Digital Curation by François Avril @digital-strategy - Tumblr Blog

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Nous avons interviewé Claire Sassonia, Directrice générale déléguée du Groupe Cerise.

Qui est le Groupe Cerise ?

Le Groupe Cerise a été créé il y a une dizaine d’années par un industriel du textile : Denis Marchand et Benjamin Tolman. Il compte deux marques médias : OhMyMag! (plutôt pour les femmes) et Gentside (plutôt pour les hommes), dont les coeurs de cible sont les 18/34ans. Nous comptons environ 15 millions de visiteurs uniques / mois sur les deux marques.

Nos deux médias sont bien évidemment présents en France mais aussi à l’international dans plus de 9 pays grâce à la déclinaison de versions anglaises, espagnoles et allemandes.

Le groupe Cerise est aussi une agence de brand publishing. Nous créons pour les marques des contenus en marque blanche.

Notre sommes sous l’égide du groupe Prisma, notre actionnaire principal, mais nous avons un fonctionnement autonome pour garder notre agilité et notre ADN startup - le groupe Cerise se situe dans des locaux différents.

Cible des 18/34 ans : quelle philosophie ?

On parle souvent des millennials comme un ensemble marketing mais en réalité c’est un groupe avec énormément de disparités. Il est compliqué de mettre dans la même catégorie un jeune de 18 ans qui est encore au lycée et un jeune de 34 ans qui vient d’être papa. Nous sommes donc à l’écoute de cette grande catégorie, nous essayons de trouver le plus de points communs.

Notre coeur de cible, par exemple, vient chercher de l'émotion et du divertissement à travers nos contenus, mails il est aussi très conscient des enjeux de

société dans laquelle nous vivons, plus que d’autres générations. Il met au coeur de sonprisme de pensées toutes les questions liées à l’humain : égalité homme/femme, racisme,environnement.

C’est aussi une génération qui à un rapport au travail différent par rapport aux générations précédentes, où ce dernier ne doit pas occuper toute la vie. Des limites sont donc plus facilement posées. C’est une génération qui met à distance toutes les injonctions subies par les générations précédentes (sur le physique, sur la façon d’être de bons parents…). Elle rejette tous ces diktats et souhaite construire sa propre identité.

Quelle est votre approche et comment les 18/34 ans réagissent à vos marques médias ?

L’idée principale est de leur donner la parole, essentiellement à des personnes qui ont, pour eux, une légitimité sur des sujets de sociétés et d’engagements. Par exemple, autour des questions du Black Lives Matter du début de l’été, nous avons inviter dans notre studio des influenceurs.euses concernées par les questions de racisme.

Nous sommes présents sur toutes les plateformes sociales où sont les 18/34 ans. Bien évidemment, il y’a Facebook, même si notre cible n’est pas forcément la plus active sur ce canal, en tout cas de moins en moins. On les retrouve surtout sur Instagram, Tik Tok ( un média qui crée énormément d'interactions sur nos contenus) et bien sûr Snapchat.

Quel est votre modèle d’audience?

Nous avons deux objectifs : Nous devons à la fois créer du trafic sur notre site (notre modèle économique est lié à la publicité) et développer de façon native notre audience sur les réseaux sociaux car notre cible y est très active et c’est là qu’il y a de l’engagement. Notre modèle est donc hybride. Cela nous permet aussi de faire vivre nos marques en dehors de nos propres actifs et toucher des personnes que nous n’aurions peut-être pas intéressé autrement, comme des populations plus jeunes et qui demain pourraient être notre cible.

Sur les réseaux sociaux, nous pouvons avoir des modèles de partage de revenus comme sur Snapchat où nous avons deux shows sur Discover : “Mourir moins con” et “7 secondes”.

Brand content VS publicité traditionnelle ?

Très tôt nous avons fait du brand content. A partir du moment où un contenu a un intérêt pour le public, il peut être sponsorisé par une marque. Il faut préciser dans ce cas que c’est sponsorisé, il faut le dire. notre public n’est pas dupe et il veut de la transparence. Il faut que le contenu réponde à des questions, rende un service ou les divertissent leur apporte une émotion.

Brand content : un exemple concret parlant ?

Récemment, nous avons fait une belle opération de notoriété avec une marque de lingerie Sans Complexe, pour les fortes poitrines. L’idée était de décomplexer les femmes à forte poitrine, leur donner confiance en elles et leur montrer qu’elles pouvaient trouver de la jolie lingerie. Nous avons produit un certain nombre de contenus autour de la thématique, avec la rédaction de Ohmymag mai aussi des influenceuses, qui ont raconté leurs rapports avec leur poitrine, leur vécu, comme elles ont surmonté leurs complexes et qui portent la lingerie Sans Complexe. L’opération a été un succès puisqu’elle a généré plus d’1,5 millions de vues.

L’audio ?

Nous sommes très actifs sur le sujet. Nous avons un super podcast, Mourir moins con, qui se décline en trois épisodes par semaine et deux minutes de culture générale. Nous apportons une réponse à une question par exemple, à l’occasion de Roland Garros, pourquoi les balles de tennis sont jaunes ? Pourquoi le maillot à pois du Tour de France est-il à pois ? Pourquoi dit-on allô au téléphone ? Le podcast rencontre un beau succès, nous avons été dans le top des podcasts d’Apple de 2019, et comptons 500 000 écoutes par mois.

Du coup, nous avons décliné la version pour enfants Grandir moins con ? lancé très récemment.

Cet été nous venons de lancer un podcast pour les femmes la Question Q. C’est un podcast sexo, en deux ou trois minutes, qui parle des problématiques de sexualité. L’idée c’est de parler de toutes les sexualités, et de lever des tabous, dédramatiser, décomplexer.

A noter que tous nos podcasts sont également disponibles en version vidéo. Les contenus sont donc disponibles sur nos sites et sur les réseaux sociaux. Les épisodes sont effet incarnés par les personnes de la rédaction, filmés dans nos studio.

Tout est produit en interne, dans notre studio de 90 m2 à Paris. Nous avons un vrai savoir-faire de production et de post-production. Nous industrialisons la production ne ce sens que nous déclinons un format en 4 ou 5 formats différents.

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“It’s complicated” is probably the best way to describe Apple’s relationship with the advertising industry in recent years. Apple itself is a much-lauded marketer that leans on glitzy advertising to sell its smartphones and services. It recognizes developers rely on advertising in order to keep its App Store thriving with free-to-download apps.

Yet the company has also positioned itself as Silicon Valley’s bastion of privacy. On several occasions, Apple CEO Tim Cook has many times denounced online advertising industry practices that allow for third-party companies to stitch together profiles of users.

“They absolutely care about advertising in the big picture sense and their own ability to advertise their own brand,” said GroupM global president of business intelligence Brian Wieser. “But we know that there’s some cultural allergies to advertising as its been practiced by the industry, both in terms of how they sell their ads and how they buy their ads.”

Apple’s ambivalence towards the ad industry was again on full display between its June announcement about a new app privacy update set for this fall — and then its subsequent announcement earlier this month that it’ll delay the change until next year to give developers more time to adjust.

The new change affects Apple’s identifier for advertisers, known as the IDFA, that allows companies to track how users behave across apps and websites. The forthcoming change will force app makers to ask users for permission in order to collect their IDFAs. App developers — from Facebook to news publishers — fear that opt-in rates will be low, which would likely decrease the CPMs developers can charge advertisers.

Beyond expressing their relief, some industry insiders I spoke to over the past week were struck by Apple’s newly conciliatory tone this month and are hopeful for a more open dialog with the Cupertino tech giant. However, some of those people also speculate Apple may have plans to build a bigger ads business of its own.

Apple’s first attempt at an ads division got off to a rocky start. iAd launched in 2010 with big ambitions — and large advertisers like AT&T and Unilever — but closed down just six years later. Executives familiar with iAd recalled it was beset with issues. At first, Apple demanded commitments of $1 million and upwards for advertisers to participate, a huge leap of faith for a new platform and when rivals were offering mobile ads for a fraction of the price. (Amid low fulfilment rates, Apple later reduced the minimum spend to $50.)

Apple also held a tight leash around not only the creative assets but also targeting data and detailed reporting information. iAd, for example, never went below 500 people in any targeting group for a campaign, a person familiar with iAd at the time told me.

“It [was] like those wildlife [TV shows] where you hear that spiders have this incredibly deadly poison … but nature has conspired to not give them fangs or means to deliver it so basically it’s just for show,” said an advertising industry executive who worked at one of iAd’s competitors during the middle of last decade.

Since iAd’s closure, Apple has become a thorn in the side of the online ad industry. Take its Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature in Safari, which it has continued to tighten. Publishers saw CPMs on Safari drop significantly and ad tech companies like Criteo reported immediate ITP-related revenue impact when it launched in 2017.

“Sometimes they have a lack of awareness of the impact they’re creating across industries,” said a buy-side ad tech executive who declined to be named.

Opponents to Apple’s app privacy change argue that any move to depreciate the IDFA would likely strengthen Apple’s own advertising business, whether intentional on Apple’s part or not. Apple currently serves search ads on the App Store and within its Apple News app.

Three industry execs who have worked with Apple speculated to me that the company may have plans to ramp up its search advertising business. On the ads front, Apple currently has 41 open roles globally that contain the phrase “advertising platforms” on its Jobs at Apple site. An ad for a client partner role in Moscow reads, “With over 65% of all app downloads resulting directly from a search on the App Store, Search Ads is quickly becoming the platform of choice for app promotion for iOS developers.” A thriving developer community strengthens Apple’s services business, which generated $46 billion in net sales last year.

Still, don’t go expecting an iAd 2.0.

“It’s hard to imagine Apple would think an ad business of their own, that checked off any less than $20 billion a year, would be of any interest,” said former GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman. “It’d mean they’d have to become as big in the ad business straight away as Amazon — that’s not super easy.”

Whether Apple has bigger advertising ambitions for itself or not, there has been one recent sign the company is slowly becoming more open to at least starting a dialog with the ad industry again.

Apple has agreed to meet (via video conference) with a coalition of advertising and media trade bodies including IAB Europe, IAB Tech Lab, IAB France, News Media Europe and the European Publishers’ Council on September 11. It follows a letter the coalition wrote to Tim Cook in July, expressing their concerns that the new IDFA opt-in pop-up is not compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and that it will adversely impact the revenue of publishers and mobile marketing companies.

Why now? Regulatory concerns could play a part. EU antitrust regulators are investigating whether Apple’s App Store rules breach competition law in the bloc. Politico reported in June that the U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of state attorneys are in the early stages of launching an antitrust probe, similarly over its App Store rules. And you’ll recall Fortnite developer Epic Games’ ongoing legal spat with Apple over the 30% fee it takes for in-app purchases. Now, more than ever, it’s in Apple’s interest to figure out a way for developers to remain financially viable (in which ads will play a part) — and also on its side.

“It’s the first time they are stepping back; it’s the first time they are listening; it’s the first time they are accepting to have a meeting,” said Nicolas Rieul, president of IAB France, which is leading the coalition of trade bodies’ dialog with Apple.

“We welcome it. Now it’s time for discussion.”

The post ‘It’s the first time they’re listening’: Apple is striking a more conciliatory tone with the ad industry appeared first on Digiday.

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

Rules Don’t Apply

Apple is intercepting site traffic to publishers on Apple News+ and redirecting it to the Apple News app through updates to iOS 14 and MacOS Big Sur. The move not only cannibalizes publishers’ subscription audiences, but puts privacy-conscious Apple in a position of doing cross-site tracking, per a Twitter thread by Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile. Users can disable the redirect, but for now, it's the default setting on iPhone and Safari. Apple’s argument for the change could be that gaining scale through Apple will ultimately benefit publishers, if Apple News can deliver higher ARPU than publishers can drive on their own. “Regardless, Apple News is making a big move to move user behavior from a web that they don't control to an app where they do,” Haile wrote.

New Blood

WarnerMedia boss Jason Kilar ousted entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt, who oversaw HBO Max, as well as head of content Kevin Reilly in an executive shakeup. The goal was to simplify the org by rolling production and operations into a single unit, led by Warner Bros. chair and CEO Ann Sarnoff, The Wall Street Journal reports. Sarnoff will oversee WarnerMedia’s content across HBO, HBO Max, TNT, TBS, and other outlets and report directly to Kilar alongside HBO Max GM Andy Forssell, who will lead operations, marketing and consumer engagement. The departure of two high-profile executives who steered the launch of HBO Max raises questions about whether the service is performing as well as AT&T had hoped. The reorg will lead to significant staff reductions.

Under The Hood

Trump is pushing for TikTok’s acquisition by a US company by Sept. 15. But it could take a year or more to unwind the app from ByteDance’s technological backbone, Reuters reports. TikTok shares resources with its Chinese counterpart, Douyin, along with other ByteDance-owned companies. ByteDance began separating out TikTok’s code when the United States raised national security concerns about the app seven months ago. But server code that underpins the app’s functionality and algorithms, manages user profiles and allows for data storage is still shared across ByteDance products. In a potential deal, Microsoft will likely have to rely on ByteDance's code while it works on revising it and moving to a new back-end infrastructure – violating Trump’s deadline. And it’s unclear if the magic of TikTok’s algorithm will work as well when separated out from ByteDance.

But Wait, There’s More!

You’re Hired!

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As the father of a five-year-old, I probably spend more time than most talking about the importance of saying “thank you” to people who do something nice. But saying thanks isn’t just about avoiding awkward scenes in grocery stores — it’s also an important tool for getting others to volunteer their labor for online work. People respond to social cues; if they feel rewarded for something — leaving a high-quality comment on a news story, contributing to a crowdsourced story, engaging with their fellow citizens — it stands to reason they’ll be more interested in doing it again.

That’s the subject of a new study out of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell, led by our old friend Nate Matias. It looks at the most ambitious contributor-driven project around — Wikipedia — and aims to find out if thanking a user for their good work generates more positive outcomes.

The paper’s authors — Matias, Julia Kamin, Reem Al-Kashif, Max Klein, and Eric Pennington — ran a set of experiments on different language versions of Wikipedia: Arabic, German, Polish, and Persian. Since 2013, the site has a tool that allows for one user to give positive feedback to another. Wikipedia editing typically comes with either no feedback (your edit is simply published) or negative feedback (your edit gets reverted or chopped). A “Thanks” within Wikipedia is private to the users involved — no public glory here.

To discover the effect of receiving thanks, we identified 15,558 newcomers and experienced contributors to Wikipedia across four languages. We then encouraged volunteers to thank half of them and observed the effects on their behavior over six weeks. We found that organizing volunteers to thank others:

increased two-week retention of newcomers and experienced contributors by 2 percentage points on average

caused people to send more thanks to others by 43% on average

We did not detect any average effect on the time contributed to Wikipedia over six weeks.

Those two effects are significant. Wikipedia — like any community-driven online enterprise — is highly dependent on the work of unpaid volunteers. And a big part of that is attracting and retaining new volunteers, who can both help fill any voids left by experienced editors dropping off and bring a more diverse set of backgrounds and life experiences to bear. As this Wikipedia article about Wikipedia puts it (meta):

“Studies have shown that content on Wikipedia suffers from the bias of its editors — [who are] mainly technically inclined, English-speaking, white-collar men living in majority-Christian, developed countries in the Northern hemisphere”…

One challenge with retaining new editors is that the “[n]erdy white guys” who predominate as Wikipedia editors “…aren’t always warm and nurturing” to new editors. For example, when new editors add content on Black history, their content may be deleted by established editors. As well, when new editors are trying to advocate for the inclusion of Black history content on Wikipedia’s talk pages (each article has an associated talk page for discussion of changes), the “[c]omments [to new editors] on [Wikipedia article] talk pages can be very blunt.”

Note that that “thanks”-related increase in retention for users is 2 percentage points, not 2 percent — meaning that, for example, for Arabic Wikipedia, it increased the retention rate from 11 percent to 13 percent, which means the number of editors retained climbed about 18 percent. All from a single “thanks.”

And that second finding — that users who’ve been thanked increased their own thanking behavior 43 percent — suggests that the positive effects on retention could be multigenerational, a Starbucks drive-thru pay-it-forward chain for humanity’s collective knowledge.

That the experiment didn’t increase the average time editors spent working on Wikipedia is interesting, but it’s worth noting that measurements of total editing time are very imprecise (derived by tracking the time between logged edits). The researchers say a larger sample size “might detect an effect,” but that it’s highly likely it would find a difference of less than 3 minutes per week.

So what could a publisher take from this? Think of all the ways you try to influence your users to take an action and whether the addition of some sort of thanks might be useful. Some ideas:

Subscription-driven outlets know the critical importance of onboarding new subscribers: those important days and weeks after that credit card number gets entered for the first time. That’s when habits newly enabled by a subscription — launching the app each morning, reading that evening newsletter, listening to that weekly podcast — have a chance to get formed and ingrained. Many publishers have learned to include messaging from journalists or the institution itself thanking subscribers for their purchase, letting them know how it helps pay for the news. Are there more places you can add that sort of thanks?

Comments sections can be fruitful places of civic exchange or hellholes defined by humanity’s worst traits. Moderating comments has long been primarily about negative reinforcement — deleting a comment, warning a user about their behavior, or blocking them entirely. But can you add more honey to balance out the vinegar, thanking (and highlighting) the best contributors for their unpaid labor?

Can you automate thanks based on user behavior? Say your data shows Jane is an extremely dedicated consumer of one of your newsletters, opening it every morning and clicking multiple links. Can you set up a trigger to send her a note of thanks for her engagement? Can that note also connect to some other goal (like offering her a free three-month guest subscription to give to a friend)?

And — perhaps most importantly — integrating thanks can help make consuming the news a slightly less depressing experience. There’s a lot of bad news these days, and we keep shoveling it all in front of our customers. Anything to lighten the mood — and make them feel like their time invested in news is appreciated — can’t hurt.

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In January, Google Chrome said it would phase out third-party cookies over the next two years.

No problem, right? The W3C, which creates common standards for web browsers, will figure out an alternative.

Except, man, it’s certainly taking its sweet time.

Two years might sound like ages but it’s not, when you consider how foundational third-party cookies are to managing identity on the open web. We’re talking about a wholesale pivot here. And ad tech leaders involved in the W3C’s Web Advertising Business Group are frustrated that progress isn’t faster.

This week on The Big Story, we’ll dive into the myriad issues that are cropping up on the road to 2022 – from the Google ads team seemingly ceding their position to the Google Chrome team, to the lack of marketer involvement in key business groups.

Also in this episode, we’ll look at the unique positioning of OTT inventory in Amazon Fire TV. Roku, Hulu and YouTube started earlier, but Amazon has been bringing its coveted data to bear for Fire TV inventory. And it’s positioning the inventory as true premium OTT – none of that longtail stuff advertisers often run against in Roku or the user-generated content they get on YouTube.

Clearly, Fire TV has a lot to offer when it comes to attribution. But that strength can also be a limitation. OTT providers are out there boasting about their ability to capture incremental reach – which doesn’t yet seem to be a selling point for Fire TV.

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When Google Chrome announced in January that third-party cookies would be phased out in two years, senior ad tech leaders joined the W3C – the group that creates common standards for web browsers – to find ways for browsers to support advertising use cases such as targeting, attribution and frequency capping.

Now six months have passed since Chrome’s announcement. Only 18 months remain before Chrome joins its fellow browsers in blocking cross-site tracking.

So as the W3C Improving Web Advertising Business Group stays mired in the theoretical and spends time explaining how advertising works to the browser community, panic is mounting.

Ad tech businesses are about to be upended by the loss of cross-site tracking, and a comprehensive solution is still out of sight.

Marketers and publishers are mostly absent from the business group – either because they think ad tech companies will solve the problem or because they don’t have the resources to participate, especially in the midst of a pandemic.

More puzzlingly, the Google ads team has been absent too, ceding the conversation to Chrome at a time when the ad tech community sees Google’s ads business as their closest ally in communicating the importance of advertising to browser engineers.

“My view is that it’s not going very well,” said Magnite Chief Technology Officer Tom Kershaw, who has been devoting eight to 10 hours a week on the W3C. He gives the group an “A” for effort but a “D” for delivery. “There are no actionable proposals on the table, and nothing we can try in the real world. And 18 months goes quick.”

There’s been “no tangible difference” since the start, added PubMatic CTO John Sabella.

So far, much of the discussion has centered on proposals in Google Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox, a group of ideas that solve for some advertising use cases, for example, moving ad auctions to browsers and adding noise to targeting groups. But few of these concepts have advanced since their introduction, in the opinion of the members interviewed.

“When we say sandbox, in tech, it’s things you want to touch and feel and play with. It’s nowhere near that yet,” Sabella said.

Even if the best-case scenario happens and all the privacy sandbox proposals become standards in the next 18 months, it still won’t restore online advertising to the way it operates now.

“We will only see maybe 60% to 70% of business models survive in the sandbox ecosystem,” said Adform Chief Strategy Officer Jochen Schlosser.

What’s more, in order to protect their users’ privacy, browsers increasingly believe they should oversee critical functions – such as running ad auctions – instead of ad tech companies. Ad tech companies, used to autonomy, have been pushing back against some of the changes that shift control to the browsers in the early months of discussions within the group.

The Process

The more than 200 members of the W3C’s Improving Web Advertising Business Group attend weekly conference calls and share code and ideas on GitHub, with the goal of establishing a dialogue between the ad tech and browser communities about what is needed to sustain an ad-supported open web. They also share what problems they need solved – such as the nuances of ad targeting, attribution and ad auctions.

“A lot of the process is getting a shared set of terminology and practices and needs, before anyone can build features to meet these needs,” said Wendy Seltzer, strategy lead and counsel at the W3C and chair of the advertising group.

The W3C primarily recommends technical specifications browsers can voluntarily adopt, Seltzer said. Business groups such as Improving Web Advertising are often the first step in a multi-step process.

Topics that graduate out of that group are incubated in W3C’s Privacy Working Community Group or the WICG (Web Platform Incubator Community Group). Those working groups write the spec, go through reviews and polish the tech with interoperability testing. Along the way, ideas must build consensus and be judged “win-win-wins” in order to proceed.

How long this process takes is a mystery to those in ad tech, who are still learning the unfamiliar politics of browsers. They shared uncertainty about how many ideas become standards and how long it takes.

They can only look at precedent. “SameSite cookies are a singular change, and it’s taken them months and months to roll out and test that one feature,” said CafeMedia Chief Product Officer Paul Bannister, a W3C member. By contrast, he added, Privacy Sandbox would require around 14 changes within the next 20 months. By Q1 of next year, he’d like to see testing of the features in the Privacy Sandbox meet the early 2022 deadline for dropping third-party cookies.

But even after testing is complete, businesses need time to adopt the new specs.

“It’s a bit concerning, from my perspective, what we are going to see on the other end of the timeline – if participants would have sufficient time to reconstruct their businesses,” said Ian Meyers, identity senior product manager at LiveRamp.

Where’s Google Ads?

Google’s advertising team has kept an extremely low profile in the group, puzzling other members.

Though Google as a whole counts 19 members in the group, and Chrome engineers actively participate, the eight W3C advertising business group members interviewed agreed that the Google ads team is silent on the weekly progress calls. They don’t comment on any of the GitHub contributions and haven’t made any contributions themselves.

Additionally, some W3C members say that Chrome engineers often ask questions that suggest a puzzling – or perhaps even performative – lack of domain understanding of how the ads business works or the value created by advertising.

“I hope they talk to each other internally,” said Criteo senior product manager and W3C member Arnaud Blanchard. “I would suggest they talk a little bit more, because they would see what the Chrome guys propose would break a lot of things: If the browser does the auction, I don’t know what the value of AdX is in this world.”

But perhaps not talking to each other is the point.

“They have a sizable antitrust target on their back, so having as much of this conversation as possible in public benefits them,” said MediaMath CTO Wilfried Schobeiri.

He, along with others, noted a corporate carefulness to the Chrome team’s speech on the weekly calls.

“There is a story of Chinese walls. But if it’s two different companies, they should both join [the conversation],” said one frustrated W3C member, who didn’t want to publicly share a negative opinion of a business partner. “The biggest publisher and tech company on the planet is not visible there, and that is completely insane.”

The Google ads team disputes that it’s absent from the W3C, pointing to a GitHub page from two months ago where they encouraged testing RTB without personalization.

“While Chrome has played an active role in W3C for years and is driving our efforts within the forum, both Chrome and Google ads are active participants in the forum and share a common commitment to ideas for a Privacy Sandbox,” said Chetna Bindra, Google senior product manager for user trust, privacy and transparency, in a statement. These experiments are already underway, she added.

But the W3C members giving up time and resources contributing to the business group want more from Google, whose might would come in handy.

So they’re urging the Google ads team to get off the bench and help them architect a solution that preserves an ad-supported open web and the livelihood of all those who rely on it.

“I would welcome their contributions to the group,” said Joshua Koran, head of Zeta Innovation Labs and W3C member. “I am surprised given their market share they haven’t taken a more active role in the conversations.”

Browser Power Plays

The advertising members of the business group are also grappling with how the new standards shift power to the browser in the name of privacy.

Web advertising has always been an anything goes affair, where trackers can be shared with hundreds of companies.

“The problem stems from what the technology allowed before,” MediaMath’s Schobeiri said.

Now that data will be locked up to protect user privacy, who holds the key?

The browsers say it’s them.

“There is an emerging consensus that the browser is the user’s agent, and should help the user protect against individually linked tracking across the web without user consent,” W3C’s Seltzer said.

Case in point: The privacy sandbox proposal TURTLEDOVE moves the auction to the browser.

But without doing some of the auction in the server, ad tech companies will be exposed to security issues and it will take too long for pages to load, said Criteo senior product manager Arnaud Blanchard.

Blanchard co-authored a counterproposal, SPARROW, which introduced the idea of a non-browser gatekeeper as well as a server-side auction outside of the browser.

W3C members praised the SPARROW proposal, but don’t see the browser community embracing a standard where they give up control.

The proposed changes in the privacy sandbox are just another example of the “platform economy,” where companies must rent consumers from platforms, Adform’s Schlosser said. “The vested interest of the publishers is to stay in front of the consumer. And that is not what the sandboxes are trying to build.”

But while he disagrees with how much power shifts to the browser in many of the sandbox proposals, Schlosser feels more closely aligned with the browser community on the issue of privacy. Having gone through GDPR, any pushback over privacy is a battle already lost.

“I’m 100% sure the old times are over,” Schlosser said. But he sees other advertising companies in the group more resistant to privacy-focused changes. “Maybe it’s just for political negotiation purposes but the gap is huge.”

The future

There are multiple paths toward solving the problem of a common advertising standard across browsers.

If the W3C can solve for a handful of online advertising use cases by early 2022, marketers will be able to rely on a common standard across all browsers to do some level of audience targeting or attribution, for example. But they should expect these solutions to look and work much differently than they did before.

A second path includes tech solutions that work with existing browser standards – like ones that use first-party cookies. However, only a couple of companies such as Google and Facebook have first-party identity at scale, so a lack of new open browser standards could push more marketing dollars into those environments. Smaller publishers don’t have the scale to create an enticing identity solution for marketers.

In the third path, each browser could individually come up with ways to help advertisers and publishers make money on the open web (or not), just as they individually made the decision to block third-party cookies.

Google Chrome, for example, could develop advertising use cases that work just on its browser. Standards developed by the W3C can be implemented at any time – though it’s most encouraged after it reaches the recommendation stage, Seltzer.

The ultimate solve would be if Google develops (and shares) a browser-specific, privacy-safe identifier – a weed of a rumor that keeps reappearing as soon as it’s killed.

Though such an ID could perhaps save online advertising in its current form, members in the group say that it’s abundantly clear a browser ID is not on the table. It’s better to just embrace a future with privacy at its core. (And to expect the mobile ad ID to disappear in a few years too).

What web browsers will do to support online advertising 18 months from now is a mystery to those closest to the browsers – so they’re advising everyone in advertising to buckle in and start asking who’s in the driver’s seat.

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Pernod Ricard may have pulled its media dollars from Facebook for the month of July, but U.S. CEO Ann Mukherjee doesn’t think a boycott will be enough to push the social network to make any lasting change to how it moderates content. After all, large advertisers like Pernod Ricard account for just a fraction of Facebook’s total ad revenue. In fact, Pernod Ricard spent $2.4 million in ads on the platform last year, according to analytics firm Pathmatics.

It’s why the alcohol business is developing an app that will allow people to report hate speech they see online. Pernod Ricard will then flag the content with the respective media owner or social network so that it can be reviewed and removed if warranted. In doing so, the app aims to bring more transparency to how social networks moderate hate speech by showing those who report it what is and isn’t deemed bad enough to be removed.

Often, the likes of Facebook and YouTube will say they have removed content, but there’s little transparency into what they’ve removed and how they’ve done it, said Mukherjee. The hope is for other advertisers and social networks to back the project so that it becomes a cross-industry project maintained and promoted by many stakeholders.

“We need to use our influence as advertisers to hold the social media platforms more accountable to how they take down hate speech so that it becomes a more transparent process,” said Mukherjee who Digiday caught up with to hear more about why Pernod Ricard is going beyond the boycott to tackle hate speech on the social network and ask how the company is setting itself up to meet new expectations from society.

Why develop an app when other companies are withholding money from social networks?

We respect the boycott. We’ve paused paid campaigns on all the social networks we use throughout July. The boycott has created momentum around the issue of hate speech online, but what happens on August 1? By creating the app, we wanted it to be additive to the boycott by finding a way to make the way these platforms deal with hate speech more transparently. As advertisers, we need to be better at getting the social media platforms to live up to what they say they’re going to do.

How will the app make it easier to see how social networks moderate hate speech?

There are these factions forming around hate speech and what we don’t know is whether these social media platforms are actually picking up these groups and choosing not to take them down. But if a consumer does see a hate speech faction they can use the app to flag it an then ask the social network they saw it on why it’s not been taken it down. The app won’t make a judgment on whether something is hate speech or misinformation. It will, however, provide some transparency around why a social media platform decides to either take that post down or leave it up.

Are you using the time away from social media to think harder about the content you fund?

We’re the companies funding these social media platforms with hate speech on them so we accept that people could say we’re culpable too. It’s time for us as an advertiser to take that seriously. Yes, we are thinking about how to be more ethical with our spending. If a consumer tells us we’re associated with something that goes against our own company values then that’s not a place where we’re going to run ads on again.

How does that ethical approach impact the way you plan campaigns?

The traditional way of targeting demographics is of yesteryear. People are multi-dimensional. We live in a world of advanced behavioral economics. And we’re advancing our efforts here to think about how we market our brands to people based on our understanding of how they behave in certain occasions. If someone is at home by themselves they behave differently to how they are with friends, regardless of the color of their skin. Those learnings form the basis of how we then create content and then find the media to reach them in ways that are fundamentally different to the traditional approach.

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This is the eighth in AdExchanger’s “Meet the CDPs” series. Read previous interviews with mParticle, Acquia-owned AgilOne, Amperity, Segment, ActionIQ, Lytics and Bluecore.

Microsoft Dynamics, the company’s customer relationship product suite, has surged lately as it repositions itself as a customer data platform (CDP) competitor, which launched last year.

Satish Thomas, a 14-year Microsoft veteran and head of product for Microsoft Dynamics 365, has been working fully on it for about 18 months.

Microsoft is a late mover to the CDP category, but it has important differentiators, such as its connection to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and Microsoft’s own internal identity graph.

“It’s one thing to have unified data,” Thomas said, referencing the common CDP pitch to consolidate customer data into a single asset.

“It’s quite another thing to have device-level insights and be able to use cloud-based AI systems to derive insights like churn or lifetime value based on your unified data,” he said.

AdExchanger caught up with Thomas about Microsoft’s plans for its new CDP.

AdExchanger: What are the defining characteristics of a CDP?

SATISH THOMAS: The CDP is about collecting the data sources attached to any given individual. It’s critical to have a consolidated view of the customer, and that’s what’s driven demand for CDPs.

It’s also about enrichment with third-party data. That could be B2B businesses layering in data about where and how people work. We have a rich set of third-party providers. And from the Microsoft graph we can enrich customer profiles with aggregated information about brand affiliation, or factors like lifetime value or churn measurement.

What’s in the Microsoft graph?

It’s aggregated insights from all of our (Microsoft’s) touch points.

Specifically in the context of customer insights, we can light up aggregated signals on, say, people in a certain age, place or other demo.

Think of it like segment lookalikes. So a brand like BMW can see that their customers in Seattle have strong affinities for certain car models, and maybe index highly for fans of Formula One racing.

Does having LinkedIn as a Microsoft asset fuel what you can do with the CDP?

Not right now.

In the context of B2B, we have third-party providers like Leadspace or Madison Logic. But it’s clear to foresee how information from LinkedIn could be useful. We are focused on B2C, where there’s the most traction for CDPs, but B2B is part of the product and there will be more use cases.

What kinds of customers are you seeing traction with?

Wherever there’s a consumer at one end and the need for tracking data. Retailers and airlines are natural adopters. They have so many data touch points and parts of the overall experience they need to keep track of.

Especially in today’s times, a lot of the energy is about preventing churn. One thing I hear a lot from companies considering or using Dynamics 365 is: “Reducing churn is the new growth.”

Do you tend to work with agencies or directly with the customer’s advertising?

CDPs have traditionally had this marketing connotation. We see traction with marketing, but also a lot on the services side, with customer service departments, as well as in sales departments.

The need for a CDP is usually being driven by the business. Like maybe they have a priority to reduce churn by n percent, or increase cross-selling revenues by x percent if they have multiple business lines. And to reach those goals, or at least to demonstrate that they’re reaching those goals, they need a unified view of their customers.

In terms of the nuts and bolts of implementing the CDP and rolling it out, we deal with the CIO office, often a mix of the business and finance side with IT or technology and engineering within a company.

Who are your competitors?

There are the usual enterprise business application players. Often the ‘competition,’ so to speak, is an internal solution that they had built.

There are typically other companies in the mix. The businesses with the biggest need for CDPs have data everywhere – so they could have a Salesforce system, web and app analytics, vendors for CRM and customer service.

An important factor is that a lot of our CDP customers came from a place where they did not use Dynamics or the Microsoft suite, and its their first experience with a product in our portfolio.

Is the connection with Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure offering Azure an important differentiator in the CDP business?

Absolutely. I never talk about customer insights without the broader platform story.

Honestly, a lot of enterprise customers and the big wins we’ve had – even in the past few weeks – it’s about their overall cloud and data infrastructure strategy.

For example, when you build a unified view of the customer, it is your most strategic data. So with a flip of the switch we can enable them to take that unified data stored in an azure data lake. That means if there’s a scenario or application we don’t support out of the gate, that’s ok, because they can go build the use case themselves. In retail in particular you’re seeing that unified data for things like shopper marketing programs.

It’s an important differentiator that this is natively integrated and built on top of that cloud system that’s driving those efforts. I see the CDP as inextricable from those cloud infrastructure strategy discussions that are happening.

What’s the timeline for onboarding a new CDP customer?

We talk about the “five by five.” New customers can spend five minutes learning the system and five minutes to set up.

How many employees are there in the Customer Dynamics 365 unit?

We don’t share specific numbers within the Dynamics org. But it’s a big investment.

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Every digital publisher worth their salt has some form of video on their websites. They may be using existing content, or they could be leaning into user generated content, but the transition from text to video that began a decade back has had a major effect on the entire publisher workforce, from editorial to operational to revenue roles. It’s not stopping. It’s not slowing. Especially in a time of quarantine and rapid social change, the revenue it can drive is more vital to publishers than ever before.

As users spend more and more time consuming video, advertising budgets continue to follow. Publishers who (still) haven’t made a dedicated pivot to video are competing for a smaller percentage of the advertising pie — and it will likely only get smaller in the months to come.

From a level playing field to duopoly domination

While it is true that the revenue video unlocks is a crucial resource that must be captured and optimized, now more than ever it’s also true that leveraging it can be a challenge for digital publishers. It used to be that, if a publisher produced quality content, revenue would follow. Unfortunately, nearly all of that budget is now going to the biggest platforms, specifically Facebook and Google. According to data from MAGNA, In 2006, about 60 percent of ad spend was collected by publishers. Now that number has plummeted to less than 25 percent.

The duopoly has access to millions of user-submitted videos, allowing them to recommend relevant videos on a user-by-user basis, a practice known as discovery. They’re reaping the benefits of video consumption like never before. This is the primary way that the publishing world has changed – from content creation to content discovery.

Not surprisingly, while more advertising budgets are going to online video, Facebook and Google are collecting the vast majority of that spend.

Still, video results can drive publisher success overall — and not only for the biggest players. Even independent publishers that use it wisely can drive revenue. However, effecting a more level playing field takes the right approach, and in the way of evaluating strategy and tactics, the team in charge of video operations under any publisher’s roof should be able to say yes to the following five questions:

1. Is ad ops tapping into all of the video ad inventory available?

Most publishers that use video have a player that shows one specific video that is relevant to a particular article. These publishers are missing out on a different video opportunity, namely a discovery unit. Examples abound on platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, discovery players automatically recommend more content that is relevant to the page’s topic.

If the ad ops team is only monetizing one of these two, then it’s leaving some of the most profitable inventory on the table. Video ad units are the fastest-growing category of digital advertising and are now the dominant form of advertising in most countries. Advertisers spent more than $45 billion on online video ads in 2019. That number is forecast to grow to $61 billion by 2021.

Publishers should turn to their video strategist to understand the best fit is for their pages, whether it be one main player, a discovery unit or both.

2. Will the team’s video strategy keep viewers watching?

According to Primis’s findings, for every video viewed per session there is on average a $7.20 increase in RPM. And so, publishers should focus on what gets users to continue watching their videos: relevancy and quality.

It’s important to match the right playlist to the right article. If the example is an article about Lebron James, it makes sense to recommend a series of videos about the NBA rather than NASCAR or rugby. To recommend multiple relevant videos, publishers need quantity (meaning, a sufficient video library) and technology (i.e., a discovery algorithm).

3. Is the video strategy monetizing the publisher’s video inventory?

A key question is whether the publisher’s video vendors have the right demand partners, and enough of them. It’s important to avoid overcrowding, too: unless the team has implemented a smart SPO process, too many demand partners can be counterproductive.

It’s also important to have the correct pricing strategy, setting different floors for each device, geography, browser, day of the week, vertical and more. This is just the tip of the iceberg regarding granularities that factor into an optimized pricing strategy. All these details matter.

4. Can we trust our video partners to treat our inventory respectfully?

Publishers can’t monetize video without partners. They will almost certainly need to form a relationship with DSPs, tech vendors, syndicators or all of the above.

Publishers must ask how transparent their video partners are and whether they have access to real time data and detailed reporting. While on the topic, they should also ask whether their video partners have committed to brand safety, low latency and GDPR/CCPA compliance.

5. Will the publisher get paid and on time by video partners?

A video strategy can be lucrative, efficient and perfect in nearly every way, but it won’t mean anything if the publisher’s vendors don’t pay up. It’s critical to find out whether vendors are publicly audited and insured against bankruptcies, and to check whether they pay consistently and on time. Oftentimes, publishers are lucky if their tech providers merely delay payments, reneging on their net-30-day commitments. For the less less lucky, they’ll go completely bankrupt and not pay out at all.

The key is to ask the team’s video strategist to confirm that vendors are either large enough that they’re unlikely to fold when challenged economically or backed by a company that is. There has been a move to vendors that are backed by big companies. Vendors such as Freewheel (Comcast), SpotX (RTL) or Primis (Interpublic Group and Universal McCann) can offer similar levels of stability.

Taking back control

The duopoly has been winning for well over a decade, taking the lion’s share of ad spend from the publishers that created the content in the first place. Savvy publishers can break this trend, and video can play a critical role. But first publishers need to make sure their viewers are actually watching, monetize everything they can monetize, and gain ironclad assurances that their vendors will pay them.

It all starts with asking the right questions. The five above will help.

The post Level the Playing Field: 5 Questions to Ask Your Video Strategist appeared first on Digiday.

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CNN has moved to improve its contextual ad tool in order to yield better returns for its advertisers and, in turn, drive more revenue.

The news giant is the latest publisher rushing to tackle rudimentary blanket keyword blocklists as the default way that advertisers manage brand safety and brand suitability. The goal: Unlock blocked inventory, generate more revenue and increase the relevance of ads next to content, in theory driving up campaign performance.

CNN’s Sentiment Analysis Moderator, dubbed SAM, uses neuro-linguistic artificial intelligence to determine the context and sentiment behind web pages to understand when content is brand-suitable. It scans all content types on CNN’s properties — CNN had over 252 million global monthly unique visitors in April, per Comscore — including text, speech to audio, video and galleries. Once scanned, it rates how positive that content is on a five-point scale, based on how suitable it is for an advertiser’s list of keywords.

“We need to be cognizant about brands aligning with the content and message they want to tell,” said Rob Bradley, svp, CNN International Commercial. “It’s not just to avoid content that’s unsafe for campaigns but to align to target positive messages as well.” Such has been the move from brand safety to brand suitability over the last 18 months as brands and publishers want to soften the edges of blanket blocking.

CNN’s tool has been in the market for nearly a year but the company has recently started talking about it. SAM is on nearly every brief it puts in the market and used on direct and programmatic campaigns too, plugging into demand-side platforms like Google’s DV360 and Xander. Publishers’ lack of visibility of the amount of money lost from overt blocking in the open marketplace has been an enduring frustration.

“Keyword blockers are an industry stopper,” said Bradley, “as it’s gathered more steam it’s got out of control, we’ve heard this on the agency side too.”

For example, one brand advertising with CNN wanted to be adjacent to positive health stories to support and raise awareness of cancer, like help guides and recovery stories. CNN’s improving tech can pick up the relevance of stories about breast cancer awareness, letting it target the campaigns appropriately.

CNN found that in some cases over 50% of news content that scored neutral and somewhat positive on its scale was misclassified by existing keyword blocklists and would have been suitable for clients to advertise against. For another campaign, after switching from using an industry brand safety tool to using SAM, it unblocked five-times more inventory that was brand suitable for that specific client.

Finding a solution to the thorny problem of incorrect keyword blocking — which cost U.S. publishers $2.8 billion in 2019 — is getting more urgent. In the same week that brands pledged their support to the Black Lives Matter movement, they were putting terms like “Black Lives Matter,” “George Floyd,” “protest” and “Black people” on their keyword blocklists, Vice reported. Content related to the death of George Floyd and resulting protests was monetized at a rate 57% lower than other news content. Another publisher noted that coverage of BLM and protests generated 40% less revenue than pages on other topics.

Aside from depriving publishers of revenue and throttling advertising campaign goals, Vice notes that another consequence of overt blocking is that ads can then wind up in weird corners of the internet, contributing to fraud. CNN was not asked by any ad buyers to block any terms relating to BLM.

“[Sentiment analysis tools are] old technology but there is a renewed focus [on how they are used],” said Lawrence Dodds, client director at Universal McCann. Coronavirus has raised keyword blocking to the top of the agenda. Campaigns can struggle to deliver on reach or performance if they can’t run on trusted news sites around a major news topic.

“We are going to see programmatic strategies evolve to include more bespoke deals that give advertisers greater access to inventory,” added Lawrence.

One such example is newspaper group Reach’s tool Mantis, which unlocks blocked inventory using IBM Watson and is white-labeling to other publishers. In the last few weeks, it has partnered with diversity-focused media network Brand Advance opening up content from a wider range of sources that advertisers can target.

Another issue with heavy-handed industry-wide contextual tools is how they miscategorize content. CNN’s proprietary tech tool works in tandem with its internal content classification tool, Contextual Engagement Platform, based on trade body IAB’s content taxonomies. SAM scans and classifies the content before the page loads and pre-bid. Another frustration is that current tools weigh down the page.

Rampant keyword blocking is a symptom of the ills from the open marketplace, but another factor is the fact that news publisher pages are dense with carousels and high volumes of traffic, often the default for programmatic spend, and publishers won’t be pulling inventory out anytime soon.

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“Reach” is one of the key objectives for most brand marketing campaigns. The Stop Hate For Profit campaign has certainly achieved that KPI by the bucketload. Hundreds of companies have pledged to pause advertising on Facebook. The boycott has made global headlines and thrown Facebook into yet another crisis PR spin.

“Behavior change” is a more challenging campaign KPI to satisfy — especially, it seems, when your target audience is Facebook.

The specific changes companies are asking of Facebook differ from advertiser to advertiser — as does their degree of specificity. Some companies, like Unilever and Mars, have extended their advertising suspensions to other social platforms like Twitter and Snapchat. By not specifying their boycotts will only take place in the month of July, those companies also have distanced themselves from the perception that they were compelled by a protest campaign to make changes to their advertising outlay—an untethering that means they can make their own, private demands. The boycott presents an added layer of complexity for multinational companies: Try convincing your country manager in Spain to cut all their social media spending, while also having no plans to simultaneously reduce their sales targets. Unilever’s pause, for example, only covers advertising in the U.S.

Any marketer that’s made the decision to potentially forego revenue and vocally announce a Facebook ad suspension now faces a second dilemma: When will the conditions be right to return?

On July 1, Facebook published a blog post laying out the work it is doing to address the “recommended next steps” the Stop Hate For Profit campaign has suggested for it to stem the flow of hate-speech and disinformation being circulated on the platform. Facebook said it is looking at ways it can give moderators of its groups better tools, it’s exploring ways to connect victims of harassment with “additional resources,” and it’s committed to a brand safety audit by the Media Rating Council, among other moves.

To say the organizers of the movement weren’t satisfied with Facebook’s response would be an understatement.

“This is simply a tired retread of the same talking points Facebook has been using for months to respond to concerns about hate and harassment on their platforms. We aren’t buying it, and neither are advertisers,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, in a statement. “The fact is, Facebook still has a serious problem with hate and harassment on their platform and is not taking it seriously enough.”

For example, Facebook said in its blog post that refunds are issued to advertisers whose ads ran in videos or Instant Articles that violated its network policies. An ADL spokesperson said Facebook requires advertisers to specifically request refunds. Instead, the spokesperson said, advertisers should be immediately notified when their ads appeared next to a post or group that was removed and their money should be refunded by default. Elsewhere, Digiday alum Sahil Patel reported for the WSJ that civil rights groups want someone with civil rights expertise in Facebook’s c-suite.

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are set to meet with the leaders of the #StopHateForProfit campaign on Tuesday this week. It’s likely the coalition will press Facebook for more concrete commitments.

“Actions speak louder than words. It’s a cliché but it’s true — especially with Facebook,” said Jon Lloyd, interim director of campaigns at Mozilla Foundation, a Stop Hate For Profit partner. Specifically, Mozilla wants to see Facebook update its algorithms to stop recommending users join groups that are dedicated to hate-speech and dangerous conspiracies.

“What’s missing is recognition of the fact that Facebook itself, through a mix of content amplification and allowing microtargeting … is positively contributing to the problem,” added Lloyd. “It’s not just that hate content exists [but that it is] being actively promoted by Facebook as a platform.”

Therein lies the rub. The effectiveness of Facebook’s targeting and huge reach are exactly what made the platform so attractive to advertisers in the first place.

Over the past couple of weeks in its efforts to quell the advertiser disquiet, Facebook executives have repeated a stat that 89% of hate-speech is removed from the platform before anyone reports it to the company — up from 23% three years ago. If Facebook improves that stat to 92% this year, is that a reasonable enough improvement to convince advertisers to return? 93%? 94%? It’ll never be 100%.

A return to advertising on Facebook sets up an element of a Faustian bargain. What are the hate-speech benchmarks that need to be applied to Instagram and other social platforms to make them safe environments to spend on? Are the benchmarks on YouTube or Snapchat or Twitter or TikTok different to those on Facebook? Do advertisers also apply the same benchmarks to advertising on the open web? How can marketers accurately measure whether their dollars are funding the good and not the bad of the web … and on a continuum? Any big platform changes will require testing and constant iteration: How long are advertisers willing to wait?

Of course, many marketers among the July boycotters probably won’t be agonizing over these details. Their participation is less about significantly damaging Facebook’s topline or drastically altering their long-term media plans and more about wanting to appear on the right side of history on an important and troubling issue. “Advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough,” said Mark Zuckerberg on a video call with Facebook employees last month, according to The Information.

Many advertisers will ultimately conclude the benefits of Facebook outweigh the risks.

“If they succeed in maintaining Facebook as a good and largely wholesome experience for almost all of their users almost all of the time, enough advertisers will be able to carry on supporting Facebook and its business model in spite of understandable ethical reservations,” said Rob Norman, former chief digital officer of WPP’s GroupM.

The post The boycotters’ Faustian bargain: The dilemma of when to resume advertising on Facebook appeared first on Digiday.

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The relationship between Facebook and its largest advertisers is really one big dysfunctional loop — Facebook’s continual detachment drives advertiser frustration. Advertiser frustration, in turn, drives and hardens Facebook’s detachment. The latest standoff is fueling the cycle once again.

More than 900 advertisers aren’t buying ads on Facebook until at least the end of July over the social network’s handling of hate speech. Facebook, however, seems content to let the boycott play out rather than make any sweeping changes to its policies around hateful content.

In fact, the social network’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already told his employees that he expects the advertisers-cum-boycotters to be back soon, per The Information. He has a point given that very few of the hundreds of advertisers to back the month-long hiatus, have committed to a permanent departure. The North Face will boycott the social network for the month when it will reassess its stance, while Coca-Cola has paused campaigns on all social networks for at least 30 days.

That so many advertisers are on a temporary hiatus from Facebook says more about the complicated relationship between both groups, than it does their stance on hate speech. If the boycott is temporary then damage to Facebook’s revenue is also temporary. Therefore, this boycott is less about hurting Facebook and more about advertisers trying to exert their influence over the social network’s policymaking. Doing so now comes at relatively little cost to these businesses given its happening during a slow second-quarter trading period a recession when ad costs are were already being cut.

“This boycott has been brewing for a while now because you have technology platforms, particularly Facebook, that don’t take our concerns seriously, said the head of media at a CPG advertiser who was unauthorized to talk to Digiday. “They can host as many meetings with trade bodies as they want, but if nothing ever changes then it creates a very frustrating scenario for advertisers.”

Funding hate speech is on a list of bugbears advertisers have with Facebook, which also includes their inability to properly validate campaign data as well as concerns over the efficacy of video ads in its news feed.

Still, for all the controversy that surrounds Facebook, it’s hard for advertisers to ignore the reach it provides in abundance. In the first quarter, the number of monthly active users on the social network hit a record 2.6 billion — a gain of around 100 million.

“Facebook made it easy to buy its media, especially if you were a larger advertiser,” said the former head of media at one of Facebook’s biggest advertisers who helped set up trading deals with the social network. “We would set up these joint business plans deals, which would usually have some media commitment attached to it, but also gave us insight into what new products were coming up, which would mean being flown out to San Francisco to meet key execs.”

There have been instances where Facebook’s advertisers have acted on their frustrations. In 2018, Adidas stopped buying video ads in the Facebook News Feed over concerns they weren’t being viewed.

But until now such actions have been rare and fleeting and there was never a big enough catalyst to push hundreds of advertisers to boycott Facebook at the same time. And even if they had banned together it could have been illegal. Any instance where advertisers had formally agreed to boycott Facebook, either between themselves or via a trade organization, then it could have been viewed as a cartel and subsequently an illegal way to improve their profits and dominate the market. So when the Stop Hate for Profit to defund Facebook emerged in the aftermath of George Flloyd’s killing, advertisers felt they had a big enough platform to rally around and force Facebook to reassess its handling of hate speech.

To understand how things became so dysfunctional between advertisers and Facebook it’s important to know how they started. Advertisers were initially drawn to the social network because it was a way for them to get branded content in front of a lot of fans for free. Then, of course, advertisers eventually had to pay for that reach.

Larger advertisers found the switch easier to accept thanks to the emergence of direct deals with the social media giant. These deals worked like annual trade agreements, though advertisers weren’t required to commit to spending certain amounts. Instead, the deals gave advertisers access to expertise on how to get the most from the ad formats and insight into upcoming products. But the more Facebook pivoted from one opportunity to another, whether it was mobile or video, the more advertisers grew frustrated. And as much as they tried to push Facebook to change, they never got exactly what they wanted.

In 2018, Facebook secured accreditation from the Media Ratings Council to correctly report ad impressions bought across both Facebook and Instagram. In May, Facebook was warned it may lose the seal of approval due to flaws in how it reports the effectiveness of display and video ads bought on its platform. The more advertisers push back against Facebook, the more it seems to resist. These power dynamics have been at the forefront of recent meetings between senior execs from both Facebook and its advertisers in recent weeks.

When a senior agency exec patched into a video conference Facebook hosted last week they had their questions at the ready. The social network had invited senior media agency bosses to take part in what was pitched as a “global partner roundtable session” to discuss the growing advertiser boycott over its content moderation in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing.

It didn’t take long, however, for the senior agency exec to realize this meeting wasn’t a roundtable discussion. For most of the hour, Facebook’s vp of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson, alongside vp of integrity Guy Rosen and pubic policy director Neil Potts did the talking. They repeated the claim that Facebook’s tools now remove 89% of hate speech before anyone sees it, up from 23% three years ago. Impressive as the improvement was to the senior agency exec, it overshadowed the impact hate speech has on the 11% of people who do still see it.

“That meeting was symptomatic of how Facebook treats advertisers,” said the agency exec on condition of anonymity. “It’s very transactional and yet in spite of that we have to work with them.”

On balance, it’s better to have advertisers competing to be the most woke when it comes to the issue of race than it would be to have them ignore the heightened awareness of the issue. But the boycott raises questions about whether the advertisers’ actions will match their words as it seems unlikely Facebook will make any wholesale changes to how it moderates content.

“When you’re in those meetings, it’s very clear that you’re talking to a tech company because they don’t have a people-centric way of addressing these societal issues,” said a marketer who attended a June 23 meeting between Facebook’s senior team and its client council that included marketers from Unilever, Nestle and Anheuser-Busch InBev.

While Zuckerberg, who was backed by Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Everson, tried to assure those present the company would review its content moderation processes, the marketer came away from it thinking very little would change on the platform.

“They talk about policies, products and integrity teams but they never talk about the impact those inputs do [have] or don’t have on society,” said the marketer.

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Do The Math

MediaMath is pursuing strategic options, including a potential sale, Digiday reports. MediaMath has more than $500 million in debt and investments to recoup, so it’s a tough sell. Retailers such as Walmart and Target might have the balance sheets, but not the appetite for a big DSP takeover. Google or Amazon would certainly be blocked on antitrust grounds. AT&T? Don’t think so. Oracle and Salesforce don’t have DSPs of their own ... because they’ve been vocally opposed to owning one. Zeta Global or The Trade Desk could make the deal, but wouldn’t pay the premium. Last year, MediaMath launched the SOURCE partnership with Rubicon Project and Telaria, which have since merged … into a possible acquirer? But Rubicon’s market cap is only $770 million, so that's a pretty unlikely scenario.

IAB GOTV

The IAB and IAB Tech Lab announced on Thursday that, in response to the protests over racial inequality and scenes of violence against citizens and the press, it will give all employees two days paid time off per month between now and Election Day, Nov. 3, to volunteer for a political campaign, party or cause they believe in. Read the release. Industry trade groups rarely publicize direct political action (they need to lobby regardless of who controls the legislative or executive branch). But the IAB isn’t mincing words. “The Interactive Advertising Bureau and the IAB Tech Lab share the fears of our diverse staff and membership that the democratic principles underlying the constitutional basis of republican government in the United States are under assault.”

EBay’s Trim New Look

EBay raised its 2020 revenue forecast as ecommerce sales remain high months into the COVID-19 crisis, according to an SEC filing on Thursday. In April and May, eBay added 6 million new or reactivated customers, Bloomberg reports. The company also said it’s exploring options for a sale of its classifieds business, having sold the ticketing company StubHub last November. The classifieds unit is the last of eBay’s outlier subsidiaries, after a years-long series of divestitures going back to Skype and PayPal. Investors think that a laser-focused approach to the online marketplace and ads – without extraneous revenue lines – will improve the overall business. EBay shares closed at an all-time high, after jumping more than 6% to more than $49 during the day.

New Waze To Buy

Waze, the Google-owned mapping app, lost 60% of its revenue at the peak of the pandemic in April. There’s just no getting around the fact that the number of miles driven by app users dropped by 71%. But Waze was able to bring back some ad budgets with new products that respond to coronavirus-specific business needs, Business Insider reports. For instance, Waze built a data dashboard for a fast food chain that shows local driving and shopping patterns, which can help businesses decide where and when to reopen locations. Another new offering called "Location Personality" ads allows businesses to display whether they’re accepting drive-through or curbside pickup sales. It’ll be interesting to see whether such products remain in use after the pandemic (and if Google continues to charge for those features or provides it as default info within the app UI).

But Wait, There’s More!

You’re Hired!

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“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Paul Bannister, co-founder and executive vice president at CafeMedia.

It’s become a statement of faith among those in digital advertising that first-party data – and first party-ness, in general – will become critical to companies’ success in the future.

But there’s a lot of confusion about what first party actually means, how first-party data can be used and what the future of first-party data looks like. There are also inherent biases and assumptions built into our blind faith in first-party data as the savior of user privacy and targeted advertising on the open web.

What is ‘first party’?

The concept of “first party” with respect to the web was coined in the mid-’90s with the creation of the cookie. Cookies were designed for websites to manage the “user state” – before cookies, a website didn’t know that you were the same user across page views. That made services such as logins, shopping carts and other things we take for granted impossible.

A cookie was viewed as first party if set by the same domain as the site the user was on (such as an Amazon.com cookie when the user is visiting Amazon.com). A cookie was viewed as third party if set by a different domain, such as a company-x.com cookie on Amazon.com. Very early on, it was clear that this setup could lead to privacy issues, and actions were taken to try to prevent this from happening.

There’s another “ficrst-party” concept people often talk about too: data that is created and owned by a given company. This is the source of significant confusion. First-party cookies do not map cleanly to first-party data. If, as a publisher or advertiser, you use multiple domains, first-party cookies can’t be linked across those domains because by definition a first-party cookie is limited to the domain on which it was set.

In the future without third-party cookies, something a company might know about a user on one of its sites (perhaps they added a specific item to a shopping cart, for example), can no longer be linked to that user on another site. For multidomain companies, this presents a huge issue. The first-party relationship a business has with its consumer is divorced from the first-party way cookies work.

What the future holds

Absent third-party cookies, there are two possible solutions to this issue. The first is a shared identifier, such as an email address or phone number. If a user is logged into two sites owned by the same company, the first-party data could be shared across those two domains. There may also be other shared identifiers that require less commitment from users, but it’s unclear which, if any, of those might work in the future.

The second potential solution is called First-Party Sets and is part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox. This essentially allows an organization to group together a batch of its owned domains and share information across them. This primarily allows them to offer shared services, such as a single sign-on, but also allows them to share data for ad targeting purposes.

Enabling Google.com and Google.co.uk to be a part of the same first-party set makes a lot of sense. Allowing Vox.com and partner site Theverge.com to be in the same first-party set might make sense to some users. Allowing Geico.com and Dairyqueen.com, which are both owned by Berkshire Hathaway, to be in the same first-party set doesn’t make sense at all. But all three cases are permitted by the proposal as it stands.

On the reverse side, sites that aren’t owned by the same organization but want to offer shared services can’t group together at all under the current proposal. The major browsers’ user agent policies deem an “organization” as a critical requirement to making a first-party set valid. With three of the four major browsers owned by the largest companies in the world – and the fourth getting nearly all of its revenue from enormous companies – it’s not surprising how biased these policies are toward large companies over small and independent ones.

Another part of the Privacy Sandbox – the Privacy Budget – also comes into play here. This proposal is still very nascent, but the basic idea is that a browser will only reveal a limited amount of information to a site, to ensure that the site can’t use any fingerprinting techniques to discern who the user is. This means that publishers or advertisers that create a first-party set across their domains will be limited in terms of the data they can collect and the services they can provide.

The only way to get around the privacy budget? Have logged-in users – of which only the largest companies in the world have high penetration levels. They also own the biggest browsers, which are setting all of the rules for privacy.

First party-ness doesn’t necessarily protect the user

All of this is based on browser engineers’ views of the world, a very technical and specific view that doesn’t reflect real peoples’ expectations. It’s probably true that when a user is on a site, they are fine with that site offering services built off first-party data. But just because a user is logged into a site and uses it all of the time doesn’t necessarily mean they want that organization using their data across all sites in a first-party set to target them with ads, creepy or not. User privacy is not protected by the simple nature of the fact that they visit a given domain or group of domains owned by the same organization.

First-party data for publishers and advertisers that aren’t enormous will be seriously impacted by these changes, far beyond what is expected. The first-party data systems that publishers are building today may fall apart quickly under the new constraints on first-party cookies in the future.

These standards should be amended to either allow for publishers of all sizes to use first-party data and share information (with consent) or no one should be able to use them, even the largest companies.

All publishers and advertisers should have the right to “first party” in the future.

Follow Paul Bannister (@pbannist), CafeMedia (@CafeMedia_) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

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When the New York Times’ branded content division T Brand went remote, Kaie Wiggin, director of video at T Brand, said that several of the projects that they had in production had to pivot their methods of production.

Some projects, like animated campaigns, were able to still go smoothly. Others, however, required interviews and live action portions of the campaigns to be self recorded using smartphones or conferencing platforms like Zoom in order to ensure that the team wouldn’t fall behind on production schedules.

This was not an isolated issue for T Brand. The Washington Post’s branded content studio WP BrandStudio and Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Media Studios both found themselves in the same situation. Only concerns came out from the teams about these operational tactics being able to provide the same level of quality that they were used to delivering to their clients.

“There are some improvisational techniques that people have had to use to keep content production going while being remote,” said Denise Burrell-Stinson, director of content for WP BrandStudio. But she added that the issue of relying on those intermittently is that it is not easy to “maintain the fidelity” of quality that campaigns had prior to the pandemic.

Ashish Verma, global head of creative at Bloomberg Media Studios said he spoke with their various production vendors and found that some companies were creating new camera and lighting equipment drop kits that his team could effectively send to subjects’ homes and they could then deliver high resolution content versus grainy internet recordings.

“Invention is about 50% of the equation of us trying to be proactive and trying to be on the cutting edge of what’s out there. But the other 50% is really being a trusted brand with significant brand safety,” said Anne Kawalerski, CMO of Bloomberg Media.

By using the emerging technology like camera drop kits to ensure higher resolution content, Kawalerski said the team is able to ensure “inherent quality to the work” that further plays into the brand safety that clients are looking for from Bloomberg.

T Brand and the WP BrandStudio also integrated drop kits into their production strategies, finding that while in some cases Zoom interviews made sense for brands in the context of what was going on, more evergreen campaigns could benefit from the high-res interviews in them.

“There’s a lot of trial and error,” Wiggins said, when it comes to guiding someone through setting up the cameras and lighting equipment from the drop kits. But overall, she said that her team has been able to get client campaigns done weeks quicker than before moving to remote production. This is because they don’t need to worry about the lead times associated with sending out a full production crew to locations.

Burrell-Stinson’s team at WP BrandStudio is still doing some level of in-person shoots for subject interviews, however there are many factors that have to be met in order to sign off on those projects, including being outdoors, sending only the bare minimum number of people to the site and ensuring that they keep a six-foot distance from each other. For the campaigns that cannot be shot like that, she said her team is relying on drop kits that they walk through the subject through setting it up remotely.

The biggest change Burrell-Stinson said her team has had to make while being remote, however, is moving away from the documentary-style campaigns that they had previously relied on, and going to mixed-media campaigns.

“The storytelling is still focused, but we’re taking a diverse approach to the creative elements within the story,” she said. This means, intercutting the interviews that they’re able to do either onsite or via the drop kits with animations and illustrations that are produced in-house.

Total branded content campaign volume across 140 publishers is still down about 26% from the 10-week period ending on March 15 versus the 10-week period ending on May 24, according to Duncan Morris, COO of advertising research company DM Squared. This is, however, showing improvement over the 43% drop in the total number of campaigns that DM Squared recorded in the 25-day period after March 11 vs. the 25-day period after that date.

“We are going to see even more creativity in not only what branded content gets created but how it is created,” said Kunal Gupta, CEO of Polar. “Some publisher studios are in a ‘wait and see’ mode for things to return back to how it once was, which I think is a mistake. Others are seeing this as an opportunity to bring their creativity forward in not only what but also the how.”

The post How publishers are changing branded content operations to remotely produce high-res campaigns appeared first on Digiday.

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Finding the diamonds in the rough…

One of my favorite features in the Google Analytics UI is the ability to do weighted sorting. With more and more Google Analytics reporting being done in Data Studio, being able to do weighted sorting is something I have felt is sorely missing. (Spoiler Alert: it still is missing from Data Studio itself, but this post will bring SQL to the rescue).

Avinash Kaushik has an excellent write up about weighted sorting (yes, from 2010). I recommend reading his article as well as the comments. (The blog comments on Occam’s Razor were most wonderful back in the day….).

To quote / summarize a few of his points (for you lazy readers who didn’t click over to his site to read the article).

The problem:

We tend to only understand the top ten rows of data, because that’s what is easily visible.

Gold [insights] exists beyond the top ten rows.

Using percentages, averages sub optimally makes it impossible to find the Gold!

The solution:

[Weighted sort] brings back for me the rows of data I should analyze further to have the highest possible impact on my business.

What powers weighted sort?

This hypothesis: The true value of a metric (bounce rate, conversion rate, time on site etc) for dimensions with small participants will be imprecise.

Within about a week of Avinash’s post, Dr. Pete wrote an excellent follow up post explaining that math in more detail, and provided the community with a wonderful sample Excel Sheet to do different types of weighted sorting as well. Quotin’ (again) fer all o’ ye lazy scallywags

Let’s assume we’ve got a data set exactly like above – visit counts and bounce rates for a set of referring sites. We’re going to need 4 sets of variables:

V = Visits for Row X

B = Bounce Rate for Row X

MV = Max Visits for the data set

AB = Average (mean) Bounce Rate for the data set

For any given row, the [Estimated True Value] ETV of Bounce Rate – ETV(B) – can be represented by the following equation:

ETV(B) = (V/ MV* B) + ((1 – (V/ MV)) * AB)

Since many of our clients use Data Studio reports that we create for them instead of the Google Analytics interface, being able to create a weighted sort in DS is a problem that I’ve been most keen on solving. Remember, weighted sort helps you find the “diamonds in the rough”, or “gold” as Avinash termed it.

One additional problem (solved)

The Google Analytics interface only allows you to apply weighted sort to Bounce Rate, CTR (for Google Ads), Goal Conversion Rate, and Ecommerce Conversion Rate. (If there are other metrics, someone please let me know). However, having a weighted sorting capability for other metrics is of significant business interest; for example Add To Cart Rate, Form Completion Rate, Internal Promotion CTR, etc. This is something that Dr. Pete’s Excel Sheet solves for, and what led Dorcas Alexander to build a Weighted Sort for GA Page Value in Google Sheets. Once you get your data out of Google Analytics, the creating weighted sorts is quite extensible; you can do it for any percentage based metric.

Another problem (not fully solved)

Technically, Google Data Studio cannot do weighted sorts at this time. This is because the formula to create Estimated True Value or Weighted ETV needs to use functions which cannot be applied to aggregated fields.

Re-aggregating metrics is not supported.

Aggregation functions can’t be applied to already aggregated data. This includes most metrics found in Google Analytics, and Google Ads. For example, Sessions is already summed in your data set, so the formula SUM(Sessions) will produce an error.

I’m very curious if the Data Studio team will solve for this in the future. It should be doable (Tableau supports table calculations functions including window functions), though I don’t expect it to be an easy task.

When working with data, having the ability to do things like change the date range or apply segmentation is important. As such, date range or segment to the data needs to be applied BEFORE the final source table is available to then calculate the Weighted ETV. In other words, you need a static table of data in order to retrieve the MAX or AVG of any field in that data set.

Solution With BigQuery

SQL is a great tool to use to create the static data set that is needed within Data Studio via the BigQuery connector. FULL TRANSPARENCY -> I did not know how to write the initial SQL query myself; a very kind Riccardo Muti helped me out via an email conversation where weighted sort was being discussed.

WITH bounce_rate_by_source AS

(

SELECT

trafficSource.source,

SUM(totals.visits) AS sessions,

(SUM(totals.bounces) / SUM(totals.visits)) AS bounce_rate

FROM `..ga_sessions_`

GROUP BY trafficSource.source

ORDER BY bounce_rate DESC

with_max_sessions_avg_bounce_rate AS

(

SELECT

source,

sessions,

MAX(sessions) OVER () AS max_sessions,

bounce_rate,

AVG(bounce_rate) OVER () AS avg_bounce_rate,

--THE FOLLOWING LINE IS SOMETHING I ADDED BASED UPON DR. PETE'S CALCULATIONS.

SUM(sessions * bounce_rate) OVER () / SUM(sessions) OVER () AS weight_avg,

FROM bounce_rate_by_source

)

SELECT

source,

sessions,

bounce_rate,

-- Expected true value

((sessions / max_sessions * bounce_rate) +

((1 - sessions / max_sessions) * avg_bounce_rate)) AS bounce_rate_etv,

-- HERE TOO THE WEIGHTED EXPECTED TRUE VALUE IS SOMETHING I ADDED TO THE QUERY

-- Weighted Expected true value

((sessions / max_sessions * bounce_rate) + ((1 - (sessions / max_sessions)) *

weight_avg)) AS weighted_bounce_rate_etv

FROM with_max_sessions_avg_bounce_rate

ORDER BY 5 desc

For those readers less familiar with SQL, I’ll do my best to translate.

The first WITH … AS statement (lines 2-11) creates a subquery which is used to get the bounce rate by source. This creates a small, aggregated set of data (i.e. the “static table”) upon which additional calculations can be performed.

The next subquery (lines 12-24) return values for the largest value within all of the rows for sessions ( MAX(sessions) ) as well as the average bounce rate for all rows. This is done by using a window function which allows you “perform a calculation across a set of table rows related to the current row” ( </quote> from Postgresql). The weighted average is created by multiplying bounce rate by sessions (for every row) and then taking the sum of all “weighted” values divided by all sessions.

The final SELECT statement (lines 25-38) return the actual fields we’re interested in: Traffic Source, Sessions, Bounce Rate, and Expected True Value, and Weighted ETV.

Bringing it into Google Data Studio

Once this SQL proof of concept was working, I began to have some fun. Since Data Studio supports data source parameters for BigQuery, I knew that I could add an additional layer of flexibility into querying these “static tables”. I’m now going to walk you through the steps you’ll need to do to replicate weighted sorting for Add To Cart Rate (!!) with a working date range selector and the ability to segment by Default Channel Grouping in Data Studio.

First – Choose BigQuery as your data source.

Second – Choose Custom Query and a Billing Project (yup, this is pretty inexpensive but it is not free).

Third – enable Date Parameters and other parameters you’re going to use in your query.

In this particular report I’d like to be able to filter by Channel Grouping, so created a parameter with the name channelGrouping. Data Source Parameters can be one of three data types (text, number, or boolean), and support different input types (text input, text area, single-select (from a drop down), and multi-select (drop-down).

Then you enter your Custom Query. (Or vice versa, write your query and then use the parameters).

In my first subquery, I return the number of Product Detail Views, Adds To Cart, and Cart To Detail Rate per product.

WITH query1 AS

(

SELECT

p.productSku,

sum( p.productDetailViews) AS productDetailViews,

sum( p.productAddsToCart ) AS productAddsToCart,

sum( p.productAddsToCart ) / sum( p.productDetailViews) as addToCartRate

FROM `trans-gate-265215.ga_hits_111210305.ga_*` a

LEFT JOIN UNNEST (a.product) p

WHERE _table_suffix between @DS_START_DATE and @DS_END_DATE

and REGEXP_CONTAINS(channelGrouping, @channelGrouping)

group by 1

Since I’m using a DATE SHARDED TABLE (which is the standard for GA360, and what we’ve built for this client even though they are using free GA), the _table_suffix within the WHERE statement will allow the date range selection in Data Studio to select the right date range of data from underlying table. @DS_START_DATE and @DS_END_DATE are reserved parameters, and Data Studio will populate this query with whichever start and end dates I choose in my date picker.

Similarly, I’ve chosen to add Channel Grouping a part of the WHERE statement as a parameter. This is analogous to adding a FILTER to GA reports; it only selects rows that meet the criteria. Since my WHERE statement supports regex, I can free type in a regular expression into Data Studio to return whichever Channels I want.

The next step in my query is to get my MAXs and AVGs

maxDetails_avgAddToCartRAte AS

(

SELECT

productSku,

productDetailViews,

productAddsToCart,

productDetailViews * addToCartRate as weighted,

MAX(productDetailViews) OVER () AS maxDetailViews,

SUM(productDetailViews) OVER () AS sumDetailViews,

SUM(productDetailViews * addToCartRate) OVER () as weighted_sum,

SUM(productDetailViews * addToCartRate) OVER () / SUM(productDetailViews) OVER () AS weight_avg,

addToCartRate,

AVG(addToCartRate) OVER () AS avg_conv_rate

FROM query1

Then I have what is probably a redundant subquery just to make it a bit easier for me to access my aliases.

weightedAddRate as (

Select *

from maxDetails_avgAddToCartRAte

)

Finally, I do my final SELECT statement to return the values that I’m interested in, and most importantly I calculate the Weighted ETV for the AddToCart rate.

SELECT

replace(to_base32(cast(productSku as bytes)), '=', '') as hiddenProductName,

productSku as ProductName,

productDetailViews,

productAddsToCart,

addToCartRate,

((productDetailViews / maxDetailViews * addToCartRate) + ((1 - (productDetailViews / maxDetailViews)) * avg_conv_rate)) AS conv_rate_etv, -- Expected true value

((productDetailViews / maxDetailViews * addToCartRate) + ((1 - (productDetailViews / maxDetailViews)) * weight_avg)) AS weighted_conv_rate_etv -- Weighted Expected true value

FROM weightedAddRate

order by weighted_conv_rate_etv desc

The replace(to_base32()) function special for you, the reader, so that you can’t see this brands actual product names and product performance.

The final output

Now compare the Add To Cart rate when sorted by the Weighted ETV (above) to the Add To Cart rate when sorted by volume of adds (below). Instead of seeing the “most popular products” based upon how many times the product was added to cart (below), we can find the products with the most potential by using Weighted ETV.

Unfortunately, the only way to use Data Source Parameters at this time (apart from the Date Parameters) is via EDIT mode in Data Studio. This means that you’ll need to grant edit access to your report if you want to enable the “interactivity” that parameters provide.

In my example report, I chose Channel Grouping as the parameter in my query and since I used the parameter within a regular expression simply typing in the regex into the free text field will automatically re-query BigQuery and return the data i’m interested in.

Summary

In this post of shown how I’ve built a Data Studio report that supports weighted sort of any percentage based metric within data studio, whilst maintaining the ability to use a date range selector as well as apply filters to slice and dice your data. Please share your comments, questions, and suggestions for improvement below.

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For decades, TV’s annual upfront marketplace has been organized around a bargain. In exchange for locking themselves into long-term commitments, advertisers receive lower rates than if they were to spend their money in TV’s so-called scatter market, where networks sell ad space left unsold by the upfront sales process.

Now, driven by advertisers canceling portions of their upfront commitments and viewership going up, TV advertising’s supply-demand dynamic has flipped to the point that it has become cheaper for advertisers to buy some TV inventory outside of the upfront. That’s a profound shift, equivalent to scoring concert tickets from a scalper for less than the pre-order price.

In effect, what was once a tax is becoming a discount, threatening to lead cost-conscious advertisers to spend their money outside the upfront.

“Scatter pricing going below the upfront, if that happens, then the precedent is set because then why buy in the upfront? The whole point of the upfront is to get better pricing,” said one agency executive.

Advertisers typically pay 10% to 30% higher prices in the scatter market compared to the upfront, according to two agency executives. In some cases, the divide can be more dramatic, with scatter CPMs 40% to 80% higher than upfront rates, according to a TV network ad sales executive. However, since March the gap between scatter and upfront prices has narrowed and even inverted.

Scatter ad prices, on average, have fallen to 30% below upfront prices, according to Standard Media Index, a research firm that compiles advertiser spending and pricing data from agencies. However, the aforementioned precedent has not been set — yet.

Scatter prices have not dropped below upfront rates for some of TV’s most prized inventory. Broadcast networks’ primetime inventory usually costs 25% to 40% more in the scatter market but now can be had for roughly the same price that upfront advertisers pay, per Standard Media Index.

That suggests that, even as upfront advertisers have cut back on their commitments, they have clung to the inventory most likely to fetch them a large audience. The continued demand for that inventory is why TV ad buyers are angling to create more flexibility within the confines of their upfront deals rather than redirect those dollars to the scatter market where they run the risk of that inventory no longer being available. And that could be what keeps the upfront kicking once live sports and networks’ hit shows return.

“As high-quality programs start to come in the fall, you’ll see that delta widen [with scatter prices returning above upfront rates],” said James Fennessy, CEO of Standard Media Index.

However, sports and sitcoms won’t save every TV network. For networks to keep advertisers in the upfront, they need to offer what is not available in the scatter market. And so they have been.

To keep upfront advertisers from canceling their commitments, networks have offered to guarantee additional ratings points and inventory upgrades for advertisers that maintain their upfront commitments, according to agency executives.

Additionally, the moves by networks like NBCUniversal and Univision to reduce their ad loads are seen by agency executives as attempts to maintain some scarcity, which is the engine powering the upfront. If there are fewer ad slots available, advertisers will feel some pressure to lock up that inventory in the upfront rather than wait to see what might be available in the scatter market. “They’ve got levers on their side to decrease supply,” said a second agency executive.

Confessional

“If you’re selling a short-form show, there’s still no better place to sell it to than Quibi, even if there’s no audience. Facebook seems to be out of that game. Snapchat is fine, but the budgets are small, certainly compared to Quibi.”

— Media executive

Stay tuned: Platform video ad recovery

The RPM crisis on video platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube appears to be subsiding. Some publishers have begun to see their platform video ad revenues rebound to March levels, though they remain short of their pre-crisis numbers.

One media company had seen its Facebook video ad CPMs plummet by roughly 50% between February and April, but in May, CPMs rose to be about 20% shy of the February average, according to an executive at this company. Another media executive said their company has seen RPMs and CPMs “on most platforms back to where we were in early March.”

The media executives largely attributed the recovery to their companies post more videos and longer videos to the platforms so that they can carry more ads to offset the lower ad prices. Now the question is whether media companies will be able to maintain that output and whether the revenue will remain on an upward trajectory.

Numbers don’t lie

$130,000: Cost to run a Hashtag Challenge on TikTok, the platform’s flagship ad format.

-27%: Decline in national TV ad dollars in April compared to last year, according to Standard Media Index.

Trend watch: Ad-free vs. ad-supported viewership

We all know that streaming viewership has surged since March. But ad buyers have wanted to know whether that surge corresponds to an uptick in ad-supported streaming or whether people are just watching a lot more Netflix.

“Pre-Covid, we were seeing it was 50-50 between ad-supported and non-ad-supported [streaming viewership],” said one agency executive. “During Covid, we’re guessing it’s more ad-supported.”

That guess appears to be correct. Both ad-supported and ad-free streaming services have seen viewership grow since March, but the growth has been stronger among ad-free streamers, according to Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar.

However, while Netflix’s and Amazon’s viewership increases have outpaced Hulu’s, YouTube has received the biggest viewership boost, according to Venkateshwar’s analysis. Meanwhile, since March, free, ad-supported streamers Pluto TV, Tubi and Vudu have had an uptick in downloads and sign-ups, though that is not the same as viewership.

Quibi watch: Show cancelations

Less than two months after launch, Quibi has decided not to renew some shows, discussed changing others and canceled series that had yet to be produced, according to Bloomberg.

While Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg has blamed the coronavirus crisis for the service’s struggles, examples continue to mount of how the company has misjudged its debut.

Quibi’s brand-centric advertising strategy did not stir up enough interest in its programming, and its head of brand and content marketing Megan Imbres left the company a few weeks after its launch.

Quibi’s roster of “Daily Essentials” shows have proven to be “not that essential,” in Katzenberg’s words.

Advertisers, unimpressed with Quibi’s viewership so far, have asked to defer their payments to the company, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Quibi’s audience so far has been older and more female than the company expected, according to Bloomberg.

What we’ve covered

Media companies will need to wait until 2021 for IGTV ad revenue:

Instagram has started testing ads on creators’ IGTV videos and sharing 55% of the revenue.

Media companies have been told the monetization program won’t open up broadly until next year.

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