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Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

How publishers can reclaim their audience relationships

Today’s advertising experience can feel like a daily exercise in pain and frustration as users navigate bizarre offers and deceptive ads promoted by shady advertisers.

The digital media industry faces mounting obstacles in building audience trust, largely stemming from deceptive and intrusive ad experiences. For media professionals, trust isn’t just another buzzword – it holds tangible monetary value. To regain trust and prevent any further damage, publishers must weed out deceptive ad experiences that threaten their readership. 

Dangers of false advertising in the digital age

According to GeoEdge research, misleading product offers and financial scams have become the primary tools for fraud. Publishers’ sites have been saturated with clickbait ads in recent months. 

In 2023, one in every 170 ad impressions in the U.S. contains a malicious ad. Due to daily run-ins with these ads, audiences approach digital ads – and content – with a healthy dose of skepticism. Frustrated readers who become annoyed with bad ads leave the site and seek out alternatives, which can spell disaster for publisher monetization. The fallout includes reduced engagement rates, fewer click-throughs on ads, and ultimately, diminished ad revenue. Additionally, the reputational damage may lead to declines in traffic over time.

What digital media gets wrong

The media industry started building a house by installing the latest and greatest programmatic technology, only to realize they forgot to lay a sturdy foundation of audience experience. Since then, advertising has become increasingly bizarre and dangerous as programmatic pipelines are susceptible to nonexistent products, counterfeit goods, and unrecognizable gadgets. 

Navigating ad experiences is a hurdle for many publishers. What does digital media get wrong?

  • Passing the responsibility of ad quality to upstream partners.
  • Treating the ad experience as separate from the user experience.
  • Failing to utilize technology to identify and remove misleading or clickbait ads.

So, the big question is: Who bears the blame for lousy ads and shoulders the responsibility for eliminating them?

How digital media can course correct  

Publishers must acknowledge that ad experience and user experience are intertwined, with one influencing the other. A negative ad experience can detract from the value of content, or prevent audiences from ever reaching publishers actual product: their content. 

Despite the high stakes involved, digital media professionals tend to shift the responsibility of ad quality onto Ad Tech partners up the chain, leading to a false sense of security. Relying solely on upstream partners to weed out harmful ads is wishful thinking. Publishers cannot depend on tech giants as gatekeepers for ad quality since they are often the same culprits responsible for delivering them.

GeoEdge analyzed ad quality ranking and malicious ad trends over the last 90 days by tracking impressions from the top nine global SSPs. The results revealed that 87% of all scam ads originated from just two SSPs. Yes, Google was one of them.  

Luckily, publishers aren’t in an unwinnable programmatic trench war. Implementing publisher-centric ad quality control allows them to prevent misleading ads from appearing on their sites. By filtering out clickbait ads, publishers can protect their audience from ad scams involving fake products or questionable cryptocurrency schemes.

The Journey of Responsibility 

The junk ad epidemic undermines the entire digital media industry, posing a significant threat to its sustainability. If digital media professionals continue to ignore the impact of clickbait ads, they risk driving away audiences and losing their credibility in the process. By implementing technology that prioritizes user protection and experience, publishers can regain control over the audience relationships. 

Failure to take action can trigger a chain reaction, starting with a decrease in ad clicks, followed by reduced engagement, eroded trust in content, and ultimately, far-reaching negative consequences for the wider ad supported media industry. 

The ads appearing on trusted sites must offer a guaranteed, risk-free experience. Publishers’ ad quality values must demonstrate that the customer’s content experience, which includes advertising, is their highest priority.

Industry-Research

Focus on the customer journey to retain subscribers

Inflation often triggers consumers to assess their budgets and rethink essential spending and lifestyle changes. Included in this evaluation are subscription choices. New research, Subscription Economy: a Transformed World, from FT Strategies, Savanta, and Minna Technologies’ identifies the impact of current marketplace conditions on consumer attitudes toward subscriptions.

This research surveyed over 1,000 consumers in the U.S. and the UK, 20 financial services, fintech, and media leaders, and 50 subscription business executives across different content verticals.

Subscription market

The report shows that 25 to 34-year-olds have the most subscriptions, with only 12% reporting no subscription services. The research also indicates that approximately one-third of consumers in the 25 to 54 years old bracket have six or more subscriptions. While 73% of consumers pay for the services they use, 23% pay for some of their services while also using password sharing of accounts paid for by family and friends.

Notably, nine in 10 respondents (93%) report greater awareness of subscription spending than 12 months ago. Nearly half of the consumers state that they know their exact spending on subscriptions and said they are spending more than they did a year ago.

Discretionary spending decisions

Consumers also report that non-discretionary spending (including broadband, utilities, and financial services) on entertainment-based services ‒ TV and film streaming services are the most common subscription-based spending across all age groups. However, entertainment-based subscription offerings are the most likely to be canceled.

In terms of churn, 20% of consumers say they would first cancel TV and film services, followed by music-related consumer services (11%), TV channels (8%), and magazines (7%). Interestingly, younger consumers, ages 18-34, are the least likely to cancel TV and film services first.

Media business leaders identify the ‘watch and go’ mentality of consumers as a critical problem for video streaming services. Half of the executives note that their churn rate is higher this year than last year and are worried about a global rise in subscription cancellations.

Customer focus and retention

Consumers believe subscription services should deliver exceptional user experience, choice, and customer support. Business leaders interviewed by FT Strategies agree and think that subscription businesses must understand their customers’ functional and emotional needs to deliver a first-class customer journey. Further, as consumers understand that their data is part of the value exchange for services, they expect this information to inform a better user experience and advanced personalization.

Managing spending and managing subscriptions is a delicate balance. Consumers desire both “flexibility and control.” Nearly three-quarters of consumers (74%) say they are interested in a single app to manage all subscriptions in one place.

Subscription market forecast

  • Consumer interest in bundled offerings where several providers make their services available within a single, shared platform will grow. Consumers want to make their money go further, and bundling services may help, i.e., Disney’s exploring how to bundle its theme park benefits alongside its Disney+ content subscription service.
  • Consumers are also looking for trusted sources of information and thought leadership. This will lead to more subscription offerings incorporating experiential-like events and one-to-one interaction with specific influencers.
  • Subscriptions and personalization will expand into new business verticals, especially among financial products that offer more control and convenience over consumer financial needs.

The report concludes with retention strategies to create a meaningful and ongoing customer relationship. Subscription businesses must invest in personalization and deliver a positive user experience to meet consumer expectations. If they do not, consumers will easily switch to other services. The customer experience should include pricing sensitivity and choices – i.e., offering a subscription pause option instead of only canceling. Subscription businesses need to identify the right mix of choices and provide a positive value exchange to drive subscriber loyalty and retention.

Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

The best conversion strategy media and publishing companies still aren’t using

When talking about conversion strategies within the digital media industry, we often focus our efforts on the same tried-and-tested methods: email marketing, social media campaigns, SEO, PPC, etc. These are all important and effective ways to drive readers along the path to registration. They make up the foundation for a complete digital strategy, including subscriptions. 

But there’s one aspect of the online content offering that is too-often overlooked, despite being pivotal to a publisher’s bottom line: the on-site user experience.

By UX we don’t simply mean a seamless UI and attractive website design (although these are vital, too). We’re talking about data-driven, deeply personalized, unique experiences that make anonymous visitors far more likely to register, and repeat customers far less likely to churn. 

This improvement can take many forms, such as differentiated trigger points for your most engaged readers, messaging dependent on on-site behaviors, and personalized offers.  Any move to more closely align value with offering – in other words, every step taken into deeper personalization – makes your relationship with  customers stronger and more likely to last.

Ultimately, optimizing the user experience is a commercial gamechanger. It significantly affects two major KPIs : lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Optimize the user experience to drastically lower CAC

With more competition than ever and customer expectations at an all-time high, customer acquisition is tough. This is particularly true in the overcrowded market for digital content. 

However, experience optimization makes it much easier for publishers to target and convert their audiences. When it comes to messaging, 72% of consumers won’t respond to marketing efforts unless they are personalized, according to SmarterHQ. And while personalized messaging alone may not lead directly to a sale (although, it very much could), it may be just what your business needs to stop visitors falling at the first hurdle. If you can’t get your readers to engage, there’s no chance they are going to convert. 

But this is just the first step in a first-party data strategy. Progressively profiling readers by collecting new information at different stages of the subscriber lifecycle allows you to accurately target readers with registration walls at the right time, using user data such as on-site activity, device type and time of day. The incremental build up of your datasets gives your commercial decision makers a better understanding of the customer base. This, in turn, informs their ability to tweak messaging and experiences to nurture leads.

Further down the funnel, unique user experiences will also help get new customers over the line. The first-party data collected on registration can then inform tailored content, offers and timing. This accelerates conversation rates and keeps bounce rates low.

 It takes a lot of effort (time and money) to get users from awareness to intent. So, turning them off with an ill-timed paywall or irrelevant content offer leads to an automatic loss. On the other hand, Marketing Insider Group found that tailored content offerings increase purchasing intent for 78% of Americans. This makes triggers such as a datawall or paywall a make-or-break point for digital publishers.

Focus on personalization to increase LTV

Optimized experience increases your chances of converting a user. However, focusing on the customer experience straight after purchase also sets the foundation for higher value, longer-term subscribers. 

Maintain personalized content to keep engaged readers happy. This paves the way for an upsell opportunity for your most loyal advocates. It is famously 10x easier to sell to a current customer than a new one. However, this is often forgotten in the world of media. Increasing subscription value, or lengthening subscriber lifetime directly boosts revenue and profitability. Doing both has a double whammy effect on your commercial goals.

And personalization isn’t just for those at the top of the funnel. Use customer engagement and behaviors to identify churn risks — the subset of your customer base that seem disengaged and are therefore disproportionately likely to leave. Give them a tailored offer, potentially even a downsell to a lower plan, or nudge them with relevant content to maintain each and every relationship. 

Conversion is nothing without retention. Personalized experiences at the beginning of the customer journey (such as getting the right users to convert with relevant messaging) help keep churn at a minimum just as much as last-ditch attempts.

The bottom line

Experience optimization is the best conversion strategy publishers aren’t doing, But they should be. That’s because it has such a direct impact on commercial outcomes. Purchases are made on relevant, unique experiences just as much as bad impressions are via irrelevant or ill-timed messaging. 

And at the end of the day, optimizing the user experiences at each point of the subscriber lifecycle is an improvement that every publisher can make without needing to build a new team, or create a new marketing channel from scratch. Getting it right can turbocharge revenues. Getting it wrong can ruin all your other commercial efforts.

For most, it’s a simple yet powerful step that you just can’t afford not to take in today’s media landscape. 

Featured Post | Innovation

Do recommenders deliver more value to audiences – and the bottom line?

There are a number of reasons why legacy media faces fierce rivals in digitally native media – such as Netflix, Spotify, and Stitch. However, a critical competitive differentiator could be the fact that many of these brands are committed to delivering accurate, actionable recommendation systems.

Recommendation engines aren’t just about recommending content to your readers, according to Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and author of Recommendation Engines. They are platforms that facilitate online interaction. When designed well, they help organizations rethink how they can get more value from their data. They also offer more value to their customers.

“The biggest mistake media companies make is they think they are in content business. But they are the data business – and their data management sucks,” states Schrage. “While they won’t be able to rival Netflix, they still can engage with their communities so much better. It’s not just about how to tell a better story, it about how we can learn from people who read our stories and engage with them.”

Evolving engines

Recommendation engines, or recommenders, are nothing new. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spoke about the value of recommenders back in 1998. He said that they offer an “opportunity to develop very deep relationships with customers.”

The good news is that, while they were once a feat of extraordinary technological effort, machine learning is changing that. In fact, it’s the ease with which they can be built, applied and utilized that makes them the most exciting and valuable applications of machine learning right now.

“The big difference now is that anyone can build a recommendation engine,” states Schrage. “They are cheaper, faster and better than ever. Plus, the underlying algorithms have moved away from simple correlations to much deeper and richer analytics, around diversity and relevance. As a result, the levels of sensitivity and specificity of recommenders have improved. And they keep learning how to get better.”

Virtuous cycle of engagement

That is the key to well-designed recommenders. The more people use them, the more valuable they become. And the more valuable they become, the more people use them, creating a virtuous cycle of data with audiences. However, according to Schrage, legacy media often miss this vital opportunity to improve both customer insights and engagement.

“These organizations treat recommendation engines as a sales tool. But they need to understand how to use their data and turn it into virtuous cycle,” says Schrage. “And the low-hanging fruit is advice and recommendations.”

In other words, recommendation engines are more than a UX differentiator. When effective, they enable organizations to build customer lifetime value (CLV). The former is transactional, while the latter embraces a longer-term view.

Increasing retention

“It’s the difference between ‘always closing’, and a salesperson who wants to forge a relationship,” says Schrage. “The question is: Do you treat customers as ‘one offs? Or do you seek to use data-driven advice to get people to come back and explore, while also building brand credibility?”

Reader regularity is a key factor in preventing churn. The industry has long been concerned about unengaged subscribers. Recent research reinforced this concern when it revealed nearly half of digital subscribers to local news outlets are ‘zombie’ readers who visit a site less than once a month. These customers are far most likely to cancel their subscriptions than are frequent visitors.

The study also found that personalized, local content is a key factor in retaining subscribers – which is where recommenders play a big part. One great example of this is with the Dutch newspaper, NRC. After personalizing its newsletter, using an AI tool, 22% more readers demonstrated habitual reading behavior. However, there is a lot more to recommendations than personalization.

While recommendations can be personalized, it’s not the only – or the best – option. Personalized recommenders require large amounts of data on users, which a system won’t have with new visitors, or those that don’t sign up. This can cause what is commonly coined ‘cold start’ problem.  This occurs when a recommender system cannot draw inferences, due to a lack of information. Another problem with personalized recommenders is the potential for bias, which can be a particular problem for news sites.

Automated customization

This was a concern for the non-partisan news organization POLITICO Europe, when it launched Pro Intelligence in 2019. Pro started as a pure news service. However, it bought the start-up Statehill in 2018, so that it could build out a one-stop shop for policymakers. The platform, which accounted for 60% of POLITICO’S income in 2020, now offers news, analysis and relevant, external information within a single dashboard.

Every piece of content on the Pro platform features recommendations, from legislation to court cases, and press releases to news from the editorial team. However, the algorithm doesn’t require user input to customize the experience. Instead, it employs an auto-tagger, which uses key words, dictionary mapping and natural language processing. [Editor’s note: An in-depth look at this is available to DCN members.]

“We don’t have the engineering capabilities in our organization to dedicate to a personalized algorithm. And we’d probably be too afraid to introduce it, in case of bias,” said Karl Laurentius Roos, Director Technology Development. “But our auto-taggers mean we can surface news and data automatically, which has a real impact on the end user’s productivity and understanding.”

Pushy algorithms

Pushing news, via email or mobile notifications, remains POLITICO Europe’s most effective way to integrate their services into their users’ day. However, Roos and his team are currently building products that will pull the user into their ecosystem.

“If we can enable user access to pull more content themselves, we’re increasing the product utility and value captured each time a user accesses our content,” said Roos. “For us this translates into connecting news with data and wrapping it seamlessly across our desktop and mobile experiences.”

According to Schrage, other media brands doing a good job with their recommendation systems include the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, Bloomberg and Pocket. However, not everyone agrees that recommenders are beneficial to business. Slate built Myslate in 2015, which worked on personal recommendations, based on users telling them what they wanted, rather than machine learning. After an initial experiment, the online magazine decided that keeping the infrastructure running wasn’t worth the amount of reader minutes it generated.

“For the recommendations to work we needed to ask them to sign up, which added friction to the experience,” explains Greg Lavellee, VP, Technology at Slate. “But I’m not convinced that recommendation systems are worth it. People tend to personalize their own experience. They know where they want to go on the site. They find the content they want – you don’t have to shove it in their face.”

Culture shift

Try telling that to the likes of Jeff Bezos, Reid Hastings, and Katrina Lake. Nonetheless, media brands may be concerned they don’t have the capabilities, budget or data to build a successful recommendation system. However, Schrage says the issues aren’t necessarily technological or financial, they are organizational and cultural. Recommendation systems don’t just require an IT upgrade, they require a rethink of business fundamentals.

“Legacy media have had the sh*t kicked out of them by companies that literally didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago,” he states. “It’s because the tech giants have committed to using data to learn. They take good design, good data and good recommendations seriously.

“This is what other media brands need to emulate in order to bridge the digital divide.” In fact, he says that media companies need to learn how to leverage customer’s behavioral data to drive value and grow business. “Algorithmic plagiarism is essential to future health of legacy media.”

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Revenue or readers: Which one should you choose?

There’s a saying that what’s good for the scorpion is bad for the frog. For a long time in digital publishing, the same was true about advertising. What was good for advertising was bad for the reader.

By flashing auto-play ads, full interstitials, and full-screen scroll over ads, publishers could earn big revenue from ads that demand all of the reader’s attention. But we know that readers hate them. These ad types were also named and shamed in the Better Ads Standards “least preferred ad experiences.”

These ads don’t come without a price. Users may see the ads and they may even get duped into clicking them. However, the power of consumer choice kicks in later down the line. Unhappy users will simply leave these sites and find content elsewhere. By prioritizing pennies in the short term, a lot of publishers cost themselves dollars in reader loyalty and longer-term ad revenue.

The final straw

Either knowingly or not, publishers found the tipping point where the success of a short-term strategy has a worse effect on their long-term prospects. The cost is readers for revenue.

We have measured the effect of this “tipping point” for years. In order to get the balance right between the user experience and monetization, our platform measured 275M sessions over 23 publishers to land on a UI/UX specialized and optimized for digital content. We found that, by analyzing user behavior, you can find the exact point where mobile publishers’ monetization and engagement strategies start to damage your bottom line, even if your superficial metrics, such as CPMs, are going up.

There’s a simple philosophy that works. It’s better that a user reads two stories and sees two ads, rather than reads one story with two ads. This approach increases long-term user engagement as well as loyalty. We’ve distilled some of the tactics from our Publisher’s guide to ad-supported UX design to help media leaders balance readership and revenue in order to fine tune their individual strategies.

If users hate all ads, they really hate mobile ads

First and foremost, we need to understand that no reader likes mobile ads. A Blockthrough report shows us that readers block twice as many ads on mobile as on desktop. Hubspot research says that users find mobile ads annoying or intrusive, and that they slow the page down and disrupt the reader experience.

We know from years of print media, TV, and online content that users will accept ads. When done right, they even love them (wassssup?). This is all because these mediums found the method and message that consumers will accept when it comes to balancing an experience with adverts. For mobile publishers to monetize for long term growth, they need to find the optimum point where users consider their experience a worthy trade-off for the advertising they serve.

More content is the best way to serve more ads

If you take away one thing from this article, it should be that the reader, not the advertiser, comes first. Happy, engaged readers read more content. And they’re more receptive to the ads that accompany that content. Over-exposed bombarded readers are not forced to stay: they can leave the page, find alternative content, or simply block the ads. 

By optimizing your ad density, lazy loading ad impressions, and sticking to approved ad formats, advertising won’t overshadow the content. Adding recirculation and re-engagement features such as swipe navigation and push notifications will guide your users onto more content. By looking at metrics such as recurrency, scroll depth, and page views per user, rather than ad request volume, you can isolate techniques that keep your readers engaged.

Don’t ruin a good story with a terrible ad

There’s a good reason premium magazines get away with so many ad pages, even before the content begins. The ads form part of the experience. These top publishers incorporate the highest quality creatives and hyper-target them to their audience.

The same needs to be true of mobile publishers. It may seem intuitive to use as many ad networks as possible and prioritize high-volume networks that deliver inventory. However, publishers that want to keep their readership should stick to premium networks.

Don’t let bad creatives pull your reader out of the story and drag your brand reputation down by featuring low-quality products or services. By appearing in your publications, ads get a tacit endorsement from you. By limiting this to premium networks, you keep your reader immersed in a high-quality environment. You won’t turn them away for the sake of a higher volume of impressions. Measuring the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), rather than just page CPMs will show the effect a more premium  ad experience has on your long term revenue.

Every action you take as a publisher has an effect on your readers and your revenue. Adapting best practices and using new metrics to see the effects of individual changes helps publishers walk the most profitable line between readers and revenue. 

Perspectives

The truth about scroll and swipe: The real value of mobile’s most famous features

The world of mobile is built on scroll and swipe actions. Addictive and habit forming, infinite scroll became the defining characteristic of social media networks for a time. Clicking is making a decision. Scroll is an everlasting stream of possibilities.

Readers do love to scroll. However, it is also a better way to read and digest long content. Usability studies by the Software Usability Research Laboratory show that users can read long, scrolling pages faster than paginated ones. And they absorb the same level of information from the content.

‘Participants using the paging condition took significantly longer to read the passages than either the full or scrolling conditions. They stated that they found the Paging condition to be “too broken up,” and that they had to “go back and forth” quite a bit to search for information.’

Publishers, hoping to establish the kind of enthralled readership seen on social media, built infinite scroll and swipe navigation into their UIs, expecting readers to drip through page after page of their content. Scroll and swipe seemed to be purpose-built for news and entertainment sites.

Unfortunately, the results of scroll and swipe for publishers didn’t hit the mark. 

A bottomless pit

Infinite scroll gave readers a bottomless pit of publishers’ content. But dig into the data and you can see that most readers are still only skimming the surface of the content. According to the readership data studied here at Marfeel, we find that 75% of readers never get beyond 10% scroll depth in an article.

Here you can see how ‘content chunks’ are added to the scroll to give readers escape points to new content. These cues are easy to digest, understandable, and have a simple navigation.

Content may have infinite depth. But even engaged readers are unlikely to ever stray from the shallow-end.

When it comes to publisher content, if a reader is not engaged, they are unlikely to continue scrolling. So, if your recirculation strategy relies on readers scrolling past the bottom of an article, you’re losing out on 80% of your audience.

With swipe, the results aren’t as damning but still deeply flawed. Swipe has been shown to potentially increase page views per session by over 400% for some publishers. However, only about 20% of readers ever discover it.

Infinite scroll needs structure, variation, and novelty

Infinite scroll works so well on social media because the content and the formats change on every swipe. You’re rolling the dice for another chance at entertainment. On a publishers’ site, a swipe may just lead to another few paragraphs of content.

Traversing this dead-zone is cognitive work. There’s a lower dopamine response from making a judged evaluation on a longer article or piece of content. Faced with a paragraph of dense analysis on Euribor inflation before the next crumb of content is offered up, a reader’s first instinct will be to leave the page, not continue.

A Chartbeat report found only “slight evidence” infinite scroll contributes to deeper scroll depth, but no definitive evidence that infinite scroll improves depth of visit.

For infinite scroll to work for publishers, varied and exciting content is key. It needs to be digestible as single-scan content chunks. Users must be able to look at once and make a decision about whether they want to read or not.

Grouped titles, images, and instantly understandable content give readers more bursts of information they can use to make quick decisions. These atoms make up a proposition that a user can decide to delve into or keep scrolling. Publishers need to spot scroll-stopping points and introduce alternative exits at these points to keep readers engaged. Writing in Psychology Today, Susan Weinschenk explains, ‘If there is a small, specific cue that signifies that something is going to happen, that sets off our dopamine system’. UI/UX cues that more content is available become a dinner bell that connects to a Pavlovian response inside us.’

Without these cues, infinite scroll becomes an endless litany that unengaged readers will choose to leave rather than find the end. With these tools, publishers can reconsider scroll depth as their most crucial metric and start focusing on recirculating readers, which techniques such as ‘inline articles’ as seen above can increase recirculation by an average of 60%.

Take a lesson from Tinder on swiping

Swipe removed pagination from the mobile experience. However, not every reader discovers it in mobile publishers’ content. Imagine a world where only 20% of visitors to Tinder realized they had swipe for more content.

Apps such as Tinder and TikTok are built around swipe because they make it explicit. Publishers’ audiences are not expecting to swipe, rather follow the sections and pagination of traditional news sites. Publishers that have managed to make swipe work for them use clear and simple UI cues that make swipe a logical and intuitive cue.

Another major difference in what swipe offers us – compared with clicking new content, changing pages, or switching apps – is that we’re unsure of risk/reward ratio. And this can deliver higher rewards than evaluating decisions.

Provided we have some information about a user’s tastes, such as broad interests, swiping to a new article in a relevant or category or similar topic can even be more rewarding than choosing a new link based on rational decision-making. To do this, swipe needs to be integrated with cues to show that swipe is the intended action. As it is not yet a natural motion on content sites, this behavior needs to be taught and established.

By re-working these born-mobile techniques, publishers can re-define swipe to make it a more natural and established action. This will help publishers turn swipe and scroll from well-intentioned but ineffective tools into powerful and essential components of any content-based UI.

Innovation

Own your code and its impact on user experience

It’s hard to remember a time before the Internet. But many would still be surprised to learn that the first online news publication was launched in 1979, on CompuServe’s dial-up service. This September, it will turn 40, and its memory is kept alive by news organizations that took part in CompuServe’s historical experiment on the potential of online papers: The New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicler, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Virginian Pilot, and many others.

All of them are still online, proving that the spirit of innovation—and braving what was then a largely unknown new world—they all shared may be key to their longevity. However, times have changed. At the dawn of digitalization, publishers still owned the code that ran their online platforms. Decades later, a shift to third-party assets has changed the balance of power and introduced risks that the media is still struggling to control.

First in digital, last in security

Thanks to digitalization, publishers now have access to a global audience. Not only is it possible to communicate with readers in real-time, but new revenue models fundamentally change the way that they pay for it. From ad-supported content to metered paywalls, the digital ecosystem boosts a publisher’s reach while offering long-term profitability.

At times, however, the race for revenue and new markets has turned hectic. Bells and whistles like programmatically targeted ads, content recommendation, online chat, and video offer a competitive advantage. They can improve user experience, extend the possibility of content generation and raise profits. But to keep the show going, publishers need code. And today, most of that code comes from third parties.

Unfortunately, third-parties reduce the amount of direct control that media can exercise over its properties. Left unmonitored, they can lead to latency, data breaches, and fake news—all of which can threaten revenue streams. Add to the mix new regulations being introduced across the country, the pressure on publishers to regain control of their digital ecosystem and pressure continues to mount. Now, the industry that pioneered digitalization must also embrace programmatic monitoring, and that begins by understanding where many of these problems come from.

The risks of third-party code

Today, 60-95% of the code across digital platforms is owned and operated by third-party vendors, with online media averaging 90-95%. Given that there are over 7,000 digital vendors to choose from, publishers can make some bad partnership choices—ranging from one with poor controls that open it to compromise to one with explicit nefarious intent. Whatever the case, AdTech is abused to steal or resell user data, spread malware, and redirect users to malicious domains.

The methods used by attackers have also increased in complexity, easily bypassing traditional security measures used by Ad Ops to block them. In recent history, we have witnessed:

  • ICEPick-3PC – injected code into Javascript libraries used across thousands of websites
  • PayLeak-3PC – infected seemingly secure iOS devices by disguising itself as an update
  • JuiceChecker-3PC – evaded detection by conducting checks on user motion, battery level, user agent, and screen size
  • CartThief-3PC – injected formjacking scripts to steal payment card details from e-commerce sites
  • Stegoware-3PC – hid in seemingly innocuous PNG files and conducted various checks to ID and infect iOS devices

These are not isolated incidents. Over the past three years, the number of malvertising attacks has steadily risen, with major consequences for online publishers. In a span of 24 hours, The Media Trust manages an average of 1,500 active malware incidents. Each month, we detect more than over 6,000 new malicious domains responsible for malvertising and redirect attacks.

Self-regulation threatened

In 2018, billions of consumers around the world were impacted by data scandals. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has placed extensive restrictions on how publishers may legally use consumer data, resulting – already – in record penalties and active investigations.

In the United States, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) threatens to follow in GDPR’s footsteps. Meanwhile, U.S agencies including the FTC and DOJ have begun to levy unprecedented penalties on digital brands accused of data mishandling.

Where governments aren’t trying to contain cybercrime and privacy violations, browsers and hardware manufacturers are filling the gap.

Cookieless world emerging

In an attempt to curb data leakage and malware spread, periodic cookie audits are mandated by the GDPR in Europe and by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations in the United States. But as third-party cookies are projected to become less important to the digital ecosystem, this effort becomes increasingly fruitless.

Attackers now have multiple routes for tracking users from fingerprinting to device IDs and limited browser tracking functions. As time goes by, yesterday’s malware vectors disappear, leaving behind only one common denominator: the attackers themselves. Producing a safer digital ecosystem begins by eliminating them.

Steps to reclaim user experience

After Cambridge Analytica, a global userbasecares what happens to their data, and – whether through regulations or ad blockers – they are holding publishers accountable.

The best way for publishers to respond is by retaking control of the code that operates outside their jurisdiction, and they can do it in five steps:

  1. Decide the rules. Publishers must know who they want to work with before they enter into any agreements. They must also know what counts as “unacceptable” behavior across their digital properties. These policies should be decided in tandem with all relevant parties, including IT, marketing, and privacy executives.
  2. Know who is running code on your site. Before allowing digital code and assets onto their domains, publishers must identify and vet the creators. Doing otherwise is sacrificing a basic level of control that accumulates with time.
  3. Communicate policies. Not all data breaches happen because of malicious third parties. Some vendors are just careless or forgetful. To avoid preventable violations, publishers must clearly and specifically communicate their security rules to their partners.
  4. Monitor compliance. Aside from communicating the rules, publishers must also enforce them. And to enforce them, they must continually monitor their partners by scanning their domains, so they will be aware when violations occur.
  5. Terminate and report bad partners. Publishers must take action against the partners who violate their rules and communicate these violations to upstream partners, helping to permanently remove repeat offenders from the digital ecosystem.

By following these rules, online media would experience an immediate, noticeable improvement in ad quality and UX. As data breaches decreased, AdTech Tax and other penalties would become a dwindling threat to revenue, leaving publishers exactly where they belong: as leaders of digital commerce and security.

Innovation

First impressions count. Here’s how to create a truly satisfying user experience

It’s no secret that a great user experience is the key to attracting and retaining customers.

There are plenty of articles out there highlighting the obvious UX design must-haves: “offer real-time support,”  “create a good 404 page,” “have a working search function,” “make sure you have a quick load time,” etc. However, a good user experience goes way beyond visual cues and basic functionality (though these are certainly important). In 2019, good UX is all about how quickly you can deliver the most relevant experience to the user in the moment. 

With that in mind, here are a few things  you should consider if you want to create a truly satisfying user experience: 

Today’s users expect to see content that’s relevant to them right now. 

Consumers today expect immediate results—from their devices to their workout routine and everything in between. 

In 2019, almost every digital space is saturated and hyper-competitive. And that means an “okay” user experience—in this case, surfacing somewhat relevant content— probably isn’t good enough to grow your business. So you have to make sure the articles, products, recommendations, etc. that you serve people are relevant to what they need right at that second. 

Personalization is key—but don’t make it creepy.

With machine learning giving us greater ability to collect vast amounts of user data, we can now provide more accurate recommendations than ever before. 

In theory, this is great. But at some point, we need to take a step back and make sure that we don’t veer into creepy, potentially unethical territory. It’s fair to feel your privacy has been invaded when you see an Instagram ad for smartwatches immediately after viewing them on an unrelated site.

In other words, there’s a right way and a wrong way to approach personalization. 

“We saw you searched for yoga mats on Amazon, so here’s a bunch of yoga content” doesn’t cut it. That’s not great user experience. And it makes people feel uneasy, which could result in scaring users and customers away. 

In creating great user experience, the Japanese “omotenashi” approach to hospitality can teach us a lot. Omotenashi is a term that essentially equates to understanding your guest’s needs even before they say anything. Omotenashi is more than merely going the extra mile when servicing customers, clients, guests—or, more accurately in this case, users. It means picking up on users’ subtle clues to give them something they didn’t even know they wanted—yet. 

Don’t rely solely on what’s trending. 

Every company online today wants clicks. 

But just because an article or product is trending doesn’t mean it’s going to lead to repeat customers or subscribers. And while surfacing trending content should be part of your strategy—if something is trending, that’s certainly a good indicator of value—it shouldn’t be your only focus. 

It’s better to determine what’s really going to resonate with users. Personally, I don’t want to be told, “Hey, you should like or be interested in this because everyone else is.” When brands take this approach, I lose interest. And I’m sure I’m not alone. It is so much better to be able to say, “Hey, you will be uniquely interested in this”—and to be right about it. 

Make sure you bring in longtail content and products. 

When longtail content resonates, it adds immense value to the user experience. 

Longtail content is often niche content. For example, it might be the exact brand and color shoes someone is looking for, or an article that answers the precise answer to a question someone needs answered. It also has high engagement/conversion potential.  

If you’re providing recommendations through filtering and rules, you obviously don’t have the brainpower or time to figure out rules and connections to a million items. That’s going to limit both you and your customers. It will also make it incredibly difficult to show users everything you have to offer. 

Utilizing technology like machine learning, which can intelligently and systematically surface longtail items, can be effective in optimizing user experience. With machine learning, you can pull from your entire universe of content rather than just a small top percentage. 

Remember: Discovery takes many forms. 

Companies should keep in mind that users discover and browse content—articles, products, etc.—in many different ways. 

That means your user experience should cater to many different user behaviors. Some people  are visual and want pictures to guide them. Others are auditory and will value a listening experience or one prompted by verbal cues. 

In the digital world, users will find content, products, etc. via different pathways. Some websites use a tree structure to help users find what they’re looking for; others rely on search. If your website features a one-track discovery experience—for example, they offer no navigation route other than the search bar—you’ll frustrate users who are more attuned to other types of navigation tools. 

At the end of the day, customers want a lot of options. But they don’t want to have to sift through them all. The ideal user experience offers an expansive universe of relevant options but is also easy to navigate for when the user knows exactly what they want. 

What makes or breaks the success of your website is that all-important moment in which someone decides whether to stick around, read an article, or make a purchase. And that decision is typically made pretty quickly, usually based on a first impression. 

So when that golden moment arrives, make sure your site is optimized to provide users with a super-relevant user experience that delivers exactly what they were looking for (or maybe what they didn’t even know they wanted yet).

Innovation | Perspectives

AI Is the new printing press. Here’s what that means for online publishers

Ever wonder why web pages look the way they do?

To answer that question, we need to look to the past—1440 A.D., to be exact. When Gutenberg created the printing press, it was suddenly possible to print and distribute thousands of copies of written material, all typeset so that the letters lined up perfectly every time.

Since then, the way we read text—including online—has changed very little. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t evolved at all.

When I was living in Japan in the 90s, for example, everyone read the newspaper on the train. Japanese newspapers, unlike the papers you find in the U.S., are designed to be folded in half as you read because the trains are so crowded. You couldn’t open a Wall Street Journal arm-to-arm on the train in Tokyo because there simply wasn’t enough physical space.

But today, the way we consume content is not restricted in that way. We’re much more likely to read the news on our smartphones and laptops.

Instead of holding the physical paper in our hands, we scroll away on phones or tablets. But we’re still attached to some old-school tactics that make less sense today. Things like above-the-fold, which is a vestige of newspapers that were folded once they hit the stands so that only the top half of the paper was visible to the passers-by. This basic format remains the same for digital content, but it no longer serves much of a purpose.

Since the advent of the printing press, technology has enabled us to deliver more content more quickly to more people than ever before. As digital technology continues to evolve at an increasingly rapid pace, it’s time authors and publishers rethink how we present digital content. Just as a Japanese newspaper was designed to create the optimum experience for reading on the train, we have to evolve the way we present online content to give users the best experience.

Your users live in a digital world. Here’s how to meet them there:

It’s time to ditch trees, categories, menus, and the like.

Navigation is among the most important elements of web design.

The original navigation favorite was the tree structure, which was popularized with the explosion of Yahoo and its original navigation. It presents a hierarchical view of information, in which each item (or “branch”) leading to a number of subitems. Any branch can be expanded to reveal subitems, or collapsed to hide subitems.

However, with the rise of mobile devices, the once common tree structure is falling out of favor. Designers are creating new and improved ways of navigating websites. They have stopped. forcing users to navigate a tree, a giant list of categories, or even think of search terms. Instead, they are thinking of ways to create a digital user experience that is responsive in real-time.

Just as Google’s search engine rendered Yahoo’s original navigation approach obsolete, AI is pushing out traditional web navigation. An AI-driven site design that can pick up on and infer user signals and direct them accordingly is much more user-friendly. Before long, all websites will be creating menus, landing pages, and content generated dynamically in response to user understanding.

Ideally, prebuilt navigation should be as streamlined and minimalist as possible. When done right, it allows users to open your website or app and find what they’re looking for instantly.

Otherwise, users will become frustrated and sign off—and that’s the last thing you want.

User engagement is at stake.

Today’s consumers are less patient than ever.

According to a 2015 study from Microsoft, the modern American brain loses concentration after eight seconds, a result of our increasingly dependent relationship to technology. “Heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli,” the report read. And they’re “more easily distracted by multiple streams of media.”

Today’s customers expect instant gratification. They want to be met where they are, with an article or product recommendation that’s relevant for them at that exact moment, regardless of the channel or device in use. Real-time customer engagement requires knowledge of past purchases, specific preferences, and situational context to make instant recommendations.

Without it, your customers will go elsewhere.

Data shows that modern real-time companies that embrace this type of real-time responsiveness see double or triple level of user engagement. If it’s a content site, that means up to three times more people watching videos or reading articles, or becoming paid subscribers. On a product site, it means tripling the number of people buying your stuff.

If you’re not leveraging AI to give users a better experience already, you’re leaving money on the table and users in the dark.

Environmental cues

Soon, it won’t be enough to just show users a few options based on past purchases. The next iteration of digital experiences is content presented based on behavioral and external cues.

Rappi, or what I like to call “the Uber Eats of Latin America,” is a great example of this next generation UX and a customer of my company, Liftigniter. The app determines what you’re interested in eating and delivers it to your door—whether it’s a four-course meal prepared by a restaurant, fast food takeout, or ingredients delivered from a grocery store for you to cook on your own.

They use our AI engine to make individual determinations based on such signals as users’ behavior in their app. It understands what devices they’re using, where they are, and what time of day it is. Using this information, they can make behavioral and environmental inferences. This allows them to determine whether you’re interested in something healthy or comforting, quick or slow, fancy or casual. When it’s cold out, they’ll suggest even suggest a warm holiday soup.

If you can create a website or some sort of digital experience that can determine the user interests without them telling you, why wouldn’t you? The only conceivable reason is habit. It’s natural—and easy—to cling to the status quo.

However, the printing press no longer reigns supreme. And it”s time online publishers shake off the vestiges of an archaic user experience.

Perspectives

How consent fragmentation could alienate users and undermine the GDPR

After a two-year grace period to allow time for preparation, GDPR finally goes into effect this week. For most enterprises, mapping and remediation of private data storage has been the focus. But now it is time to focus on sustainable operational compliance starting on May 26th and continuing for years into the future.

If you monetize with programmatic ads, we’ll assume that your legal team has made the (very typical) decision that “consent” is the best legal basis for processing data under GDPR. Regardless of which basis you choose, data subjects must be given a clear and understandable explanation of what data you will use, how you’ll protect it, who you will share it with, and how long you’ll keep it. When the user gives his (now “informed”) consent, a transparent, trusting, ongoing relationship is formed – exactly what the authors of the GDPR intended.

Because it can be revoked at any time, and processing must stop when it is, consent must now be easily checkable by both internal company activities, and also by third parties (called “Data Processors” in GDPR lingo) that utilize the data (for example, ad networks). Clearly, “consent” has become a very important new corporate asset.

The Programmatic Problem

The AdTech industry has realized that under GDPR, lack of consent could quickly lead to the end of programmatic ads. Last November, the IAB trade group proposed the Transparency Consent Framework (TCF), an open source consent solution that it believes will allow the ads to keep flowing. Many observers, (including DCN) have criticized it for technical and functional shortcomings.

The purpose of this post is not to dissect the flaws of the IAB TCF. My goal is to make clear that even if it worked properly, the IAB’s solution could never be considered a complete consent solution for a publisher. Its only purpose is allowing programmatic ads to continue to flow.

As this point, you may think “So, what? It will keep my ads running. Why not use a free solution to manage the programmatic ad part of the GDPR consent puzzle?” I submit that consent needs to be handled centrally as a key corporate asset, just like accounting, HR, strategic, and other corporate data.

Consent Deconstructed

Here is a real-world example illustrating what will happen when consent is not handled centrally. A mid-sized publisher runs ads (of course) but also offers newsletters, email-based promotions with sign-ups, and an affinity / personalization program with a persistent login.

If the publisher chooses the IAB TCF solution to run ads, they still have no solution for storing or managing user consent to their internal GDPR uses. (This could include email newsletters and affinity programs, but potentially many more. Today’s digital marketing creates a lot of data ingress points).

The publisher chooses a “GDPR compliant” third party email provider that gathers consent and stores it internally (not accessible to publisher). For their affinity system, the publisher creates a basic consent flag system on their internal servers. In theory, the publisher is now covered for GPDR consent.

A Poor Patchwork

In actual practice, this “patchwork” solution is very unpleasant for users. They will be interrupted and asked for their consent for ads the first time they come to the site post-GDPR. They will again be interrupted and asked for consent (by a different vendor and with a different UX) when they join the email list. Then, they will again be interrupted and asked for their consent with a different UX when they join the affinity program.

Because of the disjointed consent strategy (known as “Consent Fragmentation,” the user has been interrupted 3 times for consent, shown 3 different notices, and given their consent using 3 different user interfaces. At a certain point, users will become frustrated with the continual interruptive requests for consent, something the GDPR authors envisioned and referred to as “Consent Fatigue”

It gets worse. Under this patchwork, when a user decides to revoke or modify their consent, their path to success is extremely arduous (the opposite of GDPR’s “easy as giving consent” wording in Article 7).

Since the IAB TCF does not provide any user interactivity, the publisher must use an IAB approved Consent Management Platform (CMP) to provide users with required rights management capability. To modify their ad consent, users must use the CMP dashboard that the publisher has chosen.

To revoke email permissions, the user would have to visit the “unsubscribe” page of the email vendor. Finally, for the loyalty program, they would need to use a “revoke my consent” function from the publisher’s in-house consent manager.

Centralized Consent

Consent fragmentation is the result of using different “Band-Aid” systems to hold user consent, and there is no positive aspect to it. This situation came about because the publisher did not understand the true importance of consent. No publisher would ever hold separate general accounting ledgers in multiple unconnected silos. It would be a certain recipe for disaster.

This disconnected experience is bad enough for a single site. Now imagine how users will feel if most sites ask their consent three or four times. This is the nightmare scenario that risks the failure of GDPR because users will simply stop giving consent.

I think you can see where this is going. Post GDPR, user consent is a vital corporate data asset, a key gating item for all user interactions. As such, consent must be gathered wherever needed. However, it must stored in a central repository, where is easily accessible to all internal activities, and to a curated group of external partners (email services, analytics, ad partners and downstream ad partners.)

With a single consent repository, users are presented with the experience they expect: one single sign-on dashboard. It will provide them with an accurate and easy to understand notice of the uses of their private data, easy access to exercise their rights, the ability to selectively opt-in or out of each of the services used by the publisher, and a secure point of access for SAR and breach notification. The solution must be an easy to use, single sign-on privacy management is evidence of “Privacy by Design,” as envisioned by the authors of GDPR.

Roy Smith is founder and CEO of PrivacyCheq, a leading provider of SaaS privacy compliance services to enterprises and small business worldwide.

Perspectives

Drive customer connection and retention with the 3Cs of empathy marketing

Our lives and devices have become inextricably intertwined. Five years ago, mobile devices eclipsed desktops to become the platform that defines our daily routine. Mobile is our go-to for advice, assistance, and access to content and experiences. This attachment to mobile and apps turns up the pressure on brands and content companies to engage with consumers in ways (and contexts) that demonstrate a deep understanding of their needs and a genuine desire to put people first.

Fulfilling consumer demand for content that is relevant, valuable, and in no way intrusive is not a mere courtesy; it’s a business imperative. Mobile has created a strong sense of entitlement among consumers — particularly Millennials and younger generations, which are accustomed to instant gratification with a swipe or click. The outcome is an audience of empowered consumers who want what they want, when and how they want it.

Audience Appropriateness

Mobile also forces companies to obsess around what I’ll call the “appropriateness” of the how, what and when of their side of this two-way conversation taking place on mobile. In a sense, mobile has rewritten the rules of engagement. Mobile is a fiercely personal device that requires companies to ask for consent and earn trust. A major trust factor is showing that they understand and appreciate what consumers want and value most. Missing a step and delivering inappropriate experiences has negative consequences.

Recent research from Forrester suggests that companies lack the skill set- mindset required to meet customer expectations. Despite “skyrocketing” mobile adoption rates globally, the analyst firm observes that most companies “struggle to engage with consumers via mobile.” Specifically, only 32% say they have systematically integrated mobile into their marketing approach, and less than 56% say they use mobile to transform the customer experience.

Underestimating the pivotal role of mobile is everyday life represents a dangerous disconnect with business best practice. After all, mobile is not another screen. It is the screen. The 2017 Mobile Maturity study, conducted by digital media and digital marketing solutions company Adobe and based on a survey of 4,000 consumers across the U.S. and Europe, reveals that over 90% of respondents consider mobile to be their “primary device.”

The Age of Empathy

People are more connected that ever. And they also demand to be heard. They hunger for experiences that are genuine. Companies must show they listen and care, and cultivating these capabilities is at the center of Empathy Marketing.

In daily life, empathy is all about the ability to take a walk in someone else’s shoes. It’s the action of understanding and being sensitive to the feelings and thoughts of another human being. In a company-to-consumer scenario, empathy is an approach fueled by hard data and soft skills to deliver people content and experiences that are amazing, appropriate and deeply engaging.

Empathy Marketing is mobile-first and consumer-centric, wielding the unique ability of the mobile channel to deliver personally- and contextually-relevant content and experiences that move the needle. But it’s not about technology. Companies must also move our hearts, with approaches that show they listen and care. Based on nearly two decades of research and writing about engagement marketing examples and best practice, I have identified 3 approaches (the 3Cs) that demonstrate empathy and drive results.

The 3Cs of Empathetic Marketing

Cognitive

Content, context, and, now, cognitive. It’s the capabilities mix that allows companies to move from acting mobile-first (table stakes at this point, by the way) to being people-first. At its core, this approach builds on a deep understanding of the consumer to anticipate needs and requirements and pinpoint proper moments in the mobile journey to interject with meaningful and useful suggestions or assistance – or simply show presence. The input is data, but not just from mobile.

Companies that have a broad range of content assets should connect the dots in the online, offline, mobile, social, and digital ‘sessions’ that define our daily routine. These insights will allow them to deliver what consumers want (when and how they want it and on their preferred platform) even before they want it. The output is a clear flow of content and experiences that feels as if it has been designed specifically to satisfy the individual’s need-state. Algorithms help. But companies should also act human, asking questions and responding in ways that indicate they are genuinely interested in listening and, above all, learning. Communications (notifications, text and email) are careful and crafted to show companies are there for their audience and dedicated to making their lives better.

Convenient

Companies can blame the new breed of on-demand apps, such as Uber, for setting the bar high. Apps and experiences that have succeeded in reducing time, friction, and frustration have created the consumer expectation that everything should be so simple. Avoid complexity at all cost. Start with a design that reduces clicks to content and keeps what’s important in “thumb’s reach.”

However, it’s not enough to embrace design that reduces friction. Fuel interactions with deep customer connection and automation where it counts. Avoid making consumers repeat actions or input information, particularly if they already provided at an earlier stage of the journey. Build in features and functions allowing consumers to save settings, store what they have read (or want to read later), make lists, and share with their communities. Think about the actions your content is likely to inspire plan to make sure their individual path-to-action is hassle-free. This starts with a review of your landscape to identify options and partners (for example, complementary content companies and apps) essential to delivering consumers a one-stop experience.

Borrow a page from the Ubers of the world — companies that offer services from the source down the last mile to the customer — and position your content within a tight-knit ecosystem with you at the helm. For example, if you have travel content, pair it with sites or apps that allow consumers to book a hotel or trip directly from the same page in the app or on the website in the all-important moment of inspiration. Remove the wait, reduce the friction or just enable an impulse action. Whatever you do, demonstrate a laser-focus on making experiences easy and enjoyable and consumers will reward your efforts with intense loyalty.

Creative

Effective approaches move the needle, creatives move the heart. Acquire and retain audiences with the help of authentic marketing creative that shows you understand and uphold what is important to them. The right creative resonates with your audience. Making that match requires a firm grasp of data that goes beyond demographics and location. Do your research, starting with consumer studies and surveys to open the aperture of how you see your audience. Harness psychographics to understand where your audience is coming from and help you map a journey that is aligned with their lifestyles and life stages (not just the stages in the funnel). There are no blueprints. But there are valuable lessons and guidelines if you have the vision to look outside your vertical.

A great example is finance, which has seen a massive decline in consumer trust and brand love. Mobile fintech apps and startups are gaining traction with the help of approaches that show they understand what their audience want and are sincere about helping them to achieve life goals. It starts with something as simple as imagery that is inclusive. For example: showcasing women in campaigns creatives and empowering them with the feeling they can take control of their financial future. Effective assets and advertising demonstrate traits women value most (trustworthiness, dependability, and accessibility). Companies can adapt these key takeaways to power approaches that drive consumer connection and deepen trust.

As the saying goes: Actions speak louder than words. This is a connected age where consumer crave authenticity. So, companies must use everything they know about their audience to deliver experiences that address needs, anticipate interests, or simply go the distance to make their life better. Anything less shows disregard for the individual and tells consumers you’re not listening, or worse, you simply don’t care.

Innovation | Perspectives

4 things HBR has learned by experimenting with audience engagement

Defining audience engagement can feel daunting at times. In our work at Harvard Business Review, we’re looking at engagement – and experimenting to understand that engagement better – through several different lenses: What is most valuable to current subscribers or potential subscribers or social audiences? And what formats hold the most growth potential across social, text, audio, video, bots, and so on.

Here are a few things we’ve learned from some of our recent projects and experiments:

1. When doing something brand new, get (at least a few) true believers in the mix.

Like others, we barreled into doing Facebook Live videos in early 2016. We weren’t doing much live video on the editorial side at the time, but we had a few ideas about what would work and what wouldn’t. We were especially eager to try videos that allowed the experts who write for HBR to explain their ideas to the audience directly. These videos, called whiteboard sessions, put a professor or business leader or other expert in front of a camera (or, early on, in front of a phone) to talk about their idea or concept for up to 40 minutes.

We knew this format would be fairly natural to the presenters because they know how to lecture or give presentations. That gave us a constant point of quality and allowed us to focus on the engagement side: questions, comments, visuals, takeaways.

However, while we had confidence in the format, we needed to work on getting the audience to engage. We discovered the importance of enthusiastic presenters. We had a few early on on who really believed in the opportunities that live, social video offered. One of those early whiteboard experts was entrepreneur and author Evan Baehr. He immediately understood the challenges: a live audience, a social platform, and a lot of competition for your attention from other content. But his enthusiasm got the audience’s attention right away and gave us a glimpse of what was possible with this format.

That confidence in the whiteboard format has been part of what has led us produce and experiment with more than 100 live whiteboards with experts from all over the world. We’re now working on creating a larger video strategy for them.

But without the enthusiasm of people like Evan and others early in the process, we might have assumed whiteboards were a nice-to-have and not invested our time as purposefully. So, keep in mind that, when you’re trying something new, you need to make sure you have some enthusiasts in the mix. The audience can feel it when you’re not enthusiastic about a medium (especially when it comes to video and audio), which will be reflected in popularity and engagement.

2. Text interactions can be tricky.

While we often seen hundreds of comments and shares on live videos, our results have been somewhat mixed when it’s come to text-based chats.

We write about a lot of work advice that’s very personal and a lot of business trends that are important to understand. We know that connecting our audience – and specifically our subscribers – to the experts who write for us helps people go even deeper in applying and sharing these ideas.

We’ve tried text-based engagement experiments around this premise in a couple of ways. In one open-to-all experiment around an important feature piece (an article series we call the Big Idea) on inequality between firms, we invited readers to a Slack channel where the author of the main piece was going to be available for questions and conversation about his research and work. We thought this had the right combination of platform plus deep, important topic and timely relevance.

The results were mixed. While we had more than 150 readers join the Slack channel, they mostly lurked. It’s tough to diagnose why. Was the text format intimidating? Too much work? Do people really want to listen to an expert first and foremost?

We’ve also tried this type of experiment in subscriber-only settings. We’ve invited authors of HBR pieces to answer questions in a closed Facebook group for subscribers, for example. The results have often been similar. Most people lurk and don’t contribute much. We’ll keep experimenting with this type of engagement. But we may need to pair text chat with something else – like video or audio – to really stir interaction. And we need to keep considering the right platform, as well as how much people want to interact with each other instead of an editor or author from HBR.

3. Constantly test your assumptions.

A central tenet of HBR’s experimentation and innovation practice is to write down our assumptions, goals, and hypotheses. This document is shared between product, editorial, and other teams involved in the project. We then check back on those assumptions at planned intervals to understand what we should do differently, what we’ve learned, and to help gauge whether the experiment should continue.

We’ve done two bot projects, one on Slack and one on Facebook Messenger, that help illustrate how this works. When we started the HBR bot on Slack, we assumed that people would love to see our big beautiful images in their conversations with our bot. However, our UX research proved that was wrong. People just wanted to get to work advice we were offering.

We also hypothesized that we wouldn’t drive any trackable subscriptions through the bot. That was right. But we also believed in driving frequent interactions through the bot should lead them to engage more deeply with us, even if we can’t draw a straight line back to their bot experience. That engagement could take a lot of shapes: Signing up for a newsletter, following a social channel, sharing an article with a friend.

It helps to write down even your most basic assumptions. For our recent Women at Work pop-up podcast, we documented the assumption that people wanted to engage with HBR about this topic in an audio experience. For the bots, we had to test our assumptions that people wanted to consume our content in bot form (and we’re still testing whether that’s true). It seems basic, but doing these things helps your build up a store of observations that can inform your future experiment plans and pitches.

4. Be clear on asks to your audience.

Don’t take this one for granted. When you ask your audience to do something, have a purpose and follow through. HBR has had a subscriber-only Facebook group for about a year now. The editor who runs it, my colleague Laura Amico, is clear that when editors post to that group, there’s a purpose and a plan. We’re not just throwing out a “What do you think?” to that community and walking away. Instead, we’re asking that community to join us in testing advice or sharing ideas on how they’ve solved tough work problems.

We’re also opening up new channels to listen to our audience and incorporate their feedback. Our new Dear HBR: podcast answers questions from the audience about tough workplace dilemmas. It’s our newest foray into the advice space, and we’re already seeing steady growth in the number of questions being posed.

And we’re taking a fresh look at the role of article comments in this space. Laura is working on this too, and I thought I’d share part of an internal report she’s developing to help push our thinking in this area:

Comments are about so much more than what is typed into a text box. Commenters need to know how to succeed in what we’re asking them to do and they need to be rewarded for doing it. That’s true on the other side, too; editors and others working with audience development also need to know how they and the business benefit from engagement. Developing use cases for comments, promoting good comments, and sharing engagement results internally and externally are all key to maintaining the relationships.

As we move into new areas of experimentation around engagement – involving everything from email to comments to visual storytelling to machine learning – we’ll keep testing our assumptions. We’ll keep pushing ourselves to think dynamically about our audience and how we ask for their time. And hopefully we’ll make their day at work a little better, too.

Maureen Hoch is Editor of HBR.org. Hoch leads Harvard Business Review’s digital newsroom and oversees the team working on HBR’s Facebook Live videos. She played an instrumental role in the redesign of HBR.org, which has since garnered three Webbys, and she helped lead the team that created HBR’s bots on Slack and Facebook Messenger. Hoch joined HBR as Senior Editor in 2013. She has previously worked for the PBS NewsHour, the World Bank, and The Washington Post Express.

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