Tags containing: "supporter"

22×20 Kicks-off media literacy week with #sschat

November 7, 2017 Jennifer Bassett, Managing Editor—Outbrain

This week marks the beginning of the third annual media literacy week. With fake and misleading news continuing to dominate the headlines, media literacy week’s mission — to highlight the power of media literacy and its essential role in education today — has never seemed so timely.

This is particularly true for those in the ad tech and media space. It is imperative for industry players, such as my employer, (whose firm policy against fake news and a history of commitment to consumer trust and long-term publisher sustainability is detailed here), to come together to combat the problem of misleading news via process, people, and policy. I also believe that industry has a moral responsibility to educate and engage the larger public on the issue as well.

Consumers need to understand how the complex ad-tech space affects them as they spend ever more time online. They also need to have better context for the content they are consuming, so they continue to ask the right questions, and stay critical of the information they see online.

This is one reason why I’m so excited to be working with the LAMP (The Learning About Multimedia Project) as Disruption Hub lead of its 22×20 campaign. 22×20 is a nonpartisan, nationwide media literacy and civics campaign to help every teen — 22 million in the US who will be of voting age by the next election — cast informed votes in the 2020 election and beyond.

The 22×20 campaign directly addresses a perceived crisis in the U.S. around youth media literacy and civic participation. According to analysis done by CIRCLE, only 50% of 18-29 year olds voted in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, a 2016 Stanford study showed that more than 80% of high school students do not question the source of news claims made on social media, and 82% of middle school students have difficulty distinguishing between online advertising and news. This data not only speaks to a need to equip youth today with the skills to discern fact from fiction, but also a need to empower them to engage with our civic process.

To quote Estefania Alba, one of the bright and engaged 16-year-old’s working with 22×20 (who recently wrote about her experience with The LAMP and 22×20 for Teen Vogue), “Just like voting gives you a voice, media literacy hands you the microphone and empowers you to have an opinion.”

As a contributor to 22×20’s three-year mission, I’ve been working together with educators, journalists, funders, student leaders, and other tech leaders, to develop an actionable framework for ramping up the media literacy skills necessary for civic engagement across the nation’s youth.

22×20 first kicked off in September, at a summit at the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University in New York City. Together, more than 60 of us from across the United States gathered together to strategize against some of our key milestones. Our collective ideas encompassed curriculum, distribution of curriculum, policy and advocacy, communications, professional development, and other out-of-the-box thinking. Now, a few months later, we continue to map out our actionable three-year plan via smaller working groups, conference calls, and late-night Slack chats.

While our efforts for 22×20 are still in its early stages, we’re hopeful that the movement will spark real change around youth media literacy and civic engagement. The ability to discern and more importantly, challenge, misinformation is key to participating in the democratic process. We need to equip young people with the skills to parse fact from fiction so they can decide for themselves what they believe is ultimately right. And we also need to make sure they know that their vote has the power to make a difference.

This week, 22×20 is excited to kick off one of our very first initiatives, in honor of Media Literacy Week. In collaboration with #sschat, an open group of dedicated network of educators and enthusiasts who aim to improve their collective teaching of social studies, we’re engaging educators across the country on the topic of youth, media, and the election on Twitter. We invite all who are interested to participate in the conversation.

Jennifer Bassett (@Jabers) is Outbrain’s Managing Editor. She has 10+ years of experience in the content strategy and editorial space. She began her career as a book editor and has consulted for top agencies, nonprofits, and media companies including Memorial Sloan Kettering, Havas Worldwide New York, and Interbrand. In her personal time, she co-founded the acclaimed newsletter Red for the Blue and when she’s not talking content, she’s playing music with her band The Missing Footage. You can read more of her writing on Outbrain.com and jennifer-bassett.com.

Perspectives

Why Slate picked engaged time as their north star metric

October 24, 2017 Melissa Bierly, Product Marketing Manager—Parse.ly

On their 20th birthday last September, the digital magazine Slate reported 17,000 paying subscribers for their membership program, Slate Plus. Today, that number is at 35,000.

The surge in subscribers owes in part to the Trump bump—Slate Plus membership jumped by 46% after the election. But the underlying catalyst is that Slate has gone all-in on loyalty to lower their dependence on platforms like Facebook and monetize their incredibly loyal audience. By launching new podcasts (and using them as platforms to promote Slate Plus), revamping their newsletter, and doubling down on comment moderation, Slate has committed to creating engaging content that keep readers coming back.

That commitment necessitated a shift in how Slate thought about measurement, moving away from a focus on unique visitors to a metric that matched their primary goal. Establishing engaged time as a “North Star metric” enabled teams across the organization to put loyalty at the forefront of their initiatives.

Connecting the dots between audience loyalty and engaged time

Digiday’s Lucia Moses regarded Slate’s loyalty initiative with a healthy amount of skepticism: “Introducing a new measurement approach isn’t easy, though. Publishers may like to talk about engagement, but there’s no industry standard for it. … And measuring loyalty, as Slate is trying to do, is murky anyway.”

In short, fostering a loyal audience sounds great… but how do you measure it in a way that makes sense for the whole company? That’s a question Slate’s Director of Research Anna Gilbert has spent a lot of time thinking about.

Gilbert and her team considered the number of unique visits and returning visitors to represent loyalty, among other metrics. Ultimately, they chose total engaged time—how long visitors actively read, watch, or listen to a piece of content—because it helped them measure the sincerity of their visitors. “When we have first time visitors that come to Slate and read two or three articles and spend a minute and a half or two minutes, we want that to be reported and credited in this loyalty initiative. And we think that those everyday visitors, or those twice-a-week visitors, are also captured really well,” said Gilbert. “They’re worth far more than drive-by visitors who quickly leave the site.”

Wherever a reader is in the funnel, whether they’re a first time or everyday visitor, Slate is now able to answer the question: “Are they staying on Slate longer?”

Implementing a new metric and acting on insights

Gilbert acknowledged that rolling out new metrics can be hard because it requires figuring out how you move the needle. “If you write more stories, that leads to higher unique visitors. It’s a pretty clear relationship. If you’re at the end of the month and you’re not close to your goal, you know tangibly what you can do. Whereas with engaged time, the levers are not as clear. You need to figure out how to reframe your thinking around it.”

Slate’s partnership with Parse.ly has helped every team to align behind engaged time as their core metric. “Seeing engaged time in the Parse.ly dashboard helped us make a much smoother transition from unique visitors and the Big Bang Facebook days to a more real relationship with our most loyal readers,” said Gilbert.

The editorial team uses the Parse.ly dashboard to track which stories are getting the most engagement, while the sales team employs it for storytelling to prospects. The product team uses Parse.ly’s API to power Slate’s infinite scroll reading experience, which recommends relevant content once a reader has finished an article. As for identifying levers, Gilbert’s team is analyzing raw engagement data made available through Parse.ly’s Data Pipeline to identify factors—like referral traffic or publication time—that correlate with a high amount of engaged time.

What about staff working on Slate Plus? “They’re one of the most data driven teams at Slate. They’re constantly using Parse.ly to monitor engaged time in combination with subscription and marketing data from other sources to figure out what’s working or where new opportunities might lie,” said Gilbert.

The future of monetizing loyal audiences

As more and more publishers turn their sights to subscriptions as a viable source of revenue, Slate’s journey to fully focusing on loyalty offers a roadmap to success.

And Gilbert has hopes that the industry at large will come to see the value of standardizing engaged time. “When our sales team goes out and does pitches, they definitely talk about Slate’s loyal visitors and how much time they spend with our content. But they still show the UV number. I think establishing a clearer relationship between engaged time and revenue generation—so that we’re talking about revenue per minute instead of revenue per pageview—will help frame why engaged time matters for more than just editorial tracking.”

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

The state of programmatic native in 2017

October 17, 2017 Todd Krizelman, CEO – MediaRadar

Over the past year, advertisers have devoted more dollars to programmatic native than ever before. And it’s easy to see why. Programmatic native gives native scale, while bringing more efficiency and data-targeting into the equation. Nativo, TripleLift, Sharethrough, Unruly, and Bidtellect are some of the most well-known players/programmatic native exchanges in this space.

To get a clearer picture of today’s programmatic native ad market, my company, MediaRadar, pulled together some of the most pressing trends on the year so far.

It’s a growing market

The number of advertisers placing native in Q1 2017 was nearly identical to Q1 2016 (2,318 vs. 2,326 brands). However, there was a sharp increase in Q2 2017, where the number of advertisers grew 42%, from 2,100 to 2,981 native programmatic advertisers. Why the surge? Good performance. As I have shared previously, programmatic native is generally evaluated on the same KPIs as display. In a contest against most standard IAB ad display units, programmatic native scores well with high click-rates and engagement. And it can scale.

Penetration is low

Despite the fast rise in programmatic native, 122,241 brands were buying advertising online in the first half of the year. This means that as a% of total, only 2.5% of those brands buy native programmatic. We are only scratching the surface here. Even though large national brands make up the early adopters, there is still significant room for programmatic native to grow. This is welcome news for native exchanges that sell this kind of advertising. They know the opportunity is poised to grow substantially.

Renewal rates are mixed

While total numbers are strong, quarterly renewal rates on programmatic native remain challenged, with only 20% renewing. Specifically, the brands buying in the first half of 2017 share just 20% of the same brands from the first half of 2016. So, for programmatic native to continue its expansion, brands will have to recognize its benefits and make a long-term commitment to the format.

Campaign duration varies

Campaign duration remains short, with most native campaigns lasting a median of one month. In Q1 and Q2 2017, 14% and 20% of advertisers ran multi-month campaigns, respectively. During this time period, renewal rates on longer campaigns were much higher than shorter-term campaigns. This is why renewal rates and campaign duration are often tied together tangentially. Longer campaigns mean more of an opportunity to tweak and amend programs, which feeds into higher renewals.

Programmatic native is on the rise. And while there are some challenges – namely measuring performance of programmatic native and no definitive, standard set of metrics, as well as some market confusion about what programmatic native can offer – the benefits outweigh them. Yes, the market is still in its infancy – relative to its potential – but it’s becoming increasingly popular. And it has a lot of room to grow.

Industry-Research | Video

The 5 big trends media execs must understand to succeed

October 9, 2017 Terri Walter, Chief Marketing Officer—Chartbeat

How has both consumer consumption of news and traffic patterns changed year-over-year? What about the role of platforms? Every October, media analytics platform Chartbeat identifies macro trends in audience behavior and news consumption to help publishers understand major shifts and discover new growth opportunities. These just released trends, rolled up from Chartbeat’s network level data from 2016 to 2017, sum up the key findings:

1. It’s not a mobile first-world, it’s mobile-only.

In looking at platform-referred traffic by device type, we see that mobile has made stunning gains year-over-year. Last year, traffic from Google had just tipped over the 50% mark for mobile for the first time ever, showing a 51% mobile vs 42% desktop split. But from 2016 to 2017, Google mobile traffic grew from 51% to 60%, and Facebook’s grew from 78% to 87%. For publishers with high dependencies on platform-referred traffic, it is significant to note that most visitors are now coming via mobile. At least for platform-referred visitors, it is practically a mobile-only world.

2. It’s not that Facebook traffic is down, it’s that Google is up.

Traffic that was referred from Facebook and Google to premium sites has been fairly steady over time, with Google driving roughly 1.25 billion visits per week and Facebook around 1 billion. The ebbs and flows in their traffic have stayed pretty consistent each month—until now.

Due to recent major news events including the solar eclipse and hurricane Irma, we saw traffic coming from Google escalate in unprecedented ways in September. Recent reports have described a decline in Facebook traffic, but in looking very closely at multiple data sources, we see a different picture: While it is true that Facebook’s share of total traffic is down, the missing piece is that, in fact, the pie is much larger, and Google is up.

So what does this mean for publishers? Newsworthy events, particularly those that are unfolding over time, are huge moments for search activity leading to direct traffic. Social traffic does not spike until afterwards, mainly around more emotional, reactionary content.

3. Demand for video is not constant; it spikes around breaking news.

In looking at consumer engagement with video content, we see that it’s much more dependent on what’s in the news than text is. Below we’re looking at how much time visitors spend watching video, relative to the time they spend with text. The first notable thing is that this line isn’t at all constant — demand for video content really changes across the year. When we look closer, we see that spikes in video watching correlate with a few highly visual stories in the news (like hurricane Irma). And that makes sense: for highly visual news, readers look for a highly visual news medium.

It is noteworthy for publishers that video demand is variable, and deeper insights here should lead to a better content strategy and smarter monetization.

4. Longer time reading content drives higher loyalty.

How can media companies build and grow a loyal audience? Focus on engagement.

Why is engagement as a metric so important? Chartbeat research shows that half of visitors who click through to an article hardly read what they land on: 45% spend less than 15 seconds on the page. As you can see in the graph below, a new reader who engages for a longer amount of time during their visit is more likely to return. And the more they return, the more pages they consume and the longer they read on the page. This in turn, means they also view more ads on the page. Overall, optimizing for engagement can drive loyalty, and revenue.

5. The homepage is not dead– it’s the place for your most vital audience.

Is the homepage really dead? Not at all. Yes, Facebook and Google are prime sources to target new readers, and those first time visitors are more likely to land on an article than a homepage. However, to our surprise, in looking at how article and homepage consumption changes by loyalty (based on the fraction of days a user visits in a two-week period), our data shows that frequently returning visitors build strong homepage habits.

As readers become more loyal, they use front pages more actively.
Visitors who come more than every other day (hitting the 50% threshold), visit more front pages than articles
Subscribers (see dotted lined below in contrast to the solid lines) demonstrate higher overall engagement, at first with articles, but as they become more frequent users, their homepage consumption then begins to spike

The lesson for publishers? It is becoming increasingly clear that there are different tools in the publisher toolbox as it relates to building and growing a loyal audience. While platforms are for acquisition of new visitors, driving direct traffic on your owned and operated properties is critical to retention. The homepage is more important than you might think–it’s where you’ll lose or retain your most loyal readers.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Despite a deluge of data, most marketers still don’t have a fix on cross-platform

September 29, 2017 Aaron Ethan Peterson, Corporate Marketing Manager, Media & Digital Practice—Kantar Millward Brown

According to Kantar Millward Brown’s fourth annual Getting Media Right study, 40% of marketers believe their media investments should be allocated to cross-channel and cross-device marketing, rather than any single channel like mobile or television. But less than 50% of advertisers in the study had confidence that their ad dollars are currently being effectively allocated in this manner.

It would appear that despite the seemingly endless amount of data available, advertisers still feel that gaps exist in available research, hampering their ability for decision making. And one of the biggest white spaces is in cross-platform and cross-channel data, with more than half of advertisers (61%) arguing there are gaps in holistic measurement.

Almost every marketer queried (90%) said that while their digital strategies are integrated into their overall brand strategy, most still don’t understand the impact of these strategies across channels. Seventy-four% say this is because it’s tough to maintain an integrated brand strategy in a fragmented media landscape.

Universal currency

For cross-channel comparison and understanding, marketers must effectively have a currency that can be utilized across all channels. But we still lack a true apples-to-apples to comparison between the old and new platforms. Traditional platforms like television and radio still primarily focus on reach and frequency metrics, while online and mobile advertising is primarily based on ROI or sales.

When it comes to measuring cross-channel performance, reach and frequency is the most widely-used metric, but it still is only used by about half of advertisers; ROI or sales is used by 47% of marketers, highlighting the difficulty the industry has had in bridging the gap between digital and traditional media.

Measuring ROI

ROI is the bane of existence for many marketers, identified for the third year in a row as the single hardest metric to get right. Though a majority of marketers feel confident in their ability to track digital channels like online and mobile, 54% have difficulty tracking traditional channels and half have difficulty tracking cross-channel ROI.

When you break it down even further, the ROI divide between traditional and digital channels is apparent. While 64% of marketers use it to measure online and half apply it to mobile, only one-third use ROI to measure TV and other traditional media.

It’s not like marketers don’t believe in those platforms. If ROI measurement improved, over half would increase spend on most channels. More than 75% would increase spend in cross-channel and the individual channels that fuel it.

It goes to show why attribution is so important and central to the overall health of the advertising industry. Accurate measurement leads to increased trust among marketers and their media agency partners, which leads to higher spends on advertising.

Digital advertising was supposed to be more efficient than television, print and radio, with technology giving marketers the ability to reduce waste by targeting only those who would want to buy their product.

But as we all know, now, the digital advertising industry has yet to fully deliver on that promise. To do so, unlocking understanding to cross-platform measurement is a crucial next step.

Industry-Research

Research finds that publishers rely on autoplay, but not without risk

September 19, 2017 Todd Krizelman, CEO – MediaRadar

Thanks to the increasing popularity of digital video, autoplay ads have become one of the most common forms of online video advertising. But that could change if Google and Apple have their way.

In recent months, both companies have hinted at browser-based features that will potentially curtail autoplay video’s impact. In April, for example, Google teased an ad-blocking feature in both the mobile and desktop versions of Chrome that would limit auto-start content. And in June, Apple unveiled an upcoming autoplay-video-blocking feature for its Safari browser. How might this impact proliferation and adoption of autoplay among publishers? To answer this question, we first need to know how many publishers rely on auto-start video inventory.

The Big Picture

At MediaRadar, we examined nearly 63,000 video ads from January to June of this year to get a better sense of how the industry is reacting. Here’s what we found:

Nearly one-third (31%) of publishers auto-start 75% or more of their on-site video ad inventory.
Roughly another third (30%) of publishers auto-start between 50 and 75% of their video ads.
Just under 40% of publishers are less reliant on autoplay video ads, auto-starting 50% or less of their inventory.

So what do these findings mean for digital publishing/advertising? Here’s a closer look.

Websites that use auto-start ads stick with them.

Among our study’s three segments that embrace autoplay video ads, there’s no broad shift in websites reducing their dependency on auto-start video inventory. In fact, we see exceptionally low variance month-to-month. Most sites have chosen a model and stayed with it consistently in 2017. It’s also worth noting that there isn’t one singular type of media company that supports autostart ads – they can be seen practically everywhere.

There are some commonalities across the types of publishers using auto-play.

Publishers that use auto-start video ads the most have some commonalities. Smaller websites – think niche, regional, enthusiast, business-to-business, as examples – have fewer overall impressions. This likely drives the need for video inventory, which is sold at a higher cost per impression. These same websites have the highest incidence of autoplay video advertising. This shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as bad news. Presumably, video ads running on these sites are highly-targeted and likely to be well-received. Sites reliant on programmatic advertising were also more likely to employ auto-start video.

How might Google and Apple shake things up here?

While the threat of Google Chrome stripping out auto-start videos is real, it’s not imminent — at least not yet. Based on past experience – like with Google AMP, for example – we found that most publishers have taken a wait-and-see approach before making a change in their business practices. Apple could be a more interesting company to watch as their advertising interests are limited. They have no dog in the auto-play fight, so to speak, and could dramatically disrupt things for publishers and advertisers if they decide to block these units more aggressively via pre-installed software or hardware.

Perspectives | Video

Pivoting to video: It’s not one size fits all

August 30, 2017 Clare Carr, Vice President of Marketing—Parse.ly

With more than one media company laying off staff to “pivot to video,” the move bears some scrutiny. Understandably, those in the “text” camp emphasize the power and speed that written content brings, while the other side sees dollar signs behind video advertisers. But these opposing storylines hide nuances that need to be considered, if you’re considering video at all.

First, the data. Yes, average time spent watching digital video is expected to keep growing and the prospect of television ad dollars ripe for the picking seems too good to not consider how digital sites can grab a piece of it. However, our research has also shown that video on media sites underperforms when it comes to content types: people spend, on average, 30% less with video posts than a non-video post.

Video is Not for Everyone

But all of that data ignores a crucial, but somewhat basic point: not all video is the same.

This summer, Parse.ly hosted a series of events in New York City asking publishers about this issue. Ryan Sager, Editorial Director of the Ladders, and Time Magazine, WSJ, and NYPost alum, took a stand against the pivot to video. He pointed to Facebook sharing inflated metrics and the uninspiring push for live video, but more broadly pointed out that the actual content of the videos people want to create matters. “What do people want to watch?” Sager asked the audience, “If you are a food brand, great. But if you are in a news space, it’s a much tougher sell.”

Even for publishers that fit into one of those spaces, like the home decor and DIY site Domino, the number show that video does better when paired with text. “Our video needs to come in tandem with content. There needs to also be text with it,” Tracy Cho, Executive Director of Marketing, Growth and Analytics at Domino told the audience.

The attendees agreed. We polled attendees and found 76% of them supported using a mix of content formats, while only 13% wanted to see a more sites pivot to video.

Video is Content Too

Some even questioned thinking about video in such a bifurcated way. “It feels foolish to categorize video as separate content,” said Andrew Littlefield, Managing Editor at Ceros. “If you examine your own habits, you don’t go on the internet and think, “Time to look at some videos,” or “Time to read some words.” It’s just all one hodgepodge.”

Sachin Kamdar, CEO of Parse.ly, emphasized that any company making a pivot to video out of desperation would face challenges unrelated to the format itself, including poor internal communication and a culture unaccustomed to producing this type of content. However, he also noted that the opportunity that video presents needs to be taken seriously in an industry struggling for monetization options. The intersection of consumer intention, market dynamics, the added incentives of the tech platforms, and the ability to monetize means that any company not considering what video could mean for their business out of sentimental value to the written word could be missing out.

So, what does make sense for publishers as the video conversation progresses? “Understand your audience and decide what products are going to best serve them, and potentially make you money,” Kamdar said. Melissa Gilkey, Vice President of Growth at Upworthy agreed, noting that when considering any choice that affected content that “data is a huge component of that. It’s a non-negotiable if you’re building a strategy.”

Perspectives

How the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation drives data quality

August 25, 2017 Tiffany Morris, General Counsel & Vice President of Global Privacy—Lotame

The regulatory burdens of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have the advertising industry in a flurry. The industry press is rife with doomsday scenarios predicting the end of online advertising.

Is the regulation complex and in some instances, onerous? Yes.

Does it signal the end of online advertising? No.

GDPR does, however, force companies to examine the costs of collecting and using online behavioral data. Because GDPR increases the compliance costs associated with the collection of data, it becomes necessary to examine whether the collected data is worth the added compliance expense. Why absorb compliance costs for data that may or may not be valuable to clients and partners? While the industry has been talking about a “flight to quality” for years, GDPR has cemented Lotame’s commitment to data quality initiatives.

The Personal Approach

“Personal data” under the GDPR is broadly defined to include personally identifiable data points like name and email address, as well as less precise data points like cookies, device IDs, and IP address. The rationale is that modern technology allows marketers to identify individuals with one or more data points, even if those data points do not refer to each individual by name.

The problem with this broad definition of “personal information” is that GDPR treats anonymous data and personally identifiable information as similarly situated. A company that collects and uses cookie data has nearly the same compliance obligations as a bank that collects and stores highly sensitive financial data. The bank, and the consumers it serves, are all well aware of the risks inherent to the storage and processing of financial data. A breach has significant consequences for both the bank and the consumer. For this reason, the bank is able to pass some portion of its high compliance costs along to the consumer in the form of fees. These fees help to make banking one of the world’s most enduring, and lucrative, industries.

How the Cookie Crumbles

The potential loss or unauthorized disclosure of cookie data did not, until relatively recently, raise the ire of consumers or regulators. But now, with GDPR, cookie data is placed in the same category as financial data – meaning that a company like Lotame has the same compliance obligations with respect to its cookie data as does a bank that transacts in highly sensitive financial data. While regulators may view cookie data as having equal footing with consumer names and addresses, marketers do not, and they have not been willing to pay premium dollars for data that is viewed as less precise than personally identifiable information.

On the one hand, GDPR validates what Lotame has known and proselytized for years – that data is tremendously valuable – even when that data is not tied to personal information like name, email address, street address, or telephone number. On the other hand, GDPR makes it costly to collect, store and push large volumes of cookie and device data. There is substantial risk that compliance costs, relative to the earning potential of this data, are being driven too high. In order to drive revenue in the face of mounting regulatory burdens, Lotame and other players in online advertising must focus on quality.

Quality Over Quantity

Over the past year, we have invested heavily in technology and partnerships that emphasize quality over scale. Earlier this year, for example, we announced a partnership with Are You a Human, to provide advertisers and their agencies the ability to quickly and easily identify non-human traffic and create new bot-free audiences for ad targeting, analysis, content personalization, and more. This allows our clients to remove all profiles identified as bots, to reduce wasted ad spend, decrease bot traffic, and increase conversions. For Lotame, it also ensures that we are not absorbing compliance costs for data that offers minimal value to our clients and partners.

GDPR is a game changer for the online advertising industry, but it is not the death knell that many fear. With its emphasis on consumer transparency and consent, Lotame expects GDPR to produce higher quality data assets from more engaged consumers. We have embraced the regulations as an opportunity to review our business practices with fresh eyes and have encouraged our clients and partners to share in this approach.

Tiffany Morris is General Counsel & Vice President of Global Privacy at Lotame, overseeing all aspects of the company’s global legal strategy and operations. She brings more than 10 years of legal and business experience in the advertising, sports, and entertainment industries. Prior to joining Lotame, Tiffany held legal and business development roles at Vox Media, Inc., during a period of significant growth and acquisition activity. She previously served as Legal Counsel for The Kraft Group, where she handled a full range of legal matters for a private portfolio of companies, including the New England Patriots, Gillette Stadium, and Patriot Place. Tiffany started her career with the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Tiffany has a BA from Wellesley College and a JD from Boston College Law School.

Perspectives | Revenue

The subscription discussion we should be having

August 7, 2017 Terri Walter, Chief Marketing Officer—Chartbeat

If 2016 was the year of the platform, 2017 is the year of the subscriber.

Amid a backdrop of political change, wavering trust in government and media, and the rise of fake news, subscriptions are up among the largest U.S. publishers, proving that consumers value high quality journalism. According to Pew Research, the numbers show that in 2016, The New York Times added more than 500,000 digital subscriptions – a 47% year-over-year rise, and The Wall Street Journal added more than 150,000 digital subscriptions, a 23% rise. Even Facebook recently announced that it’s building a feature that would encourage readers to subscribe to news publications, in response to publisher interest.

And this trend isn’t going away. According to WAN-IFRA’s 2017 World Press Trends report, understanding paying commercial models is the number one priority of publishers this year, particularly as audience revenues surpass advertising revenues among global newspapers.

While the industry rightfully focuses on growing new subscribers and experimenting with business models, the discussion should not end there. What we’re not talking enough about is that subscribers are a distinct audience. They engage with your content in a different way and are loyalists in a different way. Understanding these differences is where publishers will build their revenue strategies to take their businesses to the next level.

Subscribers are Unique

No one will pay for content that doesn’t repeatedly engage them.

Loyal readers, which on average account for the majority of pageviews across all channels, have time and time again proven to be your most valuable as they consume more of your content.

And what is that link between loyalty and subscriptions? Active engagement. A recent report by the MIT School of Management, Turning Content Viewers Into Subscribers, presented the Subscriber Ladder of Participation as an illustration of reader lifecycle. Rather than thinking of your reader journey in a passive way, it encourages you to build your strategy around action: moving readers from Anonymous to Subscriber by encouraging them to act.

MIT School of Management’s Subscriber Ladder of Participation

And this active participation is central to Chartbeat as well – our research has shown that analyzing and optimizing the reader experience around engagement patterns as opposed to just empty pageviews drives returning visitors, motivating users to proverbially ascend the ladder towards subscriptions. Subscribers are loyalists who engage with your content in a unique way, and understanding that engagement is key to driving more loyalty.

As Kritsanarat Khunkham from Die Welt put it, “Our whole subscription model is based on returning visitors—they’re essential. You can only turn users to subscribers when they’re returning. I’d rather have 500 returning visitors than 5,000 one-time users. They’re [the ones] who appreciate my work, who trust my brand.”

Besides the simple fact that returning visitors increase ad impressions, they also represent a crucial point in a publisher’s subscription funnel. Every new visitor is a potential subscriber, but — to put it bluntly — no one will pay for content that doesn’t engage them.

Subscribers are Ideal

Once you’ve engaged your subscribing audience, you need to focus on keeping them and getting more. To do this, you need to study how they engage and drive like-behaviors in your loyal/returning audience to turn them into subscribers.

Khunkham notes that often, their consistent eye on data uncovers what topics their audience is truly interested in. This justifies expanding coverage in those areas, often areas they might not have expected. “Sometimes [our audience is] more interested in political news than we expected, and we have such potential for [an audience] who reads seriously,” he says. “When we can prove to [journalists] that readers engage with their meaningful work, it motivates them.”

In other words, publishers need to start thinking about taking their data past the point of conversion. Once a reader has subscribed, are you continuing to dig deeper into their behaviors and deliver the content that they have demonstrated a complex interest in? Discover not only what content your subscriber communities engage with, but think of subscription status as another lens to evaluate all of your editorial strategies — from social media channels and platforms, to devices and portals, and even relationship-building campaigns.

At the end of the day, understanding new visitors and their journey to return is important, but garnering deeper insights around how subscribers engage with your content differently can unlock durable retention and growth strategies for publishers across the board.

Terri Walter, the Chief Marketing Officer of Chartbeat, works every day to ensure that publishers and newsrooms have the tools and insights they need for quality content to thrive. A digital marketing veteran of 20 years, Terri has worked over the course of her career to position high potential brands and spearhead thought leadership in media and analytics at companies including DoubleClick, Razorfish and Microsoft Advertising.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion | Perspectives

Six fearless female executives weigh in on their greatest challenges and opportunities

July 31, 2017 Jennifer Bassett, Managing Editor—Outbrain

If you haven’t heard already, more than 40 years after women entered the workplace, we’re still having trouble climbing the ladder. The percentage of female chief executives of Fortune 500 companies only recently passed six percent. Meanwhile, some of the biggest headlines to come from the tech space lately are not about positive earnings, but rather a culture of sexual harassment. And the issue isn’t just regulated to the tech industry. Last year, 54% of the women surveyed in the advertising industry by the 4A’s also reported that they experienced sexual harassment at work.

I spoke to five talented and successful women leaders in advertising and tech to get their opinions on some of the greatest challenges and opportunities for women in their field right now. Here are some of their insightful – and inspiring – words.

1. Yao Huang, Founder, The Hatchery

There is a rising tide of opportunity to change the way things are. There is a swell of activism, unrest, and willingness to do something if there was leadership that showed the way to results. Words are hollow. Actions are deep. I’m not saying people are not doing anything, I’m saying it’s not actionable enough. For example, we’ve been talking about the pay gap for decades. Half the population should have the leverage to change that. There is a need for a united front at tables of decision making and negotiation. Around a shared vision of going forward by saying YES. Yes to helping your coworker up. Yes to mentoring. Yes to giving another woman an opportunity. Yes to support and organizations that are making moves forward. How does half the population not have a voice with votes? How does 80% of consumer spending power not have a voice in products and the companies that make them? How is there still sexual harassment at work? And bias to women for funding? Leadership needs to rise to unify around people powerful enough to rally a gender together. The challenge is finding people willing to step all the way up. Not just enough for good PR.

2. Anita Schillhorn van Veen, Founding Partner, Frame Strategy Co

Wonder Woman has just blown up the box office. The Fearless Girl statue (and the lady creative team behind it) just slayed at Cannes. And as tough as the last American election was, we can’t forget that a woman won the popular vote.

On the flip side, Uber is getting decimated in large part because of its internal misogyny. And the latest attempt at a health care bill, written solely by men, does not mention women at all.

We’re seeing the juxtaposition of women’s power and powerlessness everywhere we look. We need women to be role models, and we also need women behind the scenes to build a culture of inclusivity.

Advertising is one of the myriad media that seed culture. One of the reasons I’m in this industry is because we have the opportunity to create narratives and experiences that can make a difference.

I’m a fan of the Bechdel rule for movies: at least two women talk to each other about something other than a man. This rule calls attention to gender inequality in the film industry, and many dedicated viewers compile lists of films that comply and don’t. The more films that follow the Bechdel rule, the more women are represented as fleshed out human beings and not as stereotype.

I want this rule to hold true for every cultural artifact, including advertising. Data tells us that women hold much of the purchasing power in categories traditionally considered “masculine,” like automotive, financial services, electronics. The stories we tell as advertisers need to reflect the power that women have in society.

The Bechdel rule can also hold true for leadership. The token woman isn’t good enough anymore. Having one woman at the helm isn’t a guarantee for more inclusive storytelling, or a more compassionate or collaborative work environment. It takes networks of women to champion each other and grow a non-patriarchal perspective.

And I must caveat, the Bechdel rule should also be applied to people of color. We’ve seen acquittal after acquittal after acquittal of police who have shot black boys and men. ICE agents are deporting plenty of Latina mothers and even a boy on his way to prom. Partially to blame is a media landscape that does little to tell human stories by and about people of color. In advertising we must examine the stories we tell to make sure we are telling stories that aren’t perpetuating the stereotypes. We must have people in power that can champion diverse perspectives – and not just one lonely black or brown face in the group office photo, but enough to support and encourage each other. Every win is a door opening a little wider for more women and more women’s stories. We have a great opportunity to build on it.

3. Rhea Hanges, Creative Director, Periscope

As simple as it sounds, I would like to see more focus on women as great talent. Lately, there’s been so much conversation about women and diversity, that it has started to burn me out a little bit. I want to see less talk and more action. Good news, I have been noticing a positive shift recently. I now see agencies wanting to bring in different types of creative talent on different types of projects, not because they are women but to get the best kind of breakthrough thinking. For me, this is the big opportunity for smart, diverse talent proving their value simply through great work. This shift comes from a whole new crew of amazing women being groomed by great organizations like SheSays, proving there’s an undeniable wealth of talent out there right now. My hope is the conversation will continue to shift from who you are to the incredible work you’re doing.

4. Stephanie Himoff, Northern Europe Managing Director, Outbrain

While I’m still always surprised by how few women there are in senior roles in tech and advertising, what I find promising is that we’re making an effort to shift how we think about global gender issues and the subjects of gender disparity and identity. On one level, as evidenced at Cannes this year, we’ve become more aware of the influence we have on culture and we’re taking more responsibility for what we create. On another level, we’re addressing organizational gaps, namely the small (but increasing!) amount of women in leadership roles within the industry. The fact that we’re talking about these issues demonstrates to me that there continues to be positive movement in our industry – though we still have a ways to go.

5. Vanessa Romann, Executive Strategy Director, Havas

We are moving from a physical hours game to a digital access game. This has allowed us to look beyond the consecutive 10 hour work day and into a model of looking at the day as 24 hours where you can ebb and flow between work and life. They feed each other. I find this particularly important for women who know what it means to be in a dual working household. I believe this change in paradigm is lending itself to a huge shift in opportunities for women. They are not as fearful to take on new roles, bigger roles, with more responsibility—if they can work in the way they want to.

Workplaces are also being more feminized—skills like empathy, supportiveness, and collaboration are the attributes shaping many thriving company cultures today. It’s giving women the chance to unmask their feminine qualities without having to fit into the traditional corporate structure.

Our industry had always been ahead of its time. The only thing that stands in the way of our industry’s progress is fear and insecurity. When we can embrace our individuality and bring those gifts to our work, our people and our business, we can contribute to a larger cultural conversation.

6. Sarita Bhatt, Global Head of Digital Marketing, Sonos

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges is overcoming the usual status quo – and actually be given the chance to lead. Due to unconscious bias, this opportunity is often harder for women to grab. But once you, as a woman, cross that chasm – after repeatedly proving to have the knowledge and experience required – the opportunities to grow and build future teams, leaders, products, and services that are awesome and innovative are endless … and that’s where it gets exciting in tech.

Jennifer Bassett (@Jabers) is Outbrain’s Managing Editor. She has 10+ years of experience in the content strategy and editorial space. She began her career as a book editor and has consulted for top agencies, non-profits, and media companies including Memorial Sloan Kettering, Havas Worldwide New York, and Interbrand. When she’s not talking content, she’s playing music with her bands The Missing Footage and The Living Kills. You can read more of her writing at Outbrain.com and jennifer-bassett.com.

Industry-Research | Revenue

The data shows it: Article pageviews and their value don’t correlate

June 27, 2017 Clare Carr, Vice President of Marketing—Parse.ly

Advertisers know that not every view is created equal and that it’s important to understand your brand in context. It’s why ad tech companies created targeting options. It’s why content can be bought by topic. Are the companies creating content thinking about getting the most value out of their audiences in the same way?

To figure out if this is the case, we examined Parse.ly’s publisher data to see how much volume different topics produce. We broke this down by the number of articles written and the average pageviews per article. Then we compared that to how advertisers value different audience segments.

The Data: Audiences by Topic

Examining how people find different topics online revealed that the subject matter of an article has an impact on the likely source of traffic. For example, in a sample of one million articles in the Parse.ly network, Facebook brought in 87% of pageviews to lifestyle content. Google search accounted for 61% of readership to technology stories.

In addition to learning how people found the articles, we looked at how did each topic compared by scale and popularity. Articles that fell cleanly into the lifestyle or U.S. presidential politics categories received the most views, while articles about sports and entertainment were the most common by volume.

A couple of explanations about our methodology are worth noting. For this report, we selected articles that fell cleanly into one category. In other words, we selected articles where at least two thirds of the words were generated by a single topic. This left us with a subset of just over one million articles that we could cleanly assign to a single topic.

For example, imagine that most articles that are written as a mix of two or more topics. Those will be excluded from this analysis. It simply doesn’t make a clear conclusion to say that “mixed-topic articles with a lifestyle slant” tend to get more pageviews. However, we can confidently say that articles that are mostly about lifestyle tend to get more pageviews than articles mostly about business.

Other important data preparation decisions to note are that we included only English-language articles. We also excluded articles whose full text was fewer than 600 characters. (The complete methodology is detailed in the full report.)

Pageviews vs. Audience

The extremes are quite telling. An average article in the lifestyle category gets nine times the pageviews of an average article on business and finance. So, does this mean the lifestyle pageview will bring in nine times as much revenue?

In fact, in some cases, the opposite is true. Digiday recently reported that CNN leverages audience segments by vertical to optimize ad rates. Chris Herbert, CNN’s SVP of digital operations and strategy, explained: “CNN’s finance vertical, CNNMoney, for example, commands higher ad rates than the parent site does because of its upscale audience, which could justify spending more to drive audience to that property.”

So, the really interesting question is how a publisher can match monetization to the potential expected pageview or volume, regardless of scale.

For example, even if the advertising value of certain topics are lower, the high volume of certain content types opens up other monetary opportunities. Lifestyle publishers and Condé Nast brands such as Condé Nast Traveler and Allure are forging partnerships to create branded subscription boxes. Efforts like these allow them to take advantage of the large “top-of-funnel” audience to drive purchase conversions.

Opportunities in High Volume/ Low Pageviews

Our team was surprised that the average views for each sports article ranked so low among topics. Given that the high-volume content was comprised mostly of local and even high school sports means that the average view totals are much lower. This is particularly true when compared to the audience for stories about national leagues. It is also worth noting that a preponderance of extremely short stories—such as those on game stats, syndication or even automated sports reporting—contribute to the high volume.

Taken in aggregate though, readers generally engage well with sports topics. A previous study we did (based on different data, but also looking at topics) found that sites focused on sports had a median engaged time of 51 seconds per article. Thus, sports can offer a strong monetization opportunity beyond pageviews. Engaged and loyal audiences can be monetized more easily through subscriptions, live events, or membership models.

Bring back the Classifieds?

Job postings are an example of a topic with low article volume—the lowest, in fact, of all topics analyzed—and high pageviews per article. From our research, we learned that the majority of traffic to job postings comes from Google search, which drives 84.4% of referral traffic. Facebook drives 11.9% of traffic comes, while the rest comes from other sources. This kind of traffic breakdown makes sense in the context of pageviews. If readers are searching for very specific information, a small subset of articles could generate a high volume of pageviews.

The classifieds are unlikely to return to their status as a primary revenue driver. However, for any scenario where you have a high amount of traffic to a low amount of content, there is likely to be room for revenue growth.

Using Data to See the Full Picture

The data we used for this study identifies ways that audience data should be considered for revenue potential, especially for opportunities outside of traditional display advertising. However, to be fully acted on, audience data must be synced in a way, both culturally and technologically, that connects it to business and monetary objectives.

Perspectives

Direct buys and non-blind programmatic need context to solve brand safety

June 16, 2017 Doug Stevenson, Founder & Co-CEO—Vibrant Media

The dust has largely settled after March’s brand safety scandal – however the problem hasn’t gone away. Although some brands are reported to have returned to Google advertising by May, others – including Pepsi, Tesco, and Marks & Spencer – were still waiting for solid guarantees from Google over and above what has already been promised.

The changes Google says it has already taken to improve brand safety haven’t been bedded in, aren’t sufficient for some brands, and still lack a vital component – third party verification. Google has promised to deliver such verification in the future, but before it’s implemented, marketers refusing to risk their brand reputation are opting for ad providers who can make promises on where their ads will appear as well as delivering third party verified monitoring and reporting on where ad creative actually did appear.

Third party monitoring, reporting and verification is imperative, of course, but it can really only help brands, publishers and ad tech companies to react to any concerning ad placement. Many brands would prefer a zero tolerance for any ad misplacement rather than an acceptance that misplacement will happen from time to time. Those marketers are likely to be the ones who focus their ad buying and planning on ad campaigns bought directly from ad inventory providers or, at very least, non-blind programmatic ad campaigns.

An incredibly insightful analysis by MediaPost’s Sean Hargrave identified this very issue. He suggested a correlation between the mere one in four media buyers who feel informed of their ad suppliers’ brand safety measures and the 28% who say they know where all their ads are going. He recognized quite reasonably that these buyers most likely focus on direct, non-blind programmatic buys. That means that they receive assurances of the quality of the ads. However, lumping blame on the blind buys alone fails to consider how some of the most sophisticated targeting technologies are the contemporary causes of even more catastrophically compromised ad placement.

Consider the Context

In fact, a Financial Times’ report on the aftermath of the scandal serves as a perfect case study. Their journalists’ research identified ads for Huawei, wix and even the Advertising Week Europe event displayed before a YouTube video from a UK-banned preacher. My strong hunch is that the European technology correspondent was researching those brands online for that article, other articles or other valid reasons, and the ads were behaviourally or re-targeted.

This one instance shows how dangerous it is for ad campaigns to rely on behaviourally and retargeting technology in isolation. They can be great at targeting brands’ biggest and established fans, but if those very consumers are presented with targeted ads for their favorite brands whilst browsing shocking content – which they are more likely to do because they fear it than agreement with it – then the damage is huge. Yes, that consumer might well be the right fit for the brand’s latest product. But that won’t matter if they are connecting within the most brand-damaging environment and state-of-mind. Here, the fundamental failure is one of context. Ad campaigns that do not include analysis and targeting of ad campaigns to the context of the content will always be at far higher risk of damaging their brand.

Need to Know

Being transparent about the publications which display campaigns’ ad creative, and backing that up with brand safety technology as well as independent third-party monitoring are essential qualities of any decent ad supplier. Yet even the most premium, brand safe media titles can carry compromising content. They have to. There are bad things in the world that people have a right to know. That’s why assessment of context – both its safety and relevance to campaigns – must be at a granular level, assessing not just the articles, but the keywords and phrases used within those articles.

Let’s be clear: categorization of content into buckets for advertisers to choose where to advertise is not contextual targeting. Content categorization alone is wildly insufficient, especially when users categorize their own content. Extremists don’t consider themselves “extremists”, so they might categorize revolting content as “current affairs”, “culture”, or “sex and relationships”. True contextual targeting understands the actual words used to identify content as both relevant and brand safe for advertisers.

Get the Signals Straight

Incorporating contextual does not mean abandoning other forms of targeting, such as behaviorally, demographic, or re-targeting, even when purchasing ads programmatically. There’s great ad tech available programmatically that can combine contextual signals with audience data to target campaigns to relevant consumers in brand safe environments. That said, pure reliance on computers to assess both audience and contextual appropriateness for ads will always be more risky than involving humans, even with the introduction of artificial intelligence. Ad buyers and planners know this, as nearly three-quarters of them (74.2%) say it’s more difficult to ensure brand safe environments when buying programmatically on open exchanges.

Hence managing brand safety must involve human beings. Computers just cannot match our abilities to identify the contextual appropriateness and relevance of content for advertisers. People are needed to vet publishers’ operations and content to ensure they meet advertisers’ stated quality standards. They’re needed to monitor and react to the news agenda which may introduce brand damaging content into campaigns. People are needed to operate the targeting and brand safety tech and to make sure things are going right for advertisers, publishers and consumers. Of course some ad providers rely on consumers rather than professionals to perform such functions. Not only is that an abdication of responsibility, but the horse has bolted by that point.

Doug Stevenson is the Co-CEO of contextual advertising platform Vibrant Media, and based in San Francisco. As the co-founder of Vibrant, Doug has co-led the company’s expansion with Craig Gooding from when the company began operations in 2000. Doug was awarded ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ from Ernst and Young and was a Distinguished Honoree for the International Business Awards, Executive of the Year in North America. Prior to founding Vibrant, Doug worked at AOL Europe as Head of E-commerce and has 25 years of publishing, media and Internet experience with AOL, CompuServe, Netscape, Haymarket Publishing, and BBC Magazines/Redwood Publishing.