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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

Our recommended reads from around the web:

 

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.

Perspectives

Trust: The foundation of a healthy audience relationship

I often get asked, who is WebMD’s audience? There are of course many ways to add dimension to the response, but the simplest answer is that the people who come to WebMD are using our content to help them make better informed decisions about their health or the health of a loved one. And at the end of the day, what could be more important? Our audience isn’t just viewing our content; they’re taking an active role in managing their health based on the information they get from us. They trust us with their health, and that trust is something we take with the utmost gravity and respect.

It has never been easier for individuals or companies to establish an online presence, position themselves as experts, and publish information without regard for accuracy and objectivity. Combine that fact with the number of new and interesting monetization opportunities, including native advertising, and it means that as a consumer it can take some real savvy to identify the source of what you’re reading.

As publishers, this gives us all the more reason to be transparent about our sources and to help our audiences clearly understand when they are reading independent editorial content and when they are reading sponsored content. We owe that to people who trust us. Trust is something that’s earned, and at WebMD we work to earn it every single day.

The following three principles ensure the integrity and accuracy of what we produce:

  1. Editorial Independence: WebMD maintains an editorial staff that is separate and distinct from our staff that works with advertisers. Our editorial controls and policies prohibit modifying a story on behalf of, or for the benefit of, an advertiser.
  1. Editorial Excellence: Our content features some of the top minds in medicine and wellness to ensure the highest-quality original offerings. Behind the scenes, we also have more than 120 award-winning writers, editors, and producers whose contributions help to provide a broad range of relevant and engaging content. Our in-house staff of board-certified physician editors review all of our content for medical accuracy, appropriateness of medical language, and proper characterization of the findings. This review is at the heart of our approach and is one of the reasons that we have earned a reputation for accuracy. Additionally, we regularly review the tens of thousands of pages of our content that we publish so that we can make any updates or changes where appropriate. We also source our content carefully and deliberately, and the list of specific references we use are available through a link on each story.
  1. Full Transparency: Like other media outlets and publishers, in addition to the content that we create in accordance with our Editorial Policy, in certain circumstances, WebMD also publishes content that is authored by our advertisers. In all cases, however, advertiser content is clearly labeled as provided by the advertiser to make the sourcing clear to our users, and our process for labeling that content is spelled out publicly.  We believe that identifying the source of such sponsored web pages is critically important. Our voluntary participation in independent accreditation and certification programs such as URAC reinforces our commitment to transparency and trust.

WebMDsponoredlogoThis tried-and-true approach has earned us consumer trust since 1996, and the 76 million unique visitors who come to us each month affirm the success of our model. We believe that publishers who create great content, adhere to these principles and enable audiences to differentiate easily between independent editorial and advertising content are the ones who will not only survive but thrive.

Kristy Hammam leads the team responsible for serving WebMD’s users by selecting the best content to appear on WebMD’s Home Page, Health & Wellness Centers, newsletters, and partner sites.

Hammam began her career as a writer and copy editor at CNN Headline News, where she worked for nearly six years. She went on to produce and voice a weekly health feature in addition to national and international features for all of the CNN networks. She also gained experience field-producing live events for CNN and line-producing in a studio control room. Before moving into her current role, Hammam served as WebMD’s deputy managing editor and as executive producer of programming.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Technology guide to scale programmatic revenue

Does this describe you?

You have done the hard part of growing an audience. You have fully functional teams to sell direct to advertisers. And you even built an in-house ad-server yourself (or duct-taped a shrink-wrapped banner ad-server) that works fine (for today). It manages your manual direct-sold deals (IOs & RFPs) reasonably well. With all of these pieces ostensibly in place, you now want to build a solid programmatic revenue strategy and execute for long-term health of your business.

The first question is, “what constitutes a solid programmatic strategy?” Let us assume you are happy with what you do on direct-sold deals; there are two things that stand-out: independence and control. You choose which advertisers you want to work with, at what rates, which users to show ads, and how many times to show ads in which geographies—all the while having full data transparency that enable you to make further optimizations. For companies passionate about user-experience, independence and control are great consideration metrics for your programmatic strategy as well.

The common myth you hear is “let’s just sign up with few SSPs and exchanges and call it a day”. Wrong! (Though it is a good start.) Signing up one/few SSPs/Exchanges/Ad-Networks and putting them behind a rotation logic is only dipping your toes into the world of programmatic. This post will guide you through and highlight few core components required in order for you to develop a robust programmatic yield strategy. Many  of which might be things you didn’t even know you needed.

First, some quick Programmatic 101: Programmatic is a term thrown around to refer to various forms of bringing in ad revenue from advertisers, vendor/partners and it also describes the style of integration with those partners to reach your audience. And, for better or worse, it is a crowded programmatic vendor ecosystem.

  1. Programmatic Partner Types: DSPs, SSPs, Ad Networks
  2. Other Internal Names Used: Indirect Revenue Sources, Demand Partners, Backfill Vendors etc
  3. Integration Styles: OpenRTB API Standard, Vendor-specific APIs, JS tags, SDKs

Pro Tip: Always, always, always ask your partners to give you their API specifications so you can integrate them server-to-server. Adding JS and SDKs will bloat your apps. Engineers hate adding SDK/JS and (even more importantly) your users will hate it too when the additional code slows their experience.

Noe that, for the purposes of this discussion, we are leaving out automation part (do-it-yourself for advertisers) aspect of programmatic. This is achieved through Self-Serve UIs built by your team (think buying Google ads using ads.google.com) or a third party (think buying Google ads using Marin Software).

Following are technical modules that make for a robust programmatic yield/mediation system to manage your programmatic partners:

  1. OpenRTB Engine: Ability to broadcast to multiple DSPs using the OpenRTB protocol that an ad opportunity exists in your site/app.
  2. Server-Side Integration Engine: Many Exchanges, SSPs and Ad Networks might themselves connect with DSPs to bring ads. These partners do not use OpenRTB but instead have their own custom APIs to connect with your audience. Ability to conform to their custom specifications and making ad-calls from server side. This is the right way to integrate partners that favor Header Bidding also. The goal is evaluate all partners equally in real-time without the overhead of client side code bloat.
  3. Data Aggregation Engine: Some partners don’t prove eCPM data in real-time, so you need the ability to pull it from their dashboards as frequently as possible. An overall ability to pull data via APIs and screen-scraping from every partner. If you are getting ad revenue from Facebook, Google or Twitter; you need to make them play nice (compete at same time versus getting “first look”) because perhaps their tools are biased to their ads?
  4. Automated Inventory Allocation Engine: Using #3 Data from partners, building price models and trends to automatically adjust your priority; this is also known as the waterfall of which partner should be called at what point.
  5. Audience Rules & Targeting Engine: A lot of partners specialize in providing ad dollars for certain set of your audience (geography, gender, interests). It is best to target those partners for that audience and reduce noise everywhere else. Also remember that your team needs precise and granular controls like you have for direct-sold deals. Examples – what if you wanted to send 1st party data to Partner A and not to Partner B? Or say you wanted to monetize only certain segments of your users (who spend less than X minutes in a month) vs everyone? Or you want to roll out a policy to show maximum of only 2 ads to users in a specific country?
  6. Bidding Patterns/Price Predictions Engine: Advanced insights and recommendations based on bidding patterns/trends tied to your inventory (physical placement and at an audience level)
  7. Holistic Yield Optimization / Reverse Auction Engine: This is a very important module. Ranking partners at a global level does not do any help. You need to optimize partners at an audience level. Doing this will enable you to get the best out of each of them. Ability to take price information from OpenRTB (DSPs), custom APIs (SSPs/Exchanges) and price predictions (Ad Networks) overlaid with forecasting insights to determine the best partner for every user and every ad opportunity in real-time. Modules from #3 to #6 feed into this engine.
  8. A/B testing Framework: Ability to easily test new revenue partners against one-another using #5 Audience Rules Engine. Engineers hate adding tags, SDKs for every new partner. Neither the business teams should wait for engineering resources to test every new partner. It should be as simple as flipping ON/OFF switch.
  9. Creative Library: Full creative assets of ads that ran on your audience with full transparency from all partners (DSPs, SSPs and Ad Networks). All stored in one place forever. You can block them or better use it as a sales intelligence tool to form direct relationships with those advertisers.
  10. Cookie/User Sync Engine: ability to sync cookies/User IDs with chosen partners, so they can pay higher when they have advertisers who are looking for a specific audience that you have.
  11. Quality Control Engine: Natural Language Processing and Textual Analysis to block ads and advertisers that will hurt user-experience when shown to your users.

Think about it: How did you build your audience? You did not sign-up with a few middlemen and rotate your trust, hoping they will do all the work. Instead, you owned the process. You worked with engineers, product owners and business teams to build stuff to grow your audience. You may have hired a few contractors/middlemen to help you along the way. You likely used open-source software (e.g. Redis, Django, Android, React, SugarCRM etc) wherever possible. And finally you licensed software (e.g. AWS/Data Centers, New Relic, CloudFlare, SalesForce) for areas that are important to your business but are not your core strengths.

Monetization, whether direct or programmatic is the same: You need to own your future. Either build it yourself or find a tech partner you can license it from because you need to invest the same level of energy as you did in building that hard-won audience.

Satish Polisetti is cofounder of AdsNative. He previously worked at mobile advertising startups Amobee and MdotM and received a Mayfield Fund fellowship in 2010.

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Perspectives

DCN’s recommended reading: week of April 28, 2016

Our recommended reads from around the web: 

Innovation | Revenue

Can media companies be successful software vendors?

Let’s face it, the core technology for any media company is the content management system, which drives everything from organizing, writing, publishing and advertising. When a media company is sufficiently large, the build versus buy CMS debate can often tip towards build. After all, who knows more about your requirements than you. While it’s not easy to build your own system, that hasn’t stopped the likes of Vox Media and The Washington Post from doing just that — and even selling what they’ve built.

Of course it’s one thing to build a platform, it’s another entirely to sell it. Transforming your organization from one that delivers media content to one that markets and sells technology, an entirely different set of skills.

These companies believe that they can export their technology and help other similar companies build their own media empires on top of the technology they’ve developed.

Vox Media, a modern online publishing company and The Washington Post, a venerable publishing brand both saw a need for building their own systems and are looking at selling at least pieces of it. In Vox’s case, Ad Age reported that it has started selling Chorus for Advertisers, a platform for creating, managing and analyzing branded content. The Washington Post is attempting to sell a more complete newsroom management package.

Rolling your own CMS
For companies that opt to build their own systems, the most compelling factors are control and flexibility. There’s no way an off-the-shelf CMS can adapt to the rapidly changing market requirements of a modern media company, says Pablo Mercado, VP of technology at Vox Media.

“By developing them in-house and tailoring them specifically to our needs we foster a “technology company” culture as well as a “media company” culture. This is key to building truly valuable solutions, and the key to thriving in an ever-changing marketplace,” Mercado explained.

He says this ability to hack the system to meet your needs is just not something that an off-the-shelf CMS is well suited do and eventually that would catch up with them. It’s similar reasoning for The Washington Post, which also made the strategic decision to build its own system, rather than get help from an existing vendor.

“I think if you asked our CTO, it’s not a specific capability, but the flexibility to take it where we need to go quickly. You can take something strategically core and what you can excel at and make it part of what you do,” Matthew Monahan, product and sales lead, for Arc Publishing (the Post’s CMS brand) at The Washington Post said.

Many obstacles, but worth the effort
It’s never easy building your own complex software system while trying to keep the old system going and taking into account the complex and varied needs of various stakeholders in a newsroom workflow process.

The Washington Post took a modular approach building various pieces of the system over time such as writing/editing, planning/scheduling/workflow and APIs and integrations into print systems.

“The key thing is that this wasn’t all pre-planned. We didn’t sit down and say we would have our own system. We built solutions to problems we had and integrated them together. It was an iterative, dynamic approach. We had a specific problem with site rendering, so we built a solution and started iterating on it. People start banging on it and you realize what it should become,” Monahan said.

This modular approach helped as they uncoupled from the older system, and allowed them to overlay and work out the kinks in the various pieces in a similar manner.

Vox faced a similar problem trying to avoid mangling its workflows while putting a new system in place. “The key to navigating these challenges, particularly the platform challenge, is again, the successful blending of a technology company culture and media company culture. Which is to say that rather than disappearing for 9 months and then suddenly re-appearing, flipping a switch and changing everyone’s day-to-day workflow and tools, the team must fully engage with the business and its users,” Mercado said.

It’s a different world
The fact is that transforming from a media company to a software company is much harder than it looks. While it may be true that every company is in its own way is becoming a software company, it’s not easy to actually sell software and all that entails, according to DCG analyst Robert Rose.

“They are ill prepared for the customer service aspect of being a technology solution provider. There’s no doubt that their solutions would work well for select clients, especially those looking to get into more media-centered operations (e.g. content marketing). But once they start hearing about things like “implementation” and “channels” and “service contracts” and the complexity of actually operating a “software business,” most companies rethink entering into the market as a solution vendor,” Rose said.

Without a doubt, media companies that make the decision to sell their CMS do so with the hopes of recouping some of the investment made in developing the system. And it is possible that a CMS purpose-built by a media company will better meet the needs of others in the industry. However, while it is clear that diversification is desirable, the software business is a complex one, and time will tell if these companies are up to the task.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Brand activation marketing offers unified approach to target audience

Over $595 billion dollars was spent on brand activation marketing in 2016. Brand activation refers to marketing that both builds a brand’s image and drives a specific consumer behavior or action.

PQ Media in partnership with the ANA conducted a comprehensive analysis of brand activation, an organized assessment of brand marketing, by platform, channel, and consumer segment. The research also projected that by 2020 activation spending will be over $740 billion outpacing advertising and trade promotion spending.

rand activation encompass focuses on six platforms that connect and interact with the consumer: promotion marketing, experiential marketing, retailer marketing, relationship marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing. Each platform includes 32 different channels.

Interestingly, 60% of all overall marketing spend is placed on integrated traditional and digital strategies with relationship marketing as the largest brand activation marketing platforms used in 2015. Relationship marketing channels includes direct mail, catalogs, list management, database marketing, marketing information and big data analysis, email and search lead generation marketing, loyalty programs, mobile marketing apps and proximity services.

The study identified that consumer brand activation accounted for 59% of all B-to-C spending ($332B) while B-to-B spending accounted for 41% or $229B. Automotive is the largest industry vertical to spend on brand activation. Importantly successful brands are using a combination of brand activation methods to effectively target audiences.

RelationshipMarketingFast

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Service journalism and the web advertising problem

There’s a toenail fungus photo in my morning news.

And it looks like it’s an ad for some questionable toenail-fungus-treating multi-level-marketing scheme.

Yeech. How did that get on there? Pass the ad blocker already.

Forget tracking protection, forget new standards for responsible advertising, forget all that. Gross infected body parts and MLM ads before I have even had my coffee? Burn all this stuff down.

Terrible ads are a big reason why tracking protection seems like an incomplete solution to the problems of web advertising. Web users don’t just block ads because people are good applied behavioral economists, seeking signal and filtering noise. A lot of web ads are just deceptive, annoying, gross, or all three. (Oh, right, some of them carry malware, too.)

Even if we could somehow combine the efficiency and depth of the web medium with the signaling power of print or TV, won’t web ads still be crap? And won’t people still block them?

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Publisher standards
Print ads are less crappy than web ads. Why can’t publishers enforce better standards on the web? How can a newspaper have memorable, well-designed ads in print, while the ads on the web site have users looking for the computer sanitizer?

It’s hard for publishers to enforce standards when an original content site is in direct competition with bottom-feeder and fraud sites that claim to reach the same audience. And that competition is enabled by third-party tracking. As Aram Zucker-Scharff mentions in an interview on the Poynter Institute site, the number of third-party trackers on a site grows as new advertising deals bring new trackers along with them. All those third-party pixels and scripts—and a news site might have 50 to 70 of them—cause slowness and obvious user experience problems. But the deeper problem, data leakage, is harder to pick out. Any of those third parties could be leaking audience data into the dark corners of the Lumascape until it re-emerges, attached to a low-value or fraudulent site that can claim to reach the same audience as the original publisher.

Publishers can try to pin down their third parties with contractual restrictions, but it’s prohibitively expensive for a publisher to figure out what any one tracker is up to. You know that sign at the corner store, “only two high school students in the store at a time”? If the storekeeper lets 50-70 kids in, he can’t see who shoplifted the Snickers bar. The news site is in the same situation on third parties. Because any one publisher has contact with so many intermediaries, only the perpetrators can see where data is leaking.

A security point of view
Information security is hard. When you have to maintain software, you fix a bug when you can see that there’s a bug. You don’t wait until someone starts exploiting it. The earlier you fix it, the less it costs.

News sites work this way for some issues. If you found a bug in your site’s content management system that would allow a remote user to log in as “editor” and change stories, you would fix it. Even if you had no evidence that random people were logging in, it’s not worth taking the chance. Because it’s so hard to catch data leakage in the act, it makes sense to apply the same bug-fixing principle. When there is an emergent bug in the combination of your site and the user’s browser that allows for data leakage, then it is more effective to proactively limit it than to try to follow audience data through multiple third parties.

That doesn’t mean just walking away from all third-party tracking. Henk Kox, Bas Straathof, and Gijsbert Zwart write, in Targeted advertising, platform competition and privacy

We find that more targeting increases competition and reduces the websites’ profits, but yet in equilibrium websites choose maximum targeting as they cannot credibly commit to low targeting. [emphasis added] A privacy protection policy can be beneficial for both consumers and websites.

. . .

If websites could coordinate on targeting, proposition 1 suggests that they might want to agree to keep targeting to a minimum. However, we next show that individually, websites win by increasing the accuracy of targeting over that of their competitors, so that in the non- cooperative equilibrium, maximal targeting results.

When publishers lack market power, they have to play a game that’s rigged against them.

Changing the game
So how to turn web advertising from a race to the bottom into a sustainable revenue source, like print or TV ads? How can the web work better for high-reputation brands that depend on costly signaling?

C.H.E.D.D.A.R is a basic set of technical choices that make web ads work in a signal-carrying way, and restore market power to news sites.

Some of the work has to happen on the user side, but tracking protection for users can start paying off for sites immediately. Every time a user gets protected from third-party tracking, a little bit of competing, problematic ad inventory goes away. For example, if a chain restaurant wants to advertise to people in your town, today they have a choice: support local content, or pay intermediaries who follow local users to low-value sites. When the users get protected from tracking, opportunities to reach them by tracking tend to go away, and market power returns to the local news site.

And users see a benefit when a site has market power, because the site can afford to enforce ad standards. (and pay copy editors, but that’s another story.)

Service journalism
Users are already concerned and confused about web ads. That’s an opportunity. The more that someone learns about how web advertising works, the more that he or she is motivated to get protected. A high-reputation publisher can win by getting users safely protected from tracking, and not caught up in publisher-hostile schemes such as paid whitelisting, ad injection, and fake ad blockers.

Here is a great start, on the New York Times site. Read the whole thing:

Free Tools to Keep Those Creepy Online Ads From Watching You
by BRIAN X. CHEN and NATASHA SINGER

The next step is to make it more interactive. Use web analytics to pick out a reader who is

  • valuable as an audience member
  • vulnerable to third-party tracking
  • using a browser for which you know a good protection tool

and give that reader a nice “click here to get protected” button that goes to your tool of choice. There is JavaScript to do this.

Tracking protection for users means fewer ad impressions available at bottom-feeder and fraud sites, which means more market power for news sites, which means sites gain the ability to enforce standards. Put it all together, and no more toenail fungus ads before breakfast.

Don Marti (@dmarti) is a contributor of code and documentation to the aloodo.org project, a low-friction way for sites and brands to reclaim the value of online advertising from fraud and ad blocking. He serves as a strategic adviser for Mozilla, and is the former editor of Linux Journal. Don is the subject of an out-of-date Wikipedia article which he will not edit himself, but wishes that someone would.

Perspectives

Ensure that your native ads are FTC compliant

From its introduction only a few years ago, native advertising has generated clicks, captured attention, and raised controversy. Native is everywhere, from Hennessy’s partnership with Vanity Fair for the original film ‘Never Stop. Never Settle’ to branded playlists on Spotify. At MediaRadar we find native ads placed both programmatically and direct. There are more than 760 websites selling native. We found 7,004 advertisers buying native ads since Jan 2015 (1,437 on DCN member websites).

Advertisers are constantly creating new ways to leverage this form of advertising, but there has been significant blurring between advertiser messaging and editorial content.

The FTC, however, has signaled that these days without regulation are coming to an end. On a quiet day on December 22, the FTC released guidelines on how native advertising should be implemented. These rules create strong separation between advertising and editorial.

So, who is impacted by the FTC’s regulation? Well, almost all publishers. Of the hundreds of sites selling native advertising, FTC violations can results in a civil penalty of up to $16,000, per count. Recently, Lord & Taylor was found to violate native ad regulations without disclosing a digital influencer campaign for Instagram.

MediaRadar found that 70% of sites will need to modify their current native advertising in order to adhere to the FTC guidelines.

Here is what you need to know in order to be compliant:

  1. Disclose Advertising. When the promoted or sponsored content mimics a website’s look-and-feel, disclosure is necessary. Readers need to know what content was influenced or paid for by advertisers.
  2. Use Precise Language. The FTC is explicit that words like “presented by” or “promoted by” are not sufficient notice. Instead use words like “Paid by” or “Advertiser.” FTC Recommended Language Accepted Language: “ad,” “advertisement,” “paid advertisement,” or “sponsored advertisement.”
  3. List the Author or Advertiser Logo. Include the advertiser’s logo in all native advertising. If an author credit is included, the advertiser should be shows in place of a person’s name. This reinforces to the reader that this is a paid placement, not regular editorial.
  4. Ad Position Matters. Location of an ad’s acknowledgement should be at the top left corner of a native ad (today, they are commonly identified at the bottom).
  5. Video or Sound. Video and sound ads are more complex—so a disclosure is needed on both the thumbnail and pop-up.

Native offers one of the highest CPM ad units and we observe favorable renewal rates on most sites. While these guidelines will create limits in how native is executed, we do not believe it poses a threat. Some of the largest firms, including the New York Times, have labeled with “Paid Post” from the start. And since the guidelines went into effect, there has been no ebb in the torrent of native ad buying. With more prominent labeling, advertisers can creatively use content to drive increased product awareness or increased sales.

Todd Krizelman is Co-Founder and CEO of MediaRadar (@MediaRadar). Growing up near the epicenter of technological innovation in Palo Alto, California encouraged him to become an entrepreneur and co-found of one of the world’s first social media sites, theGlobe.com. Krizelman also held leadership positions at Bertelsmann’s Gruner + Jahr and Random House. With his expertise in ad sales and innovation, Krizelman joined veteran web architect, Jesse Keller, to found MediaRadar in 2007.

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