Tags containing: "supporter"

Instagram vs. YouTube: Who will win the digital ad war?

October 15, 2018 Todd Krizelman, CEO – MediaRadar

YouTube is currently the most popular platform for video content. So, it’s no surprise that when Instagram released IGTV, its stand-alone app for long-form vertical video, everyone’s first reaction was to compare the two. And YouTube pretty much always came out on top.

However, in the past year, YouTube has been under fire for brand safety issues. In fact, there was a point when 250 brands stopped advertising on YouTube at the same time in order to protect their assets and brand image. To date, many advertisers still believe that YouTube has done a poor job of preventing its advertisers’ brand safety issues, even though they have gotten better at the response.

This led us to host a panel discussion on October 4^th to ponder a key question: With YouTube in its most vulnerable state, and given its ongoing brand safety concerns, is it IGTV’s time to steal advertisers away?

The discussion, entitled “Instagram TV vs. YouTube: Who Will Win the War?”, was moderated by Kerry Flynn of Digiday. The panel consisted of five advertising experts: Kaydee Bridges, VP of Digital & SM Strategy at Goldman Sachs, Elijah Harris, VP, and Head of SM, US at Reprise Digital, Noah Mallin, Managing Partner at Wavemaker North America, Brittany Richter, VP and Head of SM, US at iProspect, and myself.

The discussion offered three key takeaways:

1. YouTube still wins the popular vote.

The majority of panelists agreed that brands interested in video content should be on YouTube rather than Instagram’s IGTV. They pointed out YouTube’s benefits: It’s cheaper, long-form content performs better on YouTube, and it’s better for sharing. Elizabeth Richter, iProspect’s Head of U.S. Social Media, offered a different point of view, arguing that Instagram may work for some brands: “If a brand is struggling with their messaging, or just getting started, Instagram’s IGTV is best because they can experiment with different brand messages and see how consumers respond,” she commented.

2. Instagram’s IGTV is transforming and expanding in promising ways.

For Elijah Harris of Reprise Digital, the early IGTV experience was underwhelming. Its focus was to share long-form content from those he followed on Instagram – something he didn’t enjoy. However, Harris added that the platform currently offers more opportunities worth exploring, raising his confidence in its potential for the future.

3. Instagram’s IGTV isn’t quite ready to compete with the big boys.

Elijah Harris suggested that, if it wants to compete with YouTube, IGTV needs meta tags and better discoverability. To go up against Snapchat, he added, it needs curated content and multi-channel network (MCN) participation.

Noah Mallin of Wavemaker believes that, to compete with Snapchat, IGTV needs “breakout content,” even suggesting that it might fill the void left by the demise of Vine. (“I’m still mourning it,” he confessed). Mallin added that YouTube is “stuck in desktop mode” and must quickly adapt for mobile users.

The consensus was clear. IGTV wants to be the most popular platform for video content. However, it still has a lot of growing up to do. Perhaps Instagram will take note of our panel discussion, and we’ll see a more mature IGTV before we know it.

Advertising | Perspectives

If attention is the currency for advertising, what does it take to get more?

October 9, 2018 Dennis Yuscavitch, VP of Product Marketing—Outbrain

In today’s crowded digital advertising landscape, consumer attention is a much sought-after currency. The question is: Do consumers respond better to quantity or quality of advertising? I’d make the argument for the latter and many of my industry peers agree. Compelling, informative and relevant ad content – the non-interruptive kind — is what matters the most in gaining consumer attention.

Granted, the six-second video ad (blink and you’ll miss it) came into vogue at the beginning of 2017 when YouTube/Google showcased their best quickie video ads at Sundance, encouraging more brands and agencies to adopt this “snackable” format. The rationale was that consumers’ attention is so fragmented that advertisers need to pick up the pace to keep them engaged.

However, there’s a better case to be made for longer-form advertising that is well-targeted and brings value to the viewer or reader.

I had the privilege to speak on a panel on October 2 during New York’s Advertising Week called If Attention is the Currency for Advertising—What does it take to get More? My co-panelists were engaging executives from digital advertising company Acuity, creative agency BBDO and Prudential Financial.

Among us the feeling was mutual—quality matters more than quantity and giving more control to the user is paramount in gaining their attention.

Compelling, Long-Form Creative Works

There were some great examples of compelling long-form campaigns offered by my fellow panelists. I’ll choose one here: Anna Papadopoulos, VP of Advertising at Prudential described the financial company’s latest TV campaign, “The State of Us,” which included 30, 60, and 90 second commercials centered around its retirement planning services in which real people —not actors — were featured talking about their financial futures. She pointed out that “the magic about the campaign is that it wasn’t about Prudential. It was about people’s stories.”

I shared with the group one of my favorite examples of long-form sponsored content — The New York Times Magazine’s audio podcast that launched in September (to accompany its annual “Voyages” photo essay issue). The audio content was described as a “soundscape ecology project” allowing listeners to hear real sounds of moving lava in Hawaii or bats in Mozambique, for example. GE sponsored this engaging content. This qualifies as an advertising coup in my opinion because as a consumer, I enjoyed the audio so much I actually remembered who the advertiser was!

Consumers Appreciate Native Advertising

Our panel discussion also revolved around native advertising, another long form approach. I know from experience that consumers look at native ads 53% more than display ads and native ads create an 18% increase in purchase intent. It just stands to reason. If the sponsored content that is surfaced is based on reader interests and preferences, it is way more likely to capture their attention.

What’s noteworthy is that non-social native works best. eMarketer recently found that consumers trust information from advertisers on publishers’ sites 24.4% more than on social media platforms, and 69% trust publisher site ads while only 54% trust social platform ads.

Let’s not forget that context always matters. If someone is reading a news article, they are probably more disposed to reading another article that is recommended to them (even if it’s sponsored). A more natural content experience that seamlessly integrates into the media that users are already consuming has to be more attention-grabbing.

Want Attention? Give Users Control

The panelists agreed that we need to give consumers a greater sense of control. Are your videos fully opt-in? (This means no sound and no motion unless the reader proactively opens it.) If the video automatically starts playing, most people tend to “click to skip.”

However, if the advertiser allows the user to choose to open the video, it could be 6 seconds, 30 seconds, or 60 seconds. It becomes less about short attention spans and more about earning the right attention with the right people that will actually drive good content experiences, and hopefully, conversions.

Overall, advertising should be less about the brand, the agency, or the technology company, and more about what will resonate with the consumers viewing the ad. After all, in the words of digital analyst Brian Solis, “attention is a precious commodity.”

Industry-Research | Perspectives

How to build a malware-blocking defensive line-up

October 2, 2018 DCN

Popular malware blocking or filtering technologies can go a long way in preventing bad ads from impacting your business’ bottom line. But they’re not a one-stop solution. Much like a quarterback relies on the assistance of his teammates, blockers also function optimally when paired with other smart technologies and tighter security policies. The Media Trust Digital Security & Operations (DSO) team recently uncovered just how weak malware blockers can be when relied upon as a single malware solution. It’s vital that businesses recognize the danger of relying solely on malware blockers to thwart attacks. They must also take the time to build a better game plan to tackle incoming threats.

Obfuscation: The Quarterback Sneak

A big problem with treating malware blockers as a security solution is that they’re rife with issues. Take malicious domains, for example. Recently, a notable domain, known as “dq6375rwn2aoi.cloudfront.net” made its way onto many suppliers’ watch lists. Yet it still managed to sneak beyond malware blockers. The domain in question was disguised with additional code that made it unrecognizable and, therefore, unreadable by the blocker. This technique is known as obfuscation and it’s posing a massive problem in the malvertising space.

According to the DSO team’s analysis, when the right conditions are met, the malware presents users with a fake “you’ve won” pop-up that prompts readers to claim a reward. When users click OK, they are taken to a website that requests for sensitive, personal information like name, email and telephone. The DSO team quickly identified the malware and worked with the publisher to terminate the ads at the source, protecting its’ 900,000 weekly audience members. In just one day, the team uncovered similar obfuscated malware executing in 16 other client websites. All of them had one thing in common: They used the same malware blocking solution.

Blockers: A Narrow Lineup

There are several reasons why blockers provide only a partial solution to preventing bad ads. For starters, at least 90% of malware used in malicious mobile redirections are obfuscated. And that already-high number is growing. There’s also the conundrum of code that can identify and work around specific tools; if the malware detects the presence of a known provider’s tool, it will change tack and behave differently.

Finally, blockers often use third-party malware data which quickly goes stale, thanks to new malware being introduced quicker than the data can track. This issue is so rampant that the DSO team finds a new attack every 30 seconds and classifies at least 5,000 new active malicious domains each month. According to The Media Trust’s analysis, third-party malware data sources take an average of three to five days to identify and record malware. As a result, by the time a third-party filter is updated, 8,600+ attacks could have occurred over a three-day period. That’s at least 14,400 attacks over just five days. For context, a single attack can affect millions of devices.

It’s also important to note that some blockers shut down good ads or block legitimate digital partners like DSPs because of false positives in the data they use. This overzealous approach to rooting out bad ads and bad actors will reduce a publisher’s revenues and can undermine their reputation with a good digital partner. Additionally, when good ads are suppressed, the user experience becomes needlessly compromised. The fact is, while blockers can help, they cannot eliminate malvertising.

The Game Plan: How to Score Against Malvertisers with Blockers

Until machines can match the craftiness of human programmers, companies should supplement their preferred blocking solution with other measures to reduce risk. As regulations like the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act evolve and spread, a single breach can have a huge impact on a company’s finances, performance and reputation. Businesses can mitigate falling victim to these consequences by staying one step ahead of the curve. A good place to start is by devising a game plan that analyzes the opponent’s behaviors and timing. Here are some tips on how companies can take — and keep — the lead.

1. Choose the Best Blocker

As mentioned, a new malware attack hits the ecosystem every 30 seconds. Many blocking solution vendors use compiled synthetic and data sources that are updated every three to five days. Companies should choose a blocker that offers more frequent updates, preferably around the time when new malware is discovered.

2. Understand Malware’s Many Moving Parts

Ad experiences consist of a creative, a tag and a landing page, each of which can be infected. Ten percent of malware that the DSO team detects infect only landing pages. This is likely because most blocking tools ignore these pages, along with site-level malware. Publishers should find out whether the blocker sees these different components, and whether or not they block them when they’re infected, and how.

3. Watch for URLs That Change Their Behavior

Blockers do a good job of rejecting ads with malicious URLs until the latter are obfuscated to avoid detection. Blockers should identify malicious URLs, along with malicious domains and bad hosts. This way, no matter what form the URL takes, the blocker can identify the malware via its host and domain.

4. Remember That Most Malware is Obfuscated

As we’ve seen, this is a huge and growing problem. Legitimate developers obfuscate code to protect intellectual property, while malware developers do it to escape detection. Obfuscation should be reason enough on its own to make companies want to tighten their security policies around malware.

Reviewing Game Day

Malware blockers can be useful tools, but not when they function as the only security tool. Keeping bad ads at bay absolutely requires that companies implement a multi-layered, proactive approach by incorporating other tools and policies into the mix. Regular monitoring of the website from a customer’s view will also allow companies to understand who and what is executing on the website to be able to take action to block code when required and stay compliant.

About the Author:

Chris Olson co-founded The Media Trust with a goal to transform the internet experience by creating better digital ecosystems to govern assets, connect partners and enable Digital Risk Management. Chris has more than 15 years of experience leading high tech and ad technology start-ups and managing international software development, product and sales teams. Prior to The Media Trust, Chris created an Internet-based transaction system to research, buy and sell media for TV, radio, cable, and online channels. He started his career managing equity and fixed income electronic trading desks for Salomon Brothers, Citibank and Commerzbank AG.

Advertising | Perspectives

Demand for media quality is a challenge and an opportunity

October 1, 2018 Yvette Lapompe, Senior Product Manager, Publisher Verification—Integral Ad Science

It’s hard to deny that the landscape for digital publishers is a challenging one. Pools of advertising revenue are shrinking, competition is at an all-time high. A variety of strategic pivots — from video to subscription models revenue models — have yet to fully mature. Furthermore, traditional advertising models are strained by a buy-side that increasingly demands that publishers hit ever more stringent media quality targets. In short, it’s an environment where every penny counts, and where it’s essential that premium publishers maximize the value of their inventory. For many, that means employing tools that can curb factors like ad fraud and low viewability, which can erode the value of premium content.

Fraud

Ad fraud is often positioned as a buy-side problem. Fraudsters use a variety of techniques, from bot networks that generate artificial traffic, to domain spoofing tactics that allow them to impersonate premium publishers. For buyers, it means stolen ad dollars that never impact consumers, and for publishers, it means an obvious loss of revenue. However, ad fraud has a more insidious impact on digital publishers. Not only does it erode the revenue bottom line, but it also erodes trust. The loss of trust damages long-term relationships and reshapes the way major advertisers apportion their budgets over time.

Recently, a digital publisher serving the technology, healthcare, and financial sector experienced an unexpected spike in bot activity. The spike prompted advertisers to question the validity of the publisher’s inventory and could have led to a breakdown in trust and, ultimately, a loss of significant revenue. To combat this, the publisher in question employed a fraud optimization solution to isolate and sequester invalid traffic at the ad server level, reducing fraud across their inventory by over 78%.

Viewability

Like fraud, non-viewable inventory has an unparalleled ability to erode value for publishers. Pressure from major brand advertisers — including highly publicized ultimatums from Unilever CMO Keith Weed, P&G’s Marc Pritchard, and media buying giant Group M — have moved viewable inventory from a nice-to-have in digital advertising inventory, to table stakes for many of the worlds top advertisers. Publishers who find themselves unable to deliver highly viewable inventory may find themselves missing out on significant revenue.

However, demand for highly viewable inventory also presents an opportunity. Publishers who can meet higher viewability standards stand to earn a premium on that inventory given high demand. Recognizing this potential for untapped revenue, a pop culture publisher recently sought to increase viewability across its inventory. Using a publisher optimization solution, the publisher was able to substantially raise viewability from a baseline of 53% to 77.3%, easily hitting a 70% viewability threshold on all of its inventory, opening the door to premium advertiser dollars.

Moving forward

As publishers are increasingly challenged to adapt their business model to a changing ecosystem, it’s easy to feel that rising media quality standards are just one more pressure point. In reality, with the right tools in hand, growing advertiser demand for improved media quality presents an untapped opportunity. Publishers who are able to meet demand can grow trust and more importantly, tap unrealized revenue on high-quality inventory to support their premium content.

Industry-Research

When people can’t read news on Facebook, they find it anyhow

September 26, 2018 Josh Schwartz, Chief of Product, Engineering & Data Science—Chartbeat

What would the web look like without Facebook? Chartbeat had a glimpse into that on Aug. 3, 2018, when Facebook went down for 45 minutes and traffic patterns across the web changed in an instant. What did people do? According to our data, they went directly to publishers’ mobile apps and sites (as well as to search engines) to get their information fix. This window into consumer behavior reflects broader changes we see taking hold this year around content discovery, particularly on mobile. And this is good news for publishers.

Traffic Trends Reverse

Despite volatility driven by algorithm shifts and intense news cycles, user demand for content (represented by traffic across the web) is quite stable. But the sources of that traffic are anything but static. In fact, we’ve seen a major reversal in the specific sources driving traffic to publisher sites in the last year.

Key shifts:

Mobile traffic has seen double-digit growth and surpassed desktop, which saw double-digit declines.
On mobile, Facebook is down nearly 40% since January 2017, while Google Search has seen a 2x growth in that same time period. That means increases in Google Search referral traffic have more than offset any declines in Facebook referral traffic.
Additionally — and of significant importance — mobile direct traffic to publishers is now greater than traffic sent by Facebook to publishers’ sites. This means consumers are now more likely to get their news by typing in a publisher URL or opening an app than by being referred through Facebook.

Mobile Content Discovery Apps Broaden

We’ve also observed content discovery habits changing, as “built-in” mobile aggregators emerge as meaningful referrers. While traffic driven by more traditional referrers like Yahoo, Twitter, and Outbrain has stayed roughly constant for the last 18 months, news aggregator apps that are built directly into the mobile phone or browser experience are now driving significant traffic to publishers. These apps have seen incredible growth:

Google Chrome Suggestions, a personalized newsfeed built into Chrome’s mobile browser, is up 20x.
News aggregator Flipboard is up 2x in the past year.
The new Google News app, which is pre-installed on Android devices, is up roughly 60% since it relaunched in May.

Built-in portal apps aren’t the only apps to watch; publisher-owned news apps are also making a comeback. According to the Digital News Report 2017 from Reuters Institute, weekly use of news apps in the US was up roughly 40% in 2017. And Chartbeat data shows that app users are not just consuming more content, but they are also an incredibly loyal audience – 5.7x more loyal on average than visitors who arrive from platforms like Facebook and Google.

All of which makes the Aug. 3 Facebook incident even more interesting to observe.

The Outage

Chartbeat analyzed the Facebook outage using global traffic data across a sample of more than 4,000 sites, and presented a summary of what happened at the ONA conference. Key data points show that when Facebook went down, referrals to news sites fell as expected, but other activity more than made up for it.

Direct traffic to publishers’ websites increased 11%, while traffic to publishers’ mobile apps soared 22%.
Search referral traffic to publishers was also up 8%.
Surprisingly, there was a net new total traffic increase of 2.3%, meaning that the number of pages consumed across the web spiked upward in this timeframe.

One of the fascinating things we noticed in the data was just how instantaneous the reaction was. When Facebook went down, it took only seconds to break the habit. Habitual Facebook usage is so intertwined with mobile usage, however, that it is hard to say what would really happen in a Facebook-absent world. Would mobile consumption be the same without it?

Facebook drives a tremendous amount of traffic to publishers, but at the same time, it also competes in terms of consumer time and attention. It is heartening to see that when Facebook is temporarily out of the picture, consumers still seek out the stories they want— and this is good news for publishers.

This data was originally presented at the Online News Association 2018 annual conference by Josh Schwartz, Chief of Product, Engineering and Data Science at Chartbeat. You can watch it here.

Industry-Research

Another content “recommendation” source from Google takes off

September 18, 2018 Clare Carr, Vice President of Marketing—Parse.ly

Whenever we see a chart like this:
our analysts quickly start asking questions. Big spikes usually mean some sort of change, new product, or initiative at at platform that affects journalists and media companies. The problem is, usually the platforms don’t bother to mention it to you.

In this case, the data led us to something called Google Quick Search Box. As our Senior Audience Development Solutions Manager, Kelsey Arendt, explains: “GQSB was previously understood to be only organic search from the search bar widget on mobile devices, but now it’s a blend of search box and recommended content.”

The referrer now sends traffic from:

“View Related Pages.” This appears in a Google webview—not Chrome—on both AMP and non-AMP pages.
“Check out your feed” at the bottom of search inputs. This takes you to “interest-based” content cards.
Left-of-home swipe cards. (Note: These cards aren’t related to the googleapis referrer, and we’ve clarified that in this post.)

And so another Google initiative could be affecting how your content gets shown to audiences. Though there might be benefits this time around.

Considering the effect of personalization on readership

Beyond the fact that we see (again) the power of platforms to influence how audiences find premium content, the data also shows what an impact personalization of content can have.

According to Parse.ly data, internally referred traffic sends more views to articles than all of social media. This includes home and sections pages, as well as any recirculating traffic sent from article to article. Increasing these views by showing even better personalized articles has huge potential.

So when it comes to content, what kind of personalization works, and how do you test it?

Adapting personalization to your audience

Personalization can mean a lot of things when it comes to tactical execution. Does it mean that each reader sees content uniquely based on their reading history? Or maybe based on the section or article the user is seeing that moment?

There isn’t a one-size-fits all solution for this, and media companies should be testing and adapting their personalization strategies for their audiences. Much like technology developers test user experience, this should not be a static choice that is made once for all audiences.

Last year, Setareh Baig, a then graduate school intern from NYU’s Studio 20 program, tested how this would work in practice. She interviewed the product teams at The New Yorker and The Intercept and did user testing.

Setareh found that first-time visitors to these sites were most interested in reading more posts when they knew these articles had been the most shared. From her research:

“These readers are very interested in what’s being shared. They valued personalization tailored to stories that are relevant in conversations with peers. They want news stories that other people want to know about and take proactive action on. Whereas time on page is passive, they want to be given stories that other people were inspired and driven to do something about.”

Since The New Yorker team cares deeply about subscribers as well, other user tests could be implemented, testing whether returning visitors had the same behavior, or whether they were more likely to want to read a story they knew other subscribers had spent time with.

We’re keeping our eye on the trends and traffic that Google sends publishers’ way. We’re also encouraged to see publishers take what works and adapt to their own readers. Here’s to seeing more spikes of interested readers in the future.

Perspectives

Monetizing data: 6 ways to make money without selling your data

September 11, 2018 Michel Benjamin, Director of Marketing—Lotame

Publishers keep hearing about monetizing their data to drive revenue, but there are many ways to achieve this. Selling data, whether through a data exchange or a private marketplace, is perhaps the most obvious option to increase revenue. But if you’re already taking advantage or not interested in that option, selling your data isn’t the only way to make money with your customer data. In fact, there are many creative ways in which publishers can monetize their data. Here are six opportunities to monetize data – without selling it.

1. Sell Audiences, Not Site-Sections

When you’re collecting data on your readers, you can use that data to make their audiences more sellable to advertisers. By collecting and organizing audience data from across various sites and properties, you can sell audiences instead of pages or site sections.

Say, for instance, you have an advertiser who sells kitchenware. The first place you would think to put those ads would be in the recipes section of your site, since the people who visit that section most likely enjoy cooking. With a data management platform (DMP), however, you could create an audience of users who have a lot of interest in cooking and kitchenware. The you can display those kitchenware ads across your entire site aimed specifically at those users, rather than just in your recipes section.

Since your DMP allows you to access information about your audience’s interests, you could sell ad space to a kitchenware company even if your site has nothing to with cooking, appliances or home goods. A DMP gives you insights into your audience’s interests beyond your specific site, which provides you with the opportunity to work with advertisers you never could before.

2. Increase Average CPMs

If you’re focused on selling ads, increasing the price of each one will obviously help increase your revenue. But how can you do this? Offering advertisers the ability to target their ads to the exact audience they are trying to reach means they will be willing to pay more to reach that engaged audience. Better-targeted audiences are more sellable. When advertisers know they are reaching an engaged audience on your site, they’ll pay more to have their ads there.

3. Expand Your Overall Audience

If you’ve got large advertisers signed on for big targeted campaigns, you need to be able to fulfill those campaign targets. If you’re lacking enough uniques to make the campaign a success, 2^nd or 3^rd party data may help you expand your targets.

It might seem counterintuitive to pay for data to make money. However, if you’ve got gaps in the data available, you may need to spend more upfront to be able to attract more visitors to your site. More visitors means more impressions, which means more people who see the ads.

4. Get More Subscribers

For subscription-based publishers, reducing churn is of utmost concern. And the key to keeping subscribers engaged is serving the content they want. You can use your DMP to access insights into the characteristics of the people who subscribe to your site. You might find that your regular readers have various interests in common, beyond what you would expect based on the content of your publication. Perhaps, for instance, you run an online golf magazine, so you know your readers are interested in golf. Your data might show you that large portions of your audience are also interested in fine wine, bowling or apparel. By offering content that fits your readers’ interests, you can keep them engaged and coming back for more. Alternatively, you can essentially become a marketer yourself by promoting your content to people who are most likely to engage. From the previous golf example, this might include targeting golf fans on wine sites or pages to bring them back to your pages.

5. Reducing Remnant Inventory

Ideally, you’re already selling all of your ad space as premium inventory. However, that often doesn’t happen. It’s possible, though, to convert more of your remnant inventory to premium, which leads to a substantial increase in ad revenue. As the value of your ad space, and the value of your website as a whole, go up, your inventory will sell faster and for high prices. As a result, more of it will be considered premium.

Data is what drives this increase in value. With data, you can sell audiences rather than sections of your site and reach advertisers you wouldn’t otherwise sell to without audience data. This boosts the overall value of your site to advertisers and puts your ad space in higher demand, making it easier to sell ad space. As a result, you’re able to sell more space as premium rather than remnant.

6. Customizing Content

Your editorial team probably has a pretty good grasp on the type of content that performs best on your sites. And as the old saying goes: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But if you’re looking to keep visitors on your site longer, you’ll need to offer them content recommendations that match their interests, so that they can view more content and see more ads.

Once again, the data can guide you by revealing what kinds of content are performing the best with your audience. Your data will tell what a particular reader’s interests are, allowing you to show them content that deals with those interests. If they read a lot about fashion, for instance, you would serve them content related to fashion.

Data is powerful. And, if used correctly, it can help you increase your revenue, even without selling it directly. They key is understanding who your readers are, so you can serve them appropriately. Data is a powerful tool. Ensure that you are using it in every way possible to strengthen your revenue streams and improve your site overall.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Revenue

Programmatic spend continues to surge in 2018

August 29, 2018 Todd Krizelman, CEO – MediaRadar

It’s predicted that more than $46 billion in ad dollars will be spent on programmatic advertising in the United States this year, with 86.2% of all digital display ads bought programmatically by 2020. But who is spending the most on programmatic? MediaRadar dove in to find the answers. By analyzing thousands of brands, with ads placed programmatically in Q1 of 2018, we discovered which companies are spending more, which are spending top dollar, plus so much more.

75% of all brands running ads online buy programmatically

A whopping three quarters of brands studied had purchased some form of an ad programmatically in Q1 of 2018. Findings such as these prove that, despite transparency concerns, advertisers are continuing to invest in programmatic.

Even more compelling is that, in the wake of major brand safety controversies (e.g. YouTube’s controversial content woes), advertisers are still purchasing programmatic video. In fact, the number of brands running programmatic video have nearly doubled compared to the previous year.

Amazon leads the way in programmatic ad buys

Big brands are buying programmatically and Amazon is leading the space. Amazon was found to be the biggest programmatic spender by far. The online retailer alone accounted for 10% of the total spend of the top-50 programmatic advertisers in Q1 of 2018, spending one and a half times more than the next biggest programmatic spender, Microsoft.

In order of high to low, the top-10 programmatic advertisers in Q1 of 2018 were:

Amazon
Microsoft
Wayfair
TaxAct
Charles Schwab
Weight Watchers
Sprint
Coors Light
Geico
Dell

Amazon has always been a big spender when it comes to marketing efforts. In 2016 it was reported that Amazon spent more on advertising than Walmart Inc., Best Buy Co. Inc., The Home Depot Inc., and The Kroger Company combined. A large portion of that ad budget was dedicated to programmatic too.

The players remain the same

An impressive 94% of the top-50 programmatic spenders in Q1 of 2017 ended up buying programmatically again in Q1 of this year. The list of companies that renewed include Walmart, Microsoft, and Verizon Wireless.

Despite escalating talk about brand safety, the programmatic market has remained mostly stable, year-over-year. Significant changes in the form of exits or reduced spending have been few and far between. Not to mention, the implementation of safeguard tech like whitelist and blacklist technologies have shown brands that programmatic is actively changing for the better; becoming more brand safe and transparent with every update.

The bottomline is that most advertisers prefer programmatic for transacting online media and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. No matter the controversy, brands appear to value the rewards of programmatic more than they fear the repercussions. Amazon’s increasingly large investments in programmatic are a testament to its popularity and power in the advertising market.

About the Author

Todd Krizelman (@ToddKrizelman ) is Co-Founder and CEO of MediaRadar (@MediaRadar). Growing up near the epicenter of technological innovation in Palo Alto, California encouraged him to become an entrepreneur and co-found of one of the world’s first social media sites, theGlobe.com. Krizelman also held leadership positions at Bertelsmann’s Gruner + Jahr and Random House. With his expertise in ad sales and innovation, Krizelman joined veteran web architect, Jesse Keller, to found MediaRadar in 2007.

Perspectives | Revenue

What happens when you take “publishing” out of the “publishing business”

August 20, 2018 Dennis Yuscavitch, VP of Product Marketing—Outbrain

In May of 2017, Bill Simmons, former ESPN personality and creator of The Ringer, made an interesting decision to move his successful sports media empire to Vox Media. Simmons maintained editorial independence but relied on Vox for all the non-content creation requirements of a traditional publisher. This included all revenue and product development because as Simmons said “they are great at sales and technology.” The plan, it seems, was to offload the “publishing” part of the publishing business. This allowed Simmons to focus on content creation for his widely popular podcast and website.

This wasn’t a viable model 20 years ago when publishers had established oligopolies by controlling distribution in their respective geographic regions. As a result, the publishing needs of the business, HR, printing press, sales, and distribution existed to support editorial and content creation. Now that the internet has driven distribution costs to near $0, and oligopolies no longer exists, there is little need to combine traditional publishing sales, product and HR overhead with the journalism it is intended to support.

Even so, content creations like Simmons still need to make money. To do so, they rely on content management platforms like Chorus, the purpose-built platform Vox created to manage content and revenue. As of July, Chorus supported 350 media brands. The system includes “content management, data-informed multi-platform content distribution, integrated advertising, and a suite of publishing tools.” Media brands that strip away activities not directly related to content creation establish a sustainable model that allows them to create even more great content, a reinforcing cycle of success.

In his May 2017 post, Ben Thompson covered the changing business model while referring to platforms like Vox’s as the “Faceless Publisher.” The platform handles all the monetization, resources, and infrastructure, which allows journalists to focus on creating amazing content.

The term “Faceless Publisher” might be a misnomer in Vox’s case given they have established several great brands in the market including SB Nation, Vox and Eater. However, it is clear that this federated group of journalistic brands, supported by a single business platform, creates great efficiencies. This efficiency will deliver what readers and content creators need: a sustainable business model that delivers amazing content.

Uncategorized

Policing third-party code is essential to digital vendor risk management

August 17, 2018 Chris Olson, CEO & Co-Founder—The Media Trust

Some of the biggest companies including Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord and Taylor, Best Buy, MyFitness Pal, and Applebees have been the victims of breaches due to third party code. Third parties provide services around content recommendation engines, ads, customer identification platforms, data management platforms, social media widgets, and video players, to name a few.

Oftentimes, these third parties turn to their own third parties to help deliver their services. When unknown third (or nth) parties become part of a website’s support structure, they can introduce more risks than they were brought in to reduce, because they lie outside of a formal IT organization’s control. Gartner predicts these “shadow IT” will be the root cause of 33% of security problems by 2020.

Throwing light on digital shadow IT

Last year, one of the world’s largest magazine publishers was shocked to find their sites were supported by over 1,000 third parties. This year, they were able to winnow down that number to 100 of the most trusted. In July 2018, random sample of 350 of The Media Trust’s publisher clients showed that each of their domains was supported by an average of 140 third parties, which provided anywhere from 50-95% of each site’s code. For the magazine publisher and those in the random sample, most of these third parties (much less their activities) were unknown to them.

Recently, The Media Trust digital security and operations team found and foiled a malware campaign that affected close to 60 major publishers whose audiences span the globe. These publishers’ trusted digital advertising partners had unknowingly served an ad with malicious code that would replace the legitimate creatives of a globally recognized brand. The code would redirect visitors to a Facebook popup informing victims that they had won a prize and encourage them to enter personally identifying information.

What sets apart this campaign from other redirects is its scale and its targets: some of the world’s most popular online publications that deal only with reputable digital partners. While the campaign was effectively halted, it spotlights the growing challenges of managing the risks third parties and their own vendors can introduce to today’s ever-more dynamic, complex digital ecosystems.

Third-party code putting companies at risk

Third parties can pose risks in several ways. First, they tend to have weaker security measures. This makes them ideal attack vectors for bad actors. The headline-grabbing breaches of Target, Equifax, Ticketmaster, and, more recently, Adidas, prove how popular third parties are to exploit because of their vulnerabilities. In this scenario, when taking on a large organization, hackers will first target a third party and use it as a gateway to enter the larger network.

Second, third party code operate outside the website operator’s cybersecurity infrastructure. Their activities, authorized or otherwise, can neither be monitored nor remediated by the publisher’s marketing and IT departments. As a result, user experience can deteriorate and erode a publisher’s topline and reputation.

However, another, more serious consequence is the unsanctioned collection of user data, which in the EU will expose the publisher to the risk of infringing the GDPR and, soon, the ePR, whose scope is expected to be broader and penalties equally stiff. In fact, the ePR could potentially override the GDPR. Non-compliance is therefore a risk, and will figure prominently in other sought-after markets like Canada, which will enforce PIPEDA later this year, and California, which recently passed the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Reining in risk

Unless they have the tools to actively monitor third party-code, website owners will likely remain unaware of the broad range of code that execute on their sites and of how unexpectedly and frequently new, unknown code appear. The ability to identify, document and authorize these ever-changing vendors is critical to properly mitigate risk. Not only do most enterprises not know the full scale of vendors executing code, but they would be surprised at the amount of consumer data collection activity, i.e., cookie drops, pixel fires, device fingerprint, etc.

Continuous monitoring from your customers’ points of view helps IT teams pinpoint how these vendors and their actions—specifically the domains executed and cookies dropped—change according to user geography, browser, or device. Collecting this type of vendor intelligence provides clear insight into third party behavior to protect customers and brand reputation from cyber threats.

Working with third parties toward strong security posture

Third-party application security is essential for today’s IT security compliance, especially now that regulations are proliferating. Even if the security risk resulted from a third-party compromise, the legal responsibility falls on the primary organization. Therefore, it is crucial that organizations take sufficient steps to manage third-party risk and ensure a safer online environment for themselves and their users.

To do that businesses need to ensure that both their systems and those that look beyond their perimeter to third and nth party codes are secure. First, they should carefully vet all third parties by conducting a risk assessment before bringing any third parties on board. Second, they should maintain a continuously updated inventory of their direct and indirect third parties. Third, they should spell out security policies and standards and use contract clauses and SLAs to enforce them. Fourth, they should follow through by conducting periodic audits of third party security measures. Finally, they should conduct continuous, real-time scanning of their websites to identify any unauthorized code and activities and then compare their findings with what is executing on their visitors’ browsers outside their firewall.

These steps will help to mitigate risk and lock out bad actors from digital ecosystems. Taking a proactive approach to cleaning up and protecting websites will improve the company’s security posture, ensure customers’ safety and protect organizations from the high, upcoming fines of the GDPR and other regulations that follow it.

About the Author:

Perspectives

Do more with less: 3 opportunities using more relevant data

July 30, 2018 Clare Carr, Vice President of Marketing—Parse.ly

Every day we’re reminded about the limited resources facing our industry, from the time people have to produce stories to the lack of insights we have about decisions made at the big platforms. There’s an irony then that it feels like there’s more data available to us than ever before. Yet many people still aren’t sure how to make the most of it.

Trying to improve business models, audiences, or content simply by adding more data doesn’t guarantee any success. Now, more than ever, the answer is finding the most relevant data—and making sure we’re uncovering all the available opportunities the data we have can provide.

Historically, some of this data has been hard to get to. The major technology platforms see it as theirs to wield. So, without major undertaking, it can be hard to piece the different types of data that audiences coming from Facebook, Google, your own editorial efforts, and untrackable sources actually show.

The Parse.ly data team, using Currents, looked at a recent major news story, immigration, as an example, to uncover opportunities for media companies that might have been missed in other data sources.

Finding the under-covered angle of the story

When Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy separated children from parents, #KeepFamiliesTogether picked up steam on social media. But how did that translate to attention for the articles publishers wrote, and what did people want to know more about?

Over the course of one week, June 18 – June 25, there were 590 articles about immigration getting attention in our network. And that attention was vast: 16 million views.

So many articles means the topic was well covered, right? Not necessarily. Take the topic of “asylum seekers” for example.

Only 20% of these stories were related to asylum seekers. However, they received over 30% of the attention. High traffic per story suggests this angle was potentially under-covered and under-promoted.

Understand the differences between referral types

So where exactly were people finding stories about immigration? The biggest source of traffic was social media, which drove one-third of traffic to immigration stories. Given how much the media industry talks about Facebook, this may not seem surprising. But this is actually about double the typical traffic the network sends to any given story. It also bucks the trend of Google as the dominant source of traffic.

Other important ways readers learned about this issue? Directly from news sites, no platforms needed. About one-quarter of the overall traffic to immigration articles was from editorial promotion: site homepages, section pages, and links within articles.

For the specific topic of asylum seekers, we looked at where else people talked about this topic:

Twitter sent almost as much traffic as Google to stories about this topic. And Instagram shows as a significant referral – one of the more surprising results of this data to me. With data about what’s relevant to readers right now, and where, teams can be more pointed in how they spend precious resources, including their time.

Narrow in on what topics matter to different localities

Where people are paying attention to stories doesn’t just apply to places on the internet—search, social, etc. Readers’ physical locations impact attention, too.

For stories about immigration, attention wasn’t at the same level across the entire country. Certain areas, including parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, over-indexed, represented by darker colors on the maps below.

Geographic data can also inform where a story gets distributed. If you’re pushing your immigration story out on Facebook and Instagram, geo-target cities or states where attention, and therefore interest, is already high. Or if your newsroom is part of a network that spans multiple regions, this information can help guide syndication strategy.

Don’t get more data. Get relevant data

It would be amazing if organizations had more of everything: more staff, more resources, more time, more universally accessible sources of data and information. But the reality is you have to pick and choose your data wisely. You need to use sources that can find opportunities for your site, instead of accessing the same list or information that everyone else uses can make the most of that data.

In the absence of time and resources, focus on making sure you have the right data at your fingertips. Pay attention to the data that’s relevant: what audiences care about right now, where they’re finding that information, what stories are related, and where the gaps are.

Advertising | Revenue

Here’s how to maximize the value of your PMP

July 30, 2018 Mike Kim, VP Product Management, Optimization—Integral Ad Science

For publishers, programmatic offers the opportunity to monetize and package inventory more efficiently than traditional direct deals. For some, it is a place to more effectively sell run of site (ROS) inventory. Others place blocks of premium inventory up for auction to generate revenue without the time, expense, and overhead of negotiating a direct sale. However, while programmatic has opened the door to greater efficiency and a new stream of incremental revenue, it’s also created challenges for premium publishers who want to protect user experience and exercise some control over the type of creative that appears on their pages.

For a growing number of publishers, this means turning to private marketplaces (PMPs). PMPs offer the efficiency of programmatic exchanges in a more controlled environment for premium advertisers. In this post, we’ll attempt to offer some tips to help publishers take advantage of what PMPs have to offer. But first, just what is a private marketplace and how is it different from an open exchange?

What’s a PMP?

Private Marketplaces are exclusive inventory packages offered to buyers via a deal ID. This Deal ID acts as a key to a private auction, or automated access to an inventory pool with pre-negotiated terms. PMPs make it easier for publishers, sell-side platforms (SSPs), and networks to set aside specific inventory packages and sell them to a pre-defined group of buyers. For advertisers, PMPs offer access to premium inventory in a closed environment before it’s made available to the open market.

Through a PMP, publishers can work more directly with advertisers without sacrificing the efficiency of programmatic automation. They also offer publishers the opportunity to build tailored packages of premium inventory and bundled custom audiences, which can fetch a higher price from advertisers than the same inventory might elicit on an open exchange. Most importantly in the age of ad blocking, PMPs give publishers a chance to offer their inventory to a vetted selection of premium advertisers. This ensures that quality content is matched with quality ad creative that won’t compromise user experience.

A PMP can be built and curated by a single publisher, or parent company of premium publishers, and can offer different deal types including first-look offerings or pre-negotiated rates. Supply-side platforms (SSPs), on the other hand, provide premium publishers with lower scale for video with an opportunity to monetize their inventory at a higher CPM by grouping it with like properties. Often how the deals are packaged and the specific inventory they contain can impact publishers’ bottom line. Below are some best practices for maximizing the value of your PMP.

Tips to make the most of your PMP

Use an automated solution to optimize for viewability

A growing number of buyers are turning to PMPs to meet stringent viewability requirements. Major media-buying powerhouse Group M has gone so far as to release its own custom viewability standards, which are more rigorous than those of the MRC. Inventory that meets these more rigorous standards is the gateway to securing advertising dollars from premium brands like Unilever and Volvo. Optimizing your inventory to meet those viewability demands and building PMP packages around viewability thresholds is a great way to maximize incremental revenue and ensure that you’re able to charge buyers for the true value of your inventory.

Optimize for brand safety to score global brand dollars

A tumultuous news cycle, the rise of fake news, and the proliferation of unsafe content on social platforms has led to a major industry-wide focus on brand safety. Buyers across the board have prioritized brand-safe inventory for their digital campaigns to avoid finding themselves on the wrong side of a social media mob. UM Worldwide recently appointed a global brand safety officer, elevating the challenge of finding brand safe inventory to the C-suite. However, brand safety is subjective. Different brands have different sensitivities, and different regions have different ideas of what constitutes a risky placement. Using an optimization tool to create content category packages allows publishers to capture diverse brands and global advertiser dollars with their featured content.

Work directly with buyers to understand their needs

PMPs combine the efficiency of a programmatic transaction with the intimacy and trust of a direct deal. That means the publishers who value user experience can control which advertising partners have access to their inventory. However, that communication and vetting is a two-way street. Work directly with the buyers participating in your private marketplace to identify their needs. Just because your PMP focuses on high-viewability inventory packages doesn’t mean that advertisers aren’t also looking for packages that are low in fraud. Understanding these needs and packaging your inventory toward them can provide a competitive advantage in securing additional premium brand dollars.