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Tags containing: "personalization"

Advertising | Innovation

Personalization without people: What happens when no one can track consumers?

The alignment of new laws, reader advocacy, and technology has opened up a challenge to user tracking tools. While some express concern that an end to unbridled tracking will hinder the digital ecosystem, this is an enormous opportunity for publishers to take the lead in building the next generation of personalization technology. However, this evolution in personalization will need to be built on a foundation of editorial metadata, which will drive everything from video playlists to targeted advertising.

A new door opens

A new type of personalization that eschews user-based targeting is coming. In part this will be driven by the fact that many analytics, ad tech, and personalization-tech companies will be deeply affected by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). An AdAge headline once proclaimed that the GDPR will “rip global digital ecosystem apart.” While that may be a bit alarmist, the GDPR will force companies operating within the EU, and the third party tools they use, to adhere to a strict opt-in for all tracking. It will also levy severe penalties on those companies within EU jurisdiction that fail to do so.

The omnipresent motivation behind the law, though, has failed to prompt the development of similar legislation in the U.S. Despite results and sentiment that suggest otherwise, targeting remains central to many marketing strategies. Brands have found user targeting programmatic campaigns less effective than they expected. Consumer groups have formed in protest of the functionality of user tracking in action (such as ads appearing with no regards to the content they appear on). Individuals on social networks find retargeting approaching some sort of uncanny valley — a point at which its very accuracy is becoming deeply discomforting. And we’re even seeing the start of a conversation around user targeting happening in Congress.

A victory for publishers

Publishers have a mission to treat their readers and viewers ethically. The good news is that smart publishers can (and do) run user-targeting related tools on that basis. The personalization of ads and news has become a significant trend, one that many are still chasing. However, the fundamental underlying technology is challenged by the GDPR. Even if publishers never conduct any business outside of the U.S., the vendors who power personalization tools do. We operate on literal reams of data but must face a future where comparatively little is available.

These oncoming shifts in the marketplace shouldn’t frighten publishers. They are likely to hurt the thousands of middleware third-party ad tech companies that have failed to deliver on user targeting for years now while skimming profits. A push to decrease both publisher and advertiser reliance on user targeting is an opportunity.

Metadata to the rescue

Publishers need to take a look at the new generation of tools that can provide the data needed for personalization on-page without ever tracking a user. Metadata standards are improving and adding detail. Our current tools consider article relationships mostly in keywords and categories but new ways of telling the story about a story could bring about a revolution in personalization.

Almost by accident, social media has pushed thousands of sites to adopt Open Graph, an RDF-based standard built to provide detailed site data. Search engines have long supported and rewarded structured data like hCard. Improvement in the Schema.org project, along with increased support of JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) by a variety of platforms, has made it an increasingly promising standard. Unfortunately, The Schema Project, which is complex and lacking good documentation and in-action examples, has been challenging to adopt. Publishers have also lacked a clear reward for use. However, that is changing with the announcement of support by Google for the use of structured data for fact checking.

Regardless of how successful the fact checking markup project becomes, it demonstrates that page-to-page relational metadata is joining other complex metadata systems as part of the future of publishing. With privacy concerns on the rise, it behooves publishers to start considering these systems as part of the future of personalization.

A structured future

Beyond keywords and tags, there is an embarrassment of new options for metadata that can create a unique experience on each webpage more tailored to the moment the reader encounters an article than following them with cookies ever was. While a reader might have been shopping for shoes yesterday, what they read today may put them in a very different mindset. And the reader of today is a more useful target for personalization than the reader of yesterday.

What can we build on using enhanced metadata? Geographic coordinates could drive a set of recommendations even more relevant than attempting to geotarget the user. Article authorship has worked well for media companies where the byline promises a particular voice. We can build playlist systems that find their next videos through more than title keywords, looking at producer credits, length and related affiliate offers. Types of content or referenced urls in the body of an article can allow personalization tools to recommend other articles that share a particular format, or ads that sell the referenced type.

Planning beyond keywords

Taking advantage of these opportunities will require different ways of thinking about what everyone creates and how it breaks down. It won’t just be up to an SEO expert to drop tags on a page. News organizations will find that optimizing for search, social, or ads will require taking advantage of all the opportunities that complex metadata provides and operating within a larger plan for how metadata should be handled. The editorial and business sides will need to work together to consider the whole of outlets’ output, prioritizing approaches, and building out tools that automate and suggest metadata structures.

Owners of this process will need to consider personalization on a variety of factors that describe form, format, key ideas and digital objects. They’ll have to build out a framework on how articles connect to each other that will describe small universes of content. A site that takes full advantage of metadata structures can promise a richer experience for readers, viewers and listeners than any provided through cookie-based tracking, an experience based on in-the-moment intent.

Our current generation of overly-targeted ads and recommendations don’t just fail to perform, they’re creepy and overpriced. Our audiences deserve more and our ethics require that we provide it. We have the technology and industry pressure to deploy successful alternatives. Understanding, expanding and adapting the use of detailed metadata across the web will build better media companies and a better open and well-connected internet.

Aram Zucker-Scharff is the Director for Ad Engineering in The Washington Post’s Research, Experimentation and Development group. He is also the lead developer for the open-source tool PressForward and a consultant on content strategy and newsroom workflows. He was one of Folio Magazine’s 15 under 30 in the magazine media industry. He previously worked as Salon.com’s full stack developer. His work has been covered multiple times in journalism.co.uk and he has appeared in The Atlantic, Digiday, Poynter, and Columbia Journalism Review. He has also worked as a journalist, a community manager and a journalism educator.

Advertising | Perspectives

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

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

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

———-

Scott Bailey, President, TEN Automotive Division
@TENenthusiast

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Smith, President of Digital Media, AccuWeather
@accuweather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertising | Perspectives

How out-of-home is evolving to join the digital paid media mix

Out-of-home (OOH) advertising has been around for generations in the form of billboards, posters, public transport hub walls, bus benches and more. While these paid media placement opportunities are still around, they’ve been quietly undergoing some significant digitally-enhanced upgrades, including programmatic bidding, viewability tracking and intent-oriented targeting.

As a result, OOH is the first “offline” media realm to join the ranks of connected digital media platforms. Let’s look at how this trend is taking shape.

Why Media Buyers are Looking for Better Digital Options
In the early days of the internet, display ads were all marketers needed for their messages to be seen. Now, however, the vast majority of display ads, both on desktop and mobile, don’t command much attention at all.

This is largely because audience members have become desensitized, developing “banner blindness. However, there are plenty more issues in play: ad blockers, viewability measurement challenges, bot traffic and rampant fraud, all of which are making alternative digital ad media types increasingly attractive to buyers. One study from Integral Ad Science found that just 43% of online display ads are “human-viewable.”

Naturally, as a result of these challenges, advertisers and media brokers are hunting for new ways to reach eyeballs. If no one pays attention to your ads, then you’re simply wasting your money.

Why Media Buyers Struggle to Justify Unmeasurable Placements
In the age of granular conversion tracking and sophisticated attribution modeling, media buyers need to have the ability to demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) on their placements. This type of measurement is relatively straightforward when buying ads on Facebook, for example, but most offline media simply can’t compete in this regard.

If they can’t prove how many people saw or remembered the ad, and then gather data suggesting the extent to which the ads impacted sales, they can’t determine whether the buy was any good. It’s easy to run an ad continuously – knowing how many people saw and paid attention to it is the challenge.

Online media has, to a large extent, spoiled the viability of buying offline media. We have access to all this big data – nearly anything done in the digital world can be traced with ease – which makes it easier for marketers and other professionals to see what’s happening as a result of advertising. That’s why there’s rising demand today for similar tracking in offline media too.

The day may come when print publications use internet of things-enabled nano-chips to track ad views and attention biometrics to collect data that will later be used for audience segmentation, automated nurturing and strategy refinement. In the meantime, only outdoor advertising has the one-to-many reach to justify investing in better transparency and reporting for advertisers and media buyers. That said, smart industry players are evolving cautiously, as “big brother” privacy concerns come into play whenever behavioral tracking comes up.

Digital out-of-home media is therefore steering clear of keeping records associated with individual audience members, with several initiatives now in play that can provide performance metrics based on attention-correlated eye movements. Trade groups like Route and TAB now offer media measurement and audience estimates for OOH advertising in the UK and the US respectively.

How Digital OOH Is Addressing Offline Media Accountability 
OOH sellers are investing in development as well. Clear Channel Outdoor Americas is partnering with mobile carriers like AT&T to track whether people who see billboard ads eventually buy the products promoted. “In aggregate, that data can then tell you information about what the average viewer of that billboard looks like,” Andy Stevens, senior VP of research and insights at Clear Channel recently told the New York Times. “Obviously that’s very valuable to an advertiser.”

Following a successful pilot last year, with 1000 screens placed in 20 supermarkets across Canada, Montreal-based Impax Media recently hired Dominick Porco and Bill Ketcham, both alumni of the Adspace Digital Mall Network executive team, to oversee the relatively new company’s push to take over the US.

The Impax platform offers digital advertising on screens mounted at the checkout line at grocery stores and other retail outlets. Impax’s screens can be seen whether the lane is closed and locked or open and in use. Each screen provides advertisers with the information they need to track ROI on media spends, while protecting viewer privacy. The screens are set to display brand-sponsored content and store announcements, running in a loop.

“Our plan is to install an average of eight screens per month in each of 167 supermarkets, starting in August of this year,” says Porco. “At that rate, Impax will be active in 10,000 supermarkets within five years, reaching over 130 million shoppers every four weeks, on a network that will consist of 80,000 screens – by far the largest digital network in the US.”

The Internet of Things Makes Programmatic Booking Possible
For those interested in enabling it on their smartphones, beacon technology allows people to receive notifications about sales at stores as they pass by them. With beacons and near-field communication (NFC), advertisers can more accurately target people based on their location away from home, when they are 41% more receptive to advertising. So advertisers can already target people based on where they are, whether serving up messages via mobile push notifications or via video clips on big, wall-mounted screens.

With programmatic bidding currently under development for the OOH industry, buyers may soon be able to more accurately target their appropriate audiences, and sellers will benefit from being able to offer a fully optimized media asset.

Imagine the power of being able to serve up messages to individuals, no matter where they go in the real world. Creepiness aside, this is personalization at its most extreme. pers

Programmatic DOOH will allow marketers to reach audience members in high proximity to points of purchase, across multiple touchpoints, and on a budget that works for the client while also meeting business objectives. With the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure on the rise and back end targeting processes ready to take place in real-time, this type of contextual relevance is around the corner.

The Benefits of Today’s OOH Placements
In the age of complex, individualized customer journeys, media buying success hinges on omni-channel exposure, and digital OOH is proven to be a major performer in this regard. A study from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America found that when people see OOH ads and eventually interact with advertisers online, nearly a quarter of these interactions take place within 30 minutes of viewing.

DOOH is proven to be cost-effective, too, with CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) starting at $1.50 and maxing out at about $35, according to one recent industry-wide inventory assessment. The only media channels that are less expensive – radio, magazines and static billboards – feature zero viewability reporting capabilities.

OOH advertising’s joining of the digital paid media mix means people are exposed to promotional content that they actually want to see. This increases the chance they’ll respond to the ads positively, boosting conversion rates and profits for the advertisers, while earning money for venues as well.

JoeLiebkindJoe Liebkind is a Berlin-based writer. He has worked with startups in sales and marketing roles in Berlin and New York. Find him on Twitter.

Advertising | Innovation | Revenue

Inside the mobile-first, digital always strategy at The Dallas Morning News

Most content companies have come to terms with the hard truth that vast majority of their audience is using a mix of mobile apps and devices to access and enjoy news and multimedia. But there are still a whole lot of companies are just beginning to grasp what the shift to “mobile-first” means for their digital strategy. At one level, it’s about adapting information for smaller screens. At the other end of the spectrum, it’s about striking a balance between a presentation for occasional readers who like to dip in and out of stories and loyal brand fans who desire long-form content and coverage.

Here, Peggy Anne Salz, analyst at MobileGroove, catches up with Chris Williams, Digital Strategist & Senior Director of Digital Portfolio at The Dallas Morning News. They discuss the organization-wide rethink that has allowed the company to revamp its mobile apps, reimagine its brand and recharge advertising by harnessing mobile audience context.

The Dallas Morning News is clearly in a period of transition, going from being a newspaper company with a website to being a mobile-first digital media company. Please recount some of the recent changes.

It’s a complete overhaul from newsroom and technology outward to be mobile-first and digital-always. With our new look and approach we have a new mantra: Time is the new inches. It used to be we measured attention and loyalty in inches. It was all about how many inches in a newspaper we were trying to get people to stare at. Now we are getting away from that without alienating our print audience: It’s about driving a balance with a blended product offering, without driving away our core audience of newspaper readers. We want to offer up the right things to people at the right time. We launched a new DallasNews.com this year, plus GuideLive.com and SportsDayDFW.com in recent history.

We see a lot of our audience comes in through social media, and we see that the vast majority of our mobile audience comes in at different times of day. For that reason, much of the mobile-first design is focused on people coming in the ‘side door” instead of getting to the news from the homepage. We’ve had to ask and answer some tough questions to get this right: How do we navigate people that come in from referring sources such as social media? How do we navigate them from article to article, or keep them in a stream of headlines that they’re interested in at that exact moment? The new DallasNews.com website is responsive for all devices and times of day—and with it we have been building our content management system to match modern needs.

We did a cleanup of our apps, including one we offer in partnership with a popular local sports radio station that includes streaming audio as well as our own sports content and a DVR-like functionality. It was getting a little long in the tooth when it came to supporting new rich media assets, so we’re re-launching the iOS version of that app in the coming weeks, and following that with a launch of the Android version later in the year. Our primary brand app, “The Dallas Morning News” app, is also on a cycle of continuous improvement, so we update it regularly.

You have reduced your portfolio of apps. But at the same time you have grown your portfolio of brands to a national level and increased your curation of content. Normally, companies worry about diluting their brand, but you seem to embrace it…

sportsdaytalkSome big name brands in news insist on having a branded house, where all the content is essentially branded the same in shape or form. We decided we didn’t want to be a branded house because we’re not about the singular name; we’re about building products that resonate with the modern—and mobile—users that make up the majority of the audience out there.

Instead, we go with an approach that allows us to be a house of brands, some that are linked to Dallas where our audience is highly engaged and loyal to our news. But being digital forces us to think beyond our arrival on someone’s doorstep. We have to think about how we reach people on their devices, wherever they are. Being a house of brands allows us to be flexible and roll out coverage that can relevant to people everywhere.

Let’s say I launch the best horse racing coverage in the entire nation as an example. If I brand it “The Dallas Morning News,” then there’s the potential that I’m fighting an uphill brand battle with readers in North Dakota who love horse racing thinking, “Well, what does Dallas really know about what I’m looking for?” People think of content by topics, and not necessarily the source until the source is something they don’t identify with. That’s why our brands, like GuideLive or SportsDay, are powered by The Dallas Morning News, but they stand on their own as brands and products.

Tell me about your spin-off brands and the content focus.

GuideLive is a destination for a general entertainment and events audience and is one that’s focused on very specific things not tied only to “Dallas” or “Morning News.” When we rolled that out, it was launched as a digital pure play. We took the approach of a startup, separating people from most enterprise ties; with a small cross functional team we did an entirely new audience and product build and it’s been a steady growth plan ever since.

SportsDay is another where we wanted to build a wider audience (not start from scratch), realizing that the core audience of Cowboy and Mavericks fans, two of our sports teams here, have national appeal with that audience coming from outside Dallas. Although it is a separate brand and product with its own feature set, it’s firmly in the foundation on which we have built our house of brands.

In a way it’s reminiscent of TV or music where channels are organized in channels and address target audiences, or satisfy Long Tail tastes…

Exactly. That’s precisely the approach we take because we believe that content, in order to survive and thrive, has to be agnostic. It can’t be limited to formats, like print, or only appeal to a specific audience defined by geography. We want to reach every audience out there, and we start with what you could call it a top-down and bottoms-up approach. The top-down part is the more traditional study of the market that answers the key question: “Is there a market gap, or a growing trend out there, that we can capitalize on whether by growing audience or growing revenues?”

At the same time, we do a bottom-up approach, where we focus on pulling together the consumer insight to understand and address the opportunity. That’s when we might also do our own focus groups or build rapid prototypes to get a sense of how people feel, what their interests are, and help us decide if we want to go in with a new brand or content to serve that audience. No matter what we decide, it’s goal driven and data-driven.

Let’s discuss the user journey through your apps and destinations. How do you make the match between the audience you want to engage and the content you want them to engage with?

We start by looking at the audience and map the journey to what we know about the audience segment and what our data about the users tells us. In the case of DallasNews.com, we went from a very click-heavy site to an infinite scroll site, one where readers can click to read an article and then quickly drop back into a stream of our content options, or stubs as we call them, and be presented with new opportunities to click and read new articles. This is a huge departure from the old thinking that was all about stuffing related links into a single article and sending people down a rabbit hole to find out more.

Apps have a different use case. People aren’t coming in from social or Google. They are accessing your content because they are “content loyal.” What we’re finding is that we are serving two audience personas in our apps. One is the “Leisure Browser,” people who just skim everything, and do lots of scroll activity as they move in and out of the content. The other is “The Researcher,” people who are engrossed in the content and will spend minutes reading long-form articles. Our new design caters to both.

Digiday reports that your latest app revamp also appeals to Millennials. Of your 40,000 monthly users, 60% are Millennials…

DMNFavsThis is an audience that typically returns to the app multiple times throughout the day to check for the latest developments. They also want choices—which is why we show 10 to 20 list of top articles. This list is curated, so it’s straight out of our newsroom, not a list of trending topics Millennials can get elsewhere. They appreciate news that is thoughtfully curated because it’s one less thing they have to filter. Sometimes too much choice is also stress.

Other Millennials want control of the content and there the My Feed section of the app allows them a ton of customization. Instead of seeing what is important in the area, for example. readers can dip into the app and check out all the headlines that they care about based on topics. My Feed is a success, but we also notice that users have a large hump to climb over when it comes to self-customization. Not everyone wants to make the decisions and spend time setting their preferences. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t—so one of our next big tasks will be to use the data around what people are reading to make suggestions. We want to be able to say “Hey, we’ve preselected these items and boosted their importance in My Feed for you to check out because you’re sure to appreciate them.” That way we’re helping to populate the feed automatically, instead of making people go in and twist a bunch of knobs themselves.

Data helps you deliver content, but a data-driven approach can also help advertisers target relevant audiences with relevant messages. At a time when we read that 75 cents of every ad dollar spent is spent on Google or Facebook, how do you compete?

As an industry, we’re going from printed dollars to digital dimes to mobile pennies. Advertising dollars were very much driven by having a captive audience. And then, as digital and mobile have grown, so, too, has the pricing and sizing of advertising changed. Our approach is to be unafraid of organic opportunities that apply to our business and be bold in identifying new revenue streams.

One example is affiliate revenue. For example, if we do a product review, then it may make sense to do an adjacent product click that goes over to a provider like Amazon or eBay to let consumers make a purchase there and we potentially get a commission. Or consumer might be reading a story about a new release GuideLive and want to go see the movie. We’ve been talking to car hire services like Uber and Lyft, and ticket sales vendors and aggregators to find out how we can work together to make an engaging experience: people read a movie review, buy tickets online, and then jump in a car to head there and we can empower them, supporting other businesses, and making some additional revenue ourselves.

The aim is to come up with a blend that is good for business and good for consumers. It used to be advertising was all about how do you tie content to ads. Now we are a point where we are using data to define audiences and influence decisions when they are engaging with content. We see great performance from retargeting campaigns and audience-based campaigns. But we see even better performance when we manage to match the content and the person’s intent at the same time in the same place. In the end, our goals are excellent digital-first and people-focused products; ones that blend all the user and business needs, like amazing content, fun advertising experiences, and modern organic revenue growth.

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

Innovation

Q&A: Kamo Asatryan, Primer CEO and Co-Founder

Mobile and apps have combined to do much more than empower consumers to get stuff done on their terms (and in the context they choose). These channels are creating an increasing sense of “entitlement” and the expectation among consumers that content and experiences delivered by apps should also be personal, relevant and literally aligned with “where they’re coming from.”

On the Web, we expect companies and content owners to connect the dots in our data (cookies, search queries, and past patterns of behavior) to deliver us to where we want and need to be in order to continue our own journey.

On mobile apps, consumers expect a personal and streamlined experience— but it has been extremely difficult for companies to tailor the customer experience. Enter Primer, a startup that has developed technology that enables companies to instantly deploy native screens personalized for every new user and where they are in the journey. Peggy Anne Salz — mobile analyst, nine-time author and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove — interviews Kamo Asatryan, Primer CEO and Co-Founder to gain insight into mobile pain points and how his company is addressing them.
________________________________________________________________________________

Kamo Asatryan Headshot

With Primer, you pinpoint a key problem in mobile apps — what was the pain point you set out to address and why?

My own personal background is in growth, which has been my focus for about the past 8 years. Before Primer I co-founded a social media startup where I headed the growth team that allowed the company to grow from zero to +100 million users. In that time, we learned a lot and it’s these learnings that are the inspiration for Primer. At first, we were going to be an agency for companies that are looking to help with growth, and with getting and keeping users through engagement.

We spoke with companies and found they were all challenged — across the board — because their mobile apps allowed them to connect with their customers but didn’t make it possible for them to change the user experience to suit that customer. Companies were used to doing this on the Web, where technology and tracking allowed them to check the referring sites and traffic sources and decide the landing page, article or item they needed to show their visitor. On mobile apps these companies felt like they were taking a huge step backwards because it isn’t possible to change experiences depending on the traffic source. As soon as the user goes into the app store, all tracking information is lost.

There is indeed a disconnect. How are you bridging that gap?

Since companies don’t know where users are coming from they are forced to serve the same experience to everyone, and we all know from our experience on the Web that a generic customer experience won’t cut it. Search queries, intent, and other data that is served up when a visitor comes to a website don’t exist in mobile and that has a huge impact on conversion, engagement and growth because you don’t have visibility into intent. With Primer, companies have visibility into intent and context because our technology allows companies to make that connection.

A big part of this is the unique links you generate that effectively fingerprint the consumer as they move from the traffic source to my app. What is the user experience and what’s going on in the background to make this happen?

Primer can personalize new user screens for every traffic source. After a simple SDK integration, we allow the company to automatically show each new user a highly relevant experience in the app depending on whether that user came from a referral, an ad on Facebook, or any other traffic source. It starts with links that we generate and that the company can place in the various places where they expect to get traffic. That can be advertising, blog posts, social media — all the sources where you are and want to engage with your customers. When the user clicks on one of the links, we basically grab some information from that click. We gather the information around the time — so when they clicked on it — as well as the device, the carrier and other information that basically combines to format the fingerprint. The fingerprint allows us to connect the most important dots in the customer journey and experience.

Normally, when a user clicks on the link and is sent to the app store to download the app, that would be the step where you would expect to lose all the information about that user and the traffic source because that’s the precise point where every piece of tracking information is lost. With our SDK, the user opens the app and Primer can then grab information after that click — the same information, the time, device, IP address and so on. Since the time difference is very small between the moment the user clicks on the link in the ad or the blog post, and the time the user opens up the app they downloaded for the first time, we can determine that the user really is the one that came from the blog post where you reviewed a certain product, for example. No that we’ve made that connection — literally— Primer allows the company to welcome that user with native screens containing content that matches that user.

App shares and invites are proving to be effective app marketing tools, driving downloads because people pay more attention to recommendations from friends and peers than outright advertising. How do you personalize that experience?

So let’s imagine a user is invited by their friend to install the app, our server uses the fingerprint information to determine where the user came from and determines it was shared by a friend. The SDK then defines what objects to create, and that is based on the screens the company has designed in our web-based visual editor. But in this case the SDK builds out the native screens ­that include the friend’s photo, name, and a greeting to welcome the user to the app. The friend invited the user to the app, and that user is greeted by that friend. It’s a personal and powerful way to start the app experience.

What about the context of the share? Surely, knowing why someone thinks I should check out an app would be even more powerful…

Sharing is big and we are supporting that. So we aren’t just showing who shared it with you we are also personalizing it with a message from the friend. So they can have a message that shows: Hey I found this post that is really insightful because of this reason, so you need to check out the content. We provide that context and knowing the reason why someone shared something is important context to the reader, information that would otherwise be lost in that exchange. So imagine you see news on CNN about a team and your friend is a big fan. You can share that and add a message to the email or text that says: ‘hey this is I like this article because it’s about your favorite team, so check it out.’ Your friend sees that, clicks on the article link and then goes to the app. She installs the app and he opens it up and instead of just seeing the article, she also sees your picture, or your name and the message that you sent. It’s all right there.

Primer exposes users to content in a way that appears seamless and meets our expectations for some continuity in our experience. What’s the difference with deeplinking, an approach that also helps deliver content from inside the app?

You are right — deeplinking is exposing content in the app. What we are doing is actually building screens into the app that are about that content. It’s about a better user experience because the content matches the user’s exact expectations — because we know the link that triggered them to download the app and from that starting point we are showing them what they appreciate most when they open that app. And then the other key difference is that with Primer you are not just exposing content.

You can also change how you present that content at any time. Today if you want to change that content, you have to submit the app to the app store, wait for two weeks for the review and every change you make means you have to puts your engineers and designers to the task. It makes sense that you are not going to change your content very much — or very quickly — because it means time and money. With Primer you go in and change it yourself — without engineers and without designers — with our code-free visual editor, which takes 10 minutes. And this is important because you can never let your content go stale. Your content and your traffic changes all the time and if your app just stays static and doesn’t change — because the release cycle is so complicated —then you are missing out on growth. .

Of course, we access content and conduct commerce on apps. What are your plans for other platforms like wearables?

At the core, it’s all about user intent. It you don’t know your user intent then you are stuck building out an experience that is a one-size-fits-all type of experience — and that doesn’t work on any platform. Since users are coming from different places and have the intent to do different things with your app, we need to meet that expectation when they come in to the app because that’s how companies can keep users coming back to their app. There is real interest in serving a continuous and consistent experience that meets people’s expectations across all of their devices. We are starting with mobile because it’s where the traffic is and where the problems are right now. But I think as more devices come out and as content starts to live in more places, then it will become crucial for us to continue to connect these experiences and meet user expectations on every platform, not just mobile.

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

Industry-Research | Perspectives

High Volume of Generic Communications Disengage Digital Consumers

Consumers are highly sensitive to high volumes of mass generic communications reports the Aimia Institute. The finding is based on their global online survey, among 2,000 consumers in the UK, US, France, US, Canada and India, identifying effective brand communications.

Among the key findings:

Almost three-fifths (59%) of  High Volume Sensitive consumers report that the volume of email communications they receive from brands overwhelms them, for SMS messages (60%) and for push notifications (62%).

Millennials are the generation most likely (44%) to permanently disengage with brands if they receive high volumes of mass generic email communications while Generation X is 14% more likely to fall into this group.

This study speaks to the importance of marketers tailoring their communications to consumer preferences. If not, there are clear consequences. High Sensitive Consumers report they frequently will block numbers (80%); close accounts and unsubscribe from email lists (84%); delete apps because of push notifications (82%); and unfollow brands on social channels (86%). Still High Sensitive Consumers can be a highly desirable group given their willingness to share their information as long as it is managed properly.

For more information, download the presentation.

 

Perspectives | Revenue

Q&A with Sol Masch, Director of Mobile Sales & Strategy, Time Inc. on Mobile Ad Innovation

This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights… If you want to learn more, keep an eye out on our site for more interviews. Today’s Three on Three is with Sol Masch, Director of Mobile Sales & Strategy, Time Inc.

Solmon Masch HeadshotQ: In mobile advertising, what is the most important thing to consider?

A: The place to begin is always around the KPIs and defining those so we can figure out how to make a campaign a success. On mobile, most clients want engagement. The question is, what does engagement mean? Then you can define the right message, the right user and appropriate data targeting. Often, engagement is defined as getting a user to interact. Then you have to create rich messaging that drives interaction. But the message can also be delivered in the form of content that will prompt interaction. We are definitely getting more requests for native and we’re looking at how it lives on the mobile screen and how it will engage readers.

One of the big differentiating factors for mobile versus desktop or other platforms, is the idea of time spent. This is a big misnomer as a KPI on mobile. Agencies often want to drive campaigns based upon how much time people are spending interacting. We don’t find that time spent is the best KPI. If you can engage a user in five seconds—if they go through the entire experience and you get them to want to share the content—you have engaged them, in a matter of seconds.

We see that it is important to be more sensitive to the issue of time on mobile. Often we see that people use mobile during “found time,” which is a couple of minutes on the bus or waiting for an appointment. Mobile demands quick hits that are just as powerful as longer times spent on other devices. The trick is in designing those experiences that last less than a minute, or even just a few seconds, to deliver impact and engagement.

Q: Describe one of your recent or upcoming mobile campaigns that you think is particularly innovative and why it worked.

A: We recently did a campaign with Infiniti promoting the Q50 vehicle. What’s interesting about the Q50 is its intuitive features: You step into the car and it knows all of the personalized features you like such as seat and mirror position.

Given how personalized the Q50 experience is, we wanted to create a similar ad experience that knew the user and that was intuitive about them as well. With our database targeting we are able to identify our print readers through our partnership with Apple and on Facebook and Twitter, et cetera. We developed an experience that gave users not only content from their favorite brands but also content tailored to their specific taste. So if we identified a mobile user as a Time reader who likes technology, the ad unit would contain a bunch of tech articles. A business enthusiast would get business news articles. We tailored this experience so that it leveraged the right brand with the right reader, but also the exact right content.

This campaign was extremely successful. By delivering the right content through the ad experience, we saw engagement levels lifted three to five times.

Q: What is working in mobile advertising, and what do we need more of, in order to drive success?

A: I think that mobile is getting a lot less clunky and more sophisticated, which is a good thing for users and the industry. A few years ago, there was marketer resistance around investing in mobile because experiences on the desktop, with flash and sexy animations, couldn’t be replicated on mobile. Now we are seeing beautiful, rich experiences on mobile that have excited a lot of marketers. These improvements have fueled their interest in investing in mobile and is making it a larger part of their multimedia platform spend.

However, we still need less fragmentation and more simplicity. Mobile is still a challenging landscape to navigate. With different devices and different operating systems, mobile is a much more complex environment to run a rich media experience in and to format them to work properly. All that device and screen variation is holding us back.

Devices and operating systems will keep on coming and we need to simplify it for the marketing and advertising community. We have made progress over the past year. I’ve seen a lot more publishers and agencies adopting IAB Rising Star units, which has been a big help for the mobile advertising industry. The more we can establish standards, the more it will help everyone. Within the structure of standards, we will be able to innovate even more.

Sol Masch, Director of Corporate Mobile Sales & Strategy for Time Inc., is responsible for mobile ad monetization across Time Inc.’s network of 32 million monthly mobile users – including brands such as People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, TIME, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Health, Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine. Prior to joining Time Inc., Masch served as the Mobile Advertising Director for Viacom Media Networks. In this role, he built Viacom’s mobile business from $0 into a multimillion dollar business. Previously, Masch was co-owner of Not13, a full service mobile marketing agency and content provider dedicated to providing interactive campaigns and services on mobile devices for Elektra Records and Fuse TV.

Note: This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights.

Also in this series:

Q&A with Brian Colbert, Chief Revenue Officer, About.com on Mobile Advertising Innovation

Q&A with Joe D. Weir, VP of Digital, A.H. Belo on Mobile Advertising Innovation

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