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Industry-Research | Perspectives

Maybe the internet hasn’t killed our attention spans after all

Remember that study from last year that claimed computers and the internet had transformed human attention span to roughly the equivalent of a goldfish — you’ll be forgiven if you’ve forgotten because after all the internet supposedly has turned your brain to mush. However, a new Pew study on long articles has found we might have longer attention spans than the goldfish study would indicate. (Though actually, studies have shown that the goldfish may have been getting the short end of the attention span myth as well.)

Dueling studies aside, the Pew research team took a long look at people’s smartphone reading habits. Conventional wisdom suggests that we want to just dip in and out on our phones: We might review headlines, but we won’t do much more.

U.S. public show signs of engaging with long-form articles on cellphonesIn fact, the Pew study found the opposite is true. We spend almost twice the amount of time reading long articles — 123 seconds for long form versus 57 for short — and long and short articles get almost the same number of visitors. (For the purpose of the study Pew defined long form as over a 1000 words and short form as 101-999 words. And lest you question the methodology, Pew clearly put in the work.)

“All told, Center researchers spent months digging deeply into the details of 117 million anonymized, complete cellphone interactions with 74,840 articles from 30 news websites in the month of September 2015,” according to the research organization

My gut response to these findings would be, Duh! Of course people spend more time on longer articles than shorter ones — because they’re longer. But the fact we are reading these long articles on our smartphones at all is news in itself because it flies in the face of our preconceived notions of how we interact with content on our phones.

Julia Beizer, who is director of product at The Washington Post told Digital Content Next in a recent article, There‘s more than one way to succeed at digital that research suggests our smartphone usage might vary more than we believe.

“One of the early misplaced assumptions around mobile was that mobile users are standing in line waiting for coffee. A lot of people are doing that, but a lot of people are on their couches at home too. Research shows upwards of 70 percent are at home,” she said.

We are also on long flights and commuter trains and other places where we are captive and have a lot of time to kill with our phones in our hands. It makes sense that we would be using our phones — which are getting bigger and higher resolution screens — to do more reading.

But a single study doesn’t necessarily prove anything, even one as comprehensive as this one appears to be. That said, there are plenty of long form content initiatives that seem to be capturing their share of attention.

Last year the Huffington Post without the benefit of this study took a leap of faith and launched Highline, a long-form article site designed to let writers and readers dig into a story instead of getting a short, high-level view. A year later, while the editors aren’t sharing their numbers, they’re still around and they claim it’s been a huge success and the articles on Highline are among the most read on the Huffington Post site. It suggests that when you produce quality work people will read the articles, no matter how long they might be or on what device they might be reading them.

What this all means is the attention studies could be wrong or at least misguided. Certainly, we lack patience. We won‘t wait around if your content is taking too long to load, but it is important not to confuse that lack of patience (or the expectation of a good mobile experience) for short attention spans.

This is a big lesson for digital content creators, whether writing an article, creating content marketing pieces or writing website copy. If you write good stuff, you can keep people engaged regardless of the length. And given that time spent is increasingly being touted as the true measure of engagement, understanding the value of long form content is essential.

There‘s tons of other data in the Pew study including the impact of social media to drive traffic, the topics people like most (crime is big), the days and times we are more likely to engage with content and so much more. It’s worth digging into, but if your only take-away is that we will read an article whatever the length if it’s good enough, that’s more than enough.

Perspectives Image
Perspectives

DCN’s recommended reading: week of May 26, 2016

Our recommended reads from around the web:

 

Innovation

Time Inc. creating INSTANT mobile experience to cover digital celebrities

Last week at the NewFronts, Time Inc. announced the upcoming launch of INSTANT, a mobile-first, all-video platform featuring content about the lives and projects of digital celebrities as well as content created by digital celebrities exclusively for INSTANT. The new brand will deliver news, features and exclusives about and by “the new famous,” the digital artists of YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, YouNow, Vine and other influential emerging platforms.

Significantly, the content will be mobile-centric, to reflect the dominance of mobile in the content consumption habits of INSTANT’s target audience. Content will be delivered as a fluid video stream that facilitates audience engagement. Slated for launch early this summer, INSTANT is being designed to offer a native app-like experience directly in the mobile browser.

We caught up with Kirstin Benson, INSTANT’s editorial director, to learn a bit more about the origins of the project and her plans for INSTANT.

BensonKirstincrop.
Kirstin Benson, Editorial Director, INSTANT

Describe the origins of INSTANT:
The seeds for INSTANT were planted long before I joined the company. Word on the street is that the concept was born last summer during a strategy meeting after an executive pointed out that there was no outlet covering digital artists the way People and EW cover traditional Hollywood stars and entertainment.

Was this launch motivated by the behavior of your digital audience? Advertiser driven? Recognition of larger industry trends?
There were a number of factors that motivated us to launch INSTANT, including trends with users and advertisers. But, most importantly, we saw an opportunity to be the first media outlet dedicated to a group of people – digital artists – who play an increasingly important role in our audiences’ lives but are massively under-covered in the media. Until now, there has been a gap in the space.

Why do this as a multi-brand initiative rather than leverage one particular brand’s strength?
There is no media company better positioned to launch a platform like INSTANT than Time Inc. From TIME came People, from People came InStyle and Entertainment Weekly…and now, People and Entertainment Weekly are joining forces to launch INSTANT. Just like People and Entertainment Weekly curate the best in entertainment, human interest, and pop culture, INSTANT will tell its audience who and what to care about in the vast and frenzied digital world. Thus, we wanted to leverage both of the brands for INSTANT’s launch.

Given that you’ve opted for a 100% native and branded ad offering, could you describe what will the advertising experience be like?
All advertising on INSTANT will be presented through native and branded videos that play in-feed. In the absence of banner ads, pre-roll, and pop ups, the experience will seem fluid and seamless for our audience.

This native ad content will be created in house by the INSTANT team to ensure a consistent voice and aesthetic across content experiences, both branded and editorial so that it meets our audience’s expectation of great content experiences. All ad content on INSTANT will follow Time Inc.’s well defined guidelines for native and branded content and its labeling.

Why the focus on mobile and video for INSTANT?
Our goal with INSTANT is to create content that our audience craves (read: video) and deliver it to them in their native environments – mobile web and social media. And the statistics support this logic: Video is taking over the web and will account for 80% of web traffic by 2019. Meanwhile, 78% of teens check their phones hourly and a third of them say they “feel addicted” to their devices. It was a no brainer to make INSTANT an all video, mobile-first platform.

Why have you opted to make INSTANT browser-based rather than develop an app?
From an audience development and retention standpoint, it made more sense to make INSTANT browser-based rather than an app. We want INSTANT to be as accessible and as native to our audience as possible – and forcing them to download, register, and open an app does the exact opposite of that. That said, the INSTANT experience feels very app-like, despite being browser-based, so it delivers the best of both.

Innovation

6 Big trends from the NewFronts (hint: may include video)

The NewFronts started out as a sideshow (even a joke to some) compared to the TV Upfronts. But it’s no longer in the shadows, as everyone from the New York Times, Bloomberg, CNN and BuzzFeed stole the spotlight at this year’s NewFronts in New York. This series of events provides a forum for digital to court advertisers in an increasingly competitive market.

With two-thirds of U.S. agency and marketing professionals reporting increased investments toward desktop and mobile video, video — whether original series, virtual reality or live-streaming — naturally took center stage at this year’s event. Alongside new metrics for measuring advertising also came reflections about what exactly constitutes an advertisement now, as well as more of a natural acceptance, articulated some time ago, that the Internet indeed is becoming the new television.

Here’s a rundown of the most important trends from this year’s showcase, and some caveats:

1. Virtual Reality is Everywhere
Following the 360-degree viewing capabilities the name implies, virtual reality is seemingly all around us now as more media outlets jump into the fray. As Adage reported, publishers “are bringing virtual reality to almost every pitch.” Some indicators: National Geographic, AOL and Refinery29 are all launching VR studios. Conde Nast too is producing a VR series. The Economist revealed plans for a second year producing virtual reality documentaries. Time Inc. also announced a virtual reality app will be included around its Life brand, which will encompass publications such as Time, People, EW and Sports Illustrated. In addition, Hulu and Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, announced a partnership to curate virtual reality concert experiences to be available on Hulu’s VR app. The New York Times, meanwhile, announced its continued push toward VR on both the advertising and the editorial front.

Caveat: While virtual reality might be in the air, it might not have a big enough installed base or active user base yet.

2. Original Video Series Are Hot
Alongside publishers bringing VR to almost every pitch was their announcements of original video series. Playboy, the New York Times, and The Economist announced new original video programming. Yahoo announced it was “doubling down” on its video focus and constraining it to four verticals — news, sports, finance and lifestyle. WebMD also announced it was bulking up on its lifestyle programming, and Vice unveiled plans to create up to 20 TV channels around the world. Furthermore, among other video-based initiatives, Vox revealed it’s creating a standalone studio to create content for Snapchat, as Poynter’s Benjamin Mullin reported.

Caveat: There are so many original video series that no one has time to watch them all.

3. Technology & Metrics Matter
Major endeavors in the world of video also means that new metrics must emerge to keep up with industry demands. Mashable, for example, announced two additions to its Velocity technology suite. “Joining the Velocity Dashboard, which uses natural language processing to mine for topics about to go viral, is Velocity CMS, which is used to create competitive stories on those topics, and Velocity Kg, which will optimize content for multi-platform sharing,” as Troy Dreier of StreamingMedia wrote. Hulu is building interactive ads specifically for connected TVs, and is “working with Nielsen to enable the measurement of ads through over-the-top video delivery devices such as Roku, PlayStation, Xbox and Apple TV,”  AdAge’s Jeanine Poggi’s reported. Yahoo also announced expanded video metrics through a partnership with the advertising analytics platform Moat to measure viewability and and metrics beyond viewability. YouTube, meanwhile, announced “Breakout Videos” through its Google Preferred product, to help find the next viral hit. It’ll allow brands to automatically buy ads on these soon-to-be trending videos.

Caveat: Technology is cool, but often it’s the tech companies who can build better technology than publishers.

4. Live-streaming Becoming Routine
It goes without saying that live-streaming is becoming bigger than ever. Facebook, for example, revealed it will create a live-streamed morning show, and is partnering with Activision Blizzard, a videogame giant, to offer live e-Sports coverage on the platform. Among Time’s new video offerings is a streaming video network geared toward cord-cutters. YouTube and Hulu are also both launching live TV offerings.

Caveat: Same as VR: There might be more live-streaming show ideas than people who want to watch all those live streams.

5. Internet is the New TV
We’ve been hearing this for some time, but it seems that the Internet is truly becoming modern-day television. National Geographic, long a fixture on TV, is now putting its efforts toward Instagram and other digital platforms. While Vox is backing a new television show, tellingly, more hype surrounds its pivot toward content creation on Snapchat Discover. Ellen DeGeneres has long been known for her television talk show, and now she’s starting her own digital network. Telenovelas are now coming to the digital world — specifically targeting Millennials — thanks to a joint effort by Telemundo and BuzzFeed. The digital news company Newsy is also trying to attract Millennial eyes with online programming and advertising meant for a generation not interested in broadcast.

Caveat: While Millennials make up a large segment of cord-cutters and “cord-nevers,” pay TV continues to rebound, and Comcast even added subscribers in the last quarter.

6. Dizzying Numbers
None of the investment toward video and its related endeavors make sense unless companies have the data and metrics to back up their ambitions. BuzzFeed reported it now gets more than 7 billion content views a month (compared to 2.8 billion monthly views a year ago). And only a quarter of BuzzFeed content is consumed on its actual website, underscoring the importance of its social and other platform strategies. The entertainment and trend publisher PopSugar, meanwhile, reported that its video views on Facebook have jumped 452 percent since it first debuted its Facebook show, PopSugar Rush, a year ago. Hulu revealed that 70 percent of its viewing happens in a living room environment, reinforcing the trend of digital being the new TV. And Bloomberg Media also announced it has doubled its video streams since last year, as well as gained a 25 percent increase in mobile users. The company now attracts 20 million video views a month.

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, had its own impressive statistics: “The U.K.-based publisher is now posting 650 videos a day, which has resulted in a 516 percent jump in views in the past year. It’s getting 383 million monthly video views, 12 million video views per day, and claims an 80 percent completion and viewability rate,” Adweek’s Christopher Heine wrote.

Caveat: Some metrics are more valuable than others. Video views on Facebook have been maligned as too generous, counting after only 3 seconds. And huge numbers of eyeballs don’t always equate to huge income.

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Perspectives

DCN’s recommended reading: week of May 19, 2016

Our recommended reads from around the web:

Innovation | Revenue

Salon’s fearless approach to innovating on editorial, video and ad content

Founded in 1995, Salon is one of the oldest online publications. But it’s far from “old school” thanks to an aggressive and innovative approach to content creation, “co-creation, and sponsored advertising spearheaded by Cindy Jeffers, who took the helm as Salon Media Group, Inc.’s CEO and CTO in 2012. Jeffers, who was inducted into min Online’s Digital Hall of Fame last May, is often credited leading a turnaround for the business — one that has allowed Salon to experience unprecedented growth in traffic and ‘buzz’.

But the real news is the increase in audience engagement thanks to edgy and exciting content (and the launch of new content sections such as Tech and Sustainability), proactive social media campaigns and sponsored-content advertising programs that harness tech and video for effective and emotive storytelling. Peggy Anne Salz, chief analyst and content strategist at MobileGroove, caught up with Jeffers to discuss how a strategy sharply focused on social and mobile has allowed Salon to cultivate new audiences and ensure the continued growth of its native advertising initiatives.

You are CEO and CTO. How does having these responsibilities shape your mission for your company?

For us at Salon it’s all about driving the national conversation with fearless, strong, independent voices. It’s also about being platform-agnostic so that we can share those voices and the conversation from platform to platform. The fearlessness, the analysis, and the points of view that we express has to happen on any platform that we’re on. So, technologies matter a lot, but the focus is to get the voices out there on the platforms that matter most to our audience. It’s about the fearlessness of what we do and bringing that to every platform.

The technology backbone is the most critical piece of that. Our API allows us to be platform agnostic and spread the content that we build — whether it’s video, articles or social — onto any number of platforms.

You have been credited with the turnaround at Salon.com — but what measures really get the credit for this transformation?

I was brought on a little over four years ago and since then we’ve really been focused on a couple of key areas: First, we’ve broadened our editorial coverage, and we’ve really pushed into social and mobile in order to expand our reach and reach new audiences. Each of these platforms have very different demographics. We also launched video just last summer as a way to broaden out into more visual story telling. On the advertising side, we pivoted in 2012 to really focus on custom integrations and, more recently, storytelling through video.

salonwatchOn the product side, our big focus has been mobile. Right now 60% of our audience is accessing our content using mobile. At first had some catching up to do since we didn’t have a mobile browser experience or offer a mobile app in 2012, but that has changed with the launch if an iPhone app, an Android app and then apps for tablet devices. In April, we launched an app for the Apple Watch, one that was timed to day one of the Apple Watch. The focus has been to mobilize and optimize the main site for a mobile-focused experience.

With one in three consumers watch video on their mobile devices, it’s clear that mobile video is eating the world . You are not only using it to enhance your editorial content; you have inserted video into sponsored-content, working with advertisers using video in their storytelling. What is the attraction of video?

We’ve been really excited about video. We launched video on the site in 2012 with third-party video providers such as AOL On. At first, we wanted to get our feet wet and see how the audience would respond. Since then we’ve seen more uptake and more interest in the third-party videos on the site. Based on this positive outcome we decided last year to make it a priority, so we hired video editors and also established a video platform on the site. It’s been amazing to watch the editorial team explore video and see what Salon can build and become on this new platform.

A big part of this is storytelling, and at Salon the process is very collaborative. In fact, Matthew Sussberg, VP of sales at Salon Media Group, is quoted as saying that “when it is done well, native advertising is in the site’s overall editorial voice so that it sounds authentic.” How is that approach progressing and what’s next?

Visual storytelling in general is very popular with our audience and we want to be telling stories that are accessible to them and meet them where they are. For over 20 years, Salon has been home to a lot of amazing writers, but that doesn’t limit us to one style of content or one platform. It’s why we’ve been pushing out into video and mobile — and why we’re also seeing the majority of our audience is there. Looking at interactive and VR [Virtual Reality] I think that there’s a lot more room to grow our brand. For now, video is one of a set of tools we’re exploring to deepen visual storytelling.

One of reasons for the super-sharp focus on video and mobile is because the vast majority of your audience is already consuming and enjoying content on these platforms. What else can you tell me about your audience?

As I said, we’ve focused the last few years on broadening out the demographic — and this is definitely part of our push into new storytelling techniques, new social platforms and new content verticals. And we have been broadening out the mix on the home page as well. Today we have long-form opinion and analysis, but we also are filing timely content that is capturing what is moving through the news at that moment.

It’s the content that appeals to our broad and growing demographic. Certainly, one consistent characteristic across all of the age groups that we serve is that they’re a highly educated group. Having a very smart audience which presents us with a lot of good challenges. It means the content has to engage and empower our audience — and everything we do has to make that conversation smarter. It also means our advertising has to be a lot smarter than what you might find elsewhere. The advertising needs to meet them [the audience] where they are, and it also needs to have a level of sophistication that will actually pull them in. Finally, our audience also consists of influencers across culture, technology and politics.

And this is also why sponsored-content creation is more like ‘co-creation’. Please elaborate on the process since there have been some notable outcomes — I’m thinking here about the campaign when Salon partnered with fashion brand Cole Haan a few years back for its 85th anniversary and the launch of its “Born in 1928” campaign. It was a multimedia campaign with a very effective and engaging social element…

There are certain campaigns that we build in-house. For this we have a creative team that can build custom videos for advertisers and this is a separate creative team from our editorial staff. We also build interactive content. In the fall we did two interactive pieces with Hulu: one was an interactive advent calendar and the other was a crossword puzzle for Seinfeld. Both of those were interactive pieces that lived on the site we created in-house. We also with Cadillac last year on a series to spotlight  creative visionaries across the various creative fields. Another was storytelling and video with MOMA [the Museum of Modern Art] looking at the impact of the Internet of Things on the cultural sector.

So those are some examples where it’s not our editorial team that is creating the content. Instead, it’s a collaboration with a team that really understands our editorial team’s sensibilities and how they relate to the audience. The outcome is content that can live on the site and really match the voice of the site.

You have a highly educated audience and that is what drives your content — not to mention a fearless approach to journalism. But it is also the driver on the ad side of your business, meaning sponsored advertising has to be quite sophisticated. How do you keep the balance between content and content marketing?

Given our demographic and just how smart they are, we are not trying to put anything past them. We are absolutely maintaining a church-state divide here. We make sure to the advertisement label accompanies all of the sponsored content and native advertising content that appears on the site.

That said, we also work closely with advertisers to bring the highest quality content that we can to the site — content that allows us to meet our users’ interest while also meeting the advertiser interest. From our perspective, unless the content is quality content, it’s not going to well anyway, so it’s important to produce content our users appreciate and marketing pieces that can, therefore, also go viral because of that appeal.

And since you’ve been at Salon social is baked into your strategy…

Overall, social is very much a part of what we think of as our ‘other homepage’. We don’t think of Salon as just Salon.com. We think of Salon as existing as a brand on many platforms including social. So, posting to our social media pages is just as important to us as getting our content out onto our homepage. Our editorial team is on their social accounts and very active 24/7 on those social accounts promoting the editorial content. Occasionally we work with advertisers that wants to see some of their content to go through that social feed. As long as the content is something that editorial signs off on, then they do promote it. But, otherwise, we determine other channels that it can go out on.

And then there is video to amplify this impact. How does one set the stage for the other and what results can you share?

We’ve been experimenting with video and with uploading videos directly to Facebook, and our Facebook videos have done really well. Two that stand out because they each counted over 10 million views is a rap video that our editorial team made as a mash-up of Palin’s speech with Trump in January and another was a mash-up style video that they did with Trump and teens based on part of The Big Lebowski. These were the first really big viral videos that we had on Facebook. We definitely see a lot more reach through our videos than we had with our written content, so we’re excited about the potential to bring people back to our platform through viral video.

So, in a way, video is big part of what will allow you — and your content — to rise above the noise?

 Yes, absolutely. We see video as a big opportunity and an area for growth. Mark Zuckerberg recently said he’s obsessed with live-streaming. I think that we’re starting to see even the social media platforms that haven’t historically had a big focus on video are shifting and starting to explore it. After all, so much video is consumed on their platforms that they really can’t look away from it. It’s the way that people are consuming content.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Perspectives | Policy

Trust, transparency and the New York Yankees

According a recent report in the New York Times, the majority of new online advertising revenue—85%—will go to two companies: Google and Facebook. While these companies have consumer-facing services, the reason they dominate the digital advertising ecosystem is because of the technology and algorithms they employ as third parties. Third parties collect data about consumers yet have no direct relationship with them. In addition, those people usually have no idea that their data is being collected.

When you consider that direct response ads represent nearly two thirds of digital advertising and these companies only get paid when consumers click on ads it’s no wonder we see the digital experience dominated by annoying, intrusive, and crappy ads.

And how are consumers reacting to this situation? As TRUSTe has noted, clearing cookies is still the primary method employed by consumers to protect their privacy. However, clearing cookies has detrimental effects to the user experience such as requiring consumers to log in every time they revisit a site which then makes the stalking, creepy ads come back even more. Yet they still clear cookies because it’s one of the main tools they know about to prevent being tracked. In this dysfunctional dynamic, big data is being used to drive down costs of serving targeted ads rather than drive up relevance to the consumer.

A few years ago, consumers started activating their Do Not Track (DNT) signals in an effort to express a choice, even though there was no industry standard yet. As Doc Searls plotted out, the number of DNT signals declined at the same time that the number of consumers with ad blockers started climbing. It’s not a coincidence – consumers have been looking for easy ways to express choice. If this continues, publishers won’t be able to fund quality content like this piece about the early season slide of the Yankees.

It’s interesting that our members are having some success asking consumers to turn off their ad blockers in order to access the content they love. The conversation goes something like this:

Website owner: Hi loyal reader, would you pretty please turn off your ad blocker or whitelist this site? We need advertising revenue to pay for quality journalism.

About 40% of consumers: Sure! I love you guys.

The remaining 60% of consumers: Meh. I’m gonna go look elsewhere for that story about Trump. I really, really hate those annoying ads on those other crappy sites I visit.

My take on this is that consumers understand premium experiences and are willing to view advertising in exchange. But, the value proposition gets out of whack when there’s no transparency for the consumer and the experience is poor.

Meanwhile, advertisers aren’t happy either. As the ANA pointed out, $7.2 billion was lost to fraud last year. They’ve been paying for ads that aren’t even viewable. There are also huge concerns about the inability to fully document where all of their digital advertising dollars are going. In short, there’s a lack of transparency and trust for advertisers. Sound familiar?

So, how does our industry find its footing again? We’ve got to be more clear with consumers about the value proposition and provide them with easy ways to express choice over ubiquitous data collection. By putting consumers first, we also force the issue on ad fraud, viewability and accountability. Every company involved in the digital advertising supply chain would have to justify how it’s adding to the overall value proposition. They would need to “put in more value” than they “take out” – the best way to build trust.

The FCC recently proposed privacy rules for broadband providers that aim to give consumers more control. The problem is that this only applies to ISPs – not all of the other entities that relentlessly track consumers around the web. And, government regulation often becomes outdated very quickly – market solutions or real industry self-regulation are far more able to adapt to new business models and practices. Maybe the FCC proceeding will lead to a new conversation within industry.

With the growing market of Internet of Things, immersive experiences and connected world we live in, the strains on trust between advertisers, consumers and publishers are only going to get worse. We need to find the right balance of providing consumers with transparency and real choices. Consumers are looking for a better experience. Advertisers are demanding fairness. And, I would like to live in a world where I can read all about how badly the Yankees are playing.

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Perspectives

DCN’s recommended reading: week of May 12, 2016

Our recommended reads from around the web:

Perspectives

Three takeaways from DCN’s “Content Everywhere” event

According to our latest research, engagement with known brands is boosted when consumers encounter them on favored social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. At DCN’s most recent member’s-only event, Content Everywhere held May 10th in New York, Andrew Hare, Senior Director, Research and Strategy at Magid (which partnered with DCN on the study) previewed the 2016 DCN Content Distribution Impact Research report. The good news is that, thus far, social is additive, not cannibalistic of consumers’ content consumption on brand sites and aps. While Hare alluded to an eventual tipping point—in which consumer attention reaches maximum overload—he said that today, distributing content via social channels builds traffic through brand discovery.

However, as DCN CEO Jason Kint pointed out in his opening remarks “attention is the scarce resource that matters long term.”. So media brands must approach social wisely in order to receive fair value for their content in social contexts. And, with both the promise and challenges in mind, a wide range of speakers from DCN member companies, as well as invited industry guests, discussed topics ranging from staffing and resource allocation for social media, to deep dives into strategies for specific platforms, and measuring the impact of social distribution.

Here are 3 key takeaways from this closed-door event:

1. Social is everybody’s job: Not surprisingly, a recurring theme throughout the day was the vast audience that media brands can reach via social platforms. Even those with misgivings about brand-recognition within social settings recognize that social distribution must be part of the mix. Several speakers noted that it is ideal for all staff members to be active on social and understand how to communicate with audiences, Tom Fishman, SVP of Audience Growth & Engagement at MTV cautioned that “hiring a social team can be easier than training an existing team on social. “

And looking for the applicants with the highest follower counts is not the way to go about hiring, according toVox Director of Programming Allison Rockey who noted these individuals are terrific at building their personal brand, but may not be the best at building yours. In fact, Rockey suggests starting with a 140-character cover letter and finding people who genuinely love your brand.

That said, Rockey (and others) pointed out that there are platforms such as Snapchat that require specific skill-sets. This was reinforced by Amy Lawless, the VP Digital Strategy & Planning at Scripps Networks, which boasts a 10 person Snapchat team that produces 14 pieces of content for the platform daily. While the New York Times has tested platform-specific staffers, they’ve found that having photo editors and headline writers who are adept at social is more effective, according to Jason Sylva, Executive Director of Digital Media. The Times and others like to see staffers with social media expertise working with writers and editors to help them hone their skills so that a broader cross-section of staff become adept at creating content for different platforms.

2. Engage (and re-engage): Because there’s currently no easy way to get a clear view of measurement across the many social platforms publishers must carefully consider metrics when it comes to social content distribution.Keith Hernandez, President at Slate, says it is essential to analyze the performance of specific content in order to optimize for specific platforms and continue to look at how people interact with the content over time so that you can deliver sequential experiences that deepen engagement. With branded content specifically, Hernandez says that Slate has been able to build “audience pools” in social which are much more likely to be interested in specific types of information.

Targeting has also been a particular strength of social for Atlas Obscura, according to CEO David Plotz. In their case, using the brand’s highly-visual content to entice geo-targeted individuals to attend live events has been “a powerful indicator and driver of brand-affinity.”

Roker Media has focused its efforts on live streaming, which CEO Ron Pruett describes as “the missing link between social and television.” Given his background in commerce, Pruett says he also evaluates content based on actions and with live “you get instantaneous feedback.”

3. Build audience affinity: While reaching massive audiences is the primary driver of media brands’ social content distribution efforts, click-throughs and page-views do not tell the whole story. Though Plotz believes that social played a large part in growing his audience sevenfold in the past year, the company’s ability to drive audiences to its live events provides a context in which Atlas Obscura becomes indelibly branded.

Lawless says that Snapchat has provided Scripps Networks with an opportunity “to develop a relationship and brand affinity with younger viewers so that as they age up, they have affinity with us.”  Jonathan Meyers, Senior Vice President, Strategy & Operations at CNBC Digital says that social has offered a context in which his brand can connect with younger audiences as well. “Millennials are something like three times as likely to start a business” so he focuses evening content for social on entrepreneurship.

At Harvard Business Review, they are always thinking about the customer journey, according to Katherine Bell, Editor of HBR.org. “Use social to build the habits and trust. Then, at that moment when they are in real trouble at work, they’ll think of you… and you can save the day and earn their loyalty forever.”

Universally, the speakers and the attendees from DCN member companies that participated in the Content Everywhere member day are all embracing social platforms with a careful eye towards maintaining brand value and strategic resource allocation. As new platforms emerge, publishers are focusing on lessons learned from ongoing experimentation to make social work for audience building, brand affinity and—of course—revenue.

Innovation | Perspectives

What artificial intelligence can do for journalists and newsrooms

Artificial intelligence can help journalists automatically adapt stories to the
personalities, moods and locations of their readers.

The news and information ecosystem is in the midst of change — again.

Mobile-first consumption is on the rise, smart homes are becoming mainstream and connected cars will soon take over the roads of major cities around the world.

Smart devices will require “smart content”. It’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence becomes the backbone of the media industry of the future.

A change in how we interact with news
Today, most people find information via search or social. And while these two channels are radically different in functionality, they have one thing in common — any given article surfaced through these platforms is exactly the same for everyone in the world.

For example, The New York Times article, “Health Officials Split Over Advice on Pregnancy in Zika Areas,” reads the same to me, a 20-something male living in New York, and for an expecting mother in her mid-30s residing in Rio de Janeiro.

Content today is one size fits all. And why wouldn’t it be?  A journalist writes a story hoping to reach as many people as possible.

Search and social help tailor information choices to individuals to a degree, but Google, Facebook and Twitter know that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the equation. That’s why, since 2013, these companies have been investing substantial resources into the space and acquiring startups.

Figure1

In Facebook Messenger, for example, several news organization such as CNN and The Wall Street Journal are already using bots and some level of automation to deliver news through the platform.

Beyond automation: What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence understands the environment it operates in and performs certain actions as a result of it. AI seeks to learn what its users want and how they want it.

In the specific case of news media, articles can be processed through algorithms that analyze readers’ locations, social media posts and other publicly available data. They can then be served content tailored to their personality, mood and social economic status, among other things.

AI allows journalists and media companies to create infinite versions of an article, resulting in increasingly relevant information that speaks directly to individuals — ultimately forming a more engaged audience.

Examples of artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation in content creation
Crystal is a program that adapts emails you write to the personality of recipients. For example, if you’re sending a note to a more laid-back person, the software suggests a change in tone from a formal introduction such as “Dear John” to a more colloquial “Hi” or “Hey.”

Figure2Crystal uses previous emails to that recipient as well as their social media posts to recommend certain language, tone and sentiment. It’s easy to see how this approach can be adapted for a newsroom –in fact, it can build off of pioneering efforts already underway such as automated earnings reports by The Associated Press.

Artificial intelligence can even localize stories. If you live in California, you might not read a story entitled “Texas residents poisoned by toxic waste plant for years.” But if the story included an automated note highlighting a similar past incident in your city, you would probably be more inclined to look at it.

The future of journalism powered by artificial intelligence
Beyond tailoring content to users, AI can help journalists do more investigative work by analyzing massive sets of data and pointing to relationships not easily visible to even the most experienced reporter.

While this technology can improve efficiencies in newsrooms, though, it should work in tandem with journalists, not replace them. Going forward, the challenge will be to make sure we continue to adhere to our standards and ethics.

What will the future of news will look like when it becomes powered by AI? We will soon find out.

I’m the Strategy Manager for The Associated Press and fellow at Columbia Journalism School. I write about media, storytelling and innovation. Let’s connect. (@fpmarconi)

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Perspectives

DCN’s recommended reading: week of May 5, 2016

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Perspectives

How far can the video push go?

Seems like everyone wants video these days. Facebook is paying publishers and celebrities to be part of Facebook Live, BuzzFeed is handing out two-year contracts to top video creators, and Twitter has had to pay its Vine creators to keep them happy. Not to mention Mashable recently laying off staff while pivoting more strongly into video.

But while the video gold rush continues, will there be enough gold to go around? Will all these bets pay off? While video advertising continues to grow—and pay more than ads around text—not all video content is created equally. And not all of it will pay the bills for quality video productions.

Live-streaming craze
Live-streaming video has gone through a number of boomlets, from the Ustream days to Periscope and on to the recent push for Facebook Live. The promise is that anyone can point and shoot live video from their bedroom, or out at a protest, or out in the field from a reporter. Following in the footsteps of Meerkat and Periscope, Facebooks Live is bringing live-streaming to its 1.2 billion users.

“Live is like having a TV camera in your pocket. Anyone with a phone now has the power to broadcast to anyone in the world,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook page. “This is a big shift in how we communicate, and it’s going to create new opportunities for people to come together.”

To give the service a boost, Facebook has been paying influential celebrities and media properties like the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Vox, and food and travel publisher Tastemade to use Facebook Live. BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz reports the social media giant has offered publishers “around $250,000 for 20 posts per month over a three-month period” and “six-figure checks to celebrities who agree to use its live-streaming product.” Twitter also recently announced that it will spend millions to stream 10 NFL games during the 2016 season, and Snapchat has also scored a deal with NBC to showcase highlights from the 2016 Olympics on its platform. And AOL just announced that it will join the fray with live “TV-grade” video.

But all the talent going toward video also presents some of conundrums that publishers and platforms will have to sort through. The first has to do with content. As the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern put it, most of the mainstream media efforts seem to be as lo-fi as the do-it-yourself content, with poor production value. “Much of the content feels pointless,” she wrote. “BuzzFeed’s infamous watermelon-bursting video hit nearly a million live viewers. Fortune had reporters try protein bars made from dead insects.”

Beyond live-streaming
Live streaming isn’t the only kind of video filling up News Feeds. Mic’s daily video series “Mic Check” attracts the bulk of its mostly millennial audience through Facebook, where it has 1.7 million likes. And BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, based in Los Angeles, produces “videos that routinely rack up millions of views in the span of hours,” as Gawker’s Jordan Sargent wrote.

But some missteps have occurred along the way. BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, for example, released a video titled “27 Questions Black People Have For Black People,” that was widely criticized for perpetuating stereotypes, leading BuzzFeed to release an apology on Twitter. Not only that, but as more and more people start using video, the competition for what’s considered “good content” becomes much more fierce — which means that creating a sustainable financial operation becomes much more difficult.

BuzzFeed has been offering two-year contracts that “bind the creators to the company while also allowing their work to flow out and away from BuzzFeed,” Sargent wrote. Vine stars have also demanded they be paid for their work, according to BuzzFeed’s Kantrowitz. “Three and a half years is a long time to have us posting on your platform for free,” one Vine star said, while noting he could move elsewhere, such as Facebook or YouTube.

Whether these video endeavors are financially sustainable in the long run is still a question mark for digital-only outlets that have recently undergone corrections (although BuzzFeed certainly has assets behind it). But for now, the video push has scrambled the equation, with platforms paying publishers, publishers paying creators, and anyone with video skills sitting in the cat bird’s seat.

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