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Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

Five media trends we expect to see in 2023

Last year proved to be another turbulent one. With continued economic turmoil, publishers are beginning 2023 with a great deal of uncertainty about what the year will bring. And, given the slow but inevitable depreciation of third-party cookies, many publishers are seeking out alternative ways to reach their audiences with increasing urgency.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Industry innovations promise to provide publishers with the data – and critical insight – they need to continue demonstrating value to brand advertisers seeking to leverage their platforms.

Let’s take a closer look at the publisher trends we expect to take hold in 2023.

1. Widespread adoption of attention metrics

Despite a growing mindset shift towards attention metrics in 2022, viewable impressions are still the primary metric used by publishers to analyze ad performance. However, we are likely to see the balance tip in 2023. 

Attention metrics give publishers deeper insight into ad performance – moving beyond how long an ad is visible, to a space where publishers can accurately measure the level of attention an ad receives.

Research into the attention economy shows attention metrics are 200% more effective at predicting the performance outcomes of ads. This gives publishers a much clearer understanding of how users interact with their content, which is of course an invaluable part of the buy-in process with advertisers.

2. A growing focus on first-party data

Ever since Google’s first announcement to end support for third-party cookies in Chrome, publishers have started to seek alternative targeting solutions. Indeed, Google’s own deadline extension was driven in part by the need to further test their Privacy Sandbox initiative, which was proposed as a less intrusive solution for delivering targeted advertising.

Publishers are already busy future-proofing their marketing plans with the development of first-party data strategies, and we expect to see a growing focus in this area in 2023.

3. The rise of data clean rooms 

Clearly, first-party data provides the basis for a solid targeting solution. However, many publishers are beginning to realize their data can be further enriched with second-party data. 

By entering into second-party data partnerships, publishers can share aggregated (and therefore anonymous) data for mutual benefit. Not only does this give them a clearer picture of how readers engage with their content, but in turn, demonstrates value to prospective brand advertisers. 

Of course, these partnerships ideally take place in data clean rooms, which allow multiple parties to match user-level data without actually sharing personally identifiable information (PII). This is incredibly powerful for tracking ad performance and cross-platform user journeys without the need for third-party cookies. 

In the past couple of years, clean rooms have gained a great deal of traction. This has been driven primarily by the concept of walled gardens, where media giants such as Google, Amazon, and Meta provide access to event-level data held within their platform, to enrich their own first-party data. 

More recently, we’ve seen a rise in publishers entering into private, more mutually beneficial partnerships using independent clean rooms. And in 2023, we expect this trend to continue. 

4. A shift towards contextual targeting

Over the years, behavioral targeting has been the primary mechanism for online engagement. It has allowed marketers to deliver greater ad relevance, informed by a user’s browsing habits, and powered by third-party cookies. 

Of course, openly following a user around the web is no longer acceptable to consumers, nor will it be possible once third-party cookies disappear completely. As a result, we’ve seen a marked shift away from this method. Enter the improved ad relevance that contextual targeting brings. 

By serving ads that are highly relevant to the context in which they’re placed, publishers can create a user experience that better resonates with their readers. This approach cuts through the noise of up to 10,000 daily ads to increase brand recall by 70%.

Recently, we’ve seen more and more publishers experiment with contextual targeting as they get to grips with cookieless approaches. But in the year ahead, we expect to see them implement far-reaching contextual campaigns with growing confidence. 

5. The jury’s out on NFTs in publishing for 2023

Originally viewed as the next fad in the cryptocurrency space, NFTs struck a chord with publishers in 2022. They created opportunities to connect with new audiences, offer unique experiences to readers, and build added value into content subscription models.

At DC Comics, we saw the launch of the NFT Universe as a way to enhance readers’ comic book collections and unlock exclusive fan experiences. Meanwhile, TIME is working on a community-building initiative with its TIMEPieces project. And education publisher Pearson plans to turn its textbooks into NFTs to create a new revenue stream from secondhand sales of its titles.

However, after recent headline losses, publishers are likely to proceed with caution in 2023. It is important that they take the time to learn from the success and failures of previous investments before they take the plunge.

As we embark on yet another uncertain year, publishers will be seeking out and testing a range of new innovations. Only by working out what performs best with their readership, and what doesn’t, can they start to take engagement to the next level. 

About the author

Navid Nassiri joined Switchboard as Head of Marketing in 2021. Switchboard’s powerful data engineering automation platform aggregates disparate data at scale, reliably and in real-time, to make better business decisions. In his role at Switchboard, Navid is focused on driving growth and brand awareness through innovative marketing strategies. Navid is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive, including leadership roles at PwC and NBCUniversal. 

Perspectives

Prove the value of thought leadership with the FT’s new framework

Marketers know that thought leadership is an important part of a strategy to build awareness and trust, and to help their companies get a seat at the table. But until now, they have had a hard time proving it. The reality is that marketers are under pressure from all sides to prove their contributions to the bottom line.

While metrics are available to track many marketing activities, thought leadership efforts have been nearly impossible to measure. With this in mind, the Thought Leadership Network (TLN)—a joint venture of Longitude and The Financial Times—has released its first-ever framework for measuring the effectiveness of thought leadership in its report “Proving our Value: Measuring the effectiveness of thought leadership.”

After years of talking to clients about their challenges, Rob Mitchell, CEO of Longitude and Chairman of Thought Leadership Network, says he saw a gap in the market for a network devoted to promoting thought leadership as a career and to promote best practices. Thus, TLN was born, to bring “together thought leadership practitioners to share knowledge, experiences, and ideas.”

Mitchell thinks of TLN’s mission as “Thought leadership about thought leadership.”

Tia McPhee, Global Brand Director of The Financial Times and a Thought Leadership Network advisory board member says that she hopes the group’s annual slate of events allows thought leaders to learn from and support one another. But as the group started coming together, it was clear there was one challenge members were struggling with more than any other: measuring the effectiveness of thought leadership.

What is thought leadership?

The term “thought leadership” is familiar. However, defining it is difficult. Some might say, “You know it when you see it.” But in the age of content marketing—when every company is pumping out content—it can be even harder to separate real thought leadership from more run of the mill content marketing efforts.

“Content marketing can be part of a strategy to develop yourself as a thought leader,” says McPhee. She adds that content marketing is really the “delivery mechanism.”

“Good thought leadership starts with the strength of the ideas,” says Mitchell. To be a true thought leader, you need an original idea. Content marketing is just the avenue through which you deliver that idea.

What’s the goal?

More importantly, content marketing often focuses on short-term engagement metrics—think downloads and clicks. However, TLN’s research shows that the key to measuring the effectiveness of thought leadership is all about taking a long-term view.

When thinking about thought leadership efforts, it’s important to understand what this branch of marketing is really designed to do. According to the report, campaigns can do three things:

  • Reimagine—Pivot the business to a new reality.  
  • Renovate—Build on past successes and move into new areas that will attract attention from both new and existing customers. 
  • Reinforce—Strengthen customer loyalty and retention for existing, mature products and services.  

But the question remains: How do you know if you’re achieving those goals?

A measurement framework

In order to help TLN members better prove the value of their work, the group has compiled a report that details the metrics that matter most, six principles of effective measurement, and provides a checklist to make sure efforts align with business goals. Mitchell says the report is the result of “trying to distill” his years of experience, combined with primary research—speaking to clients and advisory board members—and even bringing in outside experts to get a new perspective.

“Alignment” is the foundation of the three-tier effectiveness model presented in the report. “It is all about ensuring that there is buy-in from every relevant function in the business, as well as agreement about the overall goals,” says the report.

Next, you have to take a look at engagement, though Mitchell warns against putting too much weight on short-term metrics. He wants to “shift the focus a little bit.” Mitchell says, “Right now we measure what’s easy to measure.”

He sees a need for a “shift toward alignment, influence, and impact.” Mitchell suggests spending 40% of your time tracking alignment, 40% on impact, and 20% on engagement. Ask yourself, are you changing behavior? That’s how you really know you’re having an effect on customers.

“These longer-term metrics are harder to measure,” says Mitchell. And therein lies the challenge. In order to determine if your thought leadership is moving the needle on influence and impact you need to track whether your perception of expertise is increasing, customer lifetime value (CLV), meetings generated, and profitability. You’ll also want to understand how your content is contributing to the marketing pipeline and generating qualified leads. 

Reading that list may have you scratching your head. Really, how do you know how your expertise is perceived? Can you really know how many meetings your thought leadership campaigns have generated?

Admittedly, the “influence and impact” metrics are the hardest to track. They will require that you invest in customer surveys and other in-depth outreach efforts that go beyond simple engagement efforts. However, Mitchell and McPhee promise that putting in the effort to track these numbers will go a long way to understanding your effectiveness.

Ultimately, says McPhee, TLN and the report give you “the tools to make your case.”

“Tribal subscription marketing”

But for publishers like The Financial Times, thought leadership is a slightly different animal than it is for other brands. After all, McPhee asks, what are you doing as a publisher if you aren’t regularly putting out interesting new ideas? Good journalism isn’t necessarily the same as thought leadership. But publishers are embracing the practice as a way to build loyalty and enhance CLV.

For instance, The FT launched its New Agenda which McPhee describes as “a rallying cry to business leaders to think about responsible capitalism.” In practice, it’s a collection of the publishers’ best pieces around the idea of protecting “the future of free enterprise and wealth creation by pursuing profit with purpose.”

She says she’s seen the model replicated across other publishers—think Washington Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It has led to what some in the industry are calling “tribal subscription marketing,” which creates a sense of belonging among readers.   

“Thought leadership can get people behind you,” says McPhee. That’s as important for publishers as it is for any other brand—especially in the age of digital disintermediation and a near constant fight for every subscriber.

“Providing expertise in thought leadership—both in terms of the content itself and the measurement of its impact—is an obvious addition to what the FT can offer clients,” adds McPhee. Ultimately, thought leadership may be just what you need to find new ways to add value for your subscribers and potential sponsors.

Advertising | Perspectives

How to accurately evaluate your content marketing

Today, branded content is the most effective way to capture the attention of and build trust with new audiences. And, as all marketers know, time (a.k.a attention) is money. For years, the best way to reach people who may be interested in your products or service was through pop-up ads, pre-roll or TV commercials.

However, with an estimated 25% of internet users employing ad-blockers and DVR devices allowing people to easily avoid intrusive ads, it’s become a marketer’s job to establish what and how to capture their attention. What we do know is, although audiences are steering clear of advertisements, they still want to enjoy the things those ads aim to interrupt: the stories.

Source: Pressboard’s 2019 Branded Content Benchmarks Report

Since releasing our first Branded Content Benchmarks Report in 2016, we’ve received many messages from marketers and media companies who found it helpful for understanding what metrics they should be using to evaluate their branded content campaigns.

Using data pulled from nearly 4,000 pieces of sponsored content created by brands and publishers through Pressboard’s platform, we’ve compiled an updated Branded Content Benchmarks Report, which details how well branded content performed in 2019. The report aims to help marketers go beyond mere impressions and clicks and to better understand the metrics they should be considering when measuring branded content.

Determine which traffic source to use

We’ve used several advertising platforms to promote our clients’ content as well as our own and have accumulated a wealth of data on traffic source performance. We’ve found that LinkedIn is incomparable for reaching working professionals, with average active attention time of 54.7 seconds. This highly engaged audience comes at a high price, however, which may be out of reach for the average marketer.

Twitter is great for reaching news seekers with timely and relevant articles, with average active attention time of 52.3 seconds. However, that’s not necessarily for the lowest possible cost. And although we’ve used several native platforms, poor traffic quality and low average attention time has consistently driven us back to paid social time and time again.

What we’ve realized is that the most cost-effective way to promote content to an engaged audience on social is through Facebook newsfeed ads, where we see an average attention time of 52.1 seconds. Facebook is a great starting point for promoting content because the ad platform is approachable, offers in-depth ad targeting options and doesn’t require a sizeable budget like some of the others to make a big impact.

Look beyond the surface data

In addition to average attention and the number of read, we find that Brand Lift Studies are emerging as an important way to measure the effectiveness of content marketing campaigns. As media executives, you want to ensure that you are capturing the right audience at the most optimal time to result in a purchase intended action.

As Brand Lift Studies have become a key marketing resource, social platforms have adapted and evolved their services to accommodate the format to advertisers needs. Facebook offers Brand Lift Studies to users and Google has two measurement models: Brand Lift Studies and Brand Lift Studies 2.0. SnapChat also jumped on the trend to offer Brand Lift Studies for premium buyers.

Brand Lift Studies are used to measure consumer-brand interaction based on a marketing campaign. They typically include a consumer survey of one question where one group of people are exposed to an ad and the second group is not. Once seeing (or not seeing the ad), the user can choose to participate and answer honestly or avoid the survey altogether. The purpose is to help advertisers identify positive changes in the consumer’s journey, from awareness, perception, consideration and the likelihood of purchase.

Ask the right questions

When conducting Brand Lift Studies, advertisers can directly determine the answers to questions such as:

  • Are audiences able to recall the ad?
    • Do people like what they see in our ad?
    • Did the ad influence people to consider your brand of product?
    • Are consumers more likely to purchase the product or brand after seeing the ad?

All of which are surveyed at different parts of the consumer’s journey in order to avoid brand fatigue and poor user experience.

Think long-term brand lift benefits

A user can be tracked through several social touchpoint metrics including post engagements, shares, link clicks, and impressions. But the goal is to be memorable to your audience. Therefore, it is important to understand how an advertiser can be memorable in a market full of content.

According to Bussiness.com, distribution metrics such as CTR, impressions, and clicks have lost value as true internet currency. When building brand awareness, advertisers can earn intuitive feedback on their audiences through their behaviors. This includes active reading time, scrolling percentage, ad recall, consideration, and likelihood of purchase.

However, the lack of granular insight produced by clicks, views, impressions, and CTR makes it quite difficult to understand an audience is really interested in. That’s where Brand Lift Studies fill this gap because they allow you to fully understand your consumer’s intent and preference.

A reason why more companies are choosing to use Brand Lift Studies as a reliable resource when marketing is because it provides direct feedback from consumers within days of audience interaction. This gives advertisers the ability to actively optimize their campaigns. They can opt to adjust creatives or targeting in order to maximize their ROI.

Through our research, we’ve established that the “how and when” you reach your target audience can be pivotal for your campaign to succeed to its full potential. Publishers should be sure that when they work with social of work with marketers on content-based campaigns, they understand audience behavioral patterns through metrics like active reading time, scrolling behavior.

Publishers should also know that Brand Lift Studies offer the most accurate measure of a campaign’s overall performance. Not only will these studies provide you with real time results, they’ll inform advertisers exactly how well your content delivers your message, and clearly demonstrate that the context you provide is an ideal fit.  

Advertising | Featured Post | Perspectives | Revenue

Local news: Forget national metrics and focus on your strengths

Regional papers depend on building communities based on geography. But younger people prioritize interest-based communities. So, how can local and regional papers build new relationships with digital natives?

At the latest World News Media Congress in Glasgow, the publisher of The Globe and Mail Philip Crawley spoke about the unsurpassed value of an engaged local audience. He argued that—while digital engagement metrics provide invaluable data about audience funnels and propensity to convert—there are metrics that are unique to regional media they consider just as important.

He used the example of the paper’s packed obituaries pages to illustrate how a local title can measure its tangible engagement with an audience through non-digital interactions. Ultimately, Crawley made it clear that the worth of a local title cannot be measured through ones and zeroes alone.

Regional titles have long been experts in measuring engagement. These metrics might be tallying attendance at events they organize, counting submissions to the letters pages, or by less concrete metrics like the willingness of the public to interact with their journalists.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily translate to sustainability, even for publishers that have the same drive to reinvest in news products. Whether it’s due to quirks of geography, unpredictable societal differences, or for any number of reasons, local news publishers have been hurting. Investment in the print product is no guaranteed panacea either.

The key issue for many is that they have struggled to find ways in which digital products can serve as a focus for local engagement as print editions once did. Another factor is the often top-down approach from regional publishers who try to use national-level engagement metrics for their regional titles. Crucially, they largely miss those specialist ‘obituary pages’ engagement measurements that are an indication that audiences are invested in a community with a news brand at its center.

What does local engagement look like?

The race, then, is for local titles to discover what local engagement looks like in the platform age before their business models become unsustainable. To the industry’s great credit, it has been quick to launch research projects designed specifically around that.

One, the Community Listening and Engagement Fund (CLEF), was co-founded by a group that includes the Knight Foundation and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism. The goal of this initiative is to develop tools that measure that engagement (as opposed to the many approaches around finding funding or cost-savings).

Meanwhile, Poynter launched the Table Stakes initiative, which focuses on diversifying revenue for local newspaper, public radio, or digital news organizations. And the recently announced Project Neon is explicitly focused on finding ways to intensify audiences’ engagement with regional publisher Archant’s titles. We can look forward to seeing useful findings from these efforts in a few years’ time.

Investment in an uncertain future

Those efforts are welcome—and exactly what the industry should be doing. The unfortunate reality, however, is that while regional publishers have the expertise and history of engaging regional audiences in print, digitally they are playing catch-up. This is particularly significant given their need connect with younger audiences—and from something of a standing start.

This is not a consequence of a lack of effort in engaging audiences. In fact, there has been plenty of excellent work done to discover how young audiences interact with news digitally. However, that hasn’t always helped local publishers build engagement with young people.

For instance, Research from Flamingo on behalf of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism demonstrates that, as a result of having grown up with ready access to the internet, younger readers do not necessarily share the same values or expectations about the purpose of news:

“They still need and want news to connect their world to the world – and fulfil an array of different social and personal needs – but they don’t necessarily see the traditional media as the best or only way to do that… They don’t need to seek it out, news comes to them.” As a result, the reality of engaging young audiences is that it is much harder to build a community around a geographical rather than an interest-based niche.

The Flamingo study also found that no news app was in the top 25 most-used app in their respondents’ phones. This implies that local publishers must have a presence on social platforms to reach those young audiences on which they are increasingly going to rely.

To make matters more difficult, social platforms do not typically offer user data or tools that are of value to local publishers. (Although Facebook’s most recent endeavor in this area is reportedly better in this respect than past attempts). Local publishers are stuck between a rock and a hard place, then, trying to build communities on platforms that don’t necessarily cater to them.

In an excellent thread on Twitter, The Los Angeles Times’ engagement editor Adriana Lacy argued that publishers having a presence on even the recently-launched platforms like TikTok will eventually help with that engagement issue. However, she also notes it might take precious time – something local publishers particularly are often short of – to see any real return.

Part of the solution

Local and regional titles have always relied on creating a community out of their local readers. Efforts like comments sections on pages are useful for eyeballing the levels of community engagement, but without a print title to provide those ‘obituary metrics’, and with younger audiences increasingly finding ‘news’ content through platforms and intermediaries, regional publishers have struggled to demonstrate they have the heart and trust of a community.

One potential solution is for regional publishers to double down on what the BBC World Service Group’s head of editorial partnerships Emily Kasriel has termed ‘Solutions-focused Journalism.’ As Kasriel put it:

“Another factor driving our SFJ initiative is the desire to better serve our audiences, particularly young people. According to recent BBC Audience Research, 51% of 16-18 year olds and 47% of 19-24 year olds in the UK ‘agree or strongly agree’ that they want news to also provide solutions. The figures were even higher in the developing world: 75% of Indians, 78% of Nigerians and 82% of Kenyans of all ages want their news to provide solutions and not just problems.”

Solutions-focused journalism, centered around local areas, are potentially how publishers can marry the interest-based communities of the internet to the local areas they cover. Here, they can happily use those platforms on which they have established themselves as both a place for discussion and to provide calls for action around those proactive, solutions-based causes they are championing. The UK’s Pink News, though an interest-based title, grew to be the largest LGBTQ+ publisher in the world as a result of its campaigning journalism, for instance.

In the city of Hull in the UK, that focus on providing solutions journalism appears to be bearing fruit for one regional digital publisher, for instance. Journalism.co.uk reports: “Constructive journalism project Hull Is This launched in November 2018 with early promise, reaching 37k hits in its debut month and 45k in January 2019. While page views alone are not always the best metric for measuring the success of editorial content, it does at least suggest demand for local, positive stories.”

Similarly, the Yorkshire Post’s high levels of trust in the community have been attributed in part to its campaigning journalism around loneliness in the region.

So, while there may not be a direct digital successor to the ‘obituary metrics’ that demonstrated there was a community around local print titles quite yet, it isn’t to say that it is impossible to recreate those communities in the age of platforms. Instead, it could be that regional publishers will find a new path by shifting from being passive but present in the community to a much more pro-active and campaigning force around which a new, younger community will form.

Perspectives

Why brand lift is the advertising industry’s most misunderstood and underutilized metric – and why it should reign supreme

Marketers, I want to ask you a not-so-hypothetical question: How do you decide whether one of your digital brand advertising campaigns was successful? Here are a couple of things that I’m guessing might instantly come to mind:

  • We drove X dollars in attributable sales.
  • We achieved X number of viewable impressions.
  • X people clicked on our ads.

But does this really mean your ad was as successful as it could be? None of these metrics, not even sales, have much to say about the long-term perception of your brand. Clicks and views, for example, are proxies for attention. They don’t tell you about how your creative actually impacted a consumer.

Plus, brand marketing is about more than a direct sale. You’re investing your budget – in some cases, a considerable budget – into building long-term perceptions of your company and what it can bring to consumers. Not every consumer is going to turn into a customer upon seeing an ad, considering not every consumer is constantly in-market for a product. That doesn’t mean the ad doesn’t have value. At it doesn’t mean that they can’t be converted to a customer somewhere down the road.

Brand lift

The metric that matters is brand lift. Brand lift is what tells you if a consumer came any closer to becoming a customer – in short, if your ad worked. And in the pre-digital days, it was celebrated as the industry gold standard for determining ad effectiveness.

But today, easier-to-collect acquisition metrics like conversions and behavioral metrics like clicks are much more actively being pursued by brands and their agencies. And this is a problem, because it means our standards aren’t as high as they could be. If the objective of brand advertising is to generate attention, inform, persuade and drive intent, why is the industry moving away from brand lift towards measuring for outcomes?

Accurate vs. actionable

The answer to the question of why brand lift fell from favor is a pretty easy one. Pre-digital, while brand lift measurement was accurate, it wasn’t actionable. Marketers typically had to wait until a campaign had wrapped before brand lift could be measured, which meant they had no way to potentially optimize their strategy or change course while the campaign was actually running because they didn’t have a statistically stable projection. Further, brand lift reporting should really illustrate how well consumers are moving down the purchase funnel, from brand awareness through to brand intent and virtually none do this well.

Measuring brand lift has also historically been expensive and complicated. The methodology isn’t an ad tech creation. It is a scientific method. It requires taking two random sets of survey observations, one from a “clean” control audience and one from a test or ad-exposed group, both from within a campaign’s targeted audience.

Measuring brand lift requires complex sampling to ensure randomization and representation, survey instrument development, rendering questionnaires online, generating responses, estimating for biases, data cleaning, sample weighting and statistical testing to name some of the efforts required.

Difficult but effective

As a result, brand lift is difficult to deploy and potentially much more so than coding for an online click-based behavior such as registering a sale or logging a site visit. And there were even more variables: Methodologically, who are these people who participate in paid, panel-based studies and are these respondents truly representative of the consumer base exposed to the ad? Most brand lift studies, rarely, if ever, provide enough data for stable and sliceable analyses. 

However, brand lift measurement works. And you can’t game it. Clicks, sign-ups, and other digital-first metrics are all subject to skews related to the type of media. Even worse, they are sitting ducks for fraud and bad actors. Brand lift is a fundamentally human metric. And bringing it back to front-and-center is just a small part of what we as an industry need to do as we refocus on the fact that humans, not machines, are at the heart of brand storytelling. 

So, what do we do? In short, we’ve got a ton of new digital tools available to us that make brand lift measurement affordable, scalable, and actionable in real time. We’re not using them at an industrywide level. And we should be.

Give brand lift a lift

To give brand lift new relevance in the digital age, the industry should explore gauging brand sentiment with innovative surveys that are far more streamlined than we’re accustomed to. Incorporating consistency and even questionnaire standards could develop real benchmarks as well as ensure brand lift is an “honest” metric that can’t fall into the shady math situation that characterizes so many other digital analytics practices.

These surveys can be structured using a single question, keeping the experience lightweight for consumers. This is important because it broadens the base of consumers who can be surveyed. No longer are you limited to paid participants or to people who are willing to sit through multiple questions.

And perhaps most importantly, collecting large samples as a campaign is still running has the potential to shift the collection brand lift data from after the campaign ends to real-time – producing truly actionable insights. If something isn’t working, you can adjust your creative or targeting.

A consumer in your target demographic might not be ready to buy your product. That’s fine. However, the metrics we’ve been using in digital are both giving us an exaggerated sense of urgency – because they can’t measure anything more than a direct conversion – and keeping our standards low. It’s time to bring brand lift back to front-and-center, because finally, we’re ready for this tried-and-true metric to reach its full potential.

Advertising | Perspectives

Trends at the NewFronts: brand safety, metrics, big media ‘coopetition’ with platforms

The NewFronts are far from new. And old-line publishers are making more noise this year, even as the event is shortened to one week from two, with another week coming in the fall in Los Angeles. This week, the discussion between publishers and advertisers around online video had the usual buzzwords and focus on youth, mobile, and fun. However, challenges remain relating to brand safety, metrics, and building awareness of publishers’ digital video offerings.

As digital video ad revenue in the U.S. continues to grow — predicted to hit $15.42 billion this year and reach $22.18 billion in 2021 — according to eMarketer, more publishers and tech platforms will battle it out for those ad dollars even as popular video destinations like Netflix and HBO lack ads. And with so many publishers and platforms working together, it’s become more of a “coopetition” among them at the NewFronts.

Here’s a roundup of some of the key NewFronts trends to watch.

Brand Safety Concerns Continue

Last year’s NewFronts said it all: Whether this dog-and-pony show is worth it highly depends on how much money you have, and what you have to offer. Similar to last year, for most publishers, what they want to offer — and therefore what is at the forefront of their minds — is brand safety.

As YouTube continues to battle crisis after crisis on its platform, brands are under pressure to make sure their content doesn’t appear next to extremist or racist propaganda. Other platforms hardly match YouTube’s scale, making it hard for advertisers to boycott YouTube for any length of time.

Whereas some companies might feel anxiety, others see opportunity. Take NBCUniversal. The company isn’t hosting a NewFront presentation but is still pitching a new way of buying short-form video — NBCU Choice — that it’s guaranteeing to be brand safe and effective at hyper-targeting. And Digiday reports that half of that inventory is on YouTube.

“With the widely reported issues around questionable adjacencies and toxic environments, this has only become more important,” Hearst Magazines Digital Media’s Todd Haskell told Digiday. “We speak to issues around brand safety in every pitch, but particularly in ambitious content marketing programs like this.”

For YouTube itself, the tech giant has revealed a slew of changes to bolster its services. In yet another effort to quell brand safety fears, Google has announced it will improve the quality of ad-supported content on Google Preferred, YouTube’s program to allow advertisers to place their advertising on the most popular 5% of YouTube channels. The tech giant will now add inventory from YouTube TV — its streaming service that packages popular TV channels — to Google Preferred. Noting that audiences are also watching YouTube on TV screens more — 150 million hours a day, by its accounts — Google has also announced advertisers can buy YouTube video ads meant to only stream on TV screens through AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager.

These changes may not be enough to make publishers forget how precarious their content is online — but it’s certainly enough to keep publishers and advertisers hooked on Google.

The Metrics and Awareness Challenge

The convergence of video and TV means that brands this year are also paying more attention to metrics. Nothing comparable to Nielsen ratings has yet to exist for digital. As such, publishers that define success with their own metrics can lead to the kind of inflation and misinformation that has gotten some of them in trouble in the first place.

“With regard to the NewFront, one of the things that has come up historically has been almost an abstract discussion of data,” Zenith Media digital investment EVP Will Warren told BeetTV.

“I think what needs to come into play is, ‘How are publishers themselves using those types of information that they own specifically to help drive their own business forward?’”

Beyond the typical vanity metrics, Meredith exec Andrew Snyder mentioned how important measuring impact is for the publisher, which swallowed up Time Inc. recently.

“We are really focused on driving impact,” Snyder told Broadcasting & Cable. “We think about impact in two ways. On one side, it’s about impact with consumers. On the advertising side of the house, what matters most to our customers is scale, and together the new Meredith reaches over 170 million consumers. We reach 80% of millennial women.”

But what really puts some traditional broadcast and print publishers behind the eight ball is the fact that audiences don’t think about them as purveyors of original online video content. According to the 2018 Digital Content NewFronts Sentiment Forecast, commissioned by Matrix Solutions, consumer interest in original content from big media names like ESPN and the New York Times is pretty abysmal. While Americans who watched online content were excited about YouTube (57%) and Hulu (32%), only 16% were excited about ESPN, 10% about New York Times, and 2% about Conde Nast.

Big Media ‘Coopetition’ with Platforms

That problem around awareness might explain why some larger media brands like ESPN and Viacom presented for the first time at the NewFronts this week. Both companies are pushing very big digital initiatives. But they have a long way to go to catch up to established players.

Disney had been content in the past to tout its Maker Studios at NewFronts in the past, but this year is breaking out with its Disney Digital Network, using the “brand safe” buzzword throughout its presentation. The company touted new food shows via Tastemade and a “Star Wars” fan event. Disney even had ESPN present in its own slot, pushing its new ESPN+ streaming service, as well as new original content deals with Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.

And Viacom was touting its new 300-person division, Viacom Digital Studios, with hundreds of hours of original digital-native content, along with expanded programming for Snapchat. Plus, Viacom will produce the first VidCon conference in London in February 2019.

While many larger publishers have had love/hate relationships with the tech platforms, it’s interesting just how much love there has been at the NewFronts. Twitter announced even more live video programming with publisher partners, and nearly every publisher mentioning programming on tech platforms.

For marketers, it’s not an either/or proposition between the platforms and publishers, but how to spread the word in brand-safe content, with measurable results to the right audience. How they get there isn’t as important as the fact that they can get there.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Research proves it: Viewable marketing campaigns get results (but how much is enough?)

Viewability is at the center of every digital media buy. It’s the metric that assures consumers have an opportunity to see a digital advertisement. The Media Rating Council (MRC), an independent third-party, has established a framework for measuring and reporting viewability. The MRC’s standard for viewability includes two factors: the amount an ad is shown on screen and the amount of time the ad is viewed on screen. A display ad is considered viewable if half its pixels are on the screen for one second. A video ad must be on screen for at least two consecutive seconds. The standard is meant to be a minimum threshold for determining an “opportunity-to-see.”

To evaluate the impact of viewability and measure its effectiveness, Magna, IPG Media Lab, Moat and The Trade Desk joined together to analyze ad viewability rates as related to overall campaign performance. The research specifically focused on direct-response advertising. While the MRC set the standard, Magna’s research focused on better understanding the relationship between how viewable an ad is to how effective it is.

Not surprisingly, the research shows that the more viewable a digital ad is and the more screen time it has, the more likely it is to be effective. The more viewable campaigns are, the more likely they are to lead to a consumer action to buy, click or register, etc.

However, viewability is one of many factors connected to a campaign’s success. Additional metrics such as ad interaction also show a positive relationship with conversions. Specifically, Magna reports a direct relationship between consumers who interact longer with ads during exposure and their conversion rates. For example, the longer consumers interact with ads during exposure, the more likely they are, at some point, to convert to an action.

The research provides confirmation that the MRC baseline of viewability is clearly connected to ad effectiveness. It is significant to note that the research also proves that higher levels of viewability required by some agencies (80% to 100%) has no additional impact on ad effectiveness.

It’s important for marketers to experiment and test viewability rates and engagement levels to find the best performing combinations. Importantly, measurement of campaign success should include metrics that relate to performance goals. Other metrics such as such as cost, conversion task, target audience, ad format, frequency and others may also to the story of an ad’s performance.

Perspectives

Metrics got us into this mess. And they can get us out of it.

The first dot-com boom was about tech startups collecting millions of eyeballs. About five years ago, there was a resurgence of that kind of thinking in digital media. BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Gawker, and many others made an art of clickbait headlines and viral listicles and quizzes. But the focus on “vanity metrics,” like sugar-spun cotton candy, wasn’t really good for them, or the bottom line.

As traffic declines and clickbait fatigue ensued, many of these publishers tried to reach audiences through their social channels and bore the brunt of algorithmic changes. This left them wondering if the chase for views, shares, and clicks would really pay off. Those measurements are imperfect at best, and often misleading at their core. However, doubling down on what really matters can move businesses forward so that they can surmount this problem. Beyond the obvious shift toward subscriptions, engagement, and impact, publishers know that the real difference-maker for their business is serving their most loyal customers.

Highs and lows in the chase for numbers

The underpinnings of how we got into this mess can be traced to two overarching reasons.

The first is the psychological boost of the numbers game. Just as a Facebook user beams when she sees the number of likes and shares skyrocket on an individual post, so too do advertisers and news publishers when they see rising numbers for corresponding clicks, views, social shares, impressions, and the like. In a competitive industry where measuring popularity can and often is boiled down to who has the biggest following, a quick glance at the numbers can settle — or aggravate — any existing tension.

Of course, the real point to metrics should be creating a long funnel that gets to something bigger. Metrics should assess genuine leads, conversions and end goals. But it’s easy for marketers’ performance measurement ABCs — acquisition, behavior, conversion — to be shoved aside when views and impressions — sometimes paid for in promoted posts or campaigns — already captivate so much of the budget. Still, paying for a click might not amount to anything at all.

Zane McIntyre, co-founder and CEO at Commission Factory, boils down this unhealthy relationship in AdExchanger with a strong case in point:

“When advertisers conduct tests to determine the best thumbnail for video views, for example, advertising ‘reach’ is determined by the number of people who see it — if only for a moment. But then viewers quickly leave, often after the premise they were promised is under-delivered. It’s a vanity metric and can be easily manipulated with clickbait and paid content promotion, both of which can get content in front of a targeted audience quickly and cheaply.”

Trust issues

This brings us to the second big trend fueling the vanity metric craze: trust in (sometimes unreliable) parties whose skewed metrics leaves little room for proper assessment. The often-tense relationship between publishers and platforms is just as much of an issue here as it is anywhere else. When Facebook and Twitter allow you to pay for promoted posts or tweets, the idea is that you sacrifice some amount of control to the gatekeeper in hopes of gaining more control (in the form of a following) with audiences.

But Facebook’s repeated metric discrepancies have included miscounting Facebook Live reactions, misreporting the average duration of video viewed, and over-reporting on the amount of time spent on Instant Articles. That’s highlighted the necessity for accountability, transparency and third-party verification in performance analytics. It’s an onus on the social giant, already reeling from issues of trustworthiness, to circumvent these problems. But it also lights a fire under publishers and marketers to take metrics back into their own hands — and not relinquish control purely for the sake of ego boosting and more reach.

Metrics that matter

In response to criticism over its misconstrued metrics, Facebook has established partnerships with verification partners. Automated analytics too, should be “machine recommended, but human approved,” as strategist Nasr ul Hadi emphasized at this year’s Online News Association conference. At ONA, the broader issue of getting distracted by the wrong numbers became a talking point.

The close cousin of measuring and increasing impact is increasing engagement, with the hopes that deepening a relationship can lead to a sincere boost in vested interest and more subscriptions. Take the efforts of GateHouse Media, with its chain of local newspapers. The large publisher launched a campaign last summer called “Newsroom Hero,” which profiled GateHouse Media journalists as more than just journalists. The campaign kept the focus on the positive influence and impact reporters bring to communities — whether in their reporting, civic engagement as volunteers, or in their own families. It’s the first such campaign for the publisher to focus on impact, and their hope is to translate that into more meaningful metrics — beyond the raw numbers of 35 million monthly digital visitors and nearly 23 million weekly readers.

Increasing engagement shouldn’t be mistaken for solving the metric conundrum. It’s hard to point to impact as a cost-cutting national chain of local newspapers. But as MediaShifts’s Jason Alcorn points out, it’s a milestone for a local news chain to talk in the language of non-profits, who aim for impact to satisfy funders and subscribers.

It’s a tall order indeed to turn numbers, whether high or low, into actionable insights that deliver real leads and results. But the fact that this inner conscience is being spoken aloud more and more shows that vanity metrics are no longer in vogue — and the quest for meaningful measurement might just lead to better business results for everyone.

Industry-Research

3 Things standing in the way of engaged time metrics

The idea of the “Attention Economy” as a currency on the internet goes back to at least 1997. So, 20 years later, we should have this engaged time metric figured out, right?

From a technological perspective, we do. We can accurately measure the time a reader spends actively reading a page, versus measuring how long a browser tab was left open with a page. Ads can measure engagement or time spent viewing.

However, we need to separate the technical ability to measure engaged time from the adoption of the metric as a valuable evaluation construct. Has the reality on the ground changed when it comes to using time to understand an audience?

Adoption at an Individual Level

We attempted to answer this question by partnering with Digiday’s CUSTOM studio on a research survey. Based on responses of almost 300 members of the Digiday audience, engaged time has gained a great deal of traction with journalists and reporters.

Time-on-page (the broader term we used in the survey questions) ranked the highest for what people use to evaluate their own work.  If you interpret this chart another way, it indicates that 50% of people working in publishing see time spent with their audience a personal goal for their work.

However, we also asked about which metrics people were responsible for reporting back to their company. When asked this way, time-on-page dropped to the sixth position – out of nine total choices.

While individuals may understand and value time-on-page as a way to show that an audience cared about the work of a piece, organizations are still prizing pageviews, impressions, and social sharing.

The disconnect between these two sets of responses emphasizes the gap between how writers view their relationship with their audience and that relationship’s value to the business. If the writer’s goal is to engage the reader, but the business still makes money from impression numbers, how can those two align?

Barriers to Organizational Adoption

In addition to the data from the survey, the report revealed specific challenges that companies face in trying to adopt any new metric or goal. Here are three takeaways:

  • Inconsistent messaging from leadership. Though executives are usually not immersed in analytics every day, leadership still sets the tone for how employees view company success. According to one of participant in the research, inconsistent messages from management can make things more confusing: “It shifts with whoever is in charge. Some new person comes on and says, ‘This is our prime metric. This is what we’re shooting for.’ And then they go off and work somewhere else and someone else comes in.”
  • The right vs wrong metric mentality. Conversations need to stay away from “the right” metrics and lean more towards what success means. Employees want their work to be successful; focus on that first and then connect the metrics to how to get there.
  • A lack of expectations and benchmarking. With new metrics, you have to indentify the status quo in order to tell if something is performing better or worse than expected, or to show improvement over time. For metrics that aren’t as intuitively understandable as pageviews or visitors, what kind of benchmarking or expectations can be set?

Over the coming years, which organizations will ensure that the goals for their audience relationships, employees’ work and business models will align? And which will be able to adopt time as a measure of how their audience values the work they do? I suspect we’ll be able to tell soon enough.

The full research cited in this article can be found on Parse.ly’s website.

clarecarrClare Vice President of Marketing at Parse.ly, which partners with digital publishers to provide clear audience insights through an intuitive analytics platform. She writes and speaks about all the ways companies can use digital analytics to improve their operations and reach their audience goals. Prior to joining Parse.ly, Clare spent five years on the publishing side as the Director of Marketing and Online Operations at Greentech Media. Previous to that, she did digital marketing and business development at ThePoint.com, the precursor to Groupon, and Venus Zine. Originally from Ohio, she graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Environmental Sciences.

Industry-Research

Attention is a valuable audience attribute

Since the beginning of broadcast television, exposure was the currency of audience measurement. Gradually audience metrics evolved from tuning behavior, to program selection, to page views, to viewable impressions. Interestingly, none of these measures capture the audience’s engagement with media or the advertising. Today’s media companies collect or count on third parties for an abundance of measurement data including page views, expressions of liking and sharing to quantify audience attributes of value to advertisers but again none quantify the audience’s attention.

Jacob L. Nelson and James G. Webster of the International Journal on Media Management at Northwestern University recognized the need to further evolve media measurement. They designed a research study to analyze the relationship between the amount of time visitors spend on sites, news sites in particular, and the number of unique visitors the sites receive.

They used comScore data to analyze 887 news websites in their study “Audience Currencies in the Age of Big Data.”  Through then analysis of this data which measured an individual’s time spent on a news site and the average number of minutes spent on a specific page, Nelson and Webster found that these two variables most accurately represented an individual’s level of engagement. In further probing, they also found no significant correlation between the number users a site reaches and the amount of time visitors spend on that site.  In other words, the number of visitors to a site does not necessarily correlate to the level of engagement. In fact, unique visitors and attention measures are very different measurements, one identifies the quantify of visitors and the other the quality of visits (engagement).

While publishers and advertisers have begun to adopt an attention based metric, there is still research to be conducted. Specifically, for advertisers, confirming the value and predictability of the halo effect of user engagement on ad recall and effectiveness. In programmatic buying, advertisers need further qualification of a time based audience especially since heavy users are often the easiest for advertisers to reach (and cheaper too).  Further, time based metrics should not be a measure of consumption where gimmicks ensure long visits that stimulate engagement. Attention metrics must ensure creative methods to monitor user activity and interest to protect against gaming of this measurement.  Being that attention is a core requisite for retention, both publishers and advertiser stand to benefit using it as a media based currency.

Innovation | Video

6 Big trends from the NewFronts (hint: may include video)

The NewFronts started out as a sideshow (even a joke to some) compared to the TV Upfronts. But it’s no longer in the shadows, as everyone from the New York Times, Bloomberg, CNN and BuzzFeed stole the spotlight at this year’s NewFronts in New York. This series of events provides a forum for digital to court advertisers in an increasingly competitive market.

With two-thirds of U.S. agency and marketing professionals reporting increased investments toward desktop and mobile video, video — whether original series, virtual reality or live-streaming — naturally took center stage at this year’s event. Alongside new metrics for measuring advertising also came reflections about what exactly constitutes an advertisement now, as well as more of a natural acceptance, articulated some time ago, that the Internet indeed is becoming the new television.

Here’s a rundown of the most important trends from this year’s showcase, and some caveats:

1. Virtual Reality is Everywhere
Following the 360-degree viewing capabilities the name implies, virtual reality is seemingly all around us now as more media outlets jump into the fray. As Adage reported, publishers “are bringing virtual reality to almost every pitch.” Some indicators: National Geographic, AOL and Refinery29 are all launching VR studios. Conde Nast too is producing a VR series. The Economist revealed plans for a second year producing virtual reality documentaries. Time Inc. also announced a virtual reality app will be included around its Life brand, which will encompass publications such as Time, People, EW and Sports Illustrated. In addition, Hulu and Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, announced a partnership to curate virtual reality concert experiences to be available on Hulu’s VR app. The New York Times, meanwhile, announced its continued push toward VR on both the advertising and the editorial front.

Caveat: While virtual reality might be in the air, it might not have a big enough installed base or active user base yet.

2. Original Video Series Are Hot
Alongside publishers bringing VR to almost every pitch was their announcements of original video series. Playboy, the New York Times, and The Economist announced new original video programming. Yahoo announced it was “doubling down” on its video focus and constraining it to four verticals — news, sports, finance and lifestyle. WebMD also announced it was bulking up on its lifestyle programming, and Vice unveiled plans to create up to 20 TV channels around the world. Furthermore, among other video-based initiatives, Vox revealed it’s creating a standalone studio to create content for Snapchat, as Poynter’s Benjamin Mullin reported.

Caveat: There are so many original video series that no one has time to watch them all.

3. Technology & Metrics Matter
Major endeavors in the world of video also means that new metrics must emerge to keep up with industry demands. Mashable, for example, announced two additions to its Velocity technology suite. “Joining the Velocity Dashboard, which uses natural language processing to mine for topics about to go viral, is Velocity CMS, which is used to create competitive stories on those topics, and Velocity Kg, which will optimize content for multi-platform sharing,” as Troy Dreier of StreamingMedia wrote. Hulu is building interactive ads specifically for connected TVs, and is “working with Nielsen to enable the measurement of ads through over-the-top video delivery devices such as Roku, PlayStation, Xbox and Apple TV,”  AdAge’s Jeanine Poggi’s reported. Yahoo also announced expanded video metrics through a partnership with the advertising analytics platform Moat to measure viewability and and metrics beyond viewability. YouTube, meanwhile, announced “Breakout Videos” through its Google Preferred product, to help find the next viral hit. It’ll allow brands to automatically buy ads on these soon-to-be trending videos.

Caveat: Technology is cool, but often it’s the tech companies who can build better technology than publishers.

4. Live-streaming Becoming Routine
It goes without saying that live-streaming is becoming bigger than ever. Facebook, for example, revealed it will create a live-streamed morning show, and is partnering with Activision Blizzard, a videogame giant, to offer live e-Sports coverage on the platform. Among Time’s new video offerings is a streaming video network geared toward cord-cutters. YouTube and Hulu are also both launching live TV offerings.

Caveat: Same as VR: There might be more live-streaming show ideas than people who want to watch all those live streams.

5. Internet is the New TV
We’ve been hearing this for some time, but it seems that the Internet is truly becoming modern-day television. National Geographic, long a fixture on TV, is now putting its efforts toward Instagram and other digital platforms. While Vox is backing a new television show, tellingly, more hype surrounds its pivot toward content creation on Snapchat Discover. Ellen DeGeneres has long been known for her television talk show, and now she’s starting her own digital network. Telenovelas are now coming to the digital world — specifically targeting Millennials — thanks to a joint effort by Telemundo and BuzzFeed. The digital news company Newsy is also trying to attract Millennial eyes with online programming and advertising meant for a generation not interested in broadcast.

Caveat: While Millennials make up a large segment of cord-cutters and “cord-nevers,” pay TV continues to rebound, and Comcast even added subscribers in the last quarter.

6. Dizzying Numbers
None of the investment toward video and its related endeavors make sense unless companies have the data and metrics to back up their ambitions. BuzzFeed reported it now gets more than 7 billion content views a month (compared to 2.8 billion monthly views a year ago). And only a quarter of BuzzFeed content is consumed on its actual website, underscoring the importance of its social and other platform strategies. The entertainment and trend publisher PopSugar, meanwhile, reported that its video views on Facebook have jumped 452 percent since it first debuted its Facebook show, PopSugar Rush, a year ago. Hulu revealed that 70 percent of its viewing happens in a living room environment, reinforcing the trend of digital being the new TV. And Bloomberg Media also announced it has doubled its video streams since last year, as well as gained a 25 percent increase in mobile users. The company now attracts 20 million video views a month.

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, had its own impressive statistics: “The U.K.-based publisher is now posting 650 videos a day, which has resulted in a 516 percent jump in views in the past year. It’s getting 383 million monthly video views, 12 million video views per day, and claims an 80 percent completion and viewability rate,” Adweek’s Christopher Heine wrote.

Caveat: Some metrics are more valuable than others. Video views on Facebook have been maligned as too generous, counting after only 3 seconds. And huge numbers of eyeballs don’t always equate to huge income.

Perspectives

Digging Deep into Attention and Metrics that Matter

I was thrilled to see an industry visionary like Ev Williams tackle the measurement discussion with his post “A mile wide, an inch deep” and advocate the use of a dimension beyond simply unique visitors.

We agree that time is a critical dimension and arguably the most important one as noted in our recent report “How Time-based Measurement is Grabbing Publishers’ Attention.”

In terms of measuring the quality of an audience, Ev’s “rectangle analogy” nails it.

Ask any junior high student which rectangle is bigger, one that is three inches wide or one that is two-and-a-half inches wide, and they’ll tell you it’s a nonsensical question unless they have more information — specifically, the height.

And yet, we literally say one company or service is “bigger” based on a single number — specifically, number of people who have “used” it in the last 30 days. 

rectangle

A site that attracts one million visitors for 30 seconds per month is an entirely different business than one that attracts one million visitors for 3 hours per month. The same holds true for brand advertising. We will continue to urge the industry to debate and discuss a time-based measurement world, what it means to brand advertisers and how it more correctly aligns the incentives for creating great media. As Ev so eloquently puts it: “Most Internet companies would build better things and create more value if they paid more attention to depth than breadth.”

It’s an Attention Economy. Content is everywhere and so are the consumers. We need to be in the business of making the most of their precious and valuable time. We’ll be exploring this topic in depth at the 13rd Annual Digital Content Next Summit later this month. It is members-only but we’ll be reporting on the insights and major themes on InContext after the event.

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