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Advertising | Perspectives

Raising the bar on ad quality and transparency

In recent years, the discussion around ad quality has become much more specific and tangible. The goals have become more quantifiable and the insights easier to act on. Today, there’s a lot riding on the publisher’s business in that moment when the page loads, and all page and ad content is revealed. And, frankly, there’s more money riding on that moment now.

As the programmatic market has grown more refined and valuable to advertisers and publishers alike, buyers increasingly pay attention to the environments their ads appear in. Quality advertisers demand that they appear adjacent not only to high-quality content, but also to other high-quality ads.

Meanwhile, increasingly sophisticated users expect publishers to host trustworthy, relevant ads alongside the content they’re engaged with. At the end of the day, reputation and revenue are on the line – from the moment the page loads and the ad content is revealed.

Context matters

The simple fact is that you can’t separate page content from ad content and from the content of the ad’s landing page. The user certainly doesn’t make that separation. The user assumes every ad on the page must be intentional, and the publisher must have co-signed on any page any ad links out to. It is time publishers view the page as a unified piece while also thinking about the ad experience beyond the page.

Today’s users are sensitive to ad content that sends a noticeably different message than the page content. They are sensitive to offensive, dishonest, or salacious ad content. They are also sensitive to clickbait-style, irrelevant, inappropriately partisan, and disruptively designed ad content. Unwelcome messages like those can lead users to lose trust in (and decrease monetizable engagement with) an otherwise high-quality publisher. And clicking through to a landing page containing misinformation, fraudulent products for sale, a phishing scam, or any other type of questionable environment can ruin a user’s relationship with a publisher for life.

Let’s face it, for publishers, there’s always been a push and pull between maintaining the integrity of the user experience and opening up ad inventory to the broadest range of programmatic buyers. And the traditional QA means to verify any and all ads on the page are relevant, on-brand, and legit often comes down to inefficient and inexact methods. This requires ad ops teams to manually refresh pages, or to check samples of ads from earlier scans.

The big picture

It may sound daunting to manage. However, today’s technology solutions help empower publishers to retain user trust and loyalty far better than, say, posting a disclaimer that explains to the user the complexities of programmatic.

Now, publishers seeking the highest level of ad content quality and control can view all 360 degrees of their ad inventory in one dashboard. This allows them to solidify their brand’s content strategy, avoid ad related annoyances, and ad quality issues. Considering how elusive real transparency in ad content/page content alignment has been, it’s about time.

When it comes to content quality control, publishers, have long been familiar with categorizing ad and page content by parameters like keywords, content vertical, domain, and blocklists. However, broad categorization is not good enough and leads to an abundance of inappropriate ad experiences.

Even worse, using blunt force to block entire categories of ads will fail to make good on the full revenue potential of premium ad inventory. In fact, 91% of publishers feel blunt-force blocking is hurting their rightful earnings. And 88% think that more customizable ad quality automation would increase their revenue.

Publishers know best

As a publisher, you recognize unwanted ads when you see them. But first, you’d have to see them. Without full transparency and vision into all of the ads on your site, that can be a tough ask. It’s tricky, time consuming, and resource draining. To streamline the process, publishers should employ ad quality tools that are customizable to the requirements of their own page content and the expectations of their particular audiences and advertisers.

Ultimately, though, the publisher knows those requirements and expectations better than anyone. Publishers absolutely need to apply a human layer to their QA process, which gives them complete control over what appears on their pages. When it comes to quality, it’s best not to simply “set it and forget it.”

Publishers need an ad content management solution that provides a full, unified view of all the ads on every page on the site, and that allows the publisher to instantly remove any unwanted, off-brand ads. Content quality QA might seem pedestrian, but it has the power to accelerate a publisher’s business, revenue, and relationships. Indeed, this is the level of real transparency the digital industry has talked about for years. Now’s the time to act.  

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

When Apple closes a door, malvertising opens a window

A lot of mobile app developers are looking toward March and sighing something along the lines of: “It’s been fun, but the salad days are coming to a close.”

As promised in the iOS14 update, Apple will begin enforcing the user consent requirement for apps to share its Identifier for Advertisers (aka IDFA) in March. This was delayed from September; however, it’s been a dark cloud rapidly approaching for anyone advertising or monetizing in the mobile app space.

IDFA was a giant boon to mobile advertising. Arguably, it kick-started in-app programmatic by enabling cross-app targeting and measurement for advertisers similarly to the way third-party cookies function in browsers. While third-party cookies are (reportedly) hitting the end of the road in 2022, Apple’s IDFA will live on. However, advertisers, adtech companies, and publishers alike are pessimistic about the percentage of users who will opt-in due to a rather negative permission window from privacy-centric Apple.

Eric Seufert, who has become somewhat of an IDFA whisperer with his Mobile Dev Memo blog, predicts that only 20% of app users will opt in to sharing IDFA. While Facebook and Google are both expected to take billion-dollar revenue hits in the next 12 months due to the privacy switch, this will be a calamity for app developers of all shapes and sizes.

Unfortunately, those developers may get hit with a double whammy. They face severe revenue loss and a storm of malvertising and malicious ads taking advantage of a drooping programmatic marketplace and mobile vulnerabilities.

Publishers’ incessant mobile troubles

Mobile has been a long, hard road for digital publishers. As more and more of their traffic creeped over to smartphones and tablets during the last decade, publisher revenue opportunities dwindled. Less screen real estate was available to show display ads, visitors scrolled by impressions at warp speed, and the available formats not only failed to satisfy advertisers, but also alienated audiences.

And that was before Apple’s Safari, the most widely used mobile browser in the US, introduced Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) and cut off third-party cookie support. Eventually, Apple plans to put even tighter restrictions on first-party collection.

At AdMonsters Publisher Forums, ad ops professionals described their mobile web environments like ghost towns. “Oh yeah, the advertisers know that iOS users skew more affluent and that we have solid first-party data segments. But they won’t bite without client-side measurement capabilities and attribution.”

Scammers step in

No surprise then that the scammers saw a weak mobile programmatic marketplace and came to play. The current age of ad quality challenges started with omnipresent mobile redirect campaigns. For a while in 2018, it seemed like every weekend you could be greeted by scam announcements that you’d won a gift card if you dared to brave the mobile web.

Much has changed since then. Publishers have creative blockers at the ready for redirect barrages. But bad actors now seem to be favoring malicious clickbait slathered in cloaking code over the ol’ redirect.

And their interest in compromising mobile users has only grown. The biggest named malvertising threats of 2020, including LuckyBoy and IcePick, used fingerprinting to pinpoint mobile devices.

Late 2020 and early 2021, The Media Trust saw a dramatic rise in malicious ads on mobile devices. (And when we refer to an incident, we mean a specific malvertising campaign; the amount of infected impressions is exponentially higher.)

Malicious advertising on mobile—web and apps—skyrocketed at the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021.

As Pat Ciavolella, Digital Security and Operations Director at The Media Trust, explained on a recent webinar, “Mobile is a juicy target for bad actors…. Most people access the Internet through their mobile devices and malvertising is harder to detect. Malicious actors are starting there to make sure their code is working before expanding onto desktop and reaching anyone and everyone.”

A significant slide in in-app programmatic CPMs—due to unidentifiable or unmeasurable traffic— will simply open up new testing grounds for malvertisers.

Double whammy

So, the enforcement of consent for IDFA—with Apple messaging that’s likely to dissuade users from opting in—couldn’t come at a worse time. As noted elsewhere, even rosy opt-in predictions could have devastating consequences on app developers’ revenue. We know because we’ve seen how advertisers pull out when users are unidentifiable and unmeasurable on Safari. (On mobile and desktop).

And when benign advertisers step back, we’ve then seen how the malevolent ones step forward. A simple examination of the rise in malicious advertising during the early days of the pandemic is enough to set your hair on end. An explosion in supply with lowered CPMs is a scammer’s paradise. The scam opportunities around Covid will once again hit fever pitch as bad actors try to capitalize on vaccine distribution.

Rise in malicious advertising detected between Jan. 2020 and April 2020—the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

App developers face a dual threat. First, the are likely to see a serious drop in revenue as in-app programmatic CPMs decline when users fail to opt-in to IDFA-sharing. And then a host of bad advertisers will try to infect their users with malware or rope them into some kind of scam.

As tempting as it may be to send the programmatic bid floors to the basement, app developers – and mobile publishers in general– have to keep their guards up against malvertising. The must also demand better protections from their upstream demand partners. It’s never been more important to scan and track where bad ads are coming from.

In the long run, infecting your users with malware or a credit card skimmer could have far worse ramifications than a revenue shortfall.

Innovation | Perspectives

Cross-industry strategies for customer acquisition in media

There is a lot that the OTT and publishing industries can learn from each other in terms of acquisition strategies. With a bit of adaptation, each could improve customer signups in unexpected ways.  

Ultimately, both industries focus on selling content direct to consumers. And there is significantly more crossover than there would have been 10 years ago, as video and online media have become the most common form of content consumption. OTT Market growth is expected to grow by 14% in 2021 and new digital subscription orders rose 420% in 2020 against the previous year. This provides the impetus for organizations on both sides to take advantage of this period of continued growth, and many of the strategies of one industry can be adapted and applied to the other.

Key Takeaways 

  • Physical and digital provisions are no longer silos in themselves, and are forming parts of a more unified strategy 
  • Payments and subscription dates can be disconnected for greater flexibility 
  • Offering the ability to pause subscriptions rather than cancel outright can reduce churn 
  • Bundling products together to form more focused packages can be more enticing than the all-you-can-eat approach 
  • Streamlining registration and payment journeys is critical to maximizing conversion 

Free content  

A common strategy in the publishing sector is to provide a certain amount of content for free. This might be a limited number of free articles, or content types/genres that is free to unregistered customers. Meanwhile, in OTT and SVOD, the general rule is to have content locked behind a paywall or have all content available for a limited free trial period. This is a commercially restrictive “all or nothing” approach.  

An alternative value exchange would be to provide a metered registration wall. In this way, you offer customers the ability to watch selected content for free in return for creating an account and sharing their personal details.

For services that do not provide a free trial, this can help entice new customers who get the opportunity to see the quality of the service. For churned customers, it is an opportunity to bring them back in. It also generates an opportunity to increases customer loyalty through other strategies. 

Subscription holidays  

A common scenario within the publishing sector, particularly those publishers that operate physical delivery, is where customers wish to “pause” their subscription for reasons such as going on holiday, or a financial decision. These customers do not want to churn. In this “subscription holiday” approach, access and payments are paused for a set length of time agreed by the customer and the provider. 

OTT, on the other hand, is either active or inactive. Customers who need to make this decision must typically cancel their subscription and then remember to reactivate. Once churned, they may choose not to come back at all. There are some services, particularly sports services such as BT Sport and Sky Sports, which offered to pause subscriptions in part of 2020 due to a lack of sports events. In the case of BT Sports, the payments could be halted, or donated to the NHS. Other sports-based OTT services offered payment holidays to their customers during this time.  

For OTT Sports, this is helpful for retaining customers who would otherwise churn in the off-season. Instead, customers can be at ease knowing their subscription and billing will only be active when they need the service.  

Product bundling  

Bundling is the process of combining multiple products and offering them in a single package. Using customer data insights and personalization solutions such as Zephr, businesses can get clear insights into the reading and viewing habits of their customers.

This data can be used to identify products that often perform well together. Then, those products can be offered in a package to the customer dynamically as an acquisition incentive. For publishing, this could be discounted access to certain articles based on topic, a group of magazines, or relevant discounts on third-party services. For larger OTT providers, this can be access to specific categories such as kids shows or movies.  

Express registration and checkout  

Netflix offers a model example of easy signup. Provide an email address and password and the customer account is ready. Amazon and Now TV both have simple sign-up pages to get customers viewing their content quickly. The key element is reducing the amount of personal data collected at the point of sign-up. The typical registration flow will offer email and password, or Social Sign On. Long signup forms are rare in the OTT space.

Publishing can stand to learn from this lesson: Customers expect as frictionless a sign-up process as possible. Where metered registration walls are used, it is a good idea to put the single sign-up process in a prominent place, using SSO and email/password only.Ensuring the registration and payment appears on a single page also reduces time and friction, which can increase acquisition rate. Publishers and OTT providers based in the European Economic Area (EEA) should also be aware of regulations around Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and factor customer identity checks into their billing journeys.

Best of both

Acknowledging that content does not have to be an all or nothing approach. Using data to personalize offerings and create bundled content tailored content is a great way to win signups from customers.  

Physical and digital are no longer separate silos but are both key parts of the acquisition strategy. The popularity of video only continues to increase and is now the expected content format of any brand. The lines between OTT and publishing are continuing to blur. So, organizations that learn from this shift in expectation early stand to see major gains in customer acquisition. 

Advertising | Perspectives

3 insider tips to enable unified cross-channel measurement

With billions of dollars transacted on metrics that didn’t exist a few years ago, precision and rigor in detailed measurement matter more than ever before. Yet connecting and rationalizing fragmented data across multiple channels remains one of the most significant barriers in advertising. This poses a pressing challenge when considering the unpredictability of this past year and how it has impacted consumption habits.

To deliver a successful cross-channel strategy, marketers and publishers require special insights about how to precisely measure the impact of advertising attention and optimize consumer experiences. It requires unifying all views of prospective consumers in the TV and digital landscapes.

Here are three insider tips that enable you to unify your view:

1. Monitor cross-platform saturation to avoid ad overload

The struggle to achieve visibility goals has flummoxed the most-savvy professional. This is in part because of the historical barriers to measure fragmented data regarding de-duplicated frequency between platforms. However, it is essential to span the measurement gap to ensure that activation strategies align with measurement capabilities. However, you would be surprised as to how often this falls short. For example: 

  • Marketers and publishers deliver on valid and viewable as the de facto standard. Yet reach and frequency are often being measured without this crucial filter in place.
  • When campaigns are delivered, particular audience segments are curated across 1st and 3rd party datasets. Yet measurement of that performance is based on demographic buckets that only roughly align to how your campaign was carefully targeted.
  • With the growing evolution and consumer adoption of connected TV (CTV) programming, it’s apparent that there’s a significant opportunity to access valuable audience share. Still, it’s challenging to unify your CTV strategy with the remainder of your digital and linear advertising approach. And this leaves you blind and unable to advance.

No one wants a wasted ad budget. Instead, leverage measurement solutions that enable detailed analytics of all ad buys across all households to work for you. They can help pinpoint hurdles or make inflight changes while the campaign runs. This degree of analysis on any-time intervals across a digital and TV portfolio will also help you develop best practices for future campaigns.

2. Pinpoint inefficient ads to untangle cross-platform performance

How can you tell when ad waste occurs? This question undoubtedly plagues our ad tech industry, which  faces epochal changes. Consumers encounter ads, even when they are off-target audiences. And relevant ads hit the same audiences ad infinitum. Learning to pinpoint inefficient ads and untangle cross-platform performance allows you to identify how much you spend efficiently sending real messages to real people.

Sophisticated cross-platform measurement solutions provide tools to measure trillions of impressions across TV and digital–and stop bad actors in their tracks. For example, the teams at Moat by Oracle recently uncovered StreamScam, characterized by forged household IP addresses, app IDs, and device models to make it look like ads were playing in digital environments when they weren’t. 

Note the following industry-wide digital ad expenditures for reference:

  • 20% serves to bots only—and never end up on the screen
  • 20% serves an empty room
  • 25% serves inattentive viewers
  • 30% serves digital, 40% TV
  • 10% serves a saturated audience

3. Unlock sophisticated audience relevancy 

With the constant evolution in ad tech, sophisticated audience relevancy means something different now than it did even five years ago. With new and emerging channels, platforms, and technologies, reaching the people you care about and in a cross-platform capacity is both more important, and in some cases, more daunting than ever.  

Today we know that people have, on average, six devices from which they consume media. All of those devices present a fundamentally different engagement experience and are all vying for our attention.

Let’s be honest, when it comes to reaching people, a one size fits all approach rarely fits the bill. Relying on imprecise definitions measured only by age and gender audiences is one clear example of potential constraints. Focus on finding better alignment with your campaign goals. This requires more inclusive data on audience interests, family structure, past purchase behavior, and more—compared to a national industry-recognized baseline. 

It is critical that marketers and publishers earn how to leverage solutions to tie relevant audiences with a unified view from TV to digital. This will provide true cross-channel clarity and empower more informed decision-making for your next campaign.

Advertising | Perspectives

3 trends that will define media success in 2021

Covid-19 hit some sectors of the media industry hard (live sports, concerts and trade shows). The global entertainment and media industry saw its largest revenue decline in more than two decades. However, the pandemic has also presented an opportunity for companies embracing digital strategies that are aligned with consumer trends and expectations. 

Disney, for example, lost over $6 billion in revenue from the closure of its theme parks. But Disney+ reached 50 million subscribers worldwide two years ahead of schedule. In January, Fortune – once just a print magazine – announced its redesigned website, an immersive video hub, and other premium offerings. All of this strongly positioned them strongly to counteract the advertising slump that hit the industry last spring. In October, the company launched Connect, a membership community and online platform for purpose-driven, mid-career professionals. 

Here are three trends we’re likely to see this year: 

1. The relationship with the content consumer matters more than ever. 

Cookies were a convenient crutch. They were the building blocks for digital advertising and helped drive revenue for media companies as they transformed. Now that cookies are nearing their end, some companies are panicking while others are evolving. The ones that succeed will be the ones that focus on creating a continuing relationship with the consumer. This means engaging with them differently, through a soft or hard paywall, or as a curated member experience (e.g. Fortune Connect). This not only preserves advertising, which is a significant source of revenue, but opens the door to new, diversified revenue streams.

The ultimate death of the cookie will turn out to be a blessing for the media industry, even if it creates disruption in the short term. Necessity drives innovation. The cookie’s demise will revamp the way companies post content and interact with their consumers. In 2021, we will see even more innovative media business models that will define the coming decade. 

2. Pandemic-driven changes won’t revert. 

There is no going back, so let’s embrace the change. Let’s highlight some of those changes. In the first 28 days on Netflix, The Queen’s Gambit was watched by 62 million households. No, it didn’t reach M.A.S.H. season finale numbers of 106 million. However, M.A.S.H. aired on a major broadcast network at a time when there were only a few. 

We’ve seen an acceleration in media companies following in Netflix’s footsteps. Peacock is betting on a network show that first aired in 2005 – The Office – to drive premium subscriptions at $5 a month. Who is the largest audience for that show? People who aren’t old enough to have worked in an office. 

Just as the music industry needed to evolve and find new ways to engage and monetize consumers when streaming took off, so must media companies. Experiments bringing what would have been blockbuster movie releases like Mulan, Soul, and Wonder Woman 1984 to Disney+ and HBOMax will forever change, but not completely destroy, the theater industry. (Alamo Drafthouse-like experiences may well be the theater experience of the future). And let’s be clear, the definition of media is evolving. Consider Peloton: a fitness company? Sure. A hardware company? Maybe. A media company? Absolutely.

Successful media companies aren’t embracing a move to digital. They are disrupting their own legacy business models to become digital. Spectator events have become intimate digital experiences. (Think DJ D-Nice spinning to 120,000 live viewers including Diddy, President Joe Biden, and Janet Jackson on IG Live in the early days of the pandemic). 

Sporting events are better with fans in stands. However, sporting experiences can, and should be, complemented with connectivity to the players, drivers and coaches. Leagues have already embraced fantasy sports, but could they openly embrace sports betting? And are there opportunities to connect with online gaming to create a full-surround fan experience, digitally? 

It is critical to focus on the consumer and how they consume and where they consume and providing new ways to consume – directly. This will create new and stronger revenue opportunities.

3. Legacy media companies can succeed. But they have an uphill climb ahead. 

Legacy media companies have the most to gain from transformative change. However, they start at a massive disadvantage compared to new media companies like Complex Networks and Spotify. (Yes, Spotify particularly with the acquisition of podcast content companies such as Gimlet). 

These brands and what they represent have lasting value. However, they demand reinvention with a focus on digital channels, habit-forming digital products, multiple streams of monetization and libraries of content. When Maven bought Sports Illustrated last year, it did so with the intent of “revitalizing and strengthening” the publication for a new era by focusing on technology. 

Past the tipping point

A recent McKinsey report noted that Covid-19 has “pushed companies over the technology tipping point.” Media companies that want to succeed will have to rethink their digital business models in 2021. And they have no time to waste. 

While most software products were once developed on a 6-to-12-month timeline, the pace of change has accelerated. Consumer expectations are far more immediate. But with the right digital product strategy, the media industry could see a game-changing resurgence in 2021. 

About the author

Chris Hansen is senior vice president of 3Pillar Global’s media and information services client service vertical.

Perspectives

Retailers drive revenue with email. So can publishers

A fundamental shift has occurred in the past year: Publishers experienced a fortuitous combination of increased audience size and engagement. Many publishers are considering how to balance subscription marketing with ad monetization in order to take advantage of new readers and higher engagement.

In a recent survey, 53% of publishers experienced an increase in engagement with their email newsletters during the Covid pandemic. Email is taking on a new role in nurturing these relationships and maximizing their value. Much like retailers, publishers can leverage email as a path to conversion.

Rethink the “customer” experience

Executives are rethinking many parts of their business in light of the pandemic’s silver lining of higher engagement. And with third party cookies under imminent threat, publishers have both a challenge and opportunity with how to collect insights about visitors to deliver value for advertisers and drive business operations effectively.

One way that publishers can take better advantage of their new engagement opportunity is to collect more data. They have an opportunity to more effectively test and integrate new revenue opportunities by approaching their digital business the way a retailer approaches ecommerce. Many publishers have discussed adding commerce opportunities to their models, such as The New York Times’ addition of Wirecutter to their portfolio. However, for many publishers, the concept needs some direction.

Often, the best work across publisher initiatives is done by connecting experiences between the website, search, and social media. Unfortunately, email remains a relatively static, separated channel. Retailers would be shocked to know that publisher email is frequently bifurcated between content-based newsletters and transaction-based messages about subscriptions with little coordination between them. Email is a hidden opportunity that will help with many 2021 publisher goals.

There are many strategic and tactical improvements that publishers can make to better orchestrate channels to achieve their goals. And these improvements have already proven successful in ecommerce. The multichannel retail experience includes data collection and segmentation, intricate channel orchestration, a dedication to measurement and analytics, and sophisticated testing and personalization with email and SMS. These channels must work together seamlessly to serve to engage, connect, and communicate.

Mapping the “customer” journey

A loyal reader has a particular series of actions that they will, pretty predictably, take. They might visit the site every morning. Or perhaps they open their mobile app every evening as they hang out on the couch. A search-driven reader might have another set of behaviors. They might averaging 30 seconds on the page, with a possible second article before abandoning the site.

These various user profiles are essentially different “customer segments.” Each of these offer their own set of value opportunities and paths to conversion. Many publishers have already created segmented strategies and content personalization. However, multichannel revenue-driven marketing, including email, usually takes a back seat. This reduces the ability to re-engage, offer deeper personalization, and drive conversion.

Retail tactics to learn from

Publishers have more in common with the ecommerce experience than they may realize. In fact, several established ecommerce best practices can be repurposed for publishers:

Browse abandon

Retailers will often trigger a personalized email when someone abandons a product search. Publishers can do the same, tracking everything from scroll depth to which search terms drove them to the site. By testing segmented triggers to bring different readers back to the story, or to similar or different stories, publishers come across as more relevant and more interesting.

Cart abandon

Similarly, retailers will trigger a personalized message via email or SMS to remind people of what’s in their cart. Publishers can do the same with event and subscription signups, or with articles saved for later reading.

Interest-based triggers

Every time a consumer reviews a product, or clicks on a link, that information is gathered to improve personalization and triggered messaging in the future. This information, be it driven by content behavior or more transactional behavior, should be collected by publishers to build richer user profiles and to inform segmentation and marketing actions. This data is also hugely valuable for editors seeking to better understand reader interests.

Live content

Retailers used live content during Black Friday/Cyber Monday to drive interest in sales, manage inventory. Streaming content showing employees explaining products, and influencers discussing health tips, drove engagement and sales. Publishers can imagine incorporating everything from breaking news and live entertainment to real time interviews and podcasts.

Channel optimization

Email is only one element of a multichannel communication strategy. It’s best to test within and across channels to understand how to get people to stay engaged based on their preferences and habits. For example, testing the success of driving engaged readers on mobile web to download the app, or transitioning engaged mobile app readers to in-app messages and push instead of email, can help publishers meet readers where they are without any friction. SMS can take things one step further for brands that don’t have standalone apps but cover breaking news, the same way many D2C retailers alert shoppers about sales.

Bonus points

These five common triggers in a retail strategy also serve another purpose: to test messages and collect more data. Adding triggers along the customer journey doesn’t just provide opportunities to re-engage, they make businesses smarter. Combining insights and measurement across different parts of the business can help speed up learning. Personalizing different elements of the customer journey can help speed up conversion.

Content is the product that many publishers focus on, but it’s the readers (aka customers) that will deliver insight and revenue. By turning focus toward the transactional touchpoints along the reader journey, publishers will find more chances to increase their insights and improve their performance. Retailers may have more measurable ROI. However, what retailers have spent years learning through testing can now serve as a reliable blueprint for publishers.

About the author

Allison Mezzafonte has worked in the media and publishing industry for 20 years and is currently a growth consultant, as well as a Media Advisor to Sailthru. A former publishing executive for Bauer Media, Dotdash, and Hearst Digital, Allison serves as a strategic partner to media clients.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives | Video

Preparing for advanced TV’s 2021 take off

The new year brings new cheer to the advanced TV advertising sector, with an exceptional outlook for 2021. Following months of accelerated change in 2020, a remarkable 84% of marketers across five European markets expect to increase their investment in advanced TV during the next 12 months. This positivity signals a recognition of the channel’s potential to reach highly engaged audiences in premium video environments that are on-demand, connected, and addressable.     

Media owners – whether programmers or distributors – have a golden opportunity to tap into this wave of optimism for a channel that includes multiple interconnected solutions and platforms. This includes video-on-demand (VOD), connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT), to audience-based linear, programmatic, and addressable. Here are just a few of the trends media owners should be aware of as they prepare for advanced TV’s take off in 2021.    

Unification of linear and digital

Linear TV and digital video have been on a convergent path for some years. However, in 2020 it became perfectly clear that viewers see no difference between the two. People switch effortlessly between channels, platforms, and screens to satisfy their appetite for video content everywhere, any time. Advertisers are adapting to this evolution. They want to deliver seamless experiences across all premium video environments, regardless of whether they are linear or digital.

In 2021, the ability to sell and deliver inventory across all devices and platforms in a unified way will be a top priority for media owners, enabling them to meet advertiser demand. Significant steps are already being taken towards achieving this goal, including the advance of linear schedule optimisation through digital ad decisioning tools. However, more still needs to be done to achieve greater unification over the coming months so media owners can make a greater portion of inventory available for advertisers to buy simply and holistically.

Availability of addressable inventory

Marketers are increasingly keen to target TV advertising at household level through the use of high-quality data insights. Traditional TV advertising is still the most effective option for achieving scale. However, marketers can supplement it with addressable advertising to access niche audiences and achieve incremental reach.

Across Europe, over three-quarters of marketers expect to increase investment in addressable advertising next year, with a 9% growth predicted overall. This does vary however, according to the maturity of individual markets, the technology capabilities and the availability of addressable inventory. Spain has the most optimistic outlook, forecasting a 13% increase in addressable advertising, while France is the most cautious at just 4% growth.

To take advantage of increased investment in addressable advertising, media owners should focus on making more of their inventory addressable. This will mean breaking down silos between TV and digital teams. It also requires exploring how they can effectively use first-party and second-party data – while complying with data privacy regulations – to enable richer targeting.

Preparing for addressable advertising will require a degree of collaboration and European media companies can take inspiration from the U.S. Across the Atlantic, industry initiatives such as On Addressability are driving progress towards simple, scalable addressable capabilities across TV formats. And project OAR (Open Addressable Ready) is establishing a common technology for dynamic, addressable advertising management.

Collaboration with competitors

The trend for cross-industry collaboration doesn’t just apply to addressable advertising, but to advanced TV as a whole. Advertisers demand more streamlined solutions that allow them to buy across channels, platforms, and devices. So, media owners will need to put aside traditional rivalries and take a collaborative approach. In this case, working with competitors well help them gain mutual advantage.

There are already examples of successful collaborations around addressable TV within European markets, including partnerships between FranceTV and both Bouygues Telecom and Orange, as well as the LOVEStv platform in Spain. In the U.K., Sky, Virgin Media and Channel 4 are all partnering on AdSmart. ITV has extended an open invitation to broadcasters to join its Planet V platform. More established cross-market collaborations are also in place, such as the European Broadcaster Exchange, which was established in 2017 between Mediaset, ProSiebensat.1, TF1 and Channel 4 to enable programmatic video advertising across multiple countries.    

Over the coming year, more media companies will form partnerships or join existing collaborations. This will allow them strengthen inventory offerings to allow advertisers to access premium, brand-safe advanced TV environments at scale.

After a turbulent year all round, the next 12 months look extremely promising for the TV and video ecosystem. Media executives will be poised to maximize the opportunity by embracing the unification of linear and digital and making more of their inventory addressable. If they also find ways to collaborate with partners and competitors across the industry, media companies can put themselves in the best position to make the most of advanced TV’s 2021 take off. 

Advertising | Perspectives

To thrive in the post-cookie era, web publishers must act now

As we enter a new year, most tech departments look to create a product creation and upgrade schedule for the year, which then gets divided into two or three-week sprints. As publishers undertake that process this year, I have two overarching thoughts:

First, recent events continue to suggest  that Google will deprecate the third-party cookie by the end of this year. As a CTO, it seems to me that publishers must deploy minimal but real changes to code-on-page to take advantage of new identity marketing solutions.

Second, most publishers declare a “code freeze” in the fourth quarter due to heavy advertising volume. Indeed, with its lower ad volumes, the first quarter is when publishers typically implement new technical capabilities.

These two facts lead me to recommend that web publishers immediately begin to deploy the code associated with new identity resolution services. This will allow them to capture the highest revenues, avoid hectic scrambling, and minimize technical risk.

Will Google eliminate the third-party cookie on schedule?

Early last year, Google announced it would eliminate third-party cookies “within two years.” Subsequently, Google officials stated that this timetable might be delayed, mainly if the industry’s replacement solution was not in-place.

At BritePool, we believe Google will follow-through with its original timetable. At a recent PRAM (Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media) meeting, Stu Ingis, chairman of the Venable law firm, discussed the urgency of completing PRAM’s work (in conjunction with the IAB Tech Lab) to be prepared for the elimination of third-party cookies.

Similarly, eMarketer recently spoke with industry experts to review the changes confronting advertisers and publishers that will have “significant effects on how they do business.” This list prominently included “Google’s planned deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome by early 2022.”

But won’t Google provide a lengthy notice period?

Google’s initial announcement included a schedule, with a two-year period, for the adtech ecosystem to prepare for the demise of third-party cookies. There is no reason to believe Google will provide an additional lengthy notice period before acting. It is easy to imagine that at the start of this year’s fourth quarter, Google will simply confirm that by the end of the year, it will eliminate third-party cookies, as planned.

How does this fit into privacy reform?

BritePool’s COO previously wrote that a Democratic election victory would lead to national privacy legislation. Now, Republican concerns associated with social media “censorship” mean a bipartisan consensus for legislative reform is developing.

In this firmament, we believe Google will conclude that it will benefit by following Apple with privacy-centric browser management. Moreover, Google officials who suggested the possibility of delay indicated Google would act when the industry is ready.

Now, multiple industry solutions are available.  For example, BritePool and LiveRamp have both demonstrated the viability of their cookieless identity resolution offerings. And PubMatic has launched its Identity Hub.

My advice? Act now

eMarketer concluded its review by stating, “It’s critical for advertisers to start testing approaches to targeting these types of users and measuring results now—while the traditional signals are still available for them to make comparisons.” My advice for web publishers is the same: It is critical to start implementing new cookieless targeting capabilities.

Acting now benefits publishers in multiple ways. It eliminates the high technical risk potentially associated with scrambling to adopt identity resolution services late this year. Publishers gain experience by running pilot campaigns with these new capabilities and can optimize their offerings for 2022. Finally, it increases the CPM’s for programmatic traffic throughout this year, in part by accessing the users of Safari and Firefox browsers, which currently block third-party cookies automatically.

Editor’s note: This article was submitted, and set for publication, before this week’s Wall Street Journal article confirming that Google would eliminate third-party cookies. This Journal reporting reinforces the significance of the related analyses in this article.
Innovation | Perspectives

Multiplatform playbook: delivering for today’s sports fans

With restaurants, bars and clubs closed, you might assume that Covid has created a surge in live TV viewing, but it has not. If you compared U.S. TV audiences in September 2020 with the previous year, all television watching was actually down 10% during prime time. This may seem counter intuitive considering that the average time spent interacting with media has shot up 17% to a whopping 12 hours, 21 minutes a day according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report for August. However, digging into the reasons why reveals important opportunities to re-engage audiences.

There has long been a simplistic narrative that live sports viewership is declining. Yet the reality is that huge amounts of sports content is still being consumed. And that number is growing, especially in international markets.  The change is predominantly around two axes. The first is that sport is no longer “the only game in town.” It must co-exist within a much wider array of activities. The second shift is that fans are redefining what “sport” content means to them – along with how they want to consume it.

Feeding frenzy

This diversity of content is highlighted by 2020 offering up another landmark. As the year when time spent using an app and/or web via a smartphone or tablet finally overtook live and time-shifted TV. This cross-over has undoubtedly accelerated due to Covid, given increased home working, less travel, and more screen time. However, the data has been moving that way for a few years. Nielsen also points out that 25% of total TV consumption is via streaming. This includes the rise of highlights and “instant” sports news services that are the equivalent of fast food compared to the three-hour banquet of a typical NFL game. 

Highlights packages are not new but what has changed is the way in which they are delivered. The big networks have jumped onboard. Fox, ESPN, and others have now added more content available via the web. Yet the mindset for many is still around the “big game” and reporting that fits into a traditional schedule.

In a generation, Netflix transitioned from renting a million DVDs through the mail to touching 200 million monthly global subscribers. However, sports media still trails behind the curve when it comes to the model of instant access.

Bleacher gets it right

However, sports publications like Bleacher Report highlight one possible direction. The Turner owned brand has always delivered exquisite reportage but its rapid diversification into video and social has been striking.

Its “House of Highlights,” an Instagram feed offering highlight clips across several sports, now reaches over 20 million subscribers. Their viewership that has grown 150% in just two years. Highlights describes itself as “Everything you need to see in sports and youth culture.” It offers huge amounts of user generated content. And, while this content is still sports themed, it has much broader in its appeal – especially to younger audiences.

Bleacher is joined by a growing cohort of app and clip-based ways to consume sports content including CBS Sports and Fotmob – with the latter particularly good at notifications. If done well, personalized mobile app notifications, can drive customers into full game viewing as well as scores and highlights.

These brands and others recognize that it’s not all about the game. They help people get their highlights and sports fix from following athletes, teams, leagues, and media companies via social on the go. They also feed the growing sports engagement around fantasy and sports betting. However, these data points do not necessarily translate into full game viewing.

Breaking bread

The fear of cannibalizing traditional TV audiences through online offerings is still deeply ingrained in the psyche of TV executives. But instant gratification culture means that failure to offer a wider buffet of visual sport experiences will make decline inevitable.

And it’s not just creating a like-for-like facsimile. The audience expectation of TV watching versus engaging with on-demand via smartphone, embedded highlights on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or the cacophony of social-led platforms requires producers to rethink program formats.

This raises several challenges. It starts with nurturing a new generation of creatives that are digital natives, with the ability to engage with fans of today. There’s also a need for technical retooling to simplify the production and distribution process. This enables content to be disseminated easily across multiple platforms. It needs to be done efficiently and with the controls in place to ensure that rights obligations are enforced as demanded by contract terms. Last, but no means least, is the ability to monetize multiple platforms by spreading CPM across a wider reach and unlocking far more targeted advertising models.

Innovation zone

A great example of innovation in action is NFL RedZone, an all-in-one channel that when a team reaches the 20-yard line, (i.e. the “red zone”) cuts to the local broadcast of that game. The channel also offers the option to watch any turnovers, game-changing plays and scoring plays outside of the designated area. RedZone also has an “octabox” mode with simultaneous 8 game highlights designed for fantasy football fans.

This ability to deliver “highlight packages on the fly” uses dynamic playlists. It is is part of a surge in Cloud based technologies that are leading the charge to build streaming platforms that can pivot output to match the increasingly diverse audience profile.

The long-term issue is more cultural than technical. Live sport is still a huge deal in terms of direct and ad-related revenue. Messing with a successful formula is certainly a hard call to make. However, the Bleacher report and its siblings illustrate ways to respond to a shift in audience demand. Ignoring the opportunity makes the prospect of an empty dinner table much more likely.

Advertising | Perspectives

Supply path optimization: only the best for publishers and advertisers

Just this past week I was buying lemon sole for dinner at our local seafood market.  My friend Joe D, the proprietor, has been running this business for more than 30 years. Yes, you will pay a premium for his tuna, crab legs, oysters and salmon. But as the saying goes: “You get what you pay for.”

Sure, Stop and Shop, Acme and even Whole Foods are cheaper. But when the family sits down to dinner it is worth that extra 10% or so to benefit from the highest quality supply path to your table. That’s the kind of optimization you can taste!

Complexity deconstructed

It occurred to me while thinking about this article that our sole meunière might be a nice way to demystify the sometimes overly complex language and the digital advertising industry’s fascination with jargon and acronyms. After all isn’t what we want just a better experience for our audiences, publishers and advertisers?

There are so many things right about the incredible content that can be discovered and enjoyed on the internet. And our industry has rightfully become the largest advertising marketplace on the planet as a result. Nevertheless, some aspects of the business are due for renovation. Apologies for extending the cuisine theme again, but let’s face it, there are too many cooks in our kitchen. We have every reason to ask ourselves why we tolerate an overabundance of SSPs who are largely undifferentiated sources of the same impressions.

Quality vs. commodity

A successful SPO strategy will benefit publishers who consistently deliver the highest quality content, engagement, audience, and impression value. Time on site, viewability, editorial excellence, desirable demographics and psychographics will be worth more to buyers. These publishers will capture share and increase revenues.

Simultaneously, we must build more effective and more efficient methods for buyers to identify, select and purchase only good, better, and best content within the internet’s marketplace of ideas. In effect, we must de-commoditize supply. This will go a long way toward eliminating fraud, increasing transparency, and reducing the non-media leakage of third-party fees.

Only buy the best

Industry leading programmatic consultancy Jounce Media states:

Supply path optimization is an emerging technique by which programmatic buyers bias their bidding toward a short list of preferred pathways that enable high scale, high efficiency inventory access.

Therefore, when shopping for the highest performing supply available buyers should pay special attention to the pathways they choose. Supply Path Optimization done right will focus on tangible qualities such as viewability, IVT and scale enabling KPIs to be met with fewer wasted impressions and greater efficiency.

About the author

Bruce Brandfon is Chief Media Officer of Duration Media. Prior to that he was EVP of Webspectator, and before that VP and Managing Director at Publicitas. Before joining Publicitas, Bruce was VP and Publisher of Scientific American. He has also held leadership positions at The Philadelphia Media Network, Newsweek, and Time Inc. Bruce is Director of the Board of Advisors at Planet Forward, and an Adjunct Professor of Media Studies at Westchester Community College.

Ping Bruce if you’d like to know more about why and how Duration Media consistently outperforms almost all other Supply Paths in the programmatic ecosystem. (And, yes, he’ll also tell you where Joe D’s fish market is.)

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives

The 4 most important questions to ask when evaluating identity solutions

The identity solution landscape is growing fast. I can count at least 10 solutions that launched last year alone. Third-party cookies are approaching their final exit. Identity is seen as a viable and sustainable way to keep digital advertising running and help large and small businesses alike survive. That’s all good news.

But like most things in adtech land, parsing through how technical solutions differ often requires an advanced degree and a good translator. It is technical for a reason. However, that doesn’t mean technology can’t be accessible and approachable.

I’ve spent the bulk of the last two years working on an identity solution, so I have some opinions. I’ve also spent a good deal of that time talking to other identity solution providers. There are a lot of smart people working on very difficult problems from a multitude of angles. If you’re not excited about the amount of innovation happening at this tremendous clip, you may be in the wrong industry.

For those not steeped in the tech parlance, however, vetting identity solution partners is daunting. So, in an effort to provide clarity, I’ve culled my top four starter questions that every identity solution partner should be able to answer. Frankly, these are questions every marketer, publisher, SSP, DSP, and data provider should ask.

Four critical questions to ask identity solution partners

1. Does your solution support the authenticated or open web?

The authenticated web refers to those users that register and login to a site, app, or platform. Email address is the most common form of authentication, and that identifier then becomes the key to accessing content or other services. Early estimates predict that publishers can achieve at best 10-20% of authenticated users by 2022. That’s great progress to be sure. But what about the other 80% of consumers? Capturing their attention is just as important as authenticated users. This is particularly true for those businesses interested in top funnel activities like prospecting. For maximum scale and coverage, consider leveraging both authenticated and open web identity solutions. 

2. Does your solution support enriched or empty IDs?

An enriched ID is exactly what it sounds like. These solutions were built with data enrichment at the core with the goal of helping marketers and publishers execute more relevant and responsible advertising. Some IDs offer up to 200+ behavioral attributes within their IDs. This offers a treasure trove of privacy-compliant, pseudonymized data for targeting, optimization, reporting, frequency management, and more. But not all identity solutions are created equally. Many others are empty. They exist to leverage first-party data alone, which may sacrifice accuracy based on a single contextual visit or single point of view (the publishers), as well as scale. Additionally, some require a fee to use them and charge additional costs to coordinate and attach relevant data for addressable advertising. Weigh all of these costs and factors when evaluating your identity partners.

3. Where privacy is concerned, is your ID transparent or opaque?

You could ask “Is your ID privacy compliant.” However, the above question will tell you much more about a company’s actions when it comes to compliance. Until U.S. federal law exists, I’d advise to look to Europe’s GDPR, some of the strictest regulation around consumer privacy, for guidance on how to vet an identity partner.

GDPR prioritizes control, transparency, and accountability when it comes to consumer data. In that spirit, look for a solution that makes it easy and accessible for consumers to access, request, and delete their data. Further, seek a partner that minimizes its data collection and communicates accountable IDs to every channel. This ensures a clear, auditable trail as opposed to opaque providers who obscure themselves to users, reduce the ability to see data sharing across platforms, and hide tracking methods.

4. Is your ID solution interoperable or siloed?

You may be wondering with so many ID solutions out there, can they and how will they talk to each other? That’s an excellent question. This is a critical area to dive into with your partners for several reasons. Number one, there may be translation activity fees you need to build into your budget if the ID solution is not interoperable out of the gate. Second, if the ID isn’t freely accessible, you may experience some technical difficulties with sharing across various platforms in other regions. And, third, if the solution doesn’t permit communication across and between IDs, all that rich consumer profiling and segmentation work you did on the front-end may be lost in the lack of translation.

All the right answers

If, however, you find a solution that does all of the above — true interoperability across channels, platforms, and other IDs — that means your portfolio approach will be working most effectively. I trust these four questions will lead to lively and transparent conversations. We all need to be talking more and more openly to solve for a post-cookie, privacy-first world. What questions are you asking identity solution partners? I’d love to hear what’s top of mind for you as you navigate this landscape

Advertising | Perspectives

Why cohorts is a privacy detour the media industry should avoid

With the end of cookies and Mobile Advertising ID’s fast approaching, there is no shortage of discussion about ways to maintain some form of user identification. We need to figure out how data-driven advertising will work within the scope of privacy regulations and technical possibilities. Lately, this debate has revolved around two very different strategic approaches: shared user IDs and cohorts.

Shared user IDs

Shared user IDs aim at solving three main issues related to third-party IDs (and their disappearance):

  • The inefficiencies related to cookie matching and the drop off between platforms using different identification framework. This renders up to 50% of web-based user data and inventory to be unusable.
  • The need for user IDs to be accessible to 3rd parties to the main web server. Instead, these will be replaced by a shared first-party ID, which the server itself provides.
  • The need for greater control around the usage of IDs and associated data, particularly concerning privacy preferences expressed by users.

On paper, shared user IDs are a very efficient and privacy compliant replacement for cookie-based IDs. Their main challenge is adoption by publishers and technology platforms as a scalable alternative to third-party identifiers. Like any currency, their value grows exponentially with usage. This implies a limited value to start with and a difficult take-off (the infamous “chicken and egg” challenge). The next few months will be critical for shared identification solutions to establish themselves as viable and scalable alternatives to third-party identifiers.

Cohorts

On the other hand “cohorts” approaches aim at grouping users into segments to avoid user-level data distribution. They have become a topic of discussion following Google Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox experiments. Cohorts have even been presented as the solution to privacy concerns. They are not.

Cohorts are merely a way to avoid the problem. The approach aggregates people’s data  to pretend that we are treating them as groups rather than individuals. However, no regulation prevents marketers and publishers from addressing individuals. Instead, it requires those individuals to be informed about the data that is collected on them, how it is processed, the purpose of that processing, and to say whether they are ok with it.

A personal approach

Is it better to harass a group of people who have seen a particular product on a website until they buy it? Or is it better to engage in conversation with a single person to understand whether they are truly interested in the product and should be shown the ad?

Personal data is not the problem; it is how we use it that matters. Circumventing privacy by grouping personal data into “cohorts” and pretending we’re off the hook is a way to trick the letter of the law. However, more importantly, it is a way to trick users from the transparency and choice they deserve. And also, maybe, this is a way to trick the Open Web into using suboptimal methods to identify people and leverage marketing data to power advertising investments.

Another critical issue is that this may provide an opening for the large platforms to – in all impunity and under the disguise of (forced) consent — to exploit the largest “personal data vacuums” ever created.

The road to a privacy-first shared user identification future is a bumpy one. Using cohorts may seem like a safe way to avoid the bumps on the road. But they are merely a detour. And as often, taking a detour is longer and less efficient. This is particularly true if that road is controlled by an entity that can raise the toll price at will.

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