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Innovation | Perspectives

Less chat, more info: Facebook tries to revive messenger bots

At Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference last year, executives touted the rise of chatbots. These automated personalities within the Messenger app promised to answer your queries as seamlessly as a human — or so was the expectation. But in fact, mismatched expectations regarding the purpose of the service, the lack of strong AI to back it up, and lack of awareness by the public left many industry analysts doubtful of chatbots’ ability to fulfill the hype.

With this year’s F8 conference upon us,Facebook is trying to shift the gears on this with the announcement of “group bots” within Messenger, a new Discovery tab for bots and more commands related to bots in Facebook’s virtual assistant M. But it looks like the social giant must also do some inward scrutiny — and involve marketers — to get users on board in much bigger numbers.

The Promise of M

When Facebook released M to a select group of some 10,000 California power users in late 2015, the promise of the virtual assistant was usurped by insight into how it could maintain such intelligent operations. “M is so smart because it cheats,” as MIT Technology Review’s Tom Simonite put it succinctly. Unlike other virtual assistants, which admit defeat when a question stumps them, a human being “invisibly” stepped into the role of the bot to cure the disease of not knowing — without ever letting the user know otherwise.

Of course, this is an expensive design to scale for Messenger’s 1.2 billion users. But M — along with competition from Siri and Amazon’s Alexa — inevitably laid a foundation for misrepresenting how users might realistically benefit from such a chatbot.

Siri and Alexa are trained to be generalists. However, Facebook has largely pushed developers to create more specialist bots. Of the more than 30,000 bots on Messenger, most of them serve a single purpose. That, in itself, makes creating a habit of use difficult. After all, unless you truly have an affinity for pizza, how many times will you use Domino’s Messenger bot in a single week? But Facebook also let the promise of chatbots spiral downward by not doing enough to inform and educate users on how to best use them.

Discoverability and Bugginess

That brings us to the twin disorders plaguing chatbots: discoverability and bugginess.

There was no native way on Messenger to find a chatbot, so unless a user already knew the name of a bot to type into Messenger’s search box, there was no way to actually use one. While third-party bot browsing options like Botlist exist, they are little-known and thus, little-used.

In part, that’s what Facebook hoped to address when it announced a new class of group bots to work inside Messenger at this year’s F8 conference. Once one person introduces the bot into a group conversation, everyone will know about its existence (although how to get that first user to know of the bot remains a looming question). And whereas users might have previously been misguided into thinking chatbots could be true, humanlike discussion partners, these group bots are meant to be more “information bots” (think scores and or stock prices) rather than “chat bots.” Feeding chatbots enough data to maintain conversation flow, and ensuring the AI was up to task, were hopeless hurdles that have made “bugginess” a default bot personality type.

That people have spoken little about chatbots since their initial hype may actually work in Facebook’s favor if it wants to reset people’s expectations. With little regard and much ignorance about the service (in fact, a November 2016 online survey by Publicis Groupe’s Digitas LBi found 78% of U.S. adults hadn’t even heard of chatbots), Facebook could help bring the popularity of chatbots outside the music fandom crowd into the mainstream population.

Can Payments, Marketing Pave the Way?

Kik CEO Ted Livingston, for one, argues the real benefits of chatbots come from their enabling the offline world around us, rather than functioning solely as app replacements. Paying for items is one way to do that And, if U.S. chatbots can make that territory theirs, they’d follow in the footsteps of China, where it’s common for QR codes to trigger interactions, and where more than 600 million WeChat users use its peer-to-peer payment service. While Kik is in talks with its Chinese counterparts to introduce payments, Facebook has already launched this option. Still, addressing Facebook’s buggy bot issues is necessary for users to trust making financial transactions.

Yet aside from all the hype and wonder, there is huge potential for publishers and marketers to seize control of the potential for bots — if they can seize control of the AI and have a common goal for users. Just like voice assistants, bots can get smarter over time with the right technology enabled. Another issue is that a simple question to a bot can yield multiple responses. However, if the aim is to get the user to do something specific — whether it is go to a website, make a purchase, or look up a news item — the answers need to actually be both human and robotic enough to do just that.

It’s not only Facebook that has to do some inward reflection on bots — marketers and publishers must too. They must also demand that Messenger (or any other messaging platform) be the right kind of environment for their goals to thrive. This involves much more nuanced AI programming to make brand interaction a clear-cut goal. It also requires much more education by both Facebook and marketers to let their audiences know bots exist, without setting them up for disappointment.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

It’s time to take action against ad fraud

The digital ad fraud controversy – which encompasses everything from fake clicks to compromised viewability and increased brand risk – has been an issue for marketers for several years now. But it isn’t something marketers want to spend too much time thinking about, and for good reason. Wasted advertising dollars, unsavory marketing tactics, and a legitimate degree of helplessness to fix the issue makes for unpleasant conversations.

But every few months, with remarkable regularity, a fresh incident or research study re-introduces the topic into the digital marketing discussion. This spawns a stream of articles in the mainstream business press, putting marketers back on the hot seat. The most recent development involved ads running on YouTube next to extremist videos, which lead to coverage such as “AT&T, Verizon Pull Ads From Google Over ‘Hate’ Videos” from the Wall Street Journal, and “Google Tries to Stop Ads From Appearing Next to Hate Speech” from the New York Times.

All the while, specialists continue to monitor industry activity and hone tactics aimed at helping advertisers minimize the impact of fraud. IAS is one such company. Twice a year, they publish an assessment that tracks digital media quality and the effectiveness of best practice techniques to combat fraud.

Here’s what you need to know from the research:
  • “It’s Time For Action.” Or so says Marc Pritchard, the Chief Brand Officer at P&G. The second half of 2016 brought a host of media quality issues to the forefront of marketers’ minds with fake news, extremist sites, and “Methbot” dominating the headlines. Transparency and trust will continue to be key issues in digital advertising this year.
  • Proactive Management Works. IAS research showed significant performance variation between campaigns using ad fraud prevention (1.6% fraud incidence) and those that did not (13.2%).
  • Timing Matters. The risk of ad fraud increases in the late hours of the night, while people are sleeping. Ad fraud begins to climb at 12:00 a.m., peaks at 4:00 a.m., then declines slowly till it reaches a steady level at 8:00 a.m. and throughout the day.
  • Brand Safety Improved, But Remains a Focus. The volume of brand safety infractions decreased compared to H1 2016, from 9.5% to 8.6% of impressions on all buy types flagged on objectionable content in H2. However, with the advent of fake news and the increase in violent and extremist content, brand safety remains a critical issue for advertisers.
  • Video Viewability Increased; May Invite More Fraudsters.  Considered more effective than display advertising, video ads continue to grow in demand. As such, video CPMs and subsequent expectations of quality are high. Over a sample of six billion impressions, video viewability showed significant improvement compared to H1, increasing from 40.0% overall to 58.2%, and outperformed desktop display viewability for the first time. Still, advertisers need to keep close watch on video campaigns as the higher CPMs make the medium more susceptible to fraudsters.

Tim Bourgeois (@ChiefDigOfficer) is a partner at East Coast Catalyst, a Boston-based digital consulting company specializing in strategic roadmaps, digital marketing audits, and online marketing optimization programs.

Perspectives

How BuzzFeed, The New York Times, Hearst, The Atlantic and Quartz define native advertising

Demand for native campaigns and content has never been higher. Thousands of advertisers are purchasing native ads each month, many for the first time. As native adoption and demand have exploded, formats have also broadened – from native “editorial” to programmatic native and beyond.

With so much complexity in this area, how are today’s top publishers defining and committing to native? That internal definition guides their strategies and approaches to working with partners, brands and agencies. It also helps shape the content they feature within their publications.

My company, MediaRadar, recently hosted a panel discussion bringing together some of the top experts in digital media to talk about native’s future. Senior advertising executives from BuzzFeed, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Hearst Digital and Quartz were featured.

Given the abundance of branded formats and wide-ranging strategies across publishers, each executive spoke at length about how their organizations define native advertising.

Here’s what they had to say:

“Native is about building things for the environment therein,” said Brian Dell, Creative Director, Client Services at Quartz. “It tends to be about how we are using the principles and the experience of Quartz’s editorial features to give brands a voice.”

The Atlantic defines native as a sensibility, according to Michael Monroe, Vice President of Marketing & Head of Re:think, The Atlantic’s in-house creative marketing group.

“We think a lot about native as a format – in that we have a magazine and we have a website, so our content lives in those ways,” he said. “But, we think about native more as a sensibility. Our readers come to our brands because they expect a certain caliber of story. So when we’re creating something for a client, we create it with the same sense of ambition.”

BuzzFeed’s Rebecca Scott, Vice President of Brand Strategy, also defined native through the end-user’s perspective, noting the need to simply tailor content to look and feel like whatever platform distributes it – not just the publisher’s site.

According to Scott, “When we think of native at BuzzFeed, we really just think of it as how can we make something that fits in naturally and authentically to wherever someone is consuming content. So that can be native video – meaning someone scrolling through their Facebook feed and they see a great video and it makes sense and it’s not a disruptive experience. It’s really additive and fits right into whatever platform they’re already consuming content on.”

With its legacy and reputation in traditional print news media, The New York Times offered its own take.

“Fact-first, narrative-first. Strong stories, strong characters,” said Adam Aston, Vice President & Executive Editorial Director, T Brand Studio, The New York Times. “From inception, where we were making the simplest stories we could three to four years ago, to today, where a lot of what we’re making is a three-ring circus of interactivity, like VR and AR — we’re still driven by the story, the quality of the reporting, finding authentic people, much in the way that our newsroom is.”

Jason Kleinman, Vice President, Brand Solutions and Global Ad Products Strategy, Hearst Digital Media, delivered a more comprehensive view of native:

“We don’t really use the term native at all. We talk in terms of creating great content.”

In the end, every publisher has their own native strategy that must live in companionship with their editorial approach, their site aesthetic and more. There is no one-size-fits-all definition. And as native spend among advertisers continues to grow, the market will continue to offer more solutions, formats and services.

Todd Krizelman (@ToddKrizelman ) 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.
Advertising | Perspectives

Agencies and the ad quality quandary

There’s no denying that two major phenomena are actively reshaping the existing digital advertising supply chain:

  1. Accountability is being pushed upstream

    Not long ago, digital publishers bore the brunt of the blame, shame and liability (financial and legal) for ad-related problems such as performance issues, unauthorized collection of audience data, and security concerns (malvertising). Today, armed with more public awareness (in the form of ad blocking, among others), industry best practices (e.g., TAG, IAB LEAN) and regulations (GDPR anyone?), publishers are finally pushing back on upstream partners when policy-flouting ads are served to their digital environments. And many partners are listening. Now, several other ad tech players on the buy side of the digital supply chain are joining this publisher revolt and to direct accountability for creative issues to their upstream partners.

  2. Advertisers have spoken

    Earlier this month, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, P&G’s chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard didn’t mince words when it came to expressing his irritation with everyone’s acceptance of serious flaws with the digital advertising supply chain. He highlighted the complexities of digital advertising and confusing agency contracts. However, what stood out were his comments on the quality of the digital ad experience for consumers:

“Sometimes we deliver a high-quality media experience, but all too often the experience is, well, crappy. We bombard consumers with thousands of ads a day, subject them to endless ad load times, interrupt them with pop-ups and overpopulate their screens and feeds…” Marc Pritchard, CMO, P&G

This comment from the world’s biggest advertiser underscores the importance of digital ad quality in regards to what is being “presented” to audiences today and rightfully so. According to recent research, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry spends almost 20% of their $225 billion annual marketing budget on digital advertising. Yet retailers and shoppers alike gave digital advertising low marks for effectiveness.

This provides further impetus for more advertisers to focus on improving the digital ad experience, thus putting the sell-side is under immense pressure to not just launch high-quality ads into the digital supply chain but to prove that those are high-quality ads.

New priorities, New challenges

As the digital ad ecosystem evolves, agencies and media buyers need to re-establish trust with both consumers and advertisers. The first step is adopting industry best practices and standards for ad quality and security. This includes being judicious about audience data collection activity and keeping abreast of the ever-evolving guidelines for a plethora of ad formats.

Agencies have a lot of work to do. As depicted here, most media buyers today need to take a more farsighted approach to campaign development and scanning. The assumption that an ad, upon entrance into the digital ecosystem, is exactly the same when it renders on a website showcases this ignorance.

To meet changing advertiser demands for a better digital ad experience, agencies need to adopt a more comprehensive view of the entire ad experience: Creative + ad (the actual creative with all the corresponding analytics code) + landing page, not just the creative.

A paradigm shift in agency priorities is required. Agencies and media buyers are under unprecedented scrutiny to address ad quality as they are where creatives originate. Their inability to meet the changing demands of both advertisers and publishers directly impact the following areas:

Ability to Launch and Serve Ads

As ad formats and standards continue to evolve, meeting these specs across publishers, platforms, and networks impact your ability to serve ads

Ad Spend and Campaigns

Delays in launching campaigns jeopardize ad spend and campaign metrics. Also, the inability to verify the campaign and its success – is the ad getting served the way it should be and to the target audience – could damage relationships with advertisers.

Brand Image

Noncompliance with complex and changing regulations damage brand image and lead to penalties potentially for the advertiser, publisher and the agency itself.

Pressure changes the status quo 

The brief to media buyers about what to do and what is expected is clear.  But it will be interesting to see how agencies actually adapt to the changing digital advertising landscape. Balancing advertiser demands while trying to achieve operational efficiencies and scale and trying to win a turf war against big consulting firms will likely prove to be a heavy lift for agencies. These bi-directional pressures coming from advertisers on one end and published on the other end of the digital ad supply chain will force revolutionary change. If done right, the end result is a transformed digital advertising ecosystem. Positive UX via an optimized and profitably monetized channel.

Chris Olson founded The Media Trust (@themediatrust) with Dave Crane in 2005. He currently serves as CEO, where he drives the company’s vision, direction and growth plans. Prior to establishing The Media Trust Company, he spent four years as the chief operating officer and board member at Spheric Media. From 1998 until 2000, he was the vice president, global equities at Commerzbank; and from 1993 until 1998, he was the vice president of electronic trading at Salomon Brothers, Inc.

Perspectives | Policy

Unbridled tracking, zero rating, and how we’re about to break the internet

According to recent reports, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai is preparing to roll back the net neutrality rules put in place by former Chairman Tom Wheeler. While we don’t know the exact details yet, Chairman Pai is aiming to restore the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over ISPs in exchange for promises from the ISPs to not block or throttle content and to not engage in paid prioritization deals.

Let’s put aside the debate over whether the FCC or FTC is best positioned to police broadband providers and whether mere promises from cable companies will be enough to protect consumers. Make no mistake – there is a lot to consider there.

For now, let’s dig into what provisions of net neutrality are important for a free and open society. As we noted in our 2015 comments to the FCC, consumers should be able to access content they choose. Therefore, it makes sense to prohibit blocking and throttling by ISPs. Also, “paid prioritization” deals could potentially favor content creators with more resources and market power over non-profit or startup companies. “Paid prioritization” would also likely favor content companies that are owned by the ISPs. Certainly, without transparency and safeguards, “paid prioritization” quickly starts to feel like paying a ransom.

Missing the Plot  

What’s more concerning about Chairman Pai’s proposal is what is missing. Namely, the silence on “zero rating” plans and the lack of basic privacy protections for consumers.

During the debate over the FCC privacy rules for broadband providers, many cable lobbyists complained that these rules would create an un-level playing field. There was concern that ISPs would have more restrictions on their ability to surreptitiously collect and sell consumer data than companies like Google. To be clear, if you’ve watched the continued rise in the use of ad blocking software by consumers, then you know consumers aren’t happy with the rise in “big brother” data collection methods by corporate giants.

However, in restoring FTC jurisdiction, there is an opportunity to create a level playing field while at the same time providing some basic privacy protections for consumers. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, the industry’s self-regulatory code requires any company that tracks “all or substantially all” of a consumer’s activity on the web to obtain that consumer’s consent. Companies like Google and Verizon have already publicly promised to abide by these rules. If the FTC holds the industry to the promises made in their self-regulatory code, we would have a level playing field that begins to match with most consumers’ expectations under a flexible FTC enforcement regime.

Zero Rating Issues

“Zero rating” plans also need to be addressed. This is the practice whereby a broadband provider allows consumers to access content without counting that access against a data cap. ISPs tend to “zero rate” content that they own (see Verizon’s AOL and Yahoo content). As more and more content consumption moves to mobile devices (with data plans), “zero rating” will become a huge issue. Most consumers don’t have unlimited data plans and many broadband providers have stopped offering them altogether.

The concern with “zero rating” is that there are only so many content creators that can benefit. This is partly true because a broadband provider only wants one content creator per vertical. For example, AT&T might accept payment from sportingnews.com to “zero rate” their content. Verizon owns Yahoo Sports. But where does that leave every other content creator in the sports world? Doesn’t this create a barrier to entry for any startup? This quickly becomes a game of a musical chairs that doesn’t end well for consumers, innovation or minority voices.

Open or Closed

Content creators thrive in a competitive and open marketplace in which they compete on the value of their news and entertainment. Unchecked “zero rating” plans could have the same effect as ISPs engaging in blocking, throttling and paid prioritization.

We can and should have a robust debate about whether the FTC or FCC is best positioned to promote net neutrality. But let’s not lose sight of the opportunity to protect the internet’s promise of wide, open access and the societal good that promise has delivered since its inception.  Any net neutrality plan must also address “zero rating” and set a level playing field for consumer privacy protections.  Without these safeguards, the hallmark characteristics of the open web — diversity of voices, opportunity for discovery and freedom to innovate — are imperiled.

Perspectives Image
Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of April 13, 2017

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion | Innovation

Outside takes on diversity in media at the newsstand

It can be hard to make heads or tails of gender equality in the media landscape. One minute we hear that women are rising on media boards – and the next we hear that news is controlled by white men. When 46 of 50 U.S. media boards have at least one female director, it’s easy to be optimistic about the state of women in media. But then the wind is taken out of our collective sails when we hear Wall Street Journal employees are so distressed about the state of their newsroom that they wrote a letter “expressing concern about the roles of women and people of color in the newsroom.”

Additionally, the Women’s Media Center found that at “20 of the nation’s top news outlets, men produced 62.3% of news reports analyzed during a studied period while women produced 37.7% of news reports.” On a slightly more encouraging note, the WMC also found, “At least one woman was among the top three editors at 77% of responding ASNE organizations.”

So, with all of this conflicting information at our fingertips, what’s a girl to do?

Girl Power

Well, if you happen to work at OUTSIDE Magazine, you strike a blow for gender equality by putting out your first ever all-female issue. Also known as the “XX Factor Issue,” the May installment will feature nothing but women, and will be created by them too. From the writers to the photographers and subject matter, this content is by women, about women.

“There have been studies done on newspaper sports sections that show most publications cover women far less than they cover men,” says Mary Turner, Deputy Editor, OUTSIDE—who received a promotion for this issue to run the show. “That’s true in the outdoor industry, too, in both [editorial] and advertising creative.” At the same time, she says, “women have never been a stronger force in our world, representing 51% of all outdoor consumers and spending billions on gear and travel alone last year.”

OUTSIDE isn’t stopping at just the one print issue. They plan to run additional women-centric stories and bylines at Outside Online. This includes an Outlook episode on Outside Television, a podcast series hosted by Florence Williams, as well as a documentary film produced in partnership with sponsor R.E.I.

Finding Balance

“During our 40 year history, OUTSIDE has always covered women. The issue we’re trying to address is overall balance, and we wanted to start a conversation about that,” Turner says. “We know we can do a better job, and we want to be a leader in this space. It was very important to us that the women on our cover and in the magazine represent all parts of our world and a diverse range of ages, sports, ethnicities, and professions. We’re very proud of how it worked out. And we’re also proud of our partnership with REI, who launched their Force of Nature effort in the issue, announcing their multiple initiatives to get more women into the outdoors and challenging the industry as a whole to do more as well. As R.E.I says, you can’t be what you can’t see.”

R.E.I isn’t the only sponsor getting in on the XX Factor. “Not only did a number of advertisers juggle budgets and campaign timing to be in the issue, several went as far as to create female-focused brand ads specifically for the issue,” says Turner.

For some publications handing an issue over to the female staff might have presented some logistical challenges, but the team at OUTSIDE was ready for it. “I’m happy to report that OUTSIDE’s [editorial] and online staff is almost 50% female, so yes, we had enough women on staff to manage the issue,” Turner says. However, they didn’t do it entirely alone. She adds, “it’s important to note that while all of the writers and photographers we used in the issue are women, the men on our staff did edit stories and contribute in other ways. They were so excited about the issue, which was really cool to see. Creating this issue brought a lot of good energy to our staff as a whole.”

What Real Diversity Looks Like

Diversity (in media or elsewhere) is not only about gender, which is why OUTSIDE wanted to make sure they represented a wide range of women of different, ages, ethnicities, and interests in the XX Factor Issue.

“In the issue, we have everyone from 8-year-old Girl Scouts to 93-year-old Gert Boyle, the Chairman of Columbia, who we interview on the last page,” says Turner. “And there are a wide range of subject matters covered, from how women are better endurance athletes than men, to a poignant memoir from writer Rahawa Haile on hiking the Appalachian trail alone last year, to a hilarious romp that writer Taffy Akner takes into the billion-dollar wellness industry.”

And OUTSIDE took the same approach when it came to creating its fold out cover. It features everyone from soccer player Abby Wambach, who is fighting for equal pay for women, to GirlTrek cofounders Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison, who aim to have one million African Americans walking by 2018.

The XX Factor issue hits stands April 11, so it’s still early gauge audience reactions to the issue. Will men skip picking it up at the store? Or will it fly off the shelves? Considering that women drive 70-80% of the economy, it’s a safe bet that quality content aimed at their interests and concerns is a good investment.

Innovation | Perspectives

3 ways we’ve been looking at working with algorithms at The Guardian

Publishing into algorithms

There are two sets of people you’ll find constantly moaning about the implementation of algorithms on services like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter—which focus on showing users the best stuff. Power-users, who visit so frequently that the algorithmic approach really doesn’t work for them, and social media managers, frustrated that they can’t get their content to all of their followers instantly.

I’m more relaxed about it. If we had our way, every single piece of content pumped out by our news organizations would be hogging the user’s news feed on Facebook. But think about it for a second: If they want to see what our news organization is doing, they’d come to us. They’ve come to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter to see what their friends (or possibly with Twitter, their enemies) are doing.

And we have to work out how to fit into their lives at that moment. So it has got to be the earth-shatteringly good pieces. It must be things that will surprise and delight and invoke emotion, not just the mundane routine of pushing out articles because we have a quota of space on the internet we feel we need to fill up every day.

I look at the Facebook algorithm as being a whole series of A/B tests for your content. Facebook shows it to a few people, if they interact with it, more people will see it, and so the best things you do will snowball and travel far. In many ways in an algoritmic internet, pieces get the audience they deserve.

Now let’s flip it in its head for a second. It always slightly reassures me that, thanks to algorithmic social feeds, if we publish stuff that is boring and un-engaging, fewer people see it. So people get an overall better impression of your brand, because they only see the good stuff. Now do you hate algorithmic feeds?

Working with chatbots

Over the course of a now pretty lengthy career looking at how the web and news publishing interact, I’ve worked on some things that became very huge. This includes Facebook, Twitter, getting content indexed and ranked by search engines. I’ve also worked on some things that very much fell by the wayside — Google Wave, or desktop widgets anybody?

At the moment, I suspect that chatbots are much more likely to fall into the latter category. I’m unconvinced people are going to tap out messages asking what’s happening rather than go to a news site or a news aggregating app.

However, with the rise of devices like Alexa or Google Home, we are really beginning to see many more examples of ‘conversational UI’, and that interests me. I don’t think it is too far-fetched to think that in a couple of years time my kids will just be yelling at the telly ‘Put on Scooby Doo’ and it will play it out on demand. And that I’ll be able to walk in the room, call out ‘What’s the news?’ at some (or maybe several) devices, and they’ll know the last time I checked, and update me accordingly.

In that context, what does the news published by an organization like the Guardian even look like? I suspect it isn’t 800 word articles, and our Facebook Messenger chatbot and our Alexa Skill have given us an opportunity to explore that possibility.

Three things I have learned:

  1. It is very hard to get people to discover that you have a chatbot.
  2. It is very hard to quickly convey to people what they are expected to do with a bot, and what commands are available to them.
  3. People really do chat to bots as if they are living sentient beings, and the technology at the moment is really nowhere near ready to cope with that.

Working with robot colleagues

The blurb description for a panel I participated in on collaborating with algorithms at the International Journalism Festival session stated that “Some journalists approach algorithmic assistance the way one might consider hopping into a self-driving car: some are delighted, some are wary.” I’ve certainly seen the looks in the news room when we are publishing stories about how robots are going to take all our jobs that have a definite expression of “and mine too?” about them.

Unsurprisingly, given the future-facing aspect of my role at the Guardian, I am perhaps more enthusiastic about the prospect than some others in the building. I’m not, at the moment, concerned that an AI is going to be adept enough to start writing 800 word opinion pieces with my authentic voice. My colleague Alex Hern has experimented in that area for one of our hack days, and the results didn’t look that promising. And while I would for sure read some of the articles that Clickbait Robot suggests, at the moment it is only generating headlines, not the actual stories.

But I think computers absolutely have a role to play now in helping us to write the first drafts in several areas. Imagine a bot that automatically ingests stock market movements, or sports data, or the latest YouGov opinion polls. A computer can instantly see “This is the biggest shift away from supporting Labour among the over-65s for a decade” or “Sunderland are on their longest run of not scoring since a similar spell in 1956” or “While the FTSE on the whole remained high, stocks in the mining sector collectively fell by 12% yesterday”.

Those may not be stories in themselves, but they might be the inspiration required jog to a journalist to phone up a source in the mining sector to get the lowdown on what is happening, or to try and see if anybody from that 1956 squad is still alive and available to interview, or give them a unique angle on a story that everybody else will be reporting in a broadly similar way. And sure, someone who knows their beat very well might be able to just look at those figures and instantly have all the relevant comparative data at her fingertips. But for most journalists, I reckon a robot saving them time and chucking out potential story ideas and angles would soon become a very useful little friend.

So what I’m interested in, is not whether algorithms can write my articles, but whether a combination of 70% algorithm grunt-work and 30% human inspiration, can produce stories that people are more engaged with and more likely to want to read.

Want to learn more? Watch Martin discuss this topic further at the April 2017 International Journalism Festival 

Martin Belam is a designer, journalist, and Social & New Formats Editor at the Guardian. Martin has spent nearly twenty years building digital products for the likes of the BBC, Daily Mirror and Sony.

Perspectives Image
Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of April 6, 2017

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Advertising | Perspectives

Will humans make a comeback in the wake of the YouTube boycott?

Programmatic advertising, with its cheap and easy targeting of individuals based on their online browsing habits, has appealed to brands since its onset. Yet the risks, while always known, have never really come to the fore, until now. Advertisers have been up in arms over the realization that their ads were showing up alongside racist and extremist videos on YouTube and other sites, and essentially underwriting hate.

While automation has its upsides, this is a time for human intervention. That means brands making more efforts to find safe spaces curated by humans, and YouTube using more human engineering to help match brands to better content. Not to mention users making judgments on what it means when big brands support objectionable content (even if they don’t realize it).

An Unfolding Disaster

A ticktock of events, including a damning Times of London investigation and decisions by the Guardian, AT&T and Verizon to pull their advertising from YouTube’s “hate” videos, shows just how big this problem has become for Google and the industry. The advertiser boycotts have continued with Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, McDonalds and even Havas Media Group following suit.

Adweek commissioned the market research company Survata to survey daily YouTube video viewers in a weekend online poll about whether they deemed ads as endorsements of the content; the results were both worrisome and relieving, depending on how you viewed them. Thirty-six percent of the 502 respondents said yes, they do interpret ads as endorsements. But about half of respondents also said that this didn’t make them change their opinions about these brands.

Regardless of what audiences may actually think, investment firm Nomura Instinet estimated the advertiser boycott could have damaging effects on parent company Google, and cost the search giant as much as $750 million in revenue. Google and other firms, meanwhile, have countered back. Google is tip-toeing around whether the problem is as big as everyone says and feels, and RBC Capital Markets said in a research update that the part of Google’s business affected by the YouTube fiasco is technically only about 10 percent of the company’s revenues. And the $750 million is also less than one percent of Google’s projected sales for this year, which means Google might not take a huge hit if it reacts fast enough.

Meanwhile, Google has altered its rules for what videos can carry advertising, and invested research efforts into improved AI to better understand the context and sentiment of YouTube videos. Increased scrutiny on its public performance likely means it’ll invest in this even more.

The JPMorgan Chase Experiment

With Google being one of the world’s biggest platforms, it’s difficult for most brands to simply opt out and boycott completely. But larger firms are experimenting with ways to bypass total automation and use human judgment to find the coveted safe brand spaces.

Take JPMorgan Chase. The company told the New York Times that it has started whitelisting websites that run its ads via Google. Prompted by the realization that an ad for Chase’s private client services had appeared on a site called “Hillary 4 Prison,” it ran a 30-day test period in which an intern manually clicked through 12,000 websites where JPMorgan ads were appearing, to see whether they were being featured alongside objectionable content. The intern flagged about 7,000 ads that were appearing where the company would prefer them not to be.

Now, JPMorgan has arranged a “human-checked” list of 1,000 YouTube channels it has deemed safe for its ads to appear. And it has dropped the number of websites showing its ads from 400,000 to 5,000. So what did it learn from the test? Performance appeared to the be same, even though the ads were displayed on far fewer sites. Chase’s CMO Kristin Lemkau told the Times that whitelisting was becoming de rigeur now at the bank, and that “at some point, a human is going to take a look.”

New Skepticism About Automation

JPMorgan’s move into whitelisting, the YouTube controversy and advertiser boycotts are stirring larger conversations on the necessary evolution of the digital advertising industry. It’s not just that the technology is failing or not yet up to the standard of human editors, but that relying on programmatic advertising allows networks to “grade their own homework.” And this kind of blind advertising is bad for business.

Outsourcing monitoring to third-party auditors and in-house ad networks, which I previously wrote about, is a potential solution. But the issue is that programmatic has become a growing default that’s hard to slow down. Forrester Research said in a report that only 29 percent of marketers in 2016 took steps to whitelist websites for their ads. And some smaller brands simply can’t manage the resources to do that.

Hany Farid, a professor at Dartmouth and senior adviser to the Counter Extremism Project, has also said that Google, Facebook and other major companies ought to deploy more human editors to filter content — because the hype around AI is just that: hype.

But the bottom line is that human intervention is costly, and would be a paradigm shift for the way the advertising industry has evolved in recent years. It may be the way to go, but it’ll take some time for it to become just as automatic as programmatic.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

How to engage multitasking, multiplatform consumers

The avalanche of mobile services and apps has led to a sizeable shift in media consumption towards mobile. But the smartphone is not always competing for people’s attention. To the contrary, a new report from Deloitte tells us the smartphone enhances TV viewing experience. But this bright spot can’t disguise the brand imperative to re-think advertising to engage audiences, not annoy them.

Drawing on a survey of 2,131 U.S. consumers Deloitte’s 11th Digital Democracy Survey highlights how key audience segments including Millennials, Gen X and Gen Z (in other words, a broad spectrum of user ages 14 and above) interact with mobile, video, TV and the Internet.  While the findings are not surprising, they are an important confirmation of people’s attitudes and behaviors and the trends sure to shape the future of media.

Optimizing Experiences

“The shift to streaming, mobile, on-demand services and personalization are significant opportunities in 2017,” Kevin Westcott, vice chairman and U.S. media and entertainment leader, Deloitte LLP, says in a press release. “Brands can bring new value, services and incredibly entertaining content to the empowered consumers across all age groups in a manner that can be monetized.”

But it won’t be a walk in the park. Yes, there is ample proof that American consumers streamed, “binge-watched” and demanded more media than ever in 2016. However, there is also an increased reliance on social networks (and friends) to make purchase decisions.  Social recommendations are proving “more influential” than traditional advertising, the report says. For example, nearly one-third (27%) of Gen Z respondents say an online recommendation from someone within their social media circles can highly influence a buying decision.

Multitasking also makes it tougher for traditional media, such as TV, to grab (and keep) audience attention. The shift to second-screening may enhance the viewing experience. (I’m thinking here of the uptick in mobile app interaction and social media sharing that coincides with the broadcast of cult shows like The Walking Dead). It also detracts from the effectiveness of TV advertising. The verdict from Deloitte: “Enlisting online influencers and creating social buzz” are likely the more effective avenue for getting through to younger consumers.

Remastering Marketing

Another barrier that companies need to overcome is the quality of their advertising – or rather the lack of it. The report reveals the vast majority (more than 80%) of consumers will skip an online video ad if allowed. And 67% of consumers are tuning out mobile ads on their phones because they find them irrelevant. Against this backdrop, a large percentage of respondents are reaching to ad-blocking tech to snuff of unwanted advertising. (Although, to be fair, their motivation is linked with the desire to improve the speed and performance of the content and videos consumed online and on mobile.)

Amid the doom-and-gloom data that leads us to believe consumers hate ads, a few surprise findings (buried on page 12) show the way for brands to improve the experience for consumers and the effectiveness of their advertising. More than half of all consumers say they would be willing to receive advertising on their smartphones based on location.  Significantly, 46% said they would pay more attention to an ad if they were able to make the call on whether they view it or skip it.

It’s a report that reinforces what has become my mantra: People want what they want – when, how and where they want it. Consumers crave more geographic relevance in their advertising and they want more control over the advertising they have to view as a condition to access and enjoy content. Clearly, brands are well advised to adapt their advertising approach to these consumer requirements. There is no guarantee the changes they make will trigger a conversion, or win customer loyalty. But it’s sure to grab at least some attention. And in a world where consumers are multitasking and massively reliant on their social circles, a little attention can mean major traction.

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

A timeline of the YouTube brand safety debacle

The link between a positive sentiment around context and ad effectiveness has been established. And, though there’s not yet been definitive research on the subject, the reverse seems an intuitive given. Ads running in negative or unfavorable contexts would be less effective.

So, it might seem that the recent uproar around Google YouTube ad placement could be seen as a boon for premium publishers. But as has been well-documented, a lack of marketer trust in digital advertising is bad for the entire ecosystem, not simply the bad (or careless) actors. So it is with great interest that our industry has watched Google’s YouTube brand safety saga unfold.

Here are the highlights of how the story has developed so far:

March 16, 2017
March 17, 2017
March 21, 2017
March 22, 2017
March 23, 2017
March 24, 2017
March 25, 2017
March 26

FT | Advertisers seek Google discounts in video backlash

March 27, 2017
March 28, 2017
March 29, 2017
March 30, 2017
March 31, 2017
April 3, 2017
April 4, 2017
April 28, 2017
May 15, 2017
October 12, 2018
February 2019
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