/ An inside look at the business of digital content

Programmatic spend continues to surge in 2018

August 29, 2018 Todd Krizelman, CEO – MediaRadar

It’s predicted that more than $46 billion in ad dollars will be spent on programmatic advertising in the United States this year, with 86.2% of all digital display ads bought programmatically by 2020. But who is spending the most on programmatic? MediaRadar dove in to find the answers. By analyzing thousands of brands, with ads placed programmatically in Q1 of 2018, we discovered which companies are spending more, which are spending top dollar, plus so much more.

75% of all brands running ads online buy programmatically

A whopping three quarters of brands studied had purchased some form of an ad programmatically in Q1 of 2018. Findings such as these prove that, despite transparency concerns, advertisers are continuing to invest in programmatic.

Even more compelling is that, in the wake of major brand safety controversies (e.g. YouTube’s controversial content woes), advertisers are still purchasing programmatic video. In fact, the number of brands running programmatic video have nearly doubled compared to the previous year.

Amazon leads the way in programmatic ad buys

Big brands are buying programmatically and Amazon is leading the space. Amazon was found to be the biggest programmatic spender by far. The online retailer alone accounted for 10% of the total spend of the top-50 programmatic advertisers in Q1 of 2018, spending one and a half times more than the next biggest programmatic spender, Microsoft.

In order of high to low, the top-10 programmatic advertisers in Q1 of 2018 were:

Amazon
Microsoft
Wayfair
TaxAct
Charles Schwab
Weight Watchers
Sprint
Coors Light
Geico
Dell

Amazon has always been a big spender when it comes to marketing efforts. In 2016 it was reported that Amazon spent more on advertising than Walmart Inc., Best Buy Co. Inc., The Home Depot Inc., and The Kroger Company combined. A large portion of that ad budget was dedicated to programmatic too.

The players remain the same

An impressive 94% of the top-50 programmatic spenders in Q1 of 2017 ended up buying programmatically again in Q1 of this year. The list of companies that renewed include Walmart, Microsoft, and Verizon Wireless.

Despite escalating talk about brand safety, the programmatic market has remained mostly stable, year-over-year. Significant changes in the form of exits or reduced spending have been few and far between. Not to mention, the implementation of safeguard tech like whitelist and blacklist technologies have shown brands that programmatic is actively changing for the better; becoming more brand safe and transparent with every update.

The bottomline is that most advertisers prefer programmatic for transacting online media and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. No matter the controversy, brands appear to value the rewards of programmatic more than they fear the repercussions. Amazon’s increasingly large investments in programmatic are a testament to its popularity and power in the advertising market.

About the Author

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.

Perspectives | Revenue

The simple formula that works for The New York Times’ T Brand Studio

August 28, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

In just a few years, the number of publishers building out branded content has soared from 15 to more than 600—and counting. But it’s not just their ranks that have grown. Many publishers have expanded their capabilities, harnessing teams, talent and tech to help brands create sponsored content and capture audiences. The New York Times has gone one better, establishing T Brand, a complete content studio, to create unconventional immersive and artistic projects that go far beyond native advertising.

Graham McDonnell, International Creative Director for T Brand Studio

Through the strategic acquisitions of Hello Society, an influencer marketing agency, and Fake Love, a design-driven agency specialized in one-of-a-kind live experiences, T Brand has also nurtured new expertise in video, 360-degree filming, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Here, Peggy Anne Salz – mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove – catches up with Graham McDonnell, International Creative Director for T Brand Studio, to discuss the company’s mission to create dynamic and innovative content with a decidedly human touch.

PAS: T Brand is leveraging its tech abilities and acquisitions, but it also benefits from audience trust in The New York Times. How do you make the most of both without blurring the lines between content you create for your brand partners and editorial content?

GM: There is quite a clear divide between the newsroom and advertising; it’s very much church and state. We obviously can’t use journalists from the newsroom. However, the studio is staffed with fully qualified journalists, many of whom have come from our competitors. So, we have the strength of a newsroom, in integrity, and talent, and we leverage this for our advertisers. We also maintain a high standard for our audience. After all, the audience coming to The New York Times expects New York Times journalism and content. So, it’s expected that our branded content should hit those heights as well.

It’s also very important to identify branded content as a piece of advertising content. As soon as an audience feels duped or tricked into reading branded content it will lose trust in the publisher and—ultimately—in the brand. Our most common branded content pieces are labeled “paid posts.” Traditionally, that post was a destination. So, it was a URL that readers could visits via our website or via our app—content that was paid, posted and lived indefinitely. The aim was to make that content accessible to audiences. We still make branded content a destination. But we also make it a journey because getting eyeballs on a page isn’t enough. We’ve started to add what we call “branded footers” to each piece of sponsored content we produce. This way, when a user is finished consuming a piece of content, we offer the opportunity to continue that conversation outside our paid-post environment.

PAS: Branded content is a major revenue driver for publishers, but not all publishers have been able to get brands to buy in for the longer term. How can publishers make that connection?

GM: Storytelling is what we as humans do and relate to—going back to cave paintings and hieroglyphics. Storytelling is an intrinsic part of our human nature and the best branded content taps into that. The best stories come when publishers partner with the client and dig deep into the story the brand wants to tell. You want to nail the narrative first, and you want to think about the execution second. It’s important to tell a human story, one that’s relatable for the audience, and not get ahead of yourself by trying to figure out if VR, for example, might be the best way to tell the story. This is a point many brand marketers forget and it’s up to the publisher to remind them. No one knows their business better than our clients, but no one knows our audience better than us. Put the two together, and that’s when you get the best—and most sustainable—results.

It’s all about the ability to marry the storytelling expertise of the in-house team with the advertiser’s goal to address its audience and express its point of view. So, brands come to us with their brand message and they look to us to position that message within a story that will resonate with our audience. Of course, brands will push hard to put their message first. It’s up to the publisher to push back and put the storytelling first.

PAS: Does it requires some “tough love” to strike a balance between the two?

GM: Yes, and that’s what will drive results. For example, some clients come to us and say they want AR or VR. They want all the bells and whistles and all the flashy toys. But we tell them it’s much more important to think about the story first and then how to tell it. Even in the word ‘storytelling,’ the story comes before the telling. This means taking a step back to think about the type of story your audience will want to engage with, not the tech you’ll need to tell it.

We were one of the first content studios. So, over time, we have found what works, and what doesn’t. Over time we’ve seen that we have much more time spent on our content than on the content given to us by brands. Sure, we get brands coming to us saying, you know, “We have got this video of our CEO. He’s very engaging. It’s 32 minutes long. We just want to put it and you don’t need to do anything with it. Just put it on and people will love it.” My response is, “No, that might not be the best idea.” You have to put the brand message in a story people will like – one that will take them on a journey not blast them with details and stats.

PAS: What is the best way to tell brand stories?

GM: There’s a simple sort of formula that all good stories follow called the narrative arc. The first thing you do is introduce an element, usually a character, that the audience likes and is emotionally invested in enough to care what happens to this person. Then you present a problem or a hurdle, some sort of challenge that must be overcome. Finally, you reveal the outcome, some kind of goal or reward. The brand message is an integral part of the story, but it shouldn’t be too obvious. Just like parents who convince their children to eat vegetables by hiding it the food kids are sure to like, branded content blends the brand story within the story—because these are the things you want your audience to digest. Making the brand message part of the storytelling makes it much more palatable. Once you’ve got the story, then you think about the execution.

The biggest trap content marketers fall into is trying to tick all the boxes. Sometimes they are pushed by their brand clients, and other times they are pushed by their own ambitions. They put together a package of four videos, three infographics and loads of cool stuff for impact across every channel. Without a strong narrative to link each piece to the next the outcome is a Frankenstein monster of fragmented content. We have found it’s more effective to limit yourself to telling very focused stories.

PAS: It’s clear that branded content has to be emotive, but it must also be effective. How do accomplish and measure this?

GM: The best results come when you have a deep partnership with the advertiser and a deep understanding of how audiences engage with content. Knowing the time of day people are consuming content on their devices is an important data point. It’s part of a larger, much more data-driven approach to know when to serve the right content at the right time. Targeting context increases engagement. If you have created a data-heavy infographic that is best consumed on the desktop or tablet, then there’s really no point in serving that during commuting times when most users will be viewing their mobile feeds and devices.

We’ve also found that around three-quarters of our programs have dwell times above the Moat benchmarks for audience attention. So, not only are we getting people to visit our content; we know they are staying to engage with it. Moreover, a vast majority of our programs surpass the Moat benchmark for scroll depth. This means they are scrolling down and exploring the content. We have succeeded in building a narrative arc that offers a reward well worth the audience’s time and attention. You’ve really done your job if you can bring rather drab content to life and a great example of this is when a client wanted us to help promote a white paper. We decided to do it in a quiz format that would draw the reader into the content. We had seven questions and after every question they asked, we gave them a little snippet of content, a statistic related to the answer they just gave. It was a reward scheme, and it worked—showing that it’s a very underused tactic but effective tactic to keep people engaged.

PAS: The international arm of the T Brand Studio is perhaps best known for its award-winning campaign for UBS, highlighting AI and what it takes to be human. The native advertising included a chat bot, a five-chapter article and a documentary-style video, surpassing target reach and engagement metrics. Another more recent campaign for Kia brought the Cadenza model to life in a series of live events. Should traditional creative advertising agencies feel nervous?

GM: As I said earlier, the best content comes from partnership. We don’t usually offer our services like an off-the-shelf product; we build a relationship with the client to tell a story in the way our New York Times audience expects it to be told. It’s not a case of jumping in on every brainstorm or every RFP; it’s a case of looking at what the client wants to achieve and answering the brief with a strong journalistic approach because that’s our strength. A lot of the time we’ll partner with other agencies when we create content for brands. We’ve also worked in tandem with other publishers on certain program to suit the needs of the client. The industry is moving fast and getting faster. Therefore, it’s important we all learn from each other, not fight against each other for first place. The bar for branded content is high—and so are audience expectations.

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of August 23, 2018

August 23, 2018 DCN

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

Financial Times | Brussels to act against tech groups over terror content (3 min read)
Ad Week | Google Is Collecting Your Data—Even When Your Phone Isn’t in Use (5 min read)
The Washington Post | Don’t want Google tracking you? You have almost no choice, according to a study. (3 min read)
The New York Times | ‘Weaponized Ad Technology’: Facebook’s Moneymaker Gets a Critical Eye (7 min read)
Variety | How Hollywood Is Racing to Catch Up With Netflix (16 min read)
The New York Times | Facebook Identifies New Influence Operations Spanning Globe (7 min read)
CNBC | Millennials are going to extreme lengths to share streaming passwords, and companies are missing out on millions (6 min read)
The Washington Post | This is the moment all of Trump’s anti-media rhetoric has been working toward (4 min read)

For Hearst’s Kate Lewis, data fuels strategy but the audience is in the driver’s seat

August 23, 2018 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

Reading Kate Lewis’s list of responsibilities as Chief Content Officer of Hearst Magazines boggles the mind. She oversees content strategy, which includes managing all of the company’s editors-in-chief and digital directors in the U.S., while working with its international network to coordinate global content.

Keep in mind that Hearst is a sprawling global publishing empire with 300 print editions and 240 digital brands. Lewis in charge of the 25 print and 25 digital publications in the U.S. The former has an audience of 89 million, the latter 108 million.

Kate Lewis, Chief Content Officer of Hearst Magazines

As though that weren’t enough for any single human, she also works closely with the product and technology teams, consumer marketing, and the division’s branded content unit, HearstMade – just in case she has some spare time.

Lewis is in constant motion. One thing is clear, to monitor this network of brands, she has become keenly aware of the value of data, which drives strategy across both print and digital. It also provides her with critical insights into the audience’s needs, desires, and expectations.

It’s all about that audience

Given her broad purview, Lewis has developed a core guiding philosophy (and great communications skills), which allows her to maintain a consistent approach while also considering each publication’s unique audience.

“Our approach is driven by our audience. What do they want from us, brand-by-brand, on every platform where we deliver content. We create and design content differently depending on the platform. And, of course, print is a huge platform for us. It’s where this all started! So, the thinking first will always be: ‘What does the audience want from us in this encounter?’ And yes, that is always evolving,” she explained.

As an example of that evolution, she points out that when she started at Hearst, they were very focused on Facebook to drive traffic. Now, they think about it as a way to get video views, among other things. “This kind of persistent change is something that feels digital in nature, but I think will be meaningful in the print world,” she said.

Digging the data

Back in the days before digital, it was hard to know much about your audience beyond subscriber numbers and some basic demographics. However, Lewis points out that today, print publications have access to the same data as the digital properties so that both can take advantage of it.

That means arming editors with as much information as possible. Hearst has a dedicated data operation called Hearst Data Studios, which feeds data across the brands. “This comes down to the efforts of our Hearst Data Studio, as well as an openness to sharing the data, the insights we have across our many, many brands.”

Beyond that, Lewis said that employees need transparency about how she is using the data internally to measure success or failure. “Sharing and being honest about wins and fails will be key. And truly defining, clearly, what a win and a loss is. My feeling is that content can rise from access to data, collaborative editors, and clear goals. We have established all the above amongst the digital team and I hope to add to what’s already being done on print.”

The future is now

Lewis believes that the biggest challenge on the content side of things remains distribution. And, she says that it’s getting harder to know your audience when it comes from many different sources. “People still hunger for content, big and small, but our direct connection to them has been somewhat obfuscated. It can be challenging to get in their face these days whether because of the decreasing number of newsstands or the increasing presence of social media. Our audience is huge but comes to us in many ways, not necessarily directly,” she said.

One way that media companies have tried to keep their audience front and center is through newsletters. Lewis acknowledges newsletters provide a kind of direct connection. However, she worries that consumer inboxes are becoming overloaded, which may sever that direct link. She sees chat as one way to fill the gap. “Chat is pervasive from grandmas to 10-year-olds,” she said. She also sees voice-driven media like Alexa and Siri also coming into play once they mature.

Ultimately, though, Lewis feels that everything boils down to audience engagement. It’s up to brands to figure out how best to keep the audience coming back as technology continually changes the way consumers interact with content creators. “Brands evolve based on generations and trends and the measure of good, and as the caretakers of the brands we’ll push them to be relevant and worth engaging with.”

Perspectives | Revenue

What happens when you take “publishing” out of the “publishing business”

August 20, 2018 Dennis Yuscavitch, VP of Product Marketing—Outbrain

In May of 2017, Bill Simmons, former ESPN personality and creator of The Ringer, made an interesting decision to move his successful sports media empire to Vox Media. Simmons maintained editorial independence but relied on Vox for all the non-content creation requirements of a traditional publisher. This included all revenue and product development because as Simmons said “they are great at sales and technology.” The plan, it seems, was to offload the “publishing” part of the publishing business. This allowed Simmons to focus on content creation for his widely popular podcast and website.

This wasn’t a viable model 20 years ago when publishers had established oligopolies by controlling distribution in their respective geographic regions. As a result, the publishing needs of the business, HR, printing press, sales, and distribution existed to support editorial and content creation. Now that the internet has driven distribution costs to near $0, and oligopolies no longer exists, there is little need to combine traditional publishing sales, product and HR overhead with the journalism it is intended to support.

Even so, content creations like Simmons still need to make money. To do so, they rely on content management platforms like Chorus, the purpose-built platform Vox created to manage content and revenue. As of July, Chorus supported 350 media brands. The system includes “content management, data-informed multi-platform content distribution, integrated advertising, and a suite of publishing tools.” Media brands that strip away activities not directly related to content creation establish a sustainable model that allows them to create even more great content, a reinforcing cycle of success.

In his May 2017 post, Ben Thompson covered the changing business model while referring to platforms like Vox’s as the “Faceless Publisher.” The platform handles all the monetization, resources, and infrastructure, which allows journalists to focus on creating amazing content.

The term “Faceless Publisher” might be a misnomer in Vox’s case given they have established several great brands in the market including SB Nation, Vox and Eater. However, it is clear that this federated group of journalistic brands, supported by a single business platform, creates great efficiencies. This efficiency will deliver what readers and content creators need: a sustainable business model that delivers amazing content.

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of August 16, 2018

August 16, 2018 DCN

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

The Wall Street Journal | The Woman Behind the New York Times’ High-Risk, High-Reward Business Strategy (5 min read)
AP | AP Exclusive: Google tracks your movements, like it or not (7 min read)
The Verge | Netflix, Amazon Video, and Xfinity are accidentally re-creating cable TV (7 min read)
Medium | Dear Journalists: The war on what you do is escalating. You need to escalate your response—by working together. (9 min read)
Bloomberg | Who Killed the Great American Cable-TV Bundle? (11 min read)
Politico | Tour de Dorsey (6 min read)
Washingtonian | Why the Washington Post’s Twitter Has Been So Good Lately (3 min read)
The New York Times Magazine| The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley — and Won (43 min read)

Why outdoor advertising is having a renaissance

August 16, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

It’s a tough market for traditional advertising. Virtually every sector will see a drop this year, except one: outdoor advertising. What’s driving the growth? Intense interest from large tech companies advertising on billboards and even buying into billboard companies. Plus, new technology allows better digital tracking of who seeks billboards. Not to mention the fact that some billboards end up being photographed and shared as memes on social media.

Both Google and Facebook, as well as Netflix and China’s Alibaba, among other companies, have started investing in outdoor advertising. And out-of-home ads are expected to expand by two percent this year, compared to one percent from last year. These incremental gains don’t mean that aging billboards will proliferate, of course. But with interest from tech behemoths – and startups trying to disrupt the buying process – outdoor advertising is having an unexpected renaissance. (Plus, no one has invented an ad blocker for real-life billboards yet.)

Tech Giants Drive Interest

While Facebook touts its targeted online adverting and rakes in billions, the social giant is actually pushing its own marketing campaigns to the physical world. Case in point: Facebook recently ran an outdoor advertising campaign to showcase its approach to user safety and privacy.

And Google is now bringing targeted ads to outside advertising after three years of testing programmatic ad technology on billboards. With an emphasis on transit points and the times and people who show up there, the company is banking on targeting ads toward these populations. These might be affluent commuters or die-hard soccer fans, as Bloomberg’s Alex Webb explained. Although a recent AP investigation is drawing attention to the ways Google tracks your location without your consent, this very location-targeting — assuming users are aware it’s on — is what will give Google an edge in serving relevant outdoor ads.

The renewed interest in old fashioned outdoor advertising is not just an American phenomenon. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, for one, has invested $2.23 billion in Focus Media, a company based in Shanghai that operates outdoor digital advertising screens in China, Singapore and Hong Kong. The move goes back to Alibaba’s “online-to-offline” strategy, also referred to as “New Retail,” that Alibaba hopes can be an alternative way of reaching China’s growing middle class.

New Technology, Digital Tracking

Of course, billboards today are much more than static images. Digital billboard advertising can switch screens every 10 seconds or so. And with their size, (especially if you’re stuck in traffic) they’re hard to ignore. Clever ad campaigns on huge digital screens can prompt viewers to share the experience of the ad on social media. Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, which operates more than 1,200 digital roadside billboards in the U.S., uses mobile data from third-party providers to know which phones are passing in front of billboards.

Despite all the interest from tech firms, the buying process for billboards is still complicated and byzantine. To circumvent some of these issues, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is now backing a startup, AdQuick, that hopes to smooth the process of purchasing billboard ads. AdQuick has secured $2.1 million to develop targeting and measuring tools. This included what CEO and co-founder Matt O’Conner hopes will include voice technology like Amazon Alexa or Google Home. The idea is that passersby will be able to ask digital voice assistants to ping billboard information directly to their phones.

Netflix Gets Exposure in Hollywood

Online advertising may get all the credit for being hyper-targeted. However, for some companies, this kind of targeted advertising is also possible when you’re in the right place at the right time. Netflix, for example, bought half the assets of Regency Outdoor Advertising, a Los Angeles-based company, in a $150 million deal. Its focus: Sunset Strip.

Why? Sunset Strip is the everyday pathway for actors, directors and writers — and would-be actors, directors and writers. So, Netflix can both promote its existing shows while enticing talent for upcoming projects. It’s a no brainer, according to Nancy Fletcher, the president and CEO of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. “In the entertainment capital of the world — where your waitress could be producing a movie — Netflix chose to buy billboards.”

But while Los Angeles is happy to plaster the highways with billboards, not every city is so welcoming of them. Nearby San Diego, for example, has long fought “sign pollution and visual blight,” but could be affected by a new California bill that would loosen the rules on outdoor advertising and allow more digital billboards. With the amount of potential revenue these advertising campaigns offer, though, this could be a tough bill to fight.

The opportunities for outdoor advertising seem endless with the right amount of investment and creative technique. Viewers might not always be happy about being bombarded with yet another advertisement — but then again, when are they not? The question is whether new technologies and interest from tech companies can truly make billboards a long-term growth story, or just another blip in the tech boom.

Perspectives

Post-GDPR, are data clean rooms the answer to accessing walled gardens?

August 15, 2018 Karen Moked, Vice President of Marketing–Digilant

As of May 25, 2018, Google announced that DoubleClick users will be unable to rely on cookies or mobile device IDs to connect impressions, clicks and site activities from DoubleClick logs. Instead, they will be limited to Google’s own Ads Data Hub for those metrics.

For some, this means that they are satisfied to stay within the Google stack. But not every brand’s solution will be and should be limited to Google. If media buyers want to analyze their spend outside of Google’s platform and offer up any attribution, then just using Google won’t work.

“Some marketers who spend 75 percent or more of their budgets on Google will be fine just letting Google do the analytics,” says Alice Sylvester of Sequent Partners.

Google wasn’t the only one to lock down its platform. In response to the combined pressure of GDPR and the Cambridge Analytica scandals (related to handling of personal information), Facebook decided that it would shut down ad tools called “Partner Categories” powered by outside data brokers. Those tools let Facebook advertisers target ads at people based on third-party data such as their offline purchasing history.

This means advertisers will have access only to their own data, and data Facebook collects itself. If an advertiser wants to pull campaign-level insights to inform future campaigns, or use the data for the basis of an attribution model, then they are out of luck.

Introduction of Data Clean Rooms

Data clean rooms allow large inventory partners like Facebook and Google to share customer information with brands, while still maintaining strict controls. Data clean rooms were named for the completely airtight rooms where microchips and other sensitive materials get made. In this case, the rooms enable a shared environment between two or more companies that are completely secure from external access (no wifi), and where each company decides the level of visibility to their data. This eliminates – or severely restricts – the possibility of data leakage (which is what happened with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica).

“We and a partner combine a data set with very specific rules and controls around how each party can operate within the shared environment,” said Scott Shapiro, a product marketing director for measurement at Facebook, who noted that Facebook didn’t invent the clean-room concept.

The driving force behind the concept is to create a safe space where data can be shared and manipulated without leaving the inventory partner’s environment. Specifically for Facebook, a brand can create an audience based on first-party data – like a list of email addresses – and then push that list into Facebook, match it, and grab a copy which they can later combine with their data as the basis for attribution, measurement, and modeling.

How it happens in reality is that an advertiser will load a clean or wiped laptop or device that has never been connected to the Internet with that advertiser’s first party data, which in most cases is an email list. A second clean computer is loaded by Facebook or Google with impression-level and non-personally identifiable information (“PII”) campaign data.

Maybe, The Answer to Scaling The Walled Gardens?

For advertisers with reams of data and substantial programmatic advertising budgets, this is a great opportunity to scale the otherwise elusive walled gardens. Data clean rooms create a safe environment for data providers to share marketing information that brands need and crave to model future media buys and advertising strategies. If managed properly, with appropriate methods and standards, this technique would allow brands to really understand their walled-garden ad spends within the larger marketing ecosystem. For both advertisers and publishers alike, the stakes are high in the post-GDPR world of data governance, and there is no room for unintended data sharing because consequences are severe.

Marketers have been eager to get more insights out of Facebook and other walled gardens, but it remains to be seen how aggressively brands and agencies will use data clean rooms to make the most of the spending with the largest inventory providers (e.g., Google, Facebook).

There are two prevailing views for what the future holds:

Glass half-empty: These same inventory providers lack a compelling incentive to play well with others in clean rooms, beyond delivering another level of customer service in a marketplace they continue to dominate.
Glass half-full: It’s been a daunting year or more for the industry category, with virtually continuous coverage related to privacy violations, bad actors influencing politics, and fraud and transparency challenges. The ‘clean room’ concept may be a half-step that the duopoly can get behind, if only as a signal of good faith to the industry.

There is also the overriding issue of what kind of manpower (likely significant) would be involved to make the clean room option a viable reality. The usefulness of data in this kind of an environment may also be somewhat limited No matter, though: The data clean room concept is one that’s getting some attention. And, considering its appeal among the dearth of options out there that seem appealing to all the affected players – brands, agencies and inventory providers – it could be one that ends up getting traction.

About the author

Karen Moked is the Vice President of Marketing at Digilant, a programmatic media company in Boston. A veteran of the advertising and technology industries, she previously worked for Akamai and O’Reilly Media. Karen is a graduate of MBA-ESG in Paris and York University in Toronto. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of August 9, 2018

August 9, 2018 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

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

CNET | Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify ban Infowars, touching off censorship debate (3 min read)
Nieman Lab | What is a Scandinavian media company’s first-ever director of public policy up against? (13 min read)
The New York Times | The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley (7 min read)
Bloomberg | A German Publisher Is Winning the Internet (7 min read)
Columbia Journalism Review | Should journalists and researchers get a special exemption from Facebook’s rules? (3 min read)
The Lenfest Institute | Hold on there, pardner: Texas Monthly is running a test to stop readers who use ad-blockers (11 min read)
The Guardian | ‘Just use cat videos’: New York Times boss wants Facebook to cut out news (6 min read)
Recode | The tech industry needs to reckon with the dark side of advertising, WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg says (1h listen)

With a little help – and a little weirdness – readers understand why it’s important to help local startup newsrooms pay the bills

August 9, 2018 Dave Burdick, Editor–Denverite

Reporters have a lot of fun. They get to call remarkable people every day.

Editors don’t do that quite as much, so Thursday was exciting for me. After a brief email exchange, I called a remarkable person who had only a couple of minutes as she walked between obligations.

The remarkable thing about Molly Trujillo is that she’s been really persistent about giving money to Denverite, a local news organization (where I’m the editor). And this is despite the fact that there’s no paywall and even though she’s unlikely to be able to get to any of the member-only events her contributions entitle her to because of her commute.

She’s had two credit cards stolen in the past few months. The first time, she canceled her card, then set up another recurring donation with Denverite. The second time, she was frustrated by the process of having to set up her various donations and payments for everything associated with that card all over again. So, she set up a larger, annual donation with Denverite, just in case something like this happens again.

When we launched Denverite’s membership program, just weeks before our Spirited Media colleagues at The Incline and Billy Penn launched theirs, we had some guesses about what might cause people to donate. We knew that our newsletter open rates were outstanding, and that Denverites enjoyed our story selection, our voice and our reader-focused suite of news products. But would that be enough to get people to help us pay the bills?

I asked Denverite members why they donate.

Trujillo told me she just really likes Denverite.

“You guys are looking at the things that are really, really interesting,” she told me.

“In one email, I can find out what’s going on this weekend, I can find out who did what to who,” she said. “I can find out where there’s going to be problems in Denver, I can find out where there are going to be really great things. The whole rundown. I just love that. The good, the bad, the fun stuff.”

Hours later, I called Jan Marie Belle, who became a member of Denverite as soon as she could. She also pays for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Denver Post and has contributed to the Colorado Sun crowdfunding campaign.

Belle said she reads our email newsletters every day. She particularly appreciates that we have local stories that no one else has.

“You get news there that you can’t get anywhere else, and you get it early, and you get it often. And your daily emails and the way you link to things — it really is valuable because there’s a lot of information there and you seem to get it up sooner than anyone else.”

Belle, a pretty engaged Denver native, said it’s important to her that local journalists are producing local news — stories about housing and neighborhoods, especially. And it’s important to her that she and others read multiple sources of news. That’s all important to us, too, and we’re pretty loud about it.

Understanding the bigger picture

A Denverite member event.
Photo by Kevin J. Beaty, Denverite

“The first reason I paid for it is, I figured if you didn’t get some money, you might not be there,” she said. “I understand that people have to have money to run a business.”

When she said that, my heart skipped a beat. Yes! Correct! That’s the whole deal!

That’s why our partners at the News Revenue Hub coached us to make our messaging really clear about that: If you’d miss Denverite if it was gone, you might want to help us pay the bills, because reporting costs money, and if the money runs out, the reporting stops.

We’d long had people asking us to put a “DONATE” button on our site, but launching membership was of course more involved than that. News Revenue Hub helped our newsrooms build email campaigns that explain why we need reader support and what that support pays for.

Our first membership program email was pretty honest about our financial situation: We’d just laid off three reporters a few months before, and we needed to make some changes to the way we were doing things. Most urgently, we needed support from the readers, starting right away.

Since then, we’ve highlighted the different types of work we do. We’ve also described the processes of local journalism in a little more detail for people who have no reason to already know how it all works.

Not everybody knows at the outset that it takes time, patience and skill to report and write the kinds of stories that connect the dots between the machinery of local government and the reader’s day-to-day needs and desires.

Inspiring love notes

“I love reading Denverite.” “You make Denver feel like a small town again. Interesting topics, great writing.” “I just discovered you and you are just what I need.”

Those messages accompanied new members’ first donations. Belle told me she loves that we ask readers for suggestions and that we’re responsive. Trujillo wrote after we’d spoken to add, “I really like the personal and witty delivery in each email.”

That makes a big difference for people, in our experience. It’s good to be useful, and it’s better to be useful and delightful. Do good work with a sense of adventure and a sense of humor. Think about how and when your audience is using your products. And do things other players can’t or won’t do.

Another new member, James Anthofer, donated within hours of attending a Denverite event in which we walked a little over five miles through the city.

When I asked him via email why he donated, he said that he’d found himself checking Denverite more than other local news sites to find out what’s going on in the city, but the thing that pushed him over the edge was something quirky.

“The turning point might have been this article, which answered a question I had wondered for long time a couple of months ago,” he wrote. “Denverite’s website found that story when I typed ‘parking lot horse statue’ or something like that into the site. I started subscribing to Denverite because I want it to continue to exist and answer my weird questions.”

About the Author

Dave Burdick is the editor of Denverite. He lives in Denver and is probably on a bike, laughing just a little too loudly somewhere or staring reverently at the moon. Read Denverite or else.

Perspectives

Creating content with intent

August 7, 2018 Jeanette Mulvey, VP B2B Content—Purch

Before bringing your “A” game, you have to know your end game.

With digital publishers facing an ever-increasing need for a constant stream of new and clickable content, it’s not surprising that content creation strategies tend to prioritize quantity above all else. But there’s a smarter way to create content – one that focuses on both quantity and quality while simultaneously developing measurable KPIs.

This process of creating content with intent means identifying what purpose your content serves early in the content development process. The key to doing that is matching your content format and distribution channels with your business needs and developing scalable processes for creating that content as cost effectively as possible.

While every company’s needs are different, the process for deploying this content strategy works no matter what your content goals are. Here are five steps to making it happen.

Get Outside the Content Bubble

Before you start developing a content strategy you need to fully understand what purpose content serves for your business. Delivering content to as many people as possible is not necessarily the most important thing for every publisher. For some, the main purpose of their content is driving revenue or leads. For others, content is mainly focused on brand building or customer retention. However, for most companies, it’s all of the above.

Identifying your goals requires involving all stakeholders in the early stages of the content-planning process. From sales and marketing to social and SEO, make sure everyone’s voice is heard early and often. It will result in a more solid content strategy that aligns with your broader business plan.

Setting Goals

Once you’ve mapped your content strategy with your business plan, you should determine early on what success will look like. If your goal is to drive traffic, figure out what your ideal traffic growth numbers are. If it’s revenue, do the same. Even if you don’t make your goals, setting them early on will give you something to aim for and help you measure your success later.

Keep in mind that your goals may change. You might discover that your intended audience is misaligned with the content you’ve created for one purpose, but in the process discover a new value for your content you hadn’t considered. Be open to adapting and evolving your goals as you learn what works.

Change the Channel

In the age of content everywhere, many publishers are struggling to find a strategy that targets their core audience and instead find themselves trying to be everything to everyone. With limited editorial resources that strategy rarely works. The result is too much content that doesn’t perform well in any particular channel and a watered-down brand that doesn’t resonate with any one, loyal group.

Before you start developing your content, assess where your desired audience likely lives and how they are most likely to find your content. Identifying a few key distribution channels will help you sculpt your content to maximize performance within a given channel.

Target Your Content

Now that you know what your content will be about and where your audience will find it, it’s time to make sure the content itself is packaged in a manner that aligns with those goals. That means identifying what formats and templates work best for your intended audience. While social media loves eye-catching images and clickable headlines, content designed to drive organic search traffic should be SEO-focused and formatted for search-friendly performance.

Aligning your content format to your end goals means again leveraging teams outside of content to gather data and advice on what works and what doesn’t. This will change over time, so a big part of targeting content requires a willingness to innovate and evolve over time.

Measuring Success

The most important step in creating a strategic and purposeful content strategy is the follow up. Find ways to measure the actual success of your content initiatives that are focused on your company goals – not simply based on standard one-size-fits-all approaches. Measuring overall traffic or page views, for example, may not be the best way of determining if what you’re doing is serving your needs.

Make sure your approach to analyzing the success of your efforts is effective by bridging the communication gap between your decision makers and your data analysts. Too often, our data experts don’t understand our broader business goals and end up assessing the data in ways that are logical but not necessarily aligned with predicting the businesses’ desired outcomes.

While each of these steps may appear to be common sense, too often they get lost in the content planning process. Teams are siloed and often don’t discuss strategy until after the content is already created. Discussing each team’s needs and concerns early will result in better performing content and more efficient processes. It may also result in better understanding across teams and shared learning that results in better performance by each.

About the author

Jeanette Mulvey loves telling small business stories. From hardware stores in Saskatchewan to fashion designers in Milan, she’s traveled the world learning what makes entrepreneurs tick and hearing their struggles. As VP of B2B Content at Purch, she is responsible for content and social media and for Business.com and BusinessNewsDaily, where she strives to ensure both sites are the go-to destination for small business advice and inspiration. Follow her on Twitter @JeanetteB2B

Innovation

How the new Economist app helps its audience feel less guilty and read more

August 6, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

As the saying goes, sometimes less is more. In the case of The Economist, the breadth of articles and analysis, which have been its hallmark since it was founded in 1843, was starting to fall out of step with today’s time-crunched readers. To realign with readers who need to digest a lot of information while on the go, The Economist released a new mobile app in May that focused on heightening interest all of the content it produces. And, even more importantly, the new app was designed to demonstrate a value proposition that would help it retain, rather than overwhelm, app subscribers.

The company doesn’t just rely on a better UX to help readers navigate content. The Economist app harnesses human judgment to curate content and surface interesting and relevant stories. It also introduces a welcome element of serendipity into the mix. Efforts to increase retention and become a “subscriber-first publication” are critical considering subscriptions and circulations make up the lion’s share (58%) of the Economist’s revenues and continue to grow at 21% year-on-year. Peggy Anne Salz, mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove, catches up with Richard Holden, Deputy Head of Product at The Economist, to discuss the role of content choice in the user experience and the value-add provided by human judgment and editorial curation.

PAS: The Economist has 10 different apps in the Apple App Store. What are some of the differences in the apps and the audiences they serve?

RH: When we started out, the focus was to replicate our print edition on the digital platforms in ways that our users would find useful. At the time, the answer was to produce an app that was a replacement for print and a companion to the user. Fast forward a few years, and we arrive at Espresso, our real mobile-first daily update product and a great example of what a proper app can deliver if you put the user at the center. At that time, we wanted to offer a different user experience and go beyond just providing readers a digital version of the full Economist: It made sense because this was a different audience from the users who had embraced our first app and the full print replica if offers. Economist Espresso is a morning briefing from the editors of The Economist delivered to your smartphone or inbox before breakfast telling you what’s going on in the world.

PAS: Where does the new Economist app fit in that continuum?

RH: As we evolved, we saw the opportunity to find new ways to offer an experience that delivers the Economist in a way that provides value, but not necessarily the full Economist experience. So, we did quite a lot of user research and developed an app that makes it possible for us to do the job that users have essentially hired us to do when they commit to a subscription. They subscribe to the Economist because they want to access and experience the breadth of what the Economist has to offer, but they don’t just want the full print edition.

Following this is how we got to the user experience the new app offers. We didn’t just copy over the print edition and say ‘job done.’ Yes, the full print edition is available in the app, but it’s not the first screen we show the reader. We start by showing them what we call Daily Picks, which is where we give readers a valuable view into the breadth of what the Economist offers.

It’s not about providing breaking news. It is about serving up our analysis of what’s going on in the world. It’s about sharing stories that are interesting, informative—the stories our readers might not have known about otherwise—or even cared about—until we showed put them in our Daily Picks. This is where we use the power of our editorial curation to help users get that broad view of the world that they come to the Economist for—and the reason they subscribe to our app

PAS: It’s the “power of your editorial curation,” as you say, that adds value. Where do the stories come from and how are they chosen?

RH: It’s all within the Economist, but it’s full breadth of the Economist. This means, in addition to the full print version, we pull in and publish the stories that previously were only available on our website. The editor, the curator of the day, brings this wealth of content —all Economist content — into the app. And we’re seeing that our readers appreciate the mix. They don’t subscribe to read what they already read. So, a reader in Britain might want to read everything in the Britain section as a matter of habit. Our readers don’t want to go down a singular route to read the Economist. They value curation that introduces them to stories they might not read as a rule or even know exist.

PAS: Your readers look to the Economist to provide breadth, not just depth. But delivering it via an app is another matter…

RH: It’s hard to do in digital, for sure. In a magazine, people flick through and stop when a story catches their eye. It’s not as easy to do in digital. What we found in our earlier app is that there would be a considerable bias towards whatever was at the front. It was harder to get that serendipity because people had to swipe through a lot of content to get to the stuff in the back of the print edition on a mobile app. It was work, in a way, and users were taking the easy way out by reading what came first rather than swipe to the end. That’s the habit we’re breaking with the new app which is focused on removing friction and making reading an adventure again.

PAS: Curation is at the core of your app experience, but it relies on human editors, not AI technology. Tell me about the user experience.

RH: Our editors using their editorial judgment. When we talked to our readers, they told us they trust us to curate, and this is what they are paying for when they commit to a subscription. They want us to help them work out what’s most important or what’s most interesting, and this is what our editors do for them. That’s why we’ve chosen to use human judgment rather than go down the road of asking our reader their preferences or harness the technology to make suggestions or recommendations based on what they are reading.

We did think about AI, but our research told us users expect us to curate content. Perhaps, over time, we can refine editorial curation with the help of AI, as the two aren’t mutually exclusive. It may be that we can combine human judgment with AI in a way that still makes sense for our readers. It’s a route we may want to explore in the future. But AI won’t be a replacement for human curation. Right now, curation by our editors is the way we want to go. It’s what our subscribers pay us to do for them.

PAS: Beyond improving the user experience through expert curation what other innovations can we expect from the Economist?

RH: To be honest, I’m less enamored around new technologies like AR and VR and more interested in using technology to reduce friction. One of the developments I’m most excited about is the password management improvement we’ll see with iOS 12. It’s perhaps not very glamorous, but it will make it easier to log in to apps with the same password you use for websites, and that is useful for our readers.

As we shift from advertising, we have focused on subscription. In the future, we will be looking at commercial opportunities for the app. While recognizing that ads are a part of the revenue streams that we need to have as part of a business, it’s also clear the commercial experience cannot be interruptive to our readers.

PAS: What’s the biggest challenge in bringing readers content from across the full breadth of your print and online assets?

RH: We see that the problem our readers have quite often is managing to read all the content we offer. They find it quite hard to finish the whole thing every week. It’s a significant time commitment. And, like a gym membership, even people with the best intentions just can’t keep to the routine. People can start to feel guilty if they’ve got a pile of print editions on their coffee table unopened, or a load of bookmarks. So, rather than enjoying reading the Economist, you’ve got a situation where readers start to a bit guilty. We don’t want readers to give up; we want to make it even easier for them to get value from The Economist without feeling they have to read it all. That’s where our focus on curation comes in. It’s our service to make life less complicated and the experience more enjoyable.

Moving forward, we’re not going to just add more content and make it complicated. It’s not about adding new tabs to make it tough to read. We keep it simple and surface relevant with interesting content that helps them get value out of their subscription.

PAS: Maintaining a user-centric approach often requires publishers to adopt a different mindset. What advice could you offer companies based on your journey at the Economist?

RH: Stay focused on your readers, not on the needs of different parts of an organization. If we’re honest, all editorial organizations struggle because different parts of the organization will always want their content to be top, front and center. If you do that, you can end up with something that’s very bloated and hard for the reader to navigate. It can be challenging to move from that mindset—thinking you know what’s best–to providing the readers what’s best for them. It requires companies to put the user first, and it requires constant testing and iteration to find out what works, rather than making assumptions about what works and what doesn’t.