mondelez International.
Her group has gone as far as to decide the content it creates ought to be good enough to make money on its own merits. One of the products from this division of Kraft Foods, the Oreo Twist, Lick, Dunk mobile game, made back 2.5 times the money spent to produce it, with about 5 billion virtual Oreo cookies dunked, Henderson said.
Like publishers, marketers “feel the pain of ad blocking, of our content being skipped, blocked, avoided at all costs – which means we need to figure out a new way,” she said.
Katrina Craigwell, director of global content and programming at GE, leads a team dedicated to connecting with lovers of science and technology on any medium or platform where they can be found. These content creators compare themselves less with their traditional industrial competitors than with media sites that create engaging tech content, be it the SyFy Channel or the people at NASA who produced the “7 Minutes of Terror” Mars lander video.
Asked if she had any use for publishers now that GE can publish its own content, Craigwell said she looks for partners who know how to tell a great story or can help the firm figure out an approach to emerging formats, such as virtual reality.
Building brand strength Many of the discussions of how publishers adapted concerned how they preserve their brand value while adapting to new business and content delivery models. The Onion Chief Operating Officer Kurt Mueller said that is something the satire site has had to be careful about with its experiments in native advertising: content is sponsored by advertisers but produced by the editorial staff.
The challenge is readers expect a certain attitude from Onion content, “and if we don’t give it to them, it comes off really badly for both us and the brand. You’re just creating ads if it’s not authentic to what you are,” Mueller said.
Laura Evans, VP of audience development and data science at Scripps Networks Interactive pointed out that data offers an excellent way to understand customer preferences, which can be leveraged to create better experiences. The goal, said Evans, is to “turn a visitor into a brand loyalist.”
As Membership Economy author, Robbie Kellman Baxter put it, “you need to love your customer more than your product” in order to create a positive relationship that will last a lifetime. And, as DCN CEO Kint pointed out in his opening remarks, “No business has succeeded, long term, without giving its customers a great experience.”
David F. Carr is a writer, editor, web consultant, and student of digital business. He is a Forbes contributor, a former InformationWeek Editor-at-Large, and the author of Social Collaboration for Dummies.
Industry leading stakeholders have set out to eradicate suspect impressions on a global level throughout the past year, and premium publishers and advertisers have begun to feel the impact of this industry shift to quality. Our Q4 2015 Quarterly Mobile Index (QMI) report, released today, shows that advertisers are directing ad spending towards higher-quality inventory with better targeting capabilities, especially through more transparent mobile private marketplaces (PMPs). As a result, premium publishers are garnering higher prices for their inventory and attracting more mobile ad spending.
This past holiday season, major brand advertisers looked to target mobile consumers with relevant advertising messages through mobile private marketplaces (PMP). This dynamic caused a 45 percent increase in weekly mobile PMP volume from the first week of the quarter through to the week of Black Friday. Looking ahead, the volume spikes in mobile PMP during Black Friday and Cyber Monday suggest similar rises in mobile ad prices and spending around this year’s landmark events, including the 2016 presidential election and major sporting events. Agencies looking to effectively execute on their advertiser clients’ strategic plans around major events should look to PMPs to buy timely, premium inventory, at scale.
The market opportunity in PMPs is significant, as eMarketer estimates that ad spending on PMPs in the U.S. will reach $3.65 billion this year, up from just $80 million in 2013. Globally, MAGNA GLOBAL projects that programmatic spending, which includes open auction, PMP and automated guaranteed, will rise to $37 billion by 2019.
PubMatic’s Q4 2015 Quarterly Mobile Index (QMI) report found five key trends that demonstrate mobile monetization growth:
Advertiser demand shifts towards higher-quality mobile PMP inventory to target mobile-obsessed holiday shoppers. Advertisers increasingly sought higher-quality mobile inventory to target holiday shoppers on mobile devices, as evidenced by mobile private marketplace volume spikes. Weekly mobile PMP monetized impression volume increased 45 percent from the start of the quarter through the week of Black Friday (Nov. 27).
By vertical, retail and technology spending drove PMP growth. Within mobile private marketplaces, the retail and technology verticals showed major volume gains ahead of Black Friday shopping, demonstrating that e-commerce and consumer technology sales likely drove ad spending. The increase in weekly PMP volume in retail and technology over that period was even higher, at 106% and 285%, respectively.
Opportunity for mobile growth remains strong on a global scale. The Americas and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) represented the largest opportunities in terms of volume, but the Asia Pacific (APAC) region was the fastest-growing mobile opportunity.
The Android app ad awakens. Android app ads increased the most in terms of both price and volume, while CPMS increased across all mobile platforms, including IOS app, mobile web and tablet web.
Mobile gap remains closed. Mobile CPMs are still higher than desktop CPMs, and both mobile and desktop CPMs grew a healthy 36% year-over-year.
Jack Essig, SVP, publisher & chief revenue officer, Hearst Men’s Group talks new initiatives, advertising partners and the group’s booth at the 2016 North American International Auto Show.
When you joined Hearst in 2011, the Hearst Men’s Group (HMG) was just newly formed. How has your go-to-market strategy changed or evolved since then?
Jack Essig: Upon joining the newly formed Hearst Men’s Group, I set out to align four credible men’s brand —Esquire, Popular Mechanics, Car and Driver, and Road & Track—as one coherent group buy. The winning strategy we developed leverages the Group’s dual audiences—enthusiast and lifestyle—to uniquely amplify our partners’ campaigns across the broad range of men’s interests, from style to culture and from DIY to auto. To help achieve this, I assessed our structure and talent with the aim of creating a more efficient use of resources. We have benefited tremendously from shared marketing and art teams, as well as the strategic selling of our teams’ category experts. These relationships help widen the field of advertising partners, and in many cases encourage advertisers to consider other brands in our group.
Can you talk more about how the HMG enthusiast brands also help advertising partners to influence a broader lifestyle audience?
Essig: Having the auto-focused titles in our group has given the lifestyle titles a distinct advantage with advance knowledge of launches, budgets and priorities for automotive manufacturers. This information has allowed us to create overarching strategic programs that can be customized to connect with the audiences specific to each title. For example, we know that the average enthusiast influences more than six car purchases a year. This represents a powerful selling tool for us in making the case why an auto manufacturer needs Car and Driver and Road & Track but should also consider the Esquire and Popular Mechanics audiences to ensure far-reaching market penetration for in-market consumers. Through this strategy, we are able to expand from the enthusiast space to create more lifestyle opportunities across the rest of the Men’s Group (and the rest of the Hearst portfolio, too). The result has been Esquire having number one market share in auto in its competitive set at 33 percent.
Tell us about some of your most recent wins and successes?
Essig: From 2014 to 2015, we more than doubled the revenue tied to the multi-title deals that encompass the Hearst Men’s Group titles—Lincoln MKC and MKX, Mercedes GLE Coupe, and Ford F-150, among others—and outside the Men’s Group, across the Hearst portfolio—Toyota “New Rules of Car Buying” and “Inventionaries,” Chevrolet Malibu Cruze. Leveraging the relationships within Car and Driver and Road & Track has been instrumental in expanding the conversation with automotive partners to include Esquire and Popular Mechanics. Conversely, we have seen growth in Car and Driver and Road & Track’s non-endemic business with partners such as Clarks as a direct result of the deep relationships within Esquire and Popular Mechanics.
HMG is hosting a booth at North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) this year. Why is making a big splash at the Auto Show a great strategic move for the group?
The auto industry is at a pivotal moment where next-generation products and technologies rapidly evolve, and Detroit remains at the nexus of it all. Having a presence at NAIAS where all these big ideas make their world debuts puts us in the right place at the right time to put a stake in the ground and proclaim the Men’s Group as the most credible, preeminent partner and creative voice for brands to reach the right audience—enthusiast, lifestyle and beyond. The booth itself will serve as a hub where we will meet with partners to discuss the upcoming year, form new relationships and interact with consumers.
Can you tell us a bit about what will be at the booth?
Essig: The Hearst Men’s Group booth will be on the floor at NAIAS and will be a respite from all of the industry action at the Auto Show. Our activation will bring to life the editorial positioning of each of the Men’s Group brands as well as the creative solutions we have developed on behalf of our partners. Video screens will show reels of our recent successes, staff members will be handing out issues to attendees and we will have a private conference room in which to conduct meetings with clients, partners and press. In addition, we may throw a few happy-hour celebrations.
One of the key parts of Auto Show is the Consumer Days. What are you most excited to share in terms of interaction with the Men’s Group consumers?
Essig: Consumer Marketing will be heading up our efforts during the Consumer Days at the Auto Show. They have giveaways and offers planned to drive subscriptions and keep our brands top of mind with this captive audience.
What are you most looking forward to for the division in 2016?
Essig: We have continued to see advertisers working in a deeper way with fewer partners. The Hearst Men’s Group satisfies that need, with a reach that is both deep—in the auto/tech/style space—and wide—reaching one in five U.S. men. My goal for the Men’s Group is to continue with our successful formula and bring in even more exclusive, market-share deals within the auto space and beyond. We have the editorial products, the right audience and the ideal means for connecting with that audience across all platforms. If you are looking to reach men, you should be working with the Hearst Men’s Group.
Take on 2016 by capitalizing on high-value sales opportunities, including leveraging programmatic to new heights and, of course, improving interpersonal relationships with prospects and customers. As the sales, and revenue generators, of our firms, locking in the fundamental habits below will allow us to remain successful even as the bumpy digital landscape continues to evolve.
Let’s take a closer look at how all of this possible:
1. Understand advertisers’ buying trends
Wouldn’t it be great to have a crystal ball so you could see what your prospects want and when? If only ad sales was that easy. Yet, there are other instructive ways to give your prospects what they want. Before you pitch, get to know which product lines they are focused on, what type of advertising they value and understand the goals of their campaigns. Once you have this information, it is important to document it. Whether you put this information in your CRM, notebook or Excel document doesn’t really matter. What’s important is to be able to easily reference this as you build out your individual account plans. Just watch the effectiveness of your next pitch soar.
2. Adopt high-CPM ad units
Choose high-CPM ad units that are most valuable to you and your digital business. This means adopting native, whole-page takeovers and online video. Given that video ad prices are capable of commanding 10x higher than the price of display ads, web publishers should leap at the opportunity. The bottom line is that high-CPM ad units are the most profitable sources for publishers, but also more valuable to the advertiser—and that’s how you should approach it in your pitch.
Among these high-CPM options, native ads probably stand out the most. It has attracted a ton of hype, and yet, only 4% of total online advertisers placed native ads from January-November last year (a total of 7,220 brands across the sites MediaRadar tracks).
3. Take advantage of programmatic
Ninety-five percent of all national consumer magazine media companies have already started selling programmatic, according to MediaRadar data.* Programmatic advertising has made it much easier for marketers to purchase advertising and expand reach. Publishers can also manipulate programmatic advertising to their advantage to leverage their audience and grow profit.
4. Identify up-selling opportunities
The probability of closing a new prospect is 5-20%, while the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60%-70%! Yet, upselling is something that reps sometimes lose focus on as they want to hunt and close a new account. As sales leaders, it is important that we focus on helping reps identify upsell opportunities and set goals for each account. By inspecting what we expect in weekly meetings, we can coach our reps to get stickier with our clients and become a more integral part of their business and success.
5. Increase client engagement (also known as “Old Faithful”)
No matter what changes happen this year in the industry, focusing on continuing to earn our client’s business is how we create lasting partnerships. People buy from people. Statistically, 38% of clients don’t renew due to lack of relationship. Make sure to engage with your clients before, during and after the sale. Proactively reach out to clients so you can get a better idea of their needs and address concerns. This will help you build confidence, show them that you are there to help and excel in the above mentioned four tips.
Jen Wilga (@JenniferWilga) is a dynamic sales champion who is leading MediaRadar’s global expansion efforts. She joins the team with over 20 years of experience in SaaS solutions. Prior to joining MediaRadar, Jen played a critical role in developing and executing the sales strategy for Careerbuilder’s HR SaaS solutions. Jen received her BA from Misericordia University.
Bearing witness has been one of the essential boons for journalists when it comes to delivering stories few have access to: “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it,” is one such adage that comes to mind.
But with the rise of cameras that can record a scene in 360-degrees, stereoscopic video (which creates depth) and a new generation of headsets accessible to consumers, the ascent of VR as a new storytelling staple is clear. Coupled with collaborative partnerships across the technological and media landscape, the chance for VR to enable the “presence” of a user — in other words, to make her feel as if she is actually reacting to the environment she is immersed in — is now unprecedented. With this, “bearing witness” is taking on a different meaning.
The bottom line? The chance for VR to encourage empathy can potentially transform journalism and viewers’ understanding of the world. Plus, it might also create the type of immersive advertising and sponsored content that no ad-blocker could deny.
New York Times as Pioneer The world took notice when the New York Times recently gave away 1.31 million Google Cardboard headsets to its print subscribers, solely to bring them into the VR experience. The simplicity and crudeness of the cardboard is its genius, Wired’s Marcus Wohlsen argued. “It’s cheap enough to be handed out for free; we smartphone users supply the only part that’s expensive,” Wohlsen wrote.
This sort of accessibility is key to the potential for VR to actually reach mass audiences instead of a tiny subset of early adopters. Producing VR work is already an expensive endeavor. While outfits like the New York Times Magazine, Frontline and Vice News — with their stories on the refugee crisis, the Ebola outbreak and last year’s Millions March against police brutality, respectively — have made major dives into VR storytelling, they are part of “the 1 percent” of news organizations that can afford to do so. Headsets like the one from Oculus Rift and other apparatuses for viewing VR are expected to become cheaper and therefore more mainstream, but it’s a far cry from the ubiquity of simply the smartphone. (Although YouTube, for one, has said it wants to bring VR to anyone with a smartphone.)
That’s why the Times’ home delivery of Cardboard units to use with a smartphone was a win in more ways than one. First of all, it delivered the headsets with its newspaper, acknowledging that traditional distribution system — and subscription — as a precursor for this modern news consumption. The Times is also planning to extend its virtual reality endeavors into sponsored content, as Sebastian Tomich, the Times’ senior vice president of advertising and innovation, told Contently. “Any format the newsroom is pursuing, you can assume that we’ll pursue it on the brand side as well,” he said.
Enticing for Brands It’s not a surprise, then, that other brands and publishers are considering VR’s potential. Writing for TheMediaBriefing, Chris Sutcliffe notes that a VR environment can be enticing to brands and other publishers, as brands are already relying more on “experiential events” to help communicate their brand messages. The “rawness” that VR environments offer and the audiences they attract could potentially provide a new revenue stream, he writes. Designer Rebecca Minkoff, for example, is selling her own cardboard VR viewer for $30 for viewers to see how she filmed her runway show.
All this is not to say VR doesn’t have its hurdles. The recent Tow Center report on virtual reality acknowledged producing such work involves a series of trade-offs, especially around production time, quality and the capacity to reach wide audiences. Tom Kent, the standards editor at the Associated Press (which is also stepping into VR) also wrote a strong statement on Medium of some of the ethical questions that could impact VR journalism in the future, which New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan also discussed.
The Times’ release of its VR documentary “The Displaced” coincided with a range of critiques, from the difficulty of using the Cardboard unit to questions of the authenticity of the story. Michael Oreskes, NPR’s news chief and a former Times editor, cautioned, “Our stories can’t be virtually true. They must be fully real.”
As we ponder how VR fact-checkers would operate, we can also consider the vast potential of what immersive journalism—and advertising—could do to create a whole new dimension in audience engagement.
Traditional media outperforms digital ads (online and mobile) in consumer trust according to The Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising 2015 Study. In fact, TV ads lead all paid media with 63% of global respondents reporting complete or somewhat trust, followed by newspaper (60%) and magazine (58%) ads. Online video ads, the highest rated of digital media advertising, was trusted by less than half of all respondents (48%) and performed below radio and pre-movie ads (each at 54%).
The study surveyed 30,000 online respondents in 60 countries to measure consumer response to paid, earned and owned advertising mediums. Important to note, survey responses were based on reported behavior and not actual metered data.
In terms of earned media, word-of-mouth remains the most trustworthy type of advertising with eight in 10 respondents (83%) completely or somewhat trusting the recommendations from people they know. Social media appears to be an influencer of trust with two-thirds of respondents (66%) stating that they trust consumer opinions posted online in reviews, etc.
As for owned media, seventy percent of respondents reported completely or somewhat trusting of branded websites, followed by brand sponsorships (61%) and opt-in emails (56%).
Trust and action appear closely correlated. For example, respondents that trust the opinions of friends and family say also they also take action on these opinions at least some of the time (83% each). In fact, the study shows that action exceeds trust by more than double digits for ads served in search engine results (47% trust; 58% take action), ads on social networks (46% trust; 56% take action) and text ads on mobile phones (36% trust; 46% take action).
Millennials more than Gen Z, Gen X or Baby Boomers reported the highest level of trust in digital advertising, online video ads at 54%, search engines 52%, ads on social networks, 51%, banner ads 47% and text ads on mobile at 41%.
Media planning is more important than ever to target audiences and ensure success metrics match objectives. Understanding consumer trust across platforms is an important measure in optimizing campaign performance.
Inefficiencies brought on by the legacy “waterfall” cost publishers both monetarily and operationally. But even as new ad serving technologies have emerged to solve for these issues, many publishers are still grappling with major challenges around outdated inventory allocation methodologies. PubMatic has released a white paper, entitled Decision Manager: Your Inventory. Your Rules., which outlines the key challenges and solutions in inventory management and monetization, and describes how publishers can leverage a technology platform to realize the full potential of their digital assets.
The white paper addresses the challenges that publishers face in inventory management and demand sourcing, and how they can achieve maximum yield optimization. PubMatic’s Decision Manager is an important step towards achieving the holistic, cross-platform marketing automation platform of the future.
TV ads have always been decried as a format of the past, rarely targeted or personalized. But interactive TV ads offer the potential for demonstrable viewer engagement and feedback. And that’s the promise of Hulu’s new deal with TrueX, a unit of 21st Century Fox. Using technology from TrueX, Hulu will give viewers of Fox shows the option of watching a 30-second “engagement” advertisement instead of the approximately two and a half minutes worth of ads that are sprinkled within an episode.
It’s the most high-profile instance yet of interactive ads within streaming TV. The question now is whether the circumstances surrounding the Hulu-TrueX deal will get other networks and brands to jump on board—and make this kind of engaged advertising more the norm.
Breaking Through on Streaming Interactive TV has been one of those Holy Grail quests that’s been tried and failed for years. The problem, however, is that marketers have been looking at the wrong screen when it came time to developing interactive ads. It was understood that some people were cutting the cord and streaming online content onto a “proper” television screen through an Xbox or Roku. But taking advantage of the use of laptops, mobile and tablet devices was not a key strategy. That’s why some of the earliest attempts at interactive ads bombed.
The point now, however, is to utilize the benefits of digital video, as Joe Marchese, president of advanced advertising products at Fox Networks Group and founder of TrueX, told the L.A. Times. “Digital video is an on-demand, non-linear medium, and having an ad format that fits this experience is a win for advertisers, publishers and viewers alike,” he said.
TrueX had already tested interactive ads on streaming sites before Hulu. This past May at the upfronts, TrueX reported on one such trial with the TV show, ”The Mindy Project.” They found that the typical viewer clicked 4 times in the ads, spending 52 seconds in the unit, with a 2.9% clickthrough rate. Plus the ads had a 96% completion rate.
Another example of interactive ads fitting well was during the Game Awards — an online-only awards show for videogames. During the show last year, which attracted about 2 million online viewers, users were able to click on ads during the show to download the different games that were nominated. For one of the games advertised during the show, sales “increased by 15 times during the weekend the awards show aired, producing seven figures in revenue for the game over that period,” the New York Times’ Nick Wingfield reported.
In-Stream Purchase Unit In the same vein, Hulu announced last year moves beyond traditional video ads with an “in-stream purchase unit” with Pizza Hut. Consumers can place an order within the ad itself before returning to whatever content they were viewing. There’s also a “360” video ad that will let users pan around through a 360-degree viewpoint within the ad. And the point of these advertisements was to get the tactile response of consumers watching on different mobile devices.
While Fox is the only media company allowing these new ads on Hulu right now, TrueX is also open to servicing the entire industry with these ads, opening the door for ABC, CBS, Viacom and other organizations to perhaps learn from Fox’s example.
“This type of attention transfer lifts all boats,” Jamie Auslander, TrueX’s VP of research, told AdWeek in May. “It’s as impactful as six video ads.”
Other media outlets will likely take a cue from Fox only after learning how these 30-second advertisements play out among viewers. But if TrueX has its way — and if its previous studies on this kind of advertising hold true — the ads will be a hit.
When it comes to finite resources, perhaps none is so keenly felt as the limited number of hours in the day. And, as more content creators vie for this precious time—across a proliferation of delivery platforms and devices—creators of digital content have steadily seen their online objectives reduced to a frantic race for audience numbers, pageviews and click-throughs. Some leaders in the industry, however, are looking to change the conversation to one where time spent is the metric that matters.
Last fall, the Financial Times began testing ad sales based upon a new cost-per-hour (CPH) metric. Its initial foray went well and in May of this year they announced the official launch of a new time-based measurement system. The FT’s US Commercial Director, Brendan Spain, says the decision to initiate a new method for transacting ad value based upon time was prompted by an increasing sense among marketers that they their digital ad investments might not be as valuable as once thought, given revelations of high bot traffic and ad-viewability limitations.
“We decided that, given our audience, as well as the registration and subscription information we have behind our readership, that we had an opportunity to go the other way to create a very transparent product that marketers could be confident in,” says Spain. Now, a year after this idea was conceived, Spain believes that the need for better metrics is at least as great—if not greater—than it was then.
In part, the need stems from new concerns over agency rebates, which have increased the demand for transparency into the ad-buying landscape. However, Spain says that he’s also seeing an increased desire for brand dollars to be allocated to digital, which requires publishers to deliver more substantive KPIs, beyond the click. Spain notes that “There’s no KPI-uplift for clicking” while CPH measurement, on the other hand, “offers recognition that there are marketers are doing something besides trying to sell a pizza, that there are other KPIs that need to be looked at.”
That said, despite a desire for something better, there’s still a hill to climb in terms of getting any new metric to gain wide acceptance. “There’s not a line for CPH on agency spreadsheets and let’s face it, those spreadsheets are a window into the minds in the middle- and back-office,” Spain says, emphasizing the need for education on both the client and agency sides.
There is also a question of standardizing the time-based metric in order for it to scale. The Economist recently rolled out its own take on selling time-based advertising. Unlike the FT, The Economist opted to cap its attention measurement at 30 seconds. The Wall Street Journal has also reportedly explored a time-based approach that would be based upon incremental blocks of time. Differing models can create confusion in the marketplace, though Spain points out that it is still early days and the FT is among an increasing number of publishers testing out what makes the most sense. The important thing, he says, is that “the vast majority of premium publishers agree that time is transactable.”
To date, the FT has worked with 15 brands on 19 campaigns. Eight percent of their digital inventory is being served through CPH, a number Spain says adds up to a not-insignificant amount of incremental revenue on the FT’s P&L. The positive impact also affects its advertisers who are seeing 10% more active time in view than if they purchased CPM campaign. They are also currently in the process of surveying all of its clients who have tested CPH buying so far to better evaluate and document its effectiveness. “Everything we’re doing is evidence based,” says Spain. “It is really important that we’re not just putting a finger in the air.”
Despite its promise, time-based sales are not right for every campaign. As Spain points out, CPH works best to achieve objectives such as ad recall, brand awareness and recognition, and purchase consideration. He also doesn’t foresee the FT moving entirely away from CPM-based sales, though he points out they’ve never been a CPC environment. By Q1, his goal is for all of the FT’s top clients to be aware of CPH and see its value based upon evidence-based case studies.
There are metrics that can be very easily manipulated, says Spain. “You can buy likes, retweets, followers—all that takes is a five minute Google search to figure out how.” What needs to be emphasized, however, is that there are things you can’t buy. “You can’t add another hour to a CEOs day to read a publication. We need to un-muddy the waters. One of the ways to do that is to focus on metrics that are a lot harder to fudge.”
As he considers the bigger digital advertising picture, Spain has high hopes: He believes that an attention-based approach can bring more brand ad dollars to quality partners; increase marketer confidence that their ads are being seen and are engaging consumers; give publishers a means to value attention at a scaled level rather than a flat rate; and maybe even drive some of the bad inventory out of consideration or drive it out of the market altogether.
According to Marchex’ 2015 Click-To-Call Commerce Mobile Performance Report, click-to-call has emerged as the most common form of purchase-oriented activity from mobile ads. They report that click-to-call commerce, in which a consumer makes a phone call from a mobile Web page or app and makes a reservation, appointment or purchase, will exceed $1 trillion this year.
In its most recent white paper, Marchex set out to determine whether display ads are influential in driving consumers to make purchase-oriented calls. According to The Missing 98%: Why Display Advertising Isn’t Getting the Credit It Deserves, “The advertising technology ecosystem has historically focused on tying display ad exposure to e-commerce purchases, or other online actions such as filling out a lead form or visiting a product web page. However, for most advertisers, the goal of a display advertising campaign is offline, such as an inbound phone call or in-store purchase.”
According to the report:
Not much click-to-call activity occurs directly from display advertising units. Whereas a paid search campaign that uses call extensions may see call-through rates as high as 20%, Marchex research has shown that it can take an average of 500,000 impressions from a display ad with click-to-call functionality to generate a quality phone call.
But display advertising does influence consumers to make a phone call in the future. Data from beta customers of Marchex Display Analytics shows that it can take an average of 8,000 impressions from a display ad to influence a phone call within 2 weeks. In other words, display ads influence 60 times more phone calls than they do a direct click-to-call. On average, they found that approximately 2% of phone calls occur directly from display ads or landing pages, and the rest occur in the days or weeks following exposure.
Marchex identified three major challenges of view-through attribution for phone calls:
Lack of a common identifier across online and offline
Cross-screen attribution
Latency
The white paper outlines these challenges in greater detail and makes suggestions on how to address them.
