For the past several years, The research team at BrightRoll (a vendor of video ad automation software) has surveyed agencies to reveal trends and topics that deserve more attention. They look at how agencies are allocating media budgets, how RFPs are changing, frequently used success metrics, etc.
In a quiet announcement leading into President’s Day weekend Vivaki disclosed a restructuring of its Audience on Demand (AOD) trading desk. The agency reassigned 120 employees to individual Publicis agencies. Vivaki’s stated goal of the restructure to increase integration as well as to comply with the client request of eliminating the “black box” veil of the agency trading desk (ATD) model—but it is likely to cause other ripples of effect in the industry.
Here are some thoughts on what this announcement signals:
This announcement should, theoretically, move programmatic buying closer to individual agency client teams.
The restructure aligns with increasing marketer hesitation to leverage agency trading desks and marketers moving to setting up their own in-house trading desks or leveraging third parties outside of the agency and holding company network.
The move has the potential to improve communication within the agency team around inventory, targeting, effectiveness and efficiency. It can also deepen integration and optimization across strategies and tactics.
This shift allows managing, leveraging, compiling and aggregating data to be done campaign-wide rather than siloed by the programmatic/ATD portion of the plan. It effectively breaks down silo of programmatic as a separate tactic.
The change brings talent in-agency to prepare for adoption of programmatic as a buying mechanism (programmatic direct, programmatic TV, programmatic premium, cross-screen, etc.).
It remains to be seen if client concerns such as inventory, fee and data usage transparency will improve.
Holding companies may follow suit or create different value propositions that help justify an increasingly outdated model.
Certainly, this move illuminates the fact that digital has permeated through every portion of media buying. At first there were digital agencies and experts but when it stopped being a specialty they were no longer needed. As the Ad Age article on Vivaki’s move suggests, we’ve seen this gradual shift in Social Media marketing as well. The timing of this announcement is interesting as we lead into the Upfronts and NewFronts. Though it seems likely that agencies will continue to ask that programmatic spend be incorporated to larger deals.
One thing is definitely clear: Agency trading desks must pivot to keep up with marketer demands around trust and transparency. It will be very interesting to see if and when other agency desks follow Vivaki’s lead.
Edmunds.com had an enviable problem: A wide range of brands wanted to advertise on the site but were being crowded out by big-pocketed automakers who love to spend on their highly-contextual pages. It’s no surprise that car makers wanted access to the Edmunds audience; according to Datalogix, 59% of U.S. car shoppers use Edmunds.com, and more than half of visits to its website result in a purchase. To increase opportunities for non-endemic brands to reach its desirable audience, Edmunds began to experiment with programmatic last year via private exchanges. And 2015 has brought a partnership with Krux – a data management platform (DMP) – to help them deliver across all digital screens and sources and continue to expand Edmunds’ advertising and content capabilities.
According to CEO Avi Steinlauf “Edmunds has embraced audience-based marketing by redefining our entire premium ad product offering.” This includes everything from page-based placements to audience-based placements for all of the company’s directly-sold, guaranteed onsite ad inventory. A key aspect of its new offering is the ability to reach the Edmunds audience offsite on other websites.
To establish this “audience-based advertising platform,” Edmunds.com turned to Krux to enable real-time tracking and audience segmentation of its audience. Krux also provides a platform to safeguard against the unauthorized use of audience data including strict adherence to industry standard consumer privacy policies.
Consumer protection is an essential component of this initiative. As Krux CEO Tom Chavez put it, “Like any publisher with valuable people data, Edmunds doesn’t want their data cast into the winds or transacted in dark rooms by frenemies who take liberties.” As such, Krux focuses on providing fine-grained controls that allow Edmunds to provision its data only to named players on times, terms, and conditions of their choosing. According to Chavez, “This requires an end-to-end approach that first detects and monitors if and where their data is leaking, and second enables them to point and send it to trusted partners in a friction-free, policy-managed fashion.”
The shift in its ad strategy is in response to what Steinlauf describes as “the ad industry’s increasing need to reach relevant audiences and provide more effective, tighter messaging to consumers.” This is achieved by offering marketers who directly buy ad inventory on Edmunds, a license to retarget those same audiences by activating them for retargeting on their programmatic buying platforms (DSPs).
As a second-party data provider for automotive OEM clients, Edmunds is able to work more collaboratively with these OEMs as well as with agencies to develop new types of ad campaigns or to increase the ROI of current ones. And, for dealership clients, Steinlauf says using these audience segments overlaid with geo-targeting data “provides an exciting opportunity to serve as a key component in their cross-channel digital marketing efforts.”
They were the perfect foils: Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer of Facebook followed by Nick Denton, CEO of Gawker. After dinner on day one of Code/Media, host Peter Kafka interviewed Cox and Denton in a brilliant bit of programming, which juxtaposed these two viewpoints:
Cox represented the evil platform intent upon vacuuming up all data, content and humanity to maximize clicks by us, the “human” robots, to support Facebook’s almighty quest for shareholder growth.
Denton represented the modern-day media czar who candidly–even caustically–fights off the controls of the platforms to protect the sustainable, independent voice for the future.
The problem was that I believed everything they both said.
While original content creators have had a love/hate relationship with Facebook for many years, there was no denying Cox’s eloquence in expressing Facebook’s current ambition to provide better consumer content experiences, particularly on mobile, by hosting content on Facebook rather than on publishers’ own sites. He deftly answered Kafka’s pointed questions about Facebook’s News Feed changes, publisher relationships and user experience decisions like auto-playing video.
Re/code’s Peter Kafka interviews Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer of Facebook. Photo credit: Asa Mathat for Re/code
But I can’t deny that Cox was the most authentic speaker I’ve ever seen from Facebook. As a rule, Facebook speakers usually leave me feeling a bit disappointed; like I’ve received the corporate playbook. But Kafka didn’t throw a lot of softballs Cox’s way and Cox wasn’t ducking.
I witnessed an hour of genuine answers that, regardless of whether or not I agreed, left me feeling like Cox was candidly sharing many of the complexities of Facebook’s global business. He explained how Facebook is different from all “archaic platforms” like Yahoo!, AOL and Google in that it’s held together by the notion that your friends and family will deliver the best content and info to you. If you agreed with Chris Cox, you should aggressively license content to Facebook’s platform where the largest audience congregates and the most conversations happen every day.
Needless to say, this is not a world view Nick Denton shares.
Denton smoothly shifted gears, channeling (if not quoting) Fred Wilson’s wise counsel to “Be Your Own Bitch.” While not quite the fiery Denton of yore, he deftly navigated Kafka’s many challenging questions. He didn’t flinch from topics that included Gawker’s publishing decisions — including the Sony files and Charlie Hebdo covers — and Gawker’s relationship with its audience, employee culture, Denton’s public exchanges with his reporters, GamerGate and anything else in the world according to Gawker, where controversy breeds like rabbits.
Denton made it clear that he doesn’t want to be informed about the news by the selections of his friends and family, which take place through some sort of democratic vote. He said that his news habits are aspirational and that he looks to brand experts to make what’s-newsworthy decisions for him. If you agreed with Nick Denton, you would defend your independence from any single platform and focus on engaging in conversations with your audience on your own platforms.
As I stood outside the spectacular Ritz Carlton waiting for my car at the end of the night, I found myself talking to a young student from California Marymount — recalling that BuzzFeed Publisher Dao Nguyen has often pressed me to find millennials to talk to about their media habits. So I asked this student what he thought of the event. He highlighted how much he had learned from listening to one of the event’s earlier speakers, New York Times CEO, Mark Thompson, and then Cox and Denton.
The young man said he was just thrilled to be in attendance as the topics covered at <Code/Media> aren’t likely to be discussed in his classrooms. In his words, “the history books on digital media haven’t even been written yet.” He’s absolutely correct. We’re writing them now. And I have zero doubt that the names Chris Cox and Nick Denton will appear in those books. And I bet, as we look back at this phase of the media business, we’ll find that they were both right. Content matters. Audiences matter. The conversations between the two matter. And great content conversations can happen everywhere.
Top photo: Re/code’s Peter Kafka interviews Nick Denton, CEO of Gawker Media
Lower photo: Kafka interviews Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer of Facebook
Not since the introduction of the television have entertainment and media consumption shifted so rapidly. It’s easy to overgeneralize that this rapid shift in media consumption means that everything goes mobile (particularly for younger audiences). However research we released last week in our Getting Audiences Right report, shows that the real headline is the extent of audience fragmentation across both media consumption and shopping behavior.
Nonetheless, this is not a disorganized fragmentation, rather we see that screen engagement coalesces around two organizing principles: the generation which an audience is a part of (we studied Millennials, GenX and Boomers) and the digital task which an audience member will perform.
The Audience Generation Generation is so important in how we understand media consumption and channel receptivity, because generation rolls up not only life stage events (career, children, and retirement), but also a set of beliefs that that cohort holds about itself (consider, for example, a 2010 Pew Research poll that asked audiences of these generations if they thought their own generation was unique, about 60% of Boomers and Millennials said yes, in contrast to half of Gen Xers). These life events and world views influence generations’ preferences for channels, devices, and even how they purchase.
In our Getting Audiences Right Research we see three generational trends emerge:
Millennials have moved to mostly mobile (particularly smartphones) and have moved away from traditional entertainment channels (like network and cable TV) for more curated entertainment (like Netflix and YouTube);
GenX is task-dependent and gender plays more of a role for men in entertainment consumption than any other generation (for example 68% of GenX men report using YouTube on a weekly basis compared to 47% of GenX women).
Boomers, who often pride themselves in their facility with and use of technology (31% of them shop online via their laptop more than once a week and 18% shop online with their smartphone once a week) still prefer traditional channels for entertainment (cable TV is still the screen they’re most likely to watch on a weekly basis — 68% of women watch cable on a weekly basis and 62% of men).
The Task at Hand Nonetheless, in the consumer path to purchase, all generations lean towards PCs as the device of choice.
Even Millennials rely heavily on PCs and laptops for shopping activity. The largest proportion of Millennials had searched or purchased consumer packaged goods using their laptops/PCs (39%) and the same was true for consumer electronics (36%) and financial services (31%)
GenX was most likely to use a laptop/PC for all purchase paths and were particularly strong adopters of laptops for the search or research of consumer packaged goods (49% of GenX had purchased or researched consumer packaged goods on their laptop in the past 6 months, compared to 27% having used smartphones for the same). Interestingly, GenXers use of tablets for CPG search/purchase was higher than that of other generations (20% of GenXers had used a tablet to research or purchase consumer packaged goods in the past 6 months).
Finally, Boomers shared a preference for laptops (54% of them have used a laptop in the past 6 months to search/research consumer packaged goods, 46% for consumer electronics and 41% for researching or purchasing travel).
All audiences stated that the primary drivers of their screen preference were screen size and the performance and speed of the device. However, our research also reveals that task time plays a large role in screen preference. Almost all audiences (81%) prefer to complete a five minute task on a smartphone. However, that percentage drops to 43% for tasks over 10 minutes.
The Message for Marketers Task and generation are so important because advertising is much more successful when contextualized and when the advertiser’s call to action can be heeded without switching tasks (or devices for that matter). We think that these findings give rise to the following three considerations for marketers:
The marketers who are beginning to consider how time shifting and on-demand viewing affect their full communication plan will be a step ahead, particularly with audiences under 50 (GenX and Millennials). The use-case for YouTube may be easier to grasp as marketers begin to understand the elements of good pre-roll, but the marketers who understand the role of advertising and the type of advertising that is effective in over the top will have an advantage.
GenX is the perfect generation for experimentation with a brand’s media mix, because GenXers still consume traditional television content (though more on cable than network TV), but have also moved to emerging channels like over the top (OTT). Given GenX’s omnichannel behavior, marketers must consider the ways in which messages can be sequenced across the channels. They must also be mindful of whether the content running on the channels ladders up to the branding objective for that channel.
Even though mobile resonates with younger audiences, Millennials (and the emerging Gen-Z (audiences under 18) still lean to laptops for lower funnel purchase behaviors. Continued expansion of and investment in the PC/laptop consumer journey is still essential in achieving maximum digital ROI.
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Note: Millennials: Born after 1980 (18 to 34); Gen X: Born 1965-1980 (35 to 50); Boomers: Born 1946-1964 (51 to 69)
Joline McGoldrick is a Research Director at Millward Brown Digital. Joline was an early member of the Dynamic Logic Team, beginning in 2001 and is well versed in studying how audiences respond to Digital advertising. Joline is a product designer and marketer and a frequent speaker and panelist on understanding the digital audience experience. Joline’s work has been featured in Forbes, Adweek, AdAge, the Economist, Media Post, and Mobile Marketer and she has spoken at conferences including the ARF, MRIA, OMMA, MRMW, the Market Research Event and AdTech.
Joline is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Carnegie Mellon University
The never-ending quest to find millennials in their native habitat has led to many strange bedfellows for publishers. Count Snapchat as another one, but this one has massive numbers: more than 200 million monthly active users. The service is best known for temporary content that disappears after it’s been sent, giving everyone license to sext to their heart’s content. But because the service has such a treasure trove of wired, young millennial users, many content players couldn’t resist the chance to be part of the service’s new ”Discover” zone with specially produced photos, text and video. The question is what role content will play in a hyper-personal, temporary space such as Snapchat.
So far, 11 different media partners, including National Geographic, ESPN, Vice and CNN, are on board. Discover works by allowing these different companies to release new content every 24 hours on their own specific channels within the messaging app. With each new update, previous content vanishes. Utilizing Discover is not only an opportunity for content outlets to reach new audiences on the Snapchat platform — particularly the coveted younger demographic who eschew traditional media and are even fleeing Facebook — but it’s also a chance for advertisers to take advantage of the service. Brands can buy advertisements that appear alongside Discover content after every three or four swipes. In effect, Snapchat now breaks through the parameters of what we might consider “social media” — it’s now a messenger, social network and media network in one mobile platform. And publishers are buzzing about potential reach.
”I can’t tell you what the numbers are, but they’re fucking incredible,” one unnamed publishing exec told Digiday, which ran a rundown of what publishers are doing there.
So what are publishers doing? CNN serves up a mix of news photos, video and even interactives. NatGeo has experimented with original quizzes. ESPN has stuck mainly to short-form video clips and stories. Some publishers have sponsors and others are working on it.
Unlike other social networks where publishers have to depend largely on people to share stories into feeds, Snapchat’s content is controlled entirely by publishers in a ”walled garden” or ”portal” type setting.
The question remains: Will users buy in? The beauty of Snapchat originally was that the ephemeral messaging service actually made the platform a preferred destination to keep in contact with friends, as opposed to say Facebook, which has become inundated with ads and links users want to share with their networks. Snapchat, in comparison, was simple because it focused on messaging. But that simplicity is now itself disappearing, and the service has upset a large chunk of the user base.
“This is like Snapchat’s wannabe version of Flipboard and I really don’t see what this offers that makes it beneficial to the user or utilizes Snapchat’s core functionality,” the user Vallsurf commented on The Verge.
More hurtful yet was a student at Butler who told the student newspaper: ”I also don’t like the Discover thing. I will never use it.”
Of course, people were up in ams when Facebook initially launched the News Feed, but that didn’t last long. A bigger problem might be that Snapchat currently makes it impossible to collect data on user behavior to enable targeted ads. Any information that might assist with that never stays on Snapchat’s servers.
The new Discover app, perhaps tellingly, also doesn’t allow users to share content outside of Snapchat. So even though publishers are excited for it and people are anticipating how Discover might change mobile news consumption, there are still a few key concerns. Among them: Will users make a habit of the Discover section? And will Discover lead to more consumption on publishers’ own domains? It’s really a long-running question that extends to any content distributed on social networks. As Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram put it: “The main beneficiary of this deal [between Snapchat and publishers] is the platform itself.”
But then again, if the content is monetized on the network, as it is on Snapchat, does it really matter as long as it’s more revenue in the pockets of publishers? We will keep a close eye on Snapchat… until it disappears.
Is there anything better than seeing your favorite team score from a great seat in the stadium? Maybe. While sports fans everywhere extol the virtues of live action and stadium comraderie, there’s also something to be said for the kind of real time commentary and analytics you are privy to at home, via your television and mobile devices. So what if you could have the best of both?
As the Official Technology Partner of the RBS 6 Nations Rugby Championship, Accenture thought it was worth a try. Having experienced much success with its RBS 6 Nations Championship mobile app, which leverages Accenture’s analytics acumen to offer Rugby fans insights and information they can’t find elsewhere, Accenture decided it was time to “experiment with how to engage the sports fan even more,” according to Ben Salama, Managing Director, Accenture Digital, Mobility. Salama and his team set out to create an experience that would deliver real-time analysis and relevant data of games that share curated content via a wearable headset.
Their innovative proof-of-concept will be unveiled the weekend of February 13th during Round 2 of the tournament — England vs. Italy; Accenture will host a hospitality event in which its guests will be treated to food, beverages, and, for some, the loan of a pair of Google Glass. While Salama looks forward to hearing guests’ feedback on whether the test enhances the live sporting event, he is even more enthusiastic about what experiments like these can lead to for both the consumer and enterprise Internet of Things (IoT) market.
“In the end, our guests might say this turned out quite cool, which would be nice. But just think about what this could be extended to: In Rugby today, teams sew GPS trackers into athletes’ shirts so the team can analyze performance. Now imagine a sports fan buying a replica of his favorite team member’s jersey and, with the IoT, they could feel a tackle happen.” Salama believes that trials like these will lead to enhanced fan experiences in addition to new “unconventional revenue streams.”
He describes this proof of concept as “a tiny, tiny step” toward realizing the possibilities presented by wearables and the IoT, pointing out Accenture’s other experiments with wearables: a 2014 partnership with Philips on a proof of concept app to help ALS patients, and an earlier one in which they delivered patient information to surgeons on Google Glass. Salama believes there are many use cases for wearables and the IoT, particularly in four key areas: connected health; connected spaces; connected transport; and industrial applications. “You can effectively have an expert looking over your shoulder whether you are down a mine shaft or on an assembly line. But you can also have access to maintenance manuals, checklists, and all sorts of things that make workers more efficient and more effective.”
Underpinning all of this experimentation and innovation is data. A lot of data. “Data is the Holy Grail. Without it, all of this is irrelevant,” said Salama. “Every single one of these applications is about creating insights and actionable outcomes from the data these devices are collecting—be it a GPS in a football player’s shirt or a sensor on a water pipe.” The analytics make the applications useful. “Without that, it is just rubbish.”
Salama does worry about security in a world in which we are collecting so much data and controlling such a wide range of physical devices digitally. “We are all aware of the security problems with personal information on websites. That is a drop in the bucket compared with the risk we could be exposed to when our entire industrial world is connected—every sensor in an airport, factory or power plant is connected.” As such, Accenture is working with partners to ensure the security of connected devices and data.
Because this category of technology is in its early stages, Salama noted that experiments like those with the 6 Nations Rugby Championship, Phillips and other partners are essential for both exploring the possibilities of wearables and the IoT, but also for tackling some of the risks and challenges in real world settings. “The only way we can help our clients is to have experimented, to have tried and gained real knowledge.”
“Building trust is essential to successfully bringing new products and services to market, and building trust in new business innovations requires that companies demonstrate clear personal and societal benefits, behave with integrity and engage with customers and stakeholders throughout the process.”
Key takeaways include:
Search engines are the most trusted form of media for millennials for breaking news.
Trust in the technology sector overall and cloud computing in particular is down.
Engagement is a multiplier, transparency and third-party validation is integral to innovation. Trusted innovation = [discovery + benefit + integrity] Engagement.
Brand sustainability and be good do good will win.
Trust comes alive through great ideas and activations.
Brands that don’t contribute to greater good lose trust .
In the age of innovation, it is more important than ever to focus on the greater good. Businesses must bring an agility and nimbleness with a multi-stakeholder and global view for discovery that offers a personal and societal benefit. They must embody attributes that build trust in any company, which is accomplished chiefly by having ethical business practices, managing risk, treating employees well and operating responsibly as a good corporate citizen. This will lead to trusted innovation–the kind of innovation that has the best odds of success.
Citing contextual relevance as the main benefit, 63% of marketers plan to spend more on native advertising over the next year according to the ANA’s (Association of National Advertisers) 2015 survey report “Advertising Is Going Native.” Eight in 10 marketers surveyed by the ANA employ native advertising via articles, and roughly six in 10 use native video and photos. Consistent with earlier DCN research among media companies on best practices in native advertising, the ANA found that “Disclosure and transparency are major concerns about native advertising that keep respondents up at night.”
According to the ANA:
Two-thirds of respondents agree that native advertising needs clear disclosure that it is indeed advertising. Only 13 percent feel that such disclosure is not needed.
Both the publisher and the advertiser have a responsibility to ensure disclosure.
Three-fourths of respondents feel that there is an ethical boundary for the advertising industry when it comes to native advertising.
Boasting household-name magazine brands that reach an audience of 100 million American women, 17 owned or operated television stations, and a reach of 70 million monthly unique visitors through its food, family, home, lifestyle and multicultural digital channels, Meredith Corporation has a lot to offer. And now, with a completely redesigned and responsive website, Meredith is better able to convey the breadth of its offerings to potential business partners, advertisers and employees according to Nancy Weber, EVP/Chief Marketing Officer.
While some consumers come to the Meredith Corporate website to get subscription information, in general readers visit individual brand sites directly. That said, the Meredith Corporate website serves a fairly broad B2B audience on its own given the company’s growing media and marketing portfolio, including recently added print, broadcast and digital properties, as well as its expanded digital advertising capabilities.
Thus, Weber said that the first step, when kicking off this project just over a year ago, was to put together an “internal task force of stakeholders,” which included the IT department, human resources, corporate and consumer public relations, communications, and finance, as well as a design team made up of corporate and digital creative, guided by Domani Studios. The team also included representatives from each of Meredith’s business divisions, including its local television stations, Meredith Xcelerated Marketing (MXM) and all of its magazines.
Weber noted that essentials for this redesign included a responsive site that would be optimized for delivery across device and screen size and ease-of-use for the many stakeholders and site contributors within Meredith, adding “We wanted a site that could quickly provide updated information about the company in near real time.” Improving the social component of the site was important as well. To this end, most pages include standard social sharing links and many include a live feed of news and selected social content along the right rail with bold images, quick share functionality, and links out to specific brand’s social feeds.
“Our company has been growing very quickly over the last couple of years—including last week’s announcement of our Shape acquisition—we needed to move to a platform that was really flexible. Obviously, you have to be forward thinking and make sure you are building something not just for today, but for what the company will be doing next year or the year after.”
Given this growth trajectory, Weber is enthusiastic about how the site will better attract potential advertisers and employees. Beyond presenting a clearer (and more attractive) picture of Meredith Corporation, the new site provides greater insights into who is using the site. “One of the things we’re most excited about is that we’ll have a lot more detailed information on who is coming to the site,” risaid Weber. “Our audience is made up of people looking to do business with us, invest with us, and people who want to work here. This new site will be easier to use and more reflective of what a terrific company this is.”
Thank you for your attention. I should be grateful for it, given that the average human attention span is now 8 seconds, 1 second less than a goldfish. I’d say let that sink in, but I may have already lost you.
I came by this remarkable statistic by way of Rhonda Crawford the Vice President of eCommerce at Delta Air Lines, a speaker at Digital Content Next’s annual member Summit, held January 21-23 in Miami, FL. She faces the daunting task of creating a content experience that meets the needs of her audience—travelers—during each phase of their journey. While her content perspective differed from many of the event’s speakers—who hailed from The New York Times, ESPN, Business Insider, NBCUniversal, The Daily Beast, among others—her goldfish statistic hit home with everyone. It also elegantly reflected the theme for DCN’s 2015 Summit: The Attention Economy.
In today’s Attention Economy, as DCN CEO Jason Kint put it in his opening remarks, “we are competing for attention with individuals, institutions, and brands… Media companies used to hope for 30 minutes of focused attention every day or maybe every week. Now, it is more like hoping for a few minutes every day. The goal, of course, is to improve the quality of that time.”
Brendan Spain, US Commercial Director at the FT & Tony Haile, CEO of Charbeat
In an Attention Economy, quality rises to the top—and not just as a measure of traditional media engagement. For example, Tony Haile, CEO of Charbeat said that a number of brand recognition studies report that good creative is one of the best predictors of advertising success. Haile is one of a growing number of advocates of moving away from click metrics to time spent as the way to measure ad impact. Brendan Spain, US Commercial Director at the FT, echoed this sentiment and emphasized that brand marketing must be outcome-oriented and “optimized for attention.” This is in line with his publication’s editorial strategy as well, which focuses on the connection between great content and reader attention.
This theme was consistent throughout the event, whether the speaker was a media or marketing executive. As Julie Fleischer, Director of Media and Consumer Engagement at Kraft put it, “They only call it branded content when it’s lousy. Otherwise, they call it content.” She called for constant innovation in marketing creative and distribution, going so far as to suggest that media companies rethink who they bring to sales meetings and include “the dev guy and the product people. Progress happens when we stop thinking about packaging and build something new.”
Julie Fleischer, Director of Media and Consumer Engagement, Kraft
R “Ray” Wang, author of the forthcoming book Disrupting Digital Business said that “good content rises above all the noise” and urges businesses of any type to focus on “transformational innovation.” The future, according to Wang, is about “the fan experience and mass-personalized journeys at scale for an audience of one.”
Fleischer from Kraft said that all organizations must “Know their customers on a proprietary level,” which leads to content and experiences that truly engage. And content creates a two way street with customers; she finds that “we learn an incredible amount from our consumers based upon their interaction with our content.”
So has the FT, particularly when it comes to ad impact and what Spain calls “the new currency of the web: time.” In its studies of the impact of exposure time on ad recall, the FT found 17% recall in ads viewed for under 5 seconds, and an almost 80% increase in recall for ads seen for over five seconds. According to Spain, they’ve already shifted their internal sales conversations from quantity to quality, focusing on the value of attention. And from what was heard at the 2015 DCN Summit, the larger industry conversation will be moving that direction as well.
/ An inside look at the business of digital content
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