The UK ad market saw steady growth in 2014 largely thanks to digital media’s +15.5% increase over the period, according to Standard Media Index (SMI), which reports on actual spend data from the world’s largest media agencies. After softening in the third quarter of the year as a result of lower post-World Cup advertising budgets, a strong fourth quarter propelled the market to round out the year up +5.9%.
SMI’s report covers television, social media, print media, radio and cinema.
Television fared well in the UK showing growth in all four quarters of 2014. The TV sector’s winner was ITV, which holds 43% of the ad spend share, and grew +9.9% YoY in 2014.
Digital was definitely the darling of 2014. According to SMI:
After showing single-digit growth figures in Q3 for the first time in years, digital ended 2014 with a +16.1% upswing in Q4. It increased +15.5% YoY in 2014.
Within digital, investment in social media advertising grew by +38.4% in 2014, video increased by +34.8% and mobile gained +22%. Direct display advertising declined slightly by-2.3% due to an increasing portion of display advertising being bought programmatically. Programmatic grew +65.4% this year and +67.1% in the final quarter.
A new report released looks at online media can best leverage games and quizzes to attract and engage audiences. Play the News Fun and Games in Digital Journalism was funded by the Tow Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and written by Maxwell Foxman. It describes specific intersections between games, play, and journalism, highlighting strategies, products, and sites of playful activity in the current news landscape with the goal of elucidating this pervasive phenomenon. Projects developed by the likes of The Washington Post and Mother Jones, and playful newsrooms like BuzzFeed, help illustrate some of the techniques journalists use to engage, inform, and educate readers through play. The report also counsels journalists, developers, and editors about the best ways and means of incorporating games and play into the newsroom.
Podcasting is definitely making a comeback. But like so many things digital, podcasting isn’t a one-size-fits-all opportunity. While many individuals and organizations are posting podcasts on their own sites, others opt to participate in podcast networks. The Associated Press is taking the latter route, getting into the resurgent podcasting game while remaining true to its brand: a trusted source of independent news and information licensed by media outlets of all kinds.
When Norm Pattiz, founder and CEO of PodcastOne, approached the AP about licensing their content for podcasts, they were interested. According to Ebony Reed, AP’s director of business development for local markets, the AP is often approached by those who are looking to fill an information need and they are always excited to figure out ways to ways to creatively meet those needs. “We want to grow and continue to be at the forefront of providing information to the world,” said Reed. “When Norm came to us, we were interested to hear what he was doing and how we could work together.”
Pattiz who has a long and storied history in radio syndication (notably as the founder of Westwood One) admits that he’s always been a big believer in news and knows that advertisers are too. He founded his latest venture in February, 2013 when he noticed that news had been in decline on broadcast radio and wanted to find a way to incorporate it into his content mix (PodcastOne hosts approximately 200 podcasts, including those by Adam Carolla, Steve Austin and Jillian Michaels.) The trick, of course, was that podcasting is an on-demand medium, while news is up-to-the-minute content. Pattiz decided to leverage PodcastOne’s dynamic ad insertion technology to solve this problem. “With dynamic insertion, you can insert the ad regardless of when a podcast is downloaded. So I thought, ‘why couldn’t we do the same thing to provide the most up-to- date newscast for consumers?’” Problem solved. (And an opportunity created.)
While this model presents a content-licensing deal (with revenue sharing) for the AP, Reed said that it was also appealing to be a part of the PodcastOne effort particularly because of Norm’s involvement and his innovative broadcast approaches. ”We are always looking for ways to help with new digital products and this is a great way to reinforce the brand by being affiliated with this new and exciting venture.”
Pattiz licenses the AP’s audio clips service which offers hundreds of cuts each day, including sound bites, correspondent reports, news headlines, wraps and more. The AP’s 60-second news headlines are featured at the end of PodcastOne’s diverse podcasts as “AP Up-To-The-Minute Newscasts.” The goal is to integrate news into the PodCast one content, while also creating additional advertising inventory to sell in the post roll and extending listener engagement beyond the formal end of the podcast episodes.
While Reed says the AP didn’t set out to be in the podcast business, she emphasizes that “The AP tries to stay on the cutting edge of digital and we are exploring a wide range of different initiatives. We are open to experimentation and pushing to be a part of new ventures and opportunities.” Ultimately, though, while the digital team at AP is focused on finding new channels for its content and creative ways to increase its footprint, the AP isn’t looking to build its own podcast network. “You read us in newspapers, you hear us on TV but we don’t own a newspaper and we don’t own a television network.” With the PodcastOne partnership, the AP continues its long tradition of offering its information through a wide range of outlets and meeting the information needs of its partners and consumers alike.
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
“Going Viral” is a phrase often bandied about in the world of media today. Rarely is it construed as a bad thing. However, in a paper funded by The Tow Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Craig Sliverman examines the role of news websites in filtering (or failing to filter) erroneous information that spreads like wildfire in social media. In his paper “Lies, Damn Lies, and Viral Content How News Websites Spread (And Debunk) Online Rumors, Unverified Claims, and Misinformation,” Silverman writes:
News organizations are meant to play a critical role in the dissemination of quality, accurate information in society. This has become more challenging with the onslaught of hoaxes, misinformation, and other forms of inaccurate content that flow constantly over digital platforms.
Journalists today have an imperative—and an opportunity—to sift through the mass of content being created and shared in order to separate true from false, and to help the truth to spread.
Unfortunately, as this paper details, that isn’t the current reality of how news organizations cover unverified claims, online rumors, and viral content. Lies spread much farther than the truth, and news organizations play a powerful role in making this happen.
…There are also widely used practices in online news that are misleading and confusing to the public. These practices reflect short-term thinking that ultimately fails to deliver the full value of a piece of emerging news.
He goes on to offer key findings about common bad practices as well as exploring in depth many examples of viral content and the role that the news media played in spreading the “bad news.”
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
Trust remains the largest single obstacle to growth in the mobile content and commerce industry, according to the 2015 MEF Global Consumer Trust Report. The third annual study, supported by AVG Technologies N.V. analyzes data from 15,000 mobile media users in 15 countries across five continents. The Global Consumer Trust Report explores trust, privacy, transparency and security to identify their impact on mobile consumers in areas from purchasing a new device to downloading apps or paying for goods and services.
Some key takeaways include:
49% of all consumers surveyed say a lack of trust limits the amount of apps they download, compared to 37% last year.
40% of respondents indicated that a lack of trust is the number one factor that prevents them from downloading items more often.
72% of mobile consumers are not happy sharing personal data such as location or contact details when using an app.
34% say trust prevents them from buying more goods and services using their mobile device.
Alongside this growing mistrust, the study also revealed an increase in resistance to sharing personal information such as location, address book details or health records, with apps.
According to the findings:
72% of mobile users said that they are not happy sharing such information and 39% say that they never to do so.
30% of respondents said that improving the way apps communicate about the data they collect would foster greater trust in the mobile platforms.
63% said that they considered transparency important or extremely important (compared to 49% last year).
Andrew Bud, MEF Global Chair, said that “Trust is the most important asset of any business, and consumer confidence must underpin the mobile ecosystem. The sustainability of the mobile industry depends on it. As mobile devices and services evolve, consumers will hold business ever more accountable … Consumer trust must be earned by consistently applying high levels of transparency, security and privacy to every mobile interaction.”
/ An inside look at the business of digital content
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