As noted in their announcement, Facebook made that last change to conversion tracking windows as a step toward the biggest expected change to data visibility: the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) prompt Apple has included in the most recent iOS 14 update.

How do we (marketers and publishers who leverage Facebook ads for content distribution) cope with the erosion of this data that’s been so central to performance management for the better part of the last decade?

In the midst of this change, it will be necessary to focus on three core truths:

1. Channel data was never fully comprehensive
2. Savvy digital marketing decision-making does not change
3. Engaging creative and user experience still rule

Embracing these principles will help navigate the broader impact of iOS 14, and increased regulation similar to CCPA/CPRA and GDPR. Let’s dive into each of these thoughts to help alleviate anxiety about changes to attribution and provide you with concrete principles to succeed despite them.

Channel Marketing Data, Especially Conversion Actions, Has Never Been Comprehensive

Marketers should value all view-through, cross-device, multi-touch, and offline conversion activity from each digital channel to value investment appropriately, optimize the marketing mix, and maximize results. Still, most performance marketers don’t value these consistently, thoughtfully, or even at all, putting them at a disadvantage to brands that have built an understanding of these “hidden” values over time.

Let’s touch on just one example of this: cohort maturation. Facebook’s previous 28-day attribution window may have provided more data than the new 7-day window, but it had never accounted for any conversion actions beyond 28 days. We know that in some cases with our clients, more than 50% of their conversions came in beyond the 28-day window of first site visit, let alone the first ad served. If you’re not accounting for how your customers buy in relation to the limitations of each platform, then you could already be making decisions on data with massive blind spots.

Of course, accounting for these blind spots, whether they be cross-device, multi-touch, or conversion lag, can be tricky. There’s a lot of overlap between categories, and you can easily take it too far. Stick to adjusting for where the data is most clear, make incremental changes, and revisit and update the metrics over time as the business and audience changes. It will never be perfect, but remember — neither was the data you’ve been using up until now!

Key next steps:

• Create multiplier benchmarks to account for data blind spots
• Create a clear record of assumptions and clarify the thinking with stakeholders
• Adjust channel performance goals accordingly
• Revisit and iterate on a recurring basis or when major business changes occur

Savvy Digital Marketing Decision-making Does Not Change

Our approach to performance has always included using channel data for comparative purposes to find the audiences, creative, and user experiences that drive optimal performance. Whether the goal be simply leads and sales or deeper goals involving LTV, qualified leads, or new-to-file customers, our approach doesn’t change.

The main question isn’t, “How many conversions did my advertising drive this month,” but rather, “How is my advertising contributing to the growth of my business?”

The main question isn’t, “How many conversions did my advertising drive this month,” but rather, “How is my advertising contributing to the growth of my business?” With this in mind, the focus is on incrementality – how many new customers you’d miss out on if you hadn’t invested. Answering this question is the key to optimal budget setting across marketing tactics, and is even more critical in a changing world of data clarity.

In one example, we partnered with a rapidly growing marketplace client, leveraging incrementality in order to unlock the optimal media mix for three market stages: Launch, Growth, Mature. Each market stage had specific benchmarks to hit in order to move forward and focus on relevant goals. Initially, standard channel data indicated greatest efficiency in bottom-funnel efforts in launch markets. It also continued to point to middle-funnel value in mature markets.

What the channel data was missing was multiple touchpoints in a customer journey, and how many bottom-funnel individuals would have converted without the additional touchpoint – the critical data of how many more conversions are generated from each tactic. Incrementality testing illustrated when each marketing tactic had its greatest impact. By investing when it had the greatest incremental impact, we were able to cut the cost of market development by 30%. These savings allowed us to aggressively grow active markets and launch new ones ahead of plan.

Key next steps:

• Determine a methodology for measuring incrementality that makes sense for your business
• Build a roadmap of suppression tests to determine lift driven by channel and tactic
• Revisit and iterate on a recurring basis or when major business changes occur

Invest in Engaging Ad Creative and User Experience Through Personalization

Consumers are not thinking about how their conversion will be attributed, or how many days it has been since they saw or clicked an ad. What will move people is relevant and timely messaging and a seamless user experience that delights them and minimizes the work involved.

What will move people is relevant and timely messaging and a seamless user experience that delights them and minimizes the work involved.

So, our work involves finding the right combination of audience and messaging. This may require revisiting processes to identify audiences and their place in the customer journey in the absence of Facebook’s automated tracking. The approach to messaging shouldn’t change much, if at all. Successful marketers will double down on testing structures that define specific hypotheses and success metrics. This testing, with the new data constraints, is how we’ll adapt and iterate for successive tests, refining audience-message fit overtime to win customers.

Key next steps:

• Build your ideal audience segments along with specific attributes
• Audit 1P audience data to identify gaps for both prospects and customers that you’ll need to execute your strategy
• Determine messaging and offers to test for each audience and stage, along with creative requirements
• Place focus, time, and effort on the creative execution, which requires an agile and talented team equipped with the skills to deliver strong digital experiences
• Utilize channel data for comparative signals as to what is working to drive business growth

Despite the inevitable challenges that will arise with data loss, you won’t need to completely rewrite your approach. Intelligently incorporating the unknown into goals, embracing incrementality to help make budgetary decisions, and investing in both audience data and creative to improve the customer journey will prepare you to take on those challenges with minimal impact to,  and likely even improvements in, your marketing success.

Everyone knows the question about a tree falling in the woods. Perhaps the marketing version in 2021 would be “If my advertising drives a purchase online, but my channel data didn’t report it, did it happen?” The answer to this one is simple: yes. By letting core marketing principles guide you, you’ll be well-positioned to continue growing, perhaps faster than you ever have before.

The post Facebook Ads & iOS 14: What Can You Do to Overcome Data Loss? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Move over Big G and Facebook … a little company (well, maybe not so little) called Amazon is nipping at your heels when it comes to digital ad sales. Amazon’s ad business raked in over $15.7 billion in 2020, according to new data from eMarketer. That’s up 53% year-over-year — and it means Amazon now controls just over 10% of the U.S. digital ad market overall.

Buoyed by the strength of its e-commerce focused ad marketplace — one that just grew and grew while we were all stuck shopping from home last year — Amazon was able to steal market share from the duopoly, especially cutting into Big G’s search business. And the buzz around the industry trades is that as the cookie crumbles, we’ll soon be looking at what Digiday calls a new digital ad “triopoly” that includes Amazon.

It’s not just that Amazon’s marketplace powers the company’s rock-solid paid search and display ad business — it’s the fact that its e-commerce pipes give Amazon a steady, voluminous stream of first-party data.

Amazon already makes that data available to advertisers (which is why they flock to the platform for purchase-driven campaigns), but if the company decides to make that data more readily available to publishers that are using its TAM header bidding platform, for example … well then, we’ve got a bit of a game-changer. (Remember back in September, when we told you now was the time to take advantage of TAM?)

With all that data, Amazon could become a true lifeline to media companies that are looking to beef up their own audience targeting capabilities — further bolstering its position as a somewhat “neutral” third-party ad tech alternative to Google.

But it doesn’t stop there, because Amazon also has video. Brands want CTV/OTT ads? Feel free to buy them on Amazon IMDb TV, its AVOD platform, or via the wide array of Fire TV devices that reach over 40 million users.

And last but not least is Twitch. Of course, I’m biased as a Twitch devotee, but you don’t need to be a fan to do the math: Advertisers can already buy in-stream display and video ads programmatically … if you add in a healthy dose of first-party data (because Twitch users have to create profiles and sign in to watch the streams), well then Amazon could really be on its way to PWNing the cookie-less ad market.

The post Can Amazon PWN the Cookieless Ad Market? appeared first on AdMonsters.

It’s a big bill with a lot of nuances — Digiday’s Kate Kaye unravels the threads quite well — but the gist of it is that the JCPA would let publishers band together to broker content distribution and monetization deals with “digital platforms that have at least one billion global monthly users.” (Read: Google and Facebook).

The JCPA would only cover deals that benefit the industry overall — not just an individual publisher or group of publishers — and basically makes it legal for media companies to collectively bargain with the walled gardens without formally “unionizing,” or having to worry about breaking any antitrust laws themselves.

If JCPA gets passed, it’s essentially a brick — a massive brick, backed by the power of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives — that publishers can throw at Google and Facebook’s walled gardens. And while it won’t make those walls come tumbling down, it would definitely make a dent (or a crack?) for more money to flow through.

Case in point: What happened in Australia in February. Big G and Facebook both essentially threatened to stop distributing and monetizing Australian news publishers’ content because of a similar law that was passed in that country. In the end, both companies came back to the bargaining table with money and technology.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that JCPA will pass (or be quite as effective) here in the States where Google and Facebook have successfully fought off lots of similar legislative battles. (A previous version of the bill got introduced in 2019 but didn’t go anywhere).

What’s different now is that the 2021 version has strong bi-partisan support, and potentially, the backing of a presidential administration that is bringing in some big, tech-savvy guns to lead key antitrust organizations like the FTC. And interestingly enough, the JCPA also has the backing of another tech giant: Microsoft.

Weeks ago, the company threw its weight behind Australian and European publishers in their respective fights against the walled gardens week Down Under. What the Verge notes, is that Microsoft also had some very specific things to say about Google and its dominance over the ad ecosystem as it pertains to the JCPA:

“News organizations have ad inventory to sell, but they can no longer sell directly to those who want to place ads,” says Microsoft president Brad Smith. “Instead, for all practical purposes they must use Google’s tools, operate on Google’s ad exchanges, contribute data to Google’s operations, and pay Google money. All this impacts the ability of news organizations to benefit economically even from advertising on their own sites.”

Oop! Sounds like fighting words to me … We’ve just got to stay tuned.

The post Will JCPA Break Down the Walled Gardens? appeared first on AdMonsters.

We haven’t seen major brand advertisers ditch social media advertising like this since MySpace 2009. An ever-growing crowd of well-known brands is pausing their ad spend on Facebook—and other social media platforms—to protest lax moderation of hateful content keeps growing longer. 

Unilever seemed to bust open the floodgates on Friday, June 26, as the highest-profile (and biggest-spending) brand to ditch Facebook and Twitter for at least the remainder of 2020. Other  big names giving Facebook the cold shoulder include Coca-Cola, Ford, The North Face, and Ben & Jerry’s. Most of these actions are tied to the #StopHateForProfit movement, which asks brands to pause their spend on Facebook for the month of July to protest the platform’s lax content moderation against hate speech. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems a bit rattled by the mobilization, but his initial overtures seem pretty thin considering the breadth of the demands from #StopHateForProfit. 

Why It Matters

Or maybe that should be “Why It Won’t Matter”? Our cynical minds immediately leap back to the great YouTube brand advertising boycott over hate content a few years back, which seemed an ultra-cynical attempt to gain leverage in pricing negotiations. 

After all that hand-wringing, most advertisers came back to YouTube, though some haven’t returned their spend to previous levels. (We have to note that YouTube took this current moment to ditch several major white-supremacist thought leaders, including David Duke, for “repeatedly violating its policies.” ) Once the public’s interest goes elsewhere, watch brands quietly ramp their spend back up as we enter the fourth quarter. 

Dr. Augustine Fou ponders how many brands are jumping on #StopHateForProfit for some good PR in a tough moment, and Ana Milicevic from Sparrow Advisors notes that many of the brands spends are puny compared to the seven-figure monthly budgets of DTC advertisers. 

Still, it’s a powerful message when hefty spenders like Unilever and household names like Coca-Cola and Ford consider your platform too toxic for ad spend. (XTREME BRAND SAFETY?!?) That’s the kind of thing that makes other advertisers wonder whether your platform is worth it… Potentially sending them to seek similar reach on premium publishers a la programmatic?

Well, that would be the hope of premium publishers, who are likely wondering if that paused spend is going to be recirculated to sites that take great pride in their content moderation. Alas, considering we’re in a (reignited?) pandemic where businesses are cutting back in fear of coming economic devastation and consumer spending could nosedive without further economic stimulus… We’re going to lean toward no. That’s another reason to be cynical about brand interest in #StopHateForProfit—how much of that pulled spend was likely getting canceled anyway?

There’s another overarching problem here, one that we’ve written about many times. Sure it makes headlines when major brands like Unilever and Coca-Cola cancel their social media spend, but the bread and butter for these platforms are millions of smaller advertisers. Facebook, Google, and YouTube in particular offer the easiest paths for smaller advertisers to reach vast audience pools while also enabling the targeting to make limited spend worthwhile. 

Truth be told, these advertisers’ other options aren’t great—most publishers need a serious cash guarantee to make a direct sale worthwhile, and the same is true for many programmatic buying platforms. The uptick in publishers integrating self-serve and programmatic guaranteed platforms is heartening, but that’s missing the element of scale. A publisher may have a great audience, but let’s be honest—a lone publisher’s base looks puny next to what the major social media platforms are offering.

What’s needed is self-serve platforms for smaller spends that can reach a host of publishers and their audiences. And it seems the publisher alliances required to bring these to life are getting there—notably Vox Media’s Concert and Washington Post’s Zeus.

We don’t know if it’s worth going into whether Facebook and their social media brethren will acquiesce to #StopHateForProfit’s demands—we predict Facebook will perform some kind of grand-yet-only-symbolic gesture and take some half-measures that will ultimately prove toothless, and we’ll have another advertiser boycott in a year or so. 

As long as there are no other great options for those smaller advertisers, social media platforms can weather the boycotts (and avoid the costs associated with large-scale content moderation). So publishers, if you want to do your part in #StopHateForProfit, join alliances or bring in tools to offer smaller advertisers the alternative marketing avenues they deserve. 

The post A Most Symbolic Boycott appeared first on AdMonsters.

A coalition of civil rights advocacy groups led by the NAACP, Colors of Change and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) launched the campaign, calling on corporations to pause advertising on Facebook during the month of July.

Could this create an opportunity for publishers as brands seek to reallocate their ad spend? 

Folio Senior Editor, Greg Dool,  weighs in on the topic.

In less than one week, a campaign by a coalition of civil rights groups aimed at encouraging businesses to pause advertising on Facebook’s platforms has already achieved some tangible results.

Last Thursday, the digital ad agency 360i, a Dentsu Group subsidiary whose clients include Burberry, Discover Financial and United Airlines, stated its support for the boycott.

A day later, outdoor apparel brand The North Face said it would halt paid advertising on Facebook-owned properties until the company implemented stricter policies to halt the spread of “racist, violent or hateful content and misinformation” on its platforms. In the four days since, outdoor retailers REI and Eddie Bauer and The North Face competitor Patagonia, as well as Ben & Jerry’s and a handful of smaller tech brands, have announced similar pledges.

And just yesterday, Goodby Silverstein, owned by the Omnicom Group, whose clients include BMW, HP, PayPal, Pepsi, Doritos, and Adobe also announced that it intends to join the campaign.

Although execs at General Motors and Unilever fell short of fully committing to the boycott despite expressing sympathy for the cause in a Wall Street Journal report Monday, it’s clear that the message is being heard by marketers ever mindful of ensuring that the environments in which their advertisements appear align with their public-facing corporate values.

An Opportunity for Pubs

For publishers, who have long positioned themselves as brand-safe advertising alternatives to tech platforms, unprecedented scrutiny of Facebook’s $80 billion global advertising business could mean a chance to recoup some lost ground.

“It does present an opportunity,” said an executive at a large digital media company, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I think it’s an important moment for brands to reassess how their actions and their marketing budgets reflect their values as a company. More than ever, employees and customers are holding their companies accountable for following through on the values they are saying to the world.”

None of the media executives Folio: contacted were willing or able to comment on the record; in many respects, publishers have been forced to play ball with tech platforms that have become indispensable business partners even as they’ve contributed to the hollowing out of newsrooms and media organizations across the country. While they eat up an estimated 60% of all U.S. digital ad spending, Facebook and Google remain important distribution channels for online publishers, many of whom promote their own products using Facebook ads.

To read the rest of this article, please visit our sister publication FOLIO.

The post The Facebook Ad Boycott Could Be Magic for Publishers appeared first on AdMonsters.

Since word came through that the deal was sealed (or rather agreed upon) on Monday, I’ve been combing through all the analyses on whether or not this merger, following the approval of AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, is a major industry shake-up—whether the days of the duopoly are numbered.

And the boring answer is: it’s way too soon to tell. Sure, the AppNexus deal expands on a foundation AT&T had been building up with the acquisition of Time Warner (and DirecTV before that). This base could be a threatening end-to-end buying solution in the next few years.

But digital advertising is a frustrating multi-player game of chess that you have to analyze one move at a time. Of course, past moves point to future strategy, and the developments so far offer a decent vision.

How We Got Here

Last year, the US Congress reversed the FCC Broadband Privacy Act requiring ISPs to seek consumer opt-in before leveraging browsing data. This means all of the ISPs have potentially massive data mines that could compete with Facebook and Google’s walled gardens.

Verizon has its own supply of content and ad tech infrastructure thanks to the acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo (the Oath, you swore!). Comcast has something similar resources in NBCUniversal and FreeWheel respectively.

Neither one is giving Google or Facebook a run for its money… Yet?

This acquisition probably could not have come at a better time as Google’s GDPR reaction alienated buyers (via cutting off certain data tools) and sellers (via what can probably be best described as manhandling) alike.

The word around Cannes was that AT&T also wanted to scoop up DSP The Trade Desk, giving the telco an end-to-end buying solution with data galore. And buyers have been looking for scalable options outside of DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM).

This acquisition probably could not have come at a better time as Google’s GDPR reaction alienated buyers (via cutting off certain data tools) and sellers (via what can probably be best described as manhandling) alike.

Let’s be honest—Google is not trusted as an exchange because they again and again use their sizable programmatic position to its own advantage often at the expense of buy- and sell-side partners. The prime example: the header bidding revolution was a response to Google’s Dynamic Allocation in DFP, which was screwing over mainly pubs but advertisers as well.

What about Facebook? Well, Facebook is an ad network. Buyers want flexibility—if they’re not happy about what Google offers, why give Facebook the time of day? Because of its scale and data quality, of course… But what if you could get decent scale, quality data, and great context in a transparent fashion?

A New Way to Buy

Since chasing cookies all over the web is no longer as cheap (and is generally frowned upon) and GDPR has tightened up the supply of quality of data, buyers are (finally) asking pubs, “What you got?” Suddenly they really need that pub data that they’ve long said was extremely valuable (while ignoring it to go cookie-hunting).

Via AppNexus and Time Warner, AT&T should be able to offer cross-site and cross-platform buying, as well as highly managed PMP and other programmatic arrangements that leverage AT&T customer data.

And you can bet those consultancies that upped their presence at Cannes Lions will use these advanced buying platforms to further their goal in dis-intermediating agencies… Because eventually we’ll see similar comprehensive buying platforms from Verizon and Comcast.

33Across’ Eric Wheeler, who had some key insights on a panel I moderated at Cannes Lions, has some smart thoughts on this: “These companies know exactly what advertisers want: to achieve true ‘network effect’ by reaching potential customers over a broad combination of digital, broadcast and OTT. And be able to do so via one company structure that can provide cross-channel advertising experiences with consistent measurement.”

Battle Drums

Is that noise I hear the tumbling of the duopoly? Well, no. Google and Facebook make a ton of money off small and medium advertiser buys on their automated platforms. No other player is really challenging them in this space; all those little buys add up.

Until the ISPs or other players can offer self-service platforms at scale for the SMBs—meaning at a price they can swallow—the duopoly will maintain its footing. Programmatic direct technology could be the answer for the ISPs (and other publisher alliances)—and then we may really have a feud on our hands.

But at this point it’s a waiting game. The opportunity for the ISPs is looming large, but there are still many moves to make. In addition, it’s unclear how Google or Facebook (or even Amazon) will react to overt moves to grab market share. The battle is a-coming; I expect smaller tech players without differentiated demand will be collateral damage and get swallowed up sooner rather than later—the second half of 2018 will likely be messy.

I’m also sure a bunch of Time Warner/Turner properties have an ad server migration in their near future.

The post AT&T Draws the Battle Lines appeared first on AdMonsters.

So why are we talking about it now, five months after its introduction? Well, Facebook is under new scrutiny for how political data company Cambridge Analytica pulled in millions of Facebook users’ data without their knowledge or consent, and that’s amplifying any unsettled transparency issues the social platform is facing, including the “Russian interference” question.

Let’s take a look at what’s in the Honest Ads Act. It’s a bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Mark Warner (D-VA, and the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee), John McCain (R-AZ) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). Its goal is to regulate political campaign ads and “issues” ads (ads that address policy, but don’t necessarily mention a specific candidate). It would require companies to disclose who bought the ads, how much the ads cost, and how the ads were targeted, and it proposes the ads and information around them be stored in a sort of public cache.

Political ads in print, TV and radio already have to include a “Paid for by…” disclosure, and the Honest Ads Act proposes bringing that same standard over to the internet—not much of a stretch, in theory. But this particular bill is under fire from multiple sides. Lobbyists for the major platforms, including the Internet Association (of which Facebook, Twitter and Google are members), are not keen on the ad cache, arguing it’ll be prohibitive to create and maintain such a thing. These groups also don’t want the platforms themselves to be liable for any shenanigans or dishonesty their ad buyers get up to. Even the IAB has said it’s best to leave the digital industry to self-regulate—an argument we’ve been hearing for years, and of course we can ask ourselves how well that’s worked for us so far. While those entities agree that transparency is important, they don’t think the Honest Ads Act is the answer.

Others say the act doesn’t do enough to combat the real problems we see in ad fraud. Take Russian troll farms, argued Bloomberg View’s Leonid Bershidsky: The very business of troll farms is to evade, to appear legit, and to skirt laws instead of clearly breaking them whenever possible. By this argument, the bill’s proposed solution has holes in it bad actors walk through every day.

Supporters of the bill say that even if it’s not perfect, we have to start somewhere. That said, the Honest Ads Act hasn’t gotten us there yet—but other bills seeking to disclose more information about the real buyers behind political ads have been introduced in state legislatures and even some cities. And for whatever “self-regulation” is worth, Mark Zuckerberg was on CNN on March 21 voicing support for some of the basic ideas behind the Honest Ads Act. “If you look at how much regulation there is around advertising on TV and print, it’s just not clear why there should be less on the internet,” he said. “People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook, and you should be able to go to any page and see the ads that people are running to different audiences.” Well, that’s exactly what the act proposes.

Zuckerberg added Facebook has already been testing out a program for such disclosures in Canada, and that he hopes it’s running in the U.S. by the midterm elections. If they stick to that timeline, it seems safe to predict get to a solution before Congress does.

AdMonsters Resources:

Will Cambridge Analytica Hurt Facebook Ad Business?
Targeting Consent Is a Publisher/Vendor Team Effort

The post What Is the Honest Ads Act? appeared first on AdMonsters.

My rebuttal was always something like: All of that stuff is too ethereal for Facebook. They can’t monetize it. They want to know where you are, what you’re interested in buying, what you and your friends do for fun, or specifically what they pay money to do for fun. The stuff you share that’s genuinely personal and private—most of it has zero marketing value, so Facebook isn’t going to touch it.

Um, yeah… A lot can change in eight or nine years, I suppose. I didn’t really predict how much more sophisticated data processing was going to get, nor how adroitly marketers would figure out how far they could take that data processing power. And now Cambridge Analytica is a thing, or rather we’ve found out it’s been a thing for years.

In his Marketing Week column, marketing professor Mark Ritson recently dug into this issue—how marketers have seen a way to use Facebook data to target really precisely, at any moment of the day or night, and as such they’ve taken that opportunity and run with it. To Ritson, there’s a classic marketer’s error at play here. Product orientation gets marketers so focused on creating demand for their product that they lose sight of what the consumer actually needs and is asking for. It gets marketers hung up on convincing the consumer of something, rather than serving them. And another addendum I’ll throw in is that marketers will tend to be around other marketers, who are way more interested in “telling their brand’s story” than the audience is.

I was at an ad tech meetup some years back, listening to a marketer talk about how shorter or longer video ad breaks opened up so many new ways for brands to tell their story. Another person butted in and said he didn’t care about her brand’s story—he cared about watching some Netflix in the comfort of his own living room, possibly in an inebriated state. I think about that conversation a lot whenever I hear or read about how super-relevant messaging is a “service” to consumers. It’s a service they’re not asking for. More often than not, what they want is not a more relevant ad, but to be left alone.

Ritson’s column argues technology is closing the gap between users’ “paranoid fantasy” of constant digital surveillance and marketers’ less sexy day-to-day reality. And he argues that in the case of a Cambridge Analytica, that gap is closing through the use of data profiles that don’t need to exist for marketers to do their work. Just because you can target really precisely, really personally, doesn’t mean you should.

Or maybe that’s not the whole of the picture. Advertising that hits the user when it’s truly relevant can be a service—in the right context. Now, it’s in the nature of marketers to want to cast a wide net. The publisher’s role is to say, “Don’t aim there, aim here. Here is where our users are more likely to be receptive to what you want to tell them.”

Publishers know more about their own audiences than anyone. Heck, you can argue many pubs have a more objective view on their audiences than some people who are in those audiences. First-party data holds crucial insights about what the audience wants, and it can show publishers and their buy-side partners how and when to target that audience in a way that doesn’t feel invasive.

Sure, users want to read or watch their stuff in peace, without being advertised to constantly. The precision we can get out of data insights ought to necessitate fewer ads, with less guesswork behind it. As advertising becomes more personal and more personalized, it’s increasingly important to sort out the right context from the wrong context. That’s publishers’ job now—one way to capitalize on marketers’ zeal, while making sure users keep coming back to the site without feeling crept on.

The post The Fallacy of the Right Ad, to the Right Person, Constantly appeared first on AdMonsters.

Facebook stated it’s ending the use of certain third-party data for ad targeting on its platform. In other words, Facebook used to partner with a number of third-party data aggregator companies to help advertisers better target their campaigns, via a program called Partner Categories, a program it’s calling off now. Brands and marketers can still use third-party data on Facebook, but they’ll need to get them from the data providers themselves, and to upload them on their own through Custom Audiences. AdExchanger reports the Custom Audiences process is “both more tedious and expensive” than Partner Categories, and suggests the performance of Facebook campaigns will suffer for brands that don’t already have enough first-party data to make those campaigns scale.

As others have observed, killing Partner Categories doesn’t really seem to address the sort of problems Facebook faced by partnering with the likes of Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica got its data from third-party apps. But Facebook is obviously battening down the hatches where new products and partnerships are concerned, including pausing the projected launch of a Facebook smart speaker and a video chat device, and halting the release of any new apps or chatbots on the Facebook platform. The connecting thread among all these disparate products and services is reliance on user data, which is evidently too hot a button for Facebook to mess around with at this point.

What’s Up With GroupM’s GDPR Publisher Contract?

GroupM has asked publishers to sign a contract addressing the sharing of user data under GDPR, and reportedly the agency will consider signing the contract a requirement for publishers to transact with them at all. According to Digiday, some publishers’ lawyer have raised concerns that the contract will hold pubs to the practice of sharing user data with GroupM, and that it may effectively call for pubs to handle GDPR compliance on the agency’s behalf. GroupM responded quickly, saying they acknowledge all parties along the supply chain share responsibilities for GDPR compliance, and that they’re simply asking publishers to do the same due diligence on their own sites as the agency will with its network. Plus, Group M argues, everyone else is fine with the contract: The agency’s statement says over 1,200 publishers, ad tech vendors and other supply-side partners have signed it so far.

28% of Web Traffic Could Be Bots, but That Could Be Partly Okay

According to a study Adobe conducted, 28% of web traffic shows symptoms of not being human. But not all bot traffic is bad, either. The Wall Street Journal cites “search engines, voice assistants and travel aggregators” as sources that send bots out into the web in search of product/service descriptions. Adobe says that with personal assistants like Google Home and Alexa gaining popularity, this trend will continue, and an increasing amount of traffic will be bot traffic— but not necessarily the malicious kind. Adobe is suggesting they’ll eventually fold a bot count of sorts into their analytics tools.

Meredith to Restructures Time Inc. Sales
Meredith is restructuring sales at Time Inc., reversing the method of selling by industry vertical categories that Time set up in 2016, and instead selling by titles—including by titles Meredith has said it intends to sell off. Time Inc. had said they had created this sell-by-category model in response to marketers’ recommendation that they have a single point of contact for various titles. But that strategy didn’t really pay off. The Wall Street Journal reports the new move is is “intended to strengthen ties with ad agencies and marketers and give specific magazines greater visibility at a time when print ad revenue continues to be under pressure.” Meredith is also moving branded/native content studio the Foundry into the building formerly known as the Time Inc. offices.

MediaMath Joins DigiTrust Consortium, Months After Leaving Advertising ID Consortium

MediaMath announced it joined the DigiTrust consortium, which is working on an industry-wide cookie-based user ID solution. That means the DigiTrust cookie ID will become standard on MediaMath’s platform starting in Q2 of 2018. You’ll remember that MediaMath had previously been a key member of the Advertising ID consortium (sometimes just known as the LiveRamp consortium, which itself is interesting, because MediaMath pulled out of that group in part because of the consortium’s reliance on the LiveRamp ID methodology). Now that MediaMath has joined forces with the older DigiTrust initiative, should we consider this shots fired, or are we overthinking it?

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In the first two installments of this interview, Claudia already has told us about how publishers don’t necessarily need Facebook for survival, but it’s extremely helpful to have some kind of distribution channel driving traffic to their O&Os. And she’s explained that with Facebook, normally such an eager-to-experiment company, focusing anew on their core competencies, pubs would be well-served to investigate other drivers of traffic.

You can catch up on Part One and Part Two of the discussion. In this third and final installment, she digs into the reality that publishers are so reliant on these outside traffic sources, which is not likely to change anytime soon.

Side entry became the norm for a lot of publishers, but are home pages about to matter again? Will we see a return to crazy homepage takeovers, or do you think the industry has outgrown that?—That is, are there better ways to look after user experience?

CLAUDIA PAGE: Given how fragmented media consumption habits have become, I don’t think most publishers will ever return to a place in which the lion’s share of their traffic is coming via the homepage. Side-door strategies and niche channelization are the most dependable pathways for audience development—but, as I mentioned, that does not diminish the need for publishers to identify partners that enable them to own their audiences, both on-site and off.

One thing to keep in mind is that social distribution strategies have forced publishers to create content within parameters that might not be best suited for their editorial voice and their brand. I don’t think it’s a good thing for publishers to have to constantly strive to retrofit their storytelling to align with the confines set by other platforms.

That’s where this idea of audience ownership becomes critical: If publishers must alter their content to fit a specific distribution channel, then how much control can they really have over their audience? This insight has been key to the development of Dailymotion’s HTML5 video player, which allows our content partners to host and stream on their owned properties—and also exposes their content to larger audiences via the Dailymotion platform, which helps consumers discover trusted premium content from thousands of leading global publishers.

What are your thoughts on Facebook’s outreach to publishers regarding its Facebook Daily Watch? It seems BuzzFeed and Bloomberg are already doing similar projects with Twitter where they have a lot more control over monetization.

Facebook has been articulating its focus for the near term: to help create a destination for community-building and meaningful conversations. As such, their video strategy falls under the umbrella of this vision. With Daily Watch, and Watch overall, Facebook wants to create video experiences that support community building and drive conversations around content. This is very different than what SVOD companies like Netflix and Hulu are setting out to do, and also different than YouTube, which focuses on aggregating a neverending library of viral and everyday video content.

The challenge Facebook faces goes back to the unit-of-content concept. If Facebook users are trained and engrained for status updates, it’s going to be an uphill battle to create entirely new user behaviors around video consumption—especially if these behaviors are taking place within a dedicated tab outside of the News Feed. Monetization opportunities follow audience behavior, so Facebook likely has less flexibility to offer publishers than Twitter in that regard.

I think flexible monetization will be a huge theme for publishers in the coming months and years. Publishers have seen their audiences fragment across various platforms, and they have been operating at the mercy of these platforms for years. The larger players like Facebook and Google will always have the benefit of reach, but I think we’re beginning to see publishers push back and diversify their distribution and growth strategies in places like Apple News, for example.

This is the third article in a three-part series. Read the first installment here and the second installment here.

The post The Next Stage of Social Strategy: A Q&A With Claudia Page of Dailymotion (Part 3) appeared first on AdMonsters.