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Perspectives

Re/code + Vox: Lessons on Being a Big Fish

There’s an old adage that sometimes it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in the ocean. The technology news industry is an example of this. Years ago, during the dot-com boom and thereafter, a slew of tech-focused news sites started making waves in Silicon Valley, including TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Wired, Mashable, Gigaom and VentureBeat (to name just a few).

AllThingsD, originally a part of the Wall Street Journal, was one of those players. But when veteran tech journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg launched it as the separate entity Re/code in January 2014, that pond housing all the big fish tech publishers was already expanding, turning into an ocean. When Vox Media announced last week that it would acquire Re/code’s parent company Revere Digital in an undisclosed all-stock deal, Swisher acknowledged to the New York Times what more and more medium-sized publishers, especially in the congested tech news industry, are realizing: “It’s not a secret that being a smaller fish is really hard.”

Rather than leading to a debate about whether it was the right or wrong decision for Re/code and Vox to merge, the discussion that’s evolved has more to do with the hard realities of what’s necessary for journalistic enterprises to stay afloat.

A Size Issue
While Re/code is known for Swisher breaking big tech stories and Mossberg’s distinctive voice on reviews, along with its pricey Code Conference confabs (previously the D conference), the publisher had a relatively small audience, with 1.5 million monthly visitors, according to comScore. That’s nothing compared to behemoths like Vox, BuzzFeed and Vice, which have grown from small fish into great white sharks, with VC funding, audience metrics and their own tech innovations feeding that growth.

Perhaps, as Forbes’ Miguel Helft writes, the Re/code + Vox deal “suggests that the investor fueled frenzy around tech journalism is likely not sustainable.” Indeed, in talking with CNBC about the deal, Swisher and Mossberg explained that Vox had what Re/code was lacking: different revenue streams, a know-how of content management systems, and prowess at navigating the advertising business. That’s in addition to Vox’s “beautiful, powerful and flexible proprietary publishing platform,” Chorus, which “will give us new ways to present our stories to you,” wrote Swisher and Mossberg in a blog post.

The buyout comes against a backdrop of sudden shakiness among tech publishers online, with Gigaom’s shutdown (and rebirth), Verizon’s buyout of AOL (with the media side possibly spun off) and ReadWrite’s crowdfunding campaign to get more stable funding. Plus, Fusion has had a reboot on its mission, and Circa might be sold to Twitter.

“The bottom line (in more ways than one) is that size still matters for media companies,” Fortune’s Mathew Ingram wrote.

A Need for Invention
The problem with tech publications is that there are market forces pushing them to do more than simply remain tech publications. They now need to be actual technology companies if they want to get notice from investors. Hence the buzz around Vox’s Chorus platform. But for all the hype surrounding how much Vox is going to help Re/code, there’s no doubt that Re/code will do a lot for Vox, as Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff wrote on Vox. Re/code will help Vox with its credibility in the business tech industry; Vox’s The Verge covers consumer tech more so than business. Plus, the folks at Re/code have event management know-how that Vox needs.

So there is a win-win situation at play. Vox may have gobbled up the little fish, but Re/code will also get the nutrients it needs from the Vox diet. The question is, how much can one fish grow inside the tummy of another?

Perspectives Image
Perspectives

DCN’s Recommended Reading: Week of June 4, 2015

Innovation

Augmented Reality Takes Weather Channel Talent—and Viewers—Inside a Tornado

It can be more than a little tempting to play with every new “toy” that comes along in the digital media toolbox. But for organizations with successful diversified businesses built on data and accuracy, these experiments need to be carefully considered and intelligently implemented. So when David Clark joined the Weather Company as President of Weather Channel TV two years ago, he took a serious look around and decided it was time to revamp the studios and invest in improving the presentation-layer of the company’s content.

Jeremy Jones, the Company’s director of television products, says that as part of Clark’s mandate the team explored a variety of graphics they could incorporate into weather coverage and also set out to fundamentally re-imagine the weather map. “We’ve relied on the green screen for years now and we wanted to get our people out of the map and move away from boxes in boxes.”

Jones says they took a good look at the technological offerings on the market and saw that augmented Reality (AR) offered a way to “create immersive graphics that brought the weather inside our beautiful new studios…and put people inside the weather.” And while this implementation of AR is first and foremost about immersive storytelling, Jones says that the company also wanted to use technology that its audiences were interested in and to “bring them the kind of experiences that keep them glued to a two hour movie.”

Social media reactions to the Tornado Week debut of the new AR broadcasting technology demonstrated that the audience was not only impressed but intrigued, with many taking guesses at how the in-studio tornado had been generated. It was clear that, as Jones had hoped, the audience of self-proclaimed weather geeks was also interested in the technology behind the visualization.

While Augmented Reality (AR) has been used in sports broadcasting for several years, it has not seen widespread use in television and certainly not for the graphical representations deployed by The Weather Channel. The presentation they are offering rivals that of the best gaming systems or cinematic applications—going beyond informational overlays to truly lifelike 3D representations that are literally at the hands of any given on-air personality.

Jones says that The Weather Channel team—the talent behind the scenes and on-camera—were enthusiastic about using augmented reality, putting extensive time and energy into the development of the presentation as well as to rehearsing its on-air usage. And it was no small feat to incorporate AR into broadcasts: It was a six month undertaking that involved outside experts working with Weather Channel engineers and directors “who had never worked with AR before, but were incredibly excited to have the chance.”

The company opted to start out with explainer videos on seasonal weather trends, starting with Anatomy of a Tornado; Anatomy of a Hurricane will air as hurricane season starts. Then, the goal for the next wave of AR-enhanced content is for it to be centered on real-time weather events and, eventually, how AR can be used to enhance weather-fans’ experience across devices. “The ideas on our white board for how we can use this technology are pretty interesting,” says Jones. But he emphasizes that the company’s entire reputation is built upon data, science and getting things right, which must carry through in this initiative.

As for the debut, Jones points to the conversation between meteorologist Jim Cantore and weather anchor Sam Champion that viewers saw on the live broadcast as an indicator of how excited the team is about adding Augmented Reality to its storytelling palette:

The studio erupts in spontaneous applause from those on and off camera and Cantore reacts to it by saying that being able to show an F5 tornado in this way, inside the Weather Channel Lab, has been one of the most amazing things he’s done in his career. To which Champion replies: “I have never been more proud to be part of The Weather Channel team.”

Industry-Research | Innovation

DCN Members React to the API’s Innovation Report

The American Press Institute recently published a “best practices for innovation within news organizations report.” As Craig Silverman notes in his analysis of the findings: innovation is a word bandied about a great deal these days. Yet given the reality of perpetual media/technology disruption, the American Press Institute thought it wise to examine how news organizations foster innovation. And because many of the participating news organizations are those with strong brands and legacy print businesses, the need to innovate—and the challenges that entrenched business models and structures pose—are many.

We reached out to a handful of our member companies to gauge their reaction to the best practices and see if they had any other insights to add.

For the purpose of the American Press Institute study, innovation is defined as

“The process of bringing new practices, culture and products alive within an organization,
to preserve core values but serve them in radically new ways.”

Across the board, the members we heard from agreed that this was a good definition.

Below are a few takeaways from the report, which is well worth a read in its entirety. Mixed in are comments from some DCN member companies on how they reacted to the API’s suggestions for how to implement these best practices:

Best practice: Leaders must set, enforce but also nurture priorities.

Our members agreed that setting priorities, in terms of what to do and what not to do was important. Among the many points of advice given, having leaders model innovative behaviors and embrace transformational leadership were the most effective.

“Leaders also need to set tone and momentum, creating a unified march toward a specific goal.”
–Andrea Spiegel, Senior Vice President, Product Development and Video, Forbes

Best practice: How to create a culture and structure for innovation.

Among those we asked, giving people ownership over their own products was something they also found effective as is creating more job and workplace flexibility. The API advice they selected as most effective was to break down silos and foster collaboration.

“While organizations can embrace a top down approach to innovation, the best ideas are those
that come from the bottom up.  Companies need cultures of curiosity yet at the same time
must provide means for ideas to coming from anywhere at any time.”
–Douglas Rozen, Chief Innovation Officer, Meredith Xcelerated Marketing

“Everyone is a leader, whether you run an entire team or a particular function. People make a huge difference:
the type of leaders, their team members and individual leadership styles. You can have all the right plans in
place but if you don’t have the right people to execute on them, you’ll never move forward.”
–Andrea Spiegel, Senior Vice President, Product Development and Video, Forbes

Best practice: How to generate and pursue ideas.

Of the many interesting suggestions in this area of the API report, those we asked believe that creating cross-departmental teams and/or embedding those from different departments into others is among the most effective tips. They also believe that holding regular cross-departmental meetings to increase awareness and foster collaboration are extremely effective.

“It’s vital to behave like both an incumbent and an insurgent, to resist two of the biggest threats an established media company can face: complacency in culture and stagnancy in content. This means serving fans in the moment with live content windows and social alerts; with surprising, engaging and delightful enterprise efforts; with being both RIGHT and FIRST with breaking news and perspective; and with tools and insight that make fans smarter and help them win a wager, win their fantasy league or win the conversation with their friends around the water cooler.”
–Patrick Stiegman, VP / Editorial Director, Digital & Print Media, ESPN

Best practice: How to gather feedback, measure and iterate.

Feedback, measurement and the ability to pivot are certainly all important to the process of innovation. As with the API’s respondents, DCN members interviewed used email, analytics dashboards and regular meetings.

“At Forbes, we believe it’s critical to understand and learn from the data. Data helps inform – not rule – what we do. We share data internally across all of our teams (edit, product, tech and sales),
but also with our contributors through their own personal data dashboards. ”
–Andrea Spiegel, Senior Vice President, Product Development and Video, Forbes

“Beyond innovation, you need ambition, the desire to do something that’s never been done before.
To quote Wayne Gretzky, ‘You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.'”
You have to take your shots, course correct and drive ahead.
–Patrick Stiegman, VP / Editorial Director, Digital & Print Media, ESPN

“Show by example that innovation is not just a buzz word. Demonstrate your commitment
to innovation by following through on an idea, from initial concept to build to launch.
Actions really do speak louder than words, and your team will see what’s possible. ”
–Andrea Spiegel, Senior Vice President, Product Development and Video, Forbes

Edmunds.com Interior
Perspectives

Member Spotlight: Edmunds.com’s Avi Steinlauf

Q: Tell us a bit about your role and the path that brought you here.

Avi Steinlauf HeadshotA: I’ve been at Edmunds for almost 18 years. After finishing business school at Kellogg and working as Senior Industry Analyst for Coopers & Lybrand’s Knowledge Strategies Group in New York, I joined Edmunds as the Director of Marketing and Business Development when we had just 20 employees. Now I’m the CEO and our team consists of 600 people nationwide. We had been a book publisher since the 1960s, then came online in 1994 and discontinued the print business in 2005. It’s been fascinating to be a part of the transition onto the Internet and to be involved in the growth that technology has enabled.

The way I approach my job is very hands-on and people-oriented–with both employees and clients. I interface regularly with senior level automaker executives as well as car dealers from all over the country–operations that are small and big, urban and rural, private and public. Car dealers are among the most innovative, entrepreneurial people in the business sector, and getting exposure to them is a fascinating part of my job.

Q: What is the biggest challenge for you in your role?

A: At Edmunds, we’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit and always looked beyond the norm to make a real difference for car shoppers and the auto industry. The larger Edmunds gets, the more challenging it is for us to continually innovate at that level, but that is required if we want to stay at the head of the pack. We have accomplished a lot, but we can never rest on our laurels. Finding new ways to creatively inspire and support employees and our leadership team to help them continually innovate is the toughest part of my role.

Q: What do you think is the most important aspect of your job?

A: We can’t do what we do without our amazing team of talented and Avi Steinlauf Familydedicated employees. The most important aspect of my job is ensuring that we’re one of the best places to work, hiring and treasuring people with our values who can contribute to building the business for the long run. (I’m very proud to say that we are often acknowledged in this area, as you can see here.)

Q: Describe one of the most unusual or most memorable experiences in your career/current role.

A: One of the most fun elements of my job is getting regular exposure to new cars and trucks. At Edmunds, we test all the new vehicles provided by automakers on a weekly basis, and on our own dime we regularly buy popular cars and trucks for long-term testing, reporting our findings to car shoppers to help make their process easier. One week I’ll be driving a new minivan, the next a pick-up truck, then move into a new family sedan or a sports car. I really enjoy the variety, and I get a kick out of seeing my kids (none driving age yet) get excited about what I’ve brought home on any given day. My kids really love it – but my wife thinks I’m nuts for having to move my stuff from car to car every week.

Edmunds.com Executives and Car

I’m very proud of our editorial team’s initiative in helping car shoppers, and the reach of Edmunds’ voice. Recently our team tackled a big question: how much would it cost to repair damage done to the aluminum body of a new truck? They took a sledgehammer to a new Ford F-150 to learn the answer, and the video went viral, earning millions of views. Ford’s CEO was even asked about it on the company’s quarterly earnings call. If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can check it out at here.

Q: What are you most excited about for the future of your organization/ the industry?

A: I like to give my team the baseball analogy that even though we’ve hit some home runs, we’re still only in the bottom of the second inning or perhaps the top of the third. I see a tremendous amount of potential for us to grow within the auto industry. We are currently unrolling a new strategy to play a valued role in the used car shopping process. The used car business is four times the size of the new car business, so that alone gives us plenty of opportunities. Also, we see technology continuing to have a major impact on car shopping. Last October we made our first acquisition – the CarCode customer/dealer texting platform – and have found it to be one of the most successful endeavors in our history. (More details can be found here.) As technology evolves, we’ll be busy for generations to come.

Avi Steinlauf, Chief Executive Office of Edmunds.com, directs the company toward the goals of empowering the automotive consumer, maintaining the high quality of the workplace and building the company to thrive for the long term. He joined Edmunds in summer of 1998 as the Director of Business Development and has also headed the company’s marketing and revenue management areas. Previously, he worked for Coopers & Lybrand’s Knowledge Strategies Group. Avi earned an MBA degree from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva College.

Innovation | Perspectives

Augmented and Virtual Reality Get Real: A Look at Media Applications Happening Now

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are getting a whole lot of press lately. From Google and GoPro partnering on a new filmmaking ecosystem for VR to Apple’s acquisition of Augmented Reality (AR) company Metaio and Oculus’ (Facebook) purchase of AR startup Surreal Vision, it looks like this pair of technologies that enhance (or supplant) what content consumers see are entering primetime. In fact, PatentVue recently reviewed the patent landscape and found more than 2,300 US patents with claims related to AR and head mounted display (HMD) platforms and devices.

Early practical developments for AR have ranged from manufacturing and engineering to retail and medicine. And brands such as Heinekin, Toyota, Dominos and Ford have already embraced AR as a way to advertise, demo products and ease the path to purchase.

Virtual Reality (VR) is also making a big splash with the marketing community, with Forbes calling it “the next big advertising medium,” pointing to the work Hearst-owned Elle Magazine did with denim designer 7 For All Mankind. Spirits brand Patron offers educational seminars and retail consumer VR experiences to provide an immersive look inside the Hacienda Patrol distillery.. And Marvel teamed up with Samsung to promote the latest Avengers movie by giving people a taste of what it is like to be a superhero.

Not surprisingly, media companies are also experimenting with ways in which AR and VR offer new ways to tell stories.

Here are a few recent examples of how media companies are jumping into the VR fray:

  • Gannet Digital leveraged virtual reality in its coverage of the 2015 FIS Alpine World Ski Championship. Not only could ski fans read about the events, they could don an Oculus headset and experience heart-pounding runs with some of skiing’s greats.
  • NBC used VR to give fans the experience of being in the star-studded audience at the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special.
  • Vice Media released a documentary at Sundance “VICE News VR: Millions March” which takes viewers inside the December 13 rally in New York in which 60,000 protesters gathered to demand greater police accountability.
  • The Weather Channel has just launched live VR weather which ”takes viewers in, and through, the science and wonder of weather.”
  • At this year’s New Fronts, Conde Nast announced that it has two original virtual reality series in the works.
  • ABC Family leveraged VR to market its new sci-fi program “Stichers,” by creating a smartphone app that promises fans an immersive experience.
  • Turner Broadcasting-owned Adult Swim also released an app-based VR experience this month called Virtual Brainload, which boasts a somewhat more psychedelic experience.

Here are some examples of the ways in which media outlets are leveraging AR:

  • National Geographic was early to experiment with AR—notably with its 2011 shopping mall experience that allowed shoppers to interact with dinosaurs. More recently, National Geographic has begun to leverage AR for educational experiences that enhance explorations of natural places.
  • Disney also offers an “edutainment” application of AR with its Disneynature Explore app, which offers kids a way to take adventures in their own backyards while learning more about nature along the way.
  • Disney-owned ESPN had an augmented reality-capable camera in use at this year’s NFL Draft and the company has leveraged AR in its broadcast media for some time.
  • Conde Nast Traveler uses GPS data location and augmented reality in its iPhone Apps to allow travelers to find things and learn more simply by pointing their phone in a given direction.
  • Conde Nast is also among several media outlets—including Time Inc., The Wall Street Journal and Warner Brothers Interactive—that are working with Shazam, which can scan physical objects for augmented reality and other enhanced content.

Virtual reality headsets and content will be “the next mega tech theme” and a market worth more than $60 billion in a decade, according to investment bank, Piper Jaffray Cos. And as we increasingly see, mega tech themes quickly become mega media themes, as the two are intertwined in the minds—and devices—of consumers.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

4 Tips for Improving Programmatic CPM

The premise that the rise of automated buying and selling through programmatic technology would have a negative impact on a publisher’s’ ability to increase—or even maintain—their CPM rates is continuing to erode. Many were surprised to learn that the 2013-2014 CPM trend for social, mobile and display across programmatic ad platforms was one of growth, not decline.

PulsePointfigureAs the click declines from its position as the metric of prominence, contextual data, viewability and high impact opportunities for engagement have become increasingly valued and sought after by brands. Today, marketers increasingly realize that “you get what you pay for” but they expect that price tag to come with the same scale and efficiency programmatic technology delivers. So how can publishers use data and technology to command premium pricing for the premium experiences brands want—and consumers expect?

Here are four strategies publishers can adopt to not simply survive, but thrive, in a programmatic world.

  1. Make your audience and contextual site data available and visible to buyers. Move beyond offering standard cookie-reliant targeting with contextual technology. Real-time, page-level contextualization of your content increases the likelihood that a person sees an ad that’s relevant to them—delighting your audiences and the buyers who want to reach them. Contextual analysis at the page-level will enable you to offer audience segments interested in that content at greater scale, beyond 1st party and 3rd party cookie pools. Contextual data can help increase yield and revenue by showing the value of inventory buyers would normally overlook.
  1. Upgrade your site to support more advanced ad functionality and cross-screen delivery. Large-format, high-impact ad sizes are designed to help brands get their ads noticed and have been shown to improve interaction rates, increase time spent and improve brand recall. The IAB recently released research showing that consumers find Rising Star ads more engaging and more informative than standard units. This makes them especially valuable to brands, who tend to bid higher on these formats. With an estimated 60% of web traffic coming from mobile, it goes without saying that your site should be mobile optimized. It’s worth spending the time and money to upgrade your site internally, or many technology partners can help you integrate new ad formats and optimize for mobile experiences quickly and easily.
  1. Understand how much of your content is viewable—and make sure you can deliver against it. Viewability is moving from “nice-to-have” to “must-have” in a buyers mind. Make sure you know how much of your inventory is viewable and provide transparent reporting against that number to clients. Publishers who can offer a pricing model that incorporates viewability (e.g vCPM) will emerge the winners, as brands will pay a premium for guaranteed viewable inventory. An easy way to get started is to ask your monetization partners if they have viewability-tracking and reporting tools to layer on your current offering—some even offer this as a value-add service.
  1. Adopt a “test and learn” approach to programmatic partners. Don’t accept the status quo from your current monetization partners. As the programmatic landscape matures, earlier pain points of integrating new technology partners are starting to subside as onboarding and operational processes have become standardized. There’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” programmatic partner, so don’t be afraid to test multiple providers concurrently to compare performance; leverage the real-time nature of programmatic to find the right solution that will help ensure a premium for your unique audience and content.

This isn’t the first time publishers have been forced to evolve alongside major industry change, and it most certainly won’t be the last. By 2018, more than 80% of display ad dollars will be transacted programmatically. Publishers that adapt to this new way of doing business and embrace the innovation it spurs will be the ones to reap the benefits.

Darline Jean is the Chief Operating Officer for PulsePoint, responsible for shaping product strategy focused on enhancing the company’s premium programmatic and content marketing solutions. Before joining PulsePoint, Darline was President and Chief Executive Officer of The About Group where she was responsible for the strategic direction of the business unit of The New York Times Company that includes About.com, CalorieCount.com and ConsumerSearch.com. During her tenure as President and CEO, she significantly increased the company’s revenue and led the sale of About.com from The New York Times Company to IAC in 2013. Darline has also held the title of Chief Operating Officer of About.com and Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer of the About Group.

Prior to The About Group, Darline held various financial leadership positions with Thomson Media, a division of Thomson Financial. She began her career with Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising in New York.

 

Perspectives

Verizon/AOL Deal Focuses on Mobile, So What About Content?

Something about AOL and buyouts always brings a strange sense of déjà vu. It takes us back to the glory days of the first dot-com era when then-upstart AOL bought media giant Time Warner for $164 billion in 2000. Fast-forward 15 years, and the shape of AOL’s identity is much more about ad technology—and popular content with Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget—than it is about dial-up Internet (though it still has 2.2 million of those subscribers too).

Last week, Verizon announced its plans to purchase AOL for $50 a share, in what amounts to a $4.4 billion deal. Some observers have noted that these numbers are pretty small for a company like Verizon, and that AOL continues to remain a major player online, especially when it comes to the future of online advertising: mobile and video. In fact, these are attributes Verizon is banking on to help it grow in mobile and video advertising as it builds its own mobile content collection as well.

What AOL stands to gain, however, may necessitate some soul-searching on its identity—or rather, how other parties view its services, and what those services have come to mean in our modern media environment. AOL owns several global brands such as Huffington Post, TechCrunch and AOL.com. Just like media giants Facebook and Google, it’s in the business of helping brands use sophisticated technology for online advertising. It’s also invested heavily in online video.

Spinning Off Content?
But will Verizon want to keep those content sites that have in the past been critical of the cell giant? The big rumor is that AOL has been in what Re/code calls “advanced discussions with a number of parties” to spin off the Huffington Post brand. It would bring in more money for Huffington Post, which has been expensive for AOL to maintain and monetize, especially against feisty competitors such as BuzzFeed and Business Insider.

According to Re/code’s Kara Swisher, the most serious talks were with German media company Axel Springer, as well as private equity firms. Her sources put a price tag of $1 billion on the Huffington Post group, but she couldn’t get a public confirmation of talks from CEO Tim Armstrong or others at AOL. “Sources said Verizon was far more focused on advertising tech and video and that some kind of spinoff or joint venture was far more likely for the Huffington Post,” Swisher wrote.

Ad Tech the Golden Goose
Indeed, AOL’s advertising business is showing positive signs: It’s reported a seven percent growth rate in this year’s first quarter, and as Trefis, a company which analyzes stock prices, noted, much of this growth came from its programmatic platform across the third-party advertising network. Trefis also estimated that third party display advertising made up nearly half—42.2%—of AOL’s value.

All of that is very good for Verizon, especially if it wants to take on giants such as Facebook and Google and plant its footprint more heavily in mobile advertising. As Farhad Manjoo wrote in his column for the New York Times, together those two online behemoths “control more than 55% of the $42.6 billion worldwide mobile ad market, according to eMarketer.”

All of that is very good for AOL as well. AOL honcho Armstrong said in a memo to employees after the acquisition announcement, “If there is one key to our journey to building the largest digital media platform in the world, it is mobile.” And Armstrong deserves all the credit in the world for turning around an online has-been into a digital powerhouse commanding a premium payoff.

So should AOL now be known for its brand, or for its platform? Another lingering question is what mobile advertising itself should mean now. Ads on a mobile device mustn’t just try to get a person to buy something; they must also utilize data and key information about that person to create a custom advertisement for that specific individual. As Manjoo put it, “People in the ad-tech industry said that in buying AOL, Verizon’s immediate goal may be to marry its data about customers to AOL’s capacity to serve ads to increase this sort of relevancy.” And data mining is what Facebook and Google already do so well.

Ultimately, this deal might be less about the booming AOL content business and a lot more about ways to serve mobile and programmatic ads into a lot more content.

Perspectives Image
Perspectives

DCN’s Recommended Reading: Week of May 21, 2015

Perspectives | Research

3 steps you can take now to make the digital ecosystem safer

We’ve all seen the headlines and statistics:

Advertisers will lose $6-10 billion to bots in 2015.

More than half of ad impressions are not seen.

A quarter of all video impressions are fraudulent.

Brands are not safe from bots and invalid traffic.

As an experienced digital auditor, the Alliance for Audited Media goes behind the scenes to examine the sources and systems of the underlying issues plaguing the digital advertising ecosystem. In a new  white paper series, we delve into the issues of viewability, fraudulent and invalid traffic, and brand safety and transparency. All from a side you might not have read yet—the auditor’s perspective.

Based on our research, there are steps that all industry players – media buyers, vendors and publishers – can immediately take to make the digital ecosystem a safer place. Here are three takeaways that you can put to work today:

1. Prepare for 100 percent viewability
eyeOn the surface, viewability is a logical goal that seems readily attainable. Publishers should serve ads that can be seen by a human. Reality is far more complicated, of course. Different publishers work with different vendors. And different vendors—even those that are accredited—can use different measurement methodologies. Add in issues with browsers, screen sizes, ad delivery mechanisms and things quickly get very complicated. The industry is working toward solutions, but in the meantime, here’s what you can do now to prepare for 100 percent viewability:

Media Buyers: Know where your ads are going and where they ran: Work with reputable publishers and networks. Talk with vendors about measurement methodologies to better understand discrepancies. Demand audited systems and data to ensure you’re able to transact with trust and transparency.

Vendors: If you’re considering an MRC accreditation against the viewability standards, schedule a pre-audit engagement – now required by the MRC – with an independent third party to cost-effectively prepare your technology and processes for compliance with industry standards.

Publishers: Evaluate the advertising real estate on your pages and optimize placement for the best opportunity to be measured and seen. Disclose to clients which viewability solutions you employ and prepare them for possible discrepancies and reconciliation methods.

2. Recognize that not all invalid traffic is fraudulent but all fraud is invalid
spiderThere are several very good reasons a website may have for generating invalid traffic including internal traffic or test environments. But there are many more ways a site can generate fraudulent traffic, here’s what you can do to combat it:

Media Buyers: Ask your media partners how they detect invalid traffic. Only use vendors and technology partners certified to industry guidelines. Agencies should take the additional step of following the IAB’s best practices for workflow, campaign set-up, site tagging and measurement processes.

Ad Networks and Exchanges: Vet your inventory and continuously monitor it for changes. Provide advertisers with site-level information about where ads are running and who is seeing them. Become certified to IAB guidelines. Build brand safety technology into the ad server or domain engines that participate in RTB.

Publishers: Use internal controls to monitor traffic increases and implement ad tech solutions that are certified to industry standards. Perhaps most importantly, become certified against the IAB Quality Assurance Guidelines, which offer a framework for brand safety and trust throughout the industry.

3. Eliminate the bad players hiding behind good technology
lockProgrammatic media buying has allowed advertisers to more precisely target audiences while helping publishers sell more inventory. It’s also created another avenue for potential fraud in the digital ad supply chain. Here’s what you can do to stop fraud:

Media Buyers: Only use exchanges that work with legitimate, validated publishers and take steps to refuse buying low-quality inventory. If the price seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Vendors: Get audited to IAB guidelines. Those vendors that comply with IAB measurement guidelines believe in providing accurate, reliable and consistent measurements every day.

Publishers: Avoid the temptation of buying undesirable traffic to fulfill commitments to advertisers. “Cheap” and “quality” traffic rarely go together.

The fact is that there’s no single answer to the issues facing digital advertising—but accountability and transparency are the foundation of any solution. Know your vendors and media buyers beyond just a name on a screen. Have a conversation and reach an understanding before a campaign begins. Support the work of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) to add background checks and weed out the bad actors before they gain entrance. 

Each of us can and must play a role in bringing transparency to the digital media ecosystem. If all sides of the industry come together against those that are infecting the system, we’ve got a real chance of creating a safe marketplace where everyone can transact with trust. Read AAM’s entire  digital white paper series to learn more about the industry initiatives at play and find your role.

Guenther is vice president of digital auditing services at AAM. As a founding partner and vice president of ImServices Group—an Alliance for Audited Media company—he has more than 25 years of experience in digital technology auditing. Guenther has been instrumental in helping develop many of today’s key standards and practices for the interactive advertising marketplace including the IAB’s Quality Assurance Guidelines, various IAB Measurement Guidelines (including the MRC Viewable Impression Guidelines) and the IAB’s Ad Campaign Measurement Process Guidelines to name a few.

In 2014 AAM and ImServices merged. Guenther leads the integrated digital audit team in helping clients address fraud detection and prevention, ad delivery verification, viewability and brand safety through platform certification audits, independent validation through the IAB’s Quality Assurance Program (QAG) and MRC accreditation support that includes pre-audit assessments, a step now required by the MRC.

Innovation | Revenue

What Drove Hearst to Invest in Ride-sharing Service Via?

Darcy Frisch, vice president of Hearst Ventures, discusses the unique model, business structure and future of Hearst Ventures’ newest investment, ride-sharing service Via.

Hearst Ventures is always on the lookout for the next big thing in the technology space that can help impact consumers’ lives. The group’s newest investment, ride-sharing company Via, shows big promise in the on-demand transportation sector and has a unique business model that provides an attractive price point and sophisticated technology that differentiates the company from the ever-expanding market competition.

Can you give us a brief background on Via?

Frisch: Via is a ride-sharing service that allows you to reserve a seat in a car using an app on your smartphone. Using Via’s app, customers drop a pin in the location where they’d like to be picked up and where they’d like to be dropped off. Via’s technology matches the request with a nearby vehicle that can fulfill the ride, and dynamically coordinates the route to include other users going in the same direction.

We think there is pent-up demand for transportation alternatives in Manhattan and other major metro areas. Via offers a solution to riders who want to share the cost of their ride, but are looking for, and willing to pay for, more convenience and comfort than what is currently offered by mass transit.

What Hearst Ventures finds particularly compelling about Via is its software platform: an automated dynamic routing system optimized for many variables ranging from traffic conditions to predicted demand along routes traveled. The software—not the vehicle driver—chooses the route and ensures that the customer will always be picked up and dropped off within two blocks of their pin drops. It automatically communicates critical information about the location of the vehicle as it approaches and clearly instructs the customer, through the app, on where to meet their driver and vehicle.

Can you talk a bit about Via’s plans for expansion?

Frisch: Via has been expanding its service in Manhattan gradually over the past year or so and demand for the service has been extraordinary. At the time Hearst invested, service was operating limited hours and in a zone from 32nd Street to 110th Street. Very recently, Via announced that it was extending its hours of operation to be 6:30 a.m.-9 p.m. and expanding its service zone to cover from 14th Street to 110th Street, river to river. Via also has plans to expand into other metro areas in the U.S., and eventually internationally. The first two targets will likely be Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Tell us a little about Via’s pricing model and how the company keeps costs so low.

Frisch: There is a pre-pay option on the app where customers can use money they have already loaded, at the five dollar per-ride price. If customers pay for each individual ride, the cost is seven dollars per ride. If there is more than one person being picked up, each additional rider is charged at 50 percent of your per-ride price. The company keeps the cost low by matching vehicle supply and customer demand. The drivers are independent contractors, licensed by the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission, and are called to work based on what Via expects demand to be on a given day, at a given time. Fully utilized, a vehicle can make three to three and a half loaded trips per hour. Ideally, Via’s vehicles will run at full capacity, but there will always be times of less-than-full utilization. The supply of drivers and vehicles is being managed to grow with demand for the service. The two will expand together.

Tell us more about the founders and the team behind Via.

Frisch: The founders, Daniel Ramot and Oren Shoval, are impressive entrepreneurs. In their home country of Israel, they grew up with Sheruts—shared taxis and vans—that are a popular and effective means of transportation. Ramot and Shoval are both graduates of the elite Talpiot program of the Israel Defense Forces, and clearly have the engineering skills, training and experience that made them able to build the Via technology and successfully roll out the service in New York. Their team is divided between New York and Tel Aviv. The engineering team resides in Tel Aviv, under Shoval, and the operations and marketing teams are based here in New York with Ramot.

What separates Via from some of its competitors?

Frisch: We think there is a lot of room for new transportation solutions in Manhattan. Via is offering a new type of service that combines the low price and sharing aspects of mass transit with the personalization and convenience of a for hire taxi or limo ride. Also, the software and technology platform that I described before is a defensible advantage that Via has over its competitors.

What about Via ultimately made it an attractive investment for Hearst?

Frisch: Hearst Ventures has been interested in on-demand service models and we have spent a good deal of time thinking about these businesses. On-demand transportation is particularly interesting because it is a very large market opportunity that is in its early days of disruption by smartphone hailing services like Uber and Lyft. We spent a long time thinking about the market, and Hearst President and CEO Steve Swartz challenged us to find a company for investment that offered a real competitive advantage to the market counterparts. When I came across Via, I honed-in on its technology platform as something that would differentiate the service. The automated routing system that enables the shared service and the low price point is truly groundbreaking.

Via’s management team is rock solid and their business model is new and different. The timing feels right, since well-funded companies already in the space have educated both the drivers and riders that it is very easy and convenient to transact using smartphones. With this new round of funding, Via can expand and grow more quickly. We are very excited about working with them as they do.

VIA

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