Back in March, many advertising buyers began using keyword blocking tools to swerve virus-related stories, or simply stopping advertising in news altogether, believing it to be too negative to be “brand-safe”.
But Integral Ad Science (IAS) research has shown how many audiences actually crave coronavirus news and don’t penalize brands for adjacency to it, whilst organizations like the 4As, Digital Content Next and the IAB have sought to educate brands.
In particular, the 4As recently published a cross-industry position paper declaring: “The overwhelming majority of news content is brand safe—if not necessarily suitable—for brands and advertisers. Large, wide-ranging blacklists are both excessive and infrequently updated, and often counterproductive.”
It is part of initiatives to tell marketers – news is brand-safe, but particular kinds of news may or may not be suitable for different marketers.
In the latest few weeks, CNN has rediscovered advertisers that had previously clammed up.
“(Some of) the brands coming to us … previously had a stated ‘no news’ policy,” says Christine Cook, SVP of WarnerMedia and chief revenue officer of CNN Digital.
“We are working with the 4As and a lot of our clients to either put them contextually against content that is appropriate for their message or using technology like SAM, our Sentiment Analysis Monitor that we launched a little over a year ago, to either target away from contextually appropriate content that’s inappropriate for them, or target toward positive sentiment.”
Today at 2pm ET! Our #BusinessAsUnusual webinar on Brand Safety with @GroupMWorldwide’s Joe Barone, @nytimes’ Allison Murphy & @tag_today’s Mike Zaneis (and read the recent Brand Suitability paper: https://t.co/xM5uRv5K9d).
Register for the webinar: https://t.co/MB6waw8JWW pic.twitter.com/bu1EAjb593
— 4A's (@4As) May 5, 2020
That last piece, context, may be the development which unlocks the more nuanced understanding of “brand suitability” that publishers are aiming to deliver.
Semantic analysis software running in a growing number of ad platforms can peer deep in to the inner meaning of content, making it available as richer indicators to buy ads against.
That can mean the difference between signalling a COVID-19 story about death counts and one about community human-interest stories.
In Cook’s case, CNN is having to offer that capability across a splintering array of devices – made more challenging by audience patterns exacerbated by COVID-19.
“Now that everyone’s sharing a household, people are looking at all of the channels, because not everyone can fit in that one place where they maybe used to go before,” she says.
Finding a way to make advertisers comfortable with news is critical, because news organizations have been walloped by declining ad revenue and diminishing ad rates during the pandemic.
CNN has been match-funding purpose-driven digital ad buys and committing further TV inventory to public health campaigns.
“The importance of news, generally, I believe is very high,” Cook says. But, at this moment, the trust that consumers have in us and the role that we play in getting information to them … is inextricably tied to politics.
“That service journalism has created an opportunity for us to provide service advertising.”
When news breaks, audiences turn to CNN:
• 184M unique U.S. visitors in March (70% of total U.S. internet audience)
• 173M U.S. unique visitors in April
• 259M global unique visitors in MarchThank you for trusting us when it matters the most.https://t.co/aJBVC8kHbi pic.twitter.com/6fn5Aw1J1b
— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) May 15, 2020
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Some ad buyers buyers even blacklisted news sites, prompting one publisher to accuse them of censorship and others like BBC News, News Corp and The Economist to protest that bad news can be good news for marketers.
The latest to do so is CNN, which – given the president’s own news agenda – is often dragged in to the political mire itself.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Andrew Morse, Executive Vice President and General Manager of CNN Digital Worldwide, says current affairs has never been a better way to engage an audience.
“(Some marketers) worry, if they delve into politics, they’re going to alienate half your audience,” Morse says. “That’s not necessarily the right lens to look at things.
“People are desperate for news, for information, for truth. I’ve never experienced a time like this, truly, in my whole career, whether you’re at a dinner party or at a business meeting or you’re on a plane, you’re on a train, everybody wants to talk about what’s going on in the world.”
There is plenty of bad news out there in the world. But news executives like Morse counter that an audience which can not just withstand reality but seeks it out in a bid to understand the world is actually a valuable one.
Turning the Tables on Social Networks with In-House Innovation
As CNN looks to profit from that appetite, it is on the same journey along with many other news organizations, figuring out how to build its own audience whilst also leveraging the big social networks.
“We spent years working with the platforms … We’re now turning the tables a little bit,” Morse says.
“We’re experimenting with them and, when we decide to do a product experiment with a platform, the goal is to try to figure out, ‘Is this a way that we can harness and engage audiences on our own platforms?'”
CNN’s own-platform growth will involve investing in data science, technology development and product development to deliver in new ways.
Under its parent Turner’s ownership by AT&T’s WarnerMedia, Morse says the company needs to build a content recommendation engine that better understands consumption.
Barely a week goes by without the news network becoming the target of a presidential critique. But Morse says the imperative is to play it straight.
“We’re not in the game of playing left or right, that’s really not what we’re there to do,” he says.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers. The series is sponsored by CNN. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Marketers need to be part of the news environment because our consumers are engaged in the news environment,” P&G’s Chief Brand Officer says in this interview with Beet.TV. “They’re getting information about the world and about society and about trends, and therefore that’s an opportunity for them to get information about our products and our brands.”
Engaging with consumers beyond headlines and quick news stories can convey messaging that brief ads alongside such content cannot, according to Pritchard.
“We can create content that a journalist or a news company can do a better job of communicating. They can unpack it in maybe a more in depth way and create different views of that particular area that might be of interest to people.”
Last year, P&G partnered with Great Big Story on a 20-minute film titled Words Matter chronicling the venerable marketer’s journey to endorsing its acceptance of all things LGBTQ—a journey that took about 30 years. The film gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the internal process that ultimately produced its LGBTQ stance.
“That was a great story and it got a lot of interest from a lot of people,” Pritchard says. “It shined the light on our company in a way that we probably couldn’t have done ourselves. It was better and more credible for a news organization doing so.”
Those same capabilities are one reason why P&G has a partnership with Katie Couric Media. “She’s a great journalist. She’s told some of the best stories and done some of the best investigative journalism of anyone.”
Asked about the company’s brand safety guidelines for news content, Pritchard says the standards are the same across every piece of content or program in which P&G advertises “because you’re judged by the company you keep. If a line is crossed then we’ll pull our ads.”
He’d like to see a higher bar for expectations of news content in the areas of truth and transparency. Light needs to be shone on situations “in such a way that has multiple views as opposed to one skewed view.” In addition, Pritchard would prefer to see less focus on “those things that are sensational and focus on a range of things. Because the news has a huge impact on culture, on images, on portrayals of people and it’s really important that they get the right balance of both the positive and negative in their programming.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers. The series is sponsored by CNN. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“There’s a lot going on and as a result, I think you as brand need a very clear and concise message. To make sure that what you’re portraying your brand to be, what the attributes are, what the value of that brand is to be very clear,” Sullivan adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
These are the attributes that people are looking for in the broader space of news and information. “They want clear, concise information” informed by fact checking. “They really pay attention now more and more.”
Research done by Omnicom shows that 60% of the people they polled “are paying more attention to where they get their news from, the credibility of that news organization, the fact checking that is done. From a brand perspective, make sure that you are also telling a very true and reliable account of who you are and make the message simple for the consumer.”
Noting that “the news sometimes is just hard to watch,” Sullivan points to vehicles like CNN’s Great Big Story and branded content studio Courageous as examples of how news is a very broad category beyond the minute-by-minute, oft-volatile headlines. Viewers desire “the ability to learn something new. The ability to get a story that you knew nothing about the topic. They have a voracious appetite to get out there, see the world that they can’t actually maybe physically see. I think as news organizations are branching out into that.”
The more that news organizations are able to tell great stories beyond just the headlines, the more they can satisfy the “tremendous appetite” for reliable information about things like health, fitness, travel, food, music and sports, according to Sullivan.
Research shows that 80% of all Millennials are getting news and information from apps and from social media. “That alone is telling you what’s out there. It’s not just about politics and not just about current affairs. It is about all those other things I just mentioned.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers. The series is sponsored by CNN. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“It’s almost as if we need like, a little bit of a slow news movement because everything’s happening so fast and there is so much access to so much information,” Stelter says in this Beet.TV interview at AT&T’s Xandr Relevance Conference in which he discusses President Trump’s “fake news” claims and what journalists should be doing in response.
“I think right now there’s so much confusion and chaos, and maybe even most news consumers are hungry for people to hit the brakes a little bit, for journalists to hit the brakes a little bit and tell them what really matters, what really is going on and why it really affects them,” Stelter says.
At The Relevance Conference, Stelter moderated a panel discussion titled Breaking The News: Staying Relevant In A Real-Time News Cycle. It featured Jesse Angelo of the New York Post, PBS NewsHour’s Sara Just, Allison Rockey of VOX and Bari Weiss from The New York Times.
“I think the higher quality news organizations, or the ones that seek to be higher quality, are the ones that are trying to help folks digest the news and process the news and get past the headlines of what’s happening,” says Stelter.
Part of the panel discussion focused on the value that news organizations should be bringing to the table. “The value is to make people smarter. Not to make people angrier or make people confused. But to make people smarter about what’s happening. I do think we see all across the news media examples of efforts to do that,” Stelter adds.
In a Tuesday morning opening fireside chat on the main stage with CNN’s Poppy Harlow moderating, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson forcefully addressed the company’s commitment to a free press and its essential role in society.
“Whatever you think about CNN, whatever you think about CNN’s rivals, we need a strong and healthy and diverse news media in the United States and we need owners who respect that. And AT&T has been saying all the right things and doing all the right things since the acquisition happened,” says Stelter.
Asked about the impact on the public of President Trump’s frequent claims of “fake news,” he calls such behavior “a slow-acting poison that is gradually trickling through the American body and causing an infection, causing a disease, causing a sickness.”
Given that a subset of the U.S. public actually believes what President Trump is saying, “My big concern is let’s take that thirty or forty percent of the country that seems to believe him or agree with his attacks. What can we do to win back folks’ trust? To show them that the news is real and the journalists are trying their best to get it right. That’s a challenge and that’s a mission for these newsrooms, for all of us.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“The audiences are coming to us not just on the desktop home page, which is such a powerful force for us. Our mobile numbers are going through the roof and, frankly, OTT has begun to really, really take hold,” Berend explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.
“That for us is proof that the brand resonates as much as it ever has. It’s also an indicator of where a lot of consumption and behavior is headed.”
CNN sees news consumption as “less fragmented and more of a giant fire hose,” Berend adds.
The global news provider walks a daily tightrope that is the oft-vitriolic political discourse some advertisers don’t want to be associated with, according to Berend. Among advertisers, there’s a higher sensitivity right now to salaciousness and vitriol prevalent within the political realm in the United States.
“Every advertiser is different and within categories, you have a lot of different concerns and sensitivities,” he says. “But we’ve also been very smart and we understand what they’re concerned about and so we put, whether it’s technical things or thematic things or editorial pieces in place, to make sure that they do have a safe environment to get their message across.”
Meanwhile, CNN has been growing a lower-profile asset in Great Big Story, launched nearly three years ago. Great Big Story is an independent media company owned by CNN that’s executed more than 50 brand partnerships this year while opening new doors for the news network.
Great Big Story monetizes its content through sponsorships and advertising. “We don’t run pre-rolls. This is not a video-start farm,” says Berend, who co-founded the operation.
While Great Big Story represents a different style and approach to the traditional digital business within CNN, it “starts a conversation with new advertisers that we may not be getting through our doors at CNN proper and it also starts a conversation with new audiences.”
The average age of user of Great Big Story is roughly 27 to 28, quite a bit younger than traditional CNN viewer.
“For us, it’s hitting all the right notes and the business is growing exponentially, and at this point we’re just trying to keep up,” Berend says.
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Breaking news also represents a “balancing test” in being able to monetize those eyeballs most effectively, as CNN Chief Product Officer Alex Wellen explains in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“It looks like CNN is more relevant than it’s ever been before,” Wellen says during a break at the DMEXCO advertising and media trade show.
On digital platforms, consumption of the company’s weekend hurricane coverage was about 80% compared with desktop, according to Wellen. One day of that coverage made it the number one day for the entire year, bypassing the Trump inauguration.
“We had 34 million multiplatform uniques across all of our platforms, largely on mobile first,” Wellen explains.
Video growth has been “immense” for CNN, including its 360-degree coverage of the Total Solar Eclipse from multiple locations and some 9 million live streams, on some 40 different platforms.
As its distribution and reach has grown, CNN is working closely with advertisers “at the onset of these platforms” to create authentic editorial and advertising experiences. “Not an adjacency or an afterthought.”
Breaking news is more appealing to some advertisers than others and they are connected with CNN through automation. “There are some advertisers, particularly through the private programmatic means, that we can connect with this content. They want to reach large audiences at scale.”
At the same time, CNN is “very, very precise and surgical” about which advertisers are aligned with premium, long-form or evergreen executions.
“When we have these spikes, we leverage them with advertisers that are very broad and then when we create bespoke content we can charge a higher CPM, but it is much more around the premium executions,” Wellen says.
He has a problem with the digital term “personalization,” considering it to be “a bit of a cop out” as it relates to scaled technology automating everything. This is because at CNN, being “personal” when delivering content means focusing on curation and relevancy derived from audience insights.
“Product for us is that combination of storytelling and technology and the way they come together to really present something in a way that others can’t really do,” Wellen says.
This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Time Warner’s CNN and Turner Sports this week signed on for Nielsen’s OOH measurement service, which uses a panel of 77,000 people across the top 44 DMA’s to capture viewing that has typically gone uncounted.
“This really enables the industry as a whole to assign value to the audiences that are being captured and not currently tracked in the traditional ratings up to this point,” Kelly Abcarian, Senior Vice President, Product Leadership, Nielsen says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Under terms of the agreement with Nielsen, the Turner units will get viewership credit for both program and commercial ratings for up to seven days of viewing of various pieces of content, as Variety reports. CNN is the first news network to make use of the Nielsen technology. Disney’s ESPN and 21st Century Fox’s Fox Sports already subscribe to the service.
For cable sports or cable news, Nielsen has seen lifts on a total day of 8 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively, according to Abcarian.
The OOH metrics are a separate number that do not contribute directly to C3 or C7 ratings. “But it is a Nielsen metric that then gets made available to the buying platforms as well to allow buyers and sellers to transact on those audiences,” Abcarian adds.
As Nielsen adds more networks on a national level to its OOH offering, it’s also making it available to local stations and cable networks.
“We really see this as a broad coverage play to ensure that these audiences are being counted across our national ratings and our local ratings alike.”
The 77,000-person panel, when projected out, represents about 65% of U.S. TV households, according to Abcarian.
]]>As consumers migrate to OTT channels, “We’re finding that engagement is very high. They spend a lot of time with our brand in that OTT environment,” Johnson says during a break at the 2017 Digital Content NewFronts.
“When we look at our entertainment business, we see a significant amount of consumption that’s happening in the VOD environment.”
Considering that Turner is in more than 50 million homes capable of viewing ads delivered dynamically, “as we approach the UpFront we talk about C3’s and C7’s. We’re looking at an environment where after the C7 window we can bring addressability into a video-on-demand environment through the set-top box,” Johnson says.
From a conventional advertising perspective, Turner is always looking for new ad units to take advantage of its scale. “We have to evolve conventional advertising to be more impactful to consumers and deliver stronger brand messages,” he adds.
The goal is to tell great stories that are contemplating brands’ KPI’s and then distributing them on company sites and off-channel through its social agency and “bringing data along for the story.”
Johnson would like to see more of a balance across the entire menu of digital advertising options because over the last five years, he believes much conversation has dwelled on full-episode players and straight video.
While video is part of the mix, so are branded content, targeting, native advertising, social channels and conventional digital ads. All of them may “have been underweighted over the last couple of years.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
]]>“It’s a completely different way of thinking about marketing,” Randall Rothenberg says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Mobile World Congress 2017. “All marketers are kind of overwhelmed.”
With some two-thirds of U.S. consumers’ time spent on mobile devices, the biggest overall opportunity is “truly a one-to-one connection,” Rothenberg explains.
He offers an anecdotal observation about the extent of change in the mobile marketing world by noting that one of the MWC participants, Leonid Sudakov, used to be Chief Marketing Officer for the Mars pet care brands. “Now he’s President of Connected Solutions. That transition alone speaks volumes,” Rothenberg says.
In addition to figuring out the one-to-one consumer interface, brands and publishers are grappling with the question of how to integrate mobile media with preexisting media, according to Rothenberg. For example, how do Nielsen ratings for traditional television viewing mix with one-to-one metrics in the mobile environment?
On the publishing side, the classic advertising model continues to move to “some kind of post-advertising model.” Gone are the days of strictly thinking of advertising units as consisting of “boxes and time slots.”
For one thing, you just can’t fit enough of the boxes and time slots into the mobile space to make up for the volume of revenue that publishers enjoyed in the pre-mobile world. “The actual value that’s being created is through this one-to-one connection with the end user,” Rothenberg says.
Citing Turner Sports, CNN and Cartoon Network, Rothenberg notes that people will always want sports, news and entertainment content. These are “the kinds of things that publishing companies have specialized in since before the dawn of print,” he adds.
While the mobile train clearly has left the station, its potential has yet to be fully unleashed.
“You know you that you’ve got to start changing the wheels on the train but how you do it, what the new wheels are, what the time frame is to put the new wheels on is difficult to discern,” says Rothenberg.
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>“There has never been a time with more challenges, but there’s never been a more intellectually interesting time to be in the business,” Martin says in a reference to the explosion of both content and consumer choices for consuming it.
Turner has set an ambition for itself to “literally reinvent the company from the inside out.” While it intends to dominate its core businesses with premium content, Turner also knows it must keep abreast of shifting distribution venues, according to Martin.
“With these new distribution mechanisms and with so much choice available for consumers, we really want to be a fan engagement company,” he says. This is because engaging with fans “who come back over and over and over again are the easiest people to monetize.”
Such engagement needs to span all age groups. While the average age of a CNN viewer on linear TV in the U.S. is 58, the equivalent figure on Snapchat is early 20’s. “Nobody would have thought that people in their early twenties would have been interested in CNN, but that’s not true,” Martin says.
“Massive investments” in technology have enabled Turner to reach these varied audiences, in addition to new distribution partnerships, according to Martin.
And then there is the proposed merger with AT&T, which Seeking Alpha believes is on a track toward approval. Martin sees the deal as being able to “supercharge our growth” with the addition of 25 million DIRECTV subscribers and AT&T’s 130 million mobile customers.
While Turner won’t offer its content exclusively to AT&T’s customers “because we make money by being agnostic, we’re going to be able to learn a lot.”
Martin is optimistic about this year’s Upfronts and Newfronts negotiations with media buyers, given its lightened commercial loads and the improved quality of ads on its networks. “We’re seeing really great early success and I’m quite confident going into the Upfront this year. I think it’s going to be healthy,” Martin says.
This video was produced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>The organisation has rebooted its app line-up across phones, tablets and smartwatches, now including live and CNN Go on-demand video plus HLN streams for US users, as well as authentication via users’ pay-TV providers.
“We re-imagined how our consumers are connecting with us on mobile,” says CNN chief product officer Alex Wellen, in this video interview with Beet.TV from Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest mobile industry show.
“We had to go back… where is the consumption happening, why mess with the app?”
The answer is an interesting one.
“On the web, we have 10 times as many users as on apps,” Wellen says. “But the individuals that are on our apps are reading 13 times more page views and 17 times more video.”
Was it worth spending so much effort retooling the apps for an audience that is one tenth the size of the web user base?
Absolutely, Wellen suggests: “This audience that is one tenth of mobile web is actually larger, because of the engagement. So apps are an opportunity to engage very deeply with the audience.”
In one way, the stat is self-evident – websites are likely to have more drive-by page views by searches and social referrals, whilst app users have already taken the time to purposely invest in downloading a news brand for ongoing consumption.
So CNN is keen to better serve its most loyal mobile audience. Now the apps include a lot more video – not just news, but also shows like Anthony Bourdain’s.
And the organisation has found some success from letting CNNgo, its premium video offering, go free for promotional days, driving 20% to 25% conversion, Wellen says.
This video was produced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>“I saw nobody recreating the MSNBC, CNN, CNBC for people under the age of 60,” Steinberg recalls of his spring 2016 launch of a live news service focusing on business and technology. “It’s a cable network. Instead of living on a cable box it lives on Twitter at three o’clock every day and on Facebook live.”
Cheddar also has its own channel on Sling TV “in the base bundle right next to CNN” and is live on Amazon’s bundles as well, Steinberg explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We’ll have two more of these announced by mid year.”
Steinberg’s bet is that young people who are hooked on on-demand programming like House of Cards and Transparent “would have a need for what I call ambient, non-appointment viewing to see what’s happening. And that’s effectively what Cheddar is. It’s a live news network.”
Last fall, Cheddar went behind a pay wall with a monthly subscription price of $6.99, as The Wall Street Journal reports. It also gets a fee from pay TV bundles “and the ability to monetize the advertising on those bundles as well,” Steinberg says.
Another revenue stream is what he calls “Native 3.0,” wherein advertisers have a presence on the lower third of the screen. For HP, it’s the Keep Reinventing message that’s promoted, while Dunkin Donuts prefers an On The Go theme and Fidelity’s app is used to reference stocks being covered by the correspondents at Cheddar.
“The direct subscription model is our restaurant regulars. They’re people that just want Cheddar and don’t want a bundle,” Steinberg says. “But ideally any skinny bundle out there, I intend for us to be in those and the consumer can buy us that way.”
He counsels against every publisher thinking that live video is where it’s at. “It’s about looking where there is white space,” says Steinberg.
As for so-called fake news, he blames social media networks like Facebook and readers themselves.
“If people just read credible sources, if you went to BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cheddar even, there would be no fake news,” Steinberg says. “Fake news is a consequence of the fact that people got disoriented from what they were actually reading and this stuff was able to spread.”
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
]]>Turner Ignite Sports is the latest iteration of Turner Ignite, which was created to offer content and data solutions. It’s described as an in-house, full-service sports marketing agency focusing on intellectual property, live events and experiential marketing, creative services and data solutions, as ADWEEK and Digiday report.
In an interview with Beet.TV, Kavilanz says Turner Ignite is well into virtual reality video creation along with finding niche audiences for marketers across Turner’s massive social, digital and linear presences.
One example is Turner Ignite’s work to promote Sully, the Warner Bros drama film about the “Miracle on the Hudson.” Calling VR “a fascinating place where we love to experiment,” Kavilanz explains how a VR camera affixed to the underside of a helicopter simulated the flight path of the crippled airliner, generating video that was augmented by CNN footage.
Having created a compelling piece of content, the next challenge was locating and targeting VR enthusiasts, according to Kavilanz.
“Given the fact that we are able to access all of Turner’s social handles, we’re able to find people who like VR,” Kavilanz says. “We have found that there are certain people who will watch anything that’s VR-centric on YouTube or Facebook. Because of our unique structure, we’re creating an audience of people who love VR in addition to people who are fans of a respective show.”
Turner initially believed its Turner Ignite clients would consist mostly or solely of its linear TV advertisers. But with so many marketers of all sizes having jumped onto the content marketing bandwagon, they need help finding audiences for it, according to Kavilanz.
Most of Turner Ignite’s work involves traditional one- or two-minute videos. “The way we typically structure these deals there is a content component and a media component,” Kavilanz says.
Using its data and insights to make sure the content reaches right audience, Turner Ignite guarantees video views or impressions. “About 70% of our deals are on a cost per view basis and the balance on a CPM basis,” says Kavilanz. “We’re also offering the opportunity for guarantees of a minimum of 30 seconds of view time, which is very unique and something advertisers are increasingly asking more and more to participate in.”
One code in particular that Turner Ignite would like to crack is video sharing, according to Kavilanz. “What we’re going after is not just deriving a quality view, we’re trying to unlock the share,” he says. “That’s something that we’re spending a considerable amount of time figuring out how we can do both.”
]]>“We have sort of these mature off channel distribution points that scale very nicely that represent sort of immediate short term opportunity. And some of them are new and nascent and beginning to build up,” Johnson, who is SVP of Digital Ad Sales & Strategy, says in an interview with Beet.TV.
The always-on CNN has been very aggressive in leveraging distribution to all available end points, including social and messaging platforms, according to Johnson. “That distribution is happening because the consumer wants it. It’s an important brand. Certainly this election demonstrated that.”
It’s all about age and devices, with television audiences being the oldest for CNN. “As we go to the desktop the audience gets younger. As we go to mobile, the audience gets even younger,” he adds. “We are now building this really young audience up as well, in environments that are native to them, so they see CNN as a brand they can relate to.”
On the TBS/TNT side, it’s also a journey to new and emerging distribution vehicles beyond MVPD’s and set-top boxes. “We’re in a premium environment there and eyeballs are going to many places,” Johnson notes. “As consumers migrate to these new distribution outlets, we want to be able to sort of re-aggregate those audiences.”
Asked by interviewer Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink, about the company’s goal to sell 50% of its inventory on an audience basis by 2020, as Advertising Age reports, Johnson sketches a bigger picture.
“I believe what’s happening is that there is broad acknowledgment that consumer consumption of media is changing,” says Johnson.
Survival depends not only on things like addressable advertising and media currencies, but how well programmers take lessons from the digital world and apply them to their programming strategies, according to Johnson.
“When we launch on a Kik or a Messenger, for example, the primary objective is let’s introduce our content to consumers on these new platforms and figure out how to program to them,” says Johnson. “This is not about simulcasting our content everywhere. It’s about programming for these distinct distribution channels.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>The latest strategy sits in the latter camp, after CNN launched CNNgo – with access to its live stream plus on-demand shows – back in 2014.
So how is CNNgo doing? CNN product chief Alex Wellen revealed March stats to Beet.TV:
CNNgo lets consumers watch CNN telecasts digitally, across multiple device types, without signing in – but only for 10 minutes. After that, they must authenticate using their local cable provider account.
Wellen’s “video starts” count is for video views clocked up by users who weren’t even signed in.
In March, we did about 300 million video starts, that’s unauthenthenticated content – all the clips you see across all our platforms.
But he says 80% of the 9.5 million hours consumed was from users who did sign in. That means the service is finding some success in driving consumers to shift from viewing CNN over local cable to viewing online, albeit using legitimate accounts.
How does CNN plan to make money from this? Beside serving up traditional TV ads from the linear feed, Wellen also hints: “Ultimately, everything’s going to dynamic ad insertion.”
This video was produced as part of a series on the need for standardization of premium video advertising. The series sponsor is the NAB. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The Guardian, CNN International, the Financial Times and Reuters are together forming the Pangea Alliance, a shared scheme to pool first-party ad data for ad buyers to target their combined 110 million users in an automated fashion.
The Pangea system is announced by The Guardian, powered by programmatic ad tech platform Rubicon Project and is due to launch in beta in April. Rubicon already powers programmatic operations for several news brands including News Corp. speaking with Beet.TV last year, Rubicon international GM Jay Stevens said automation serves publishers’ “demand for greater efficiency”.
Speaking to me as I interviewed him during a panel at Guardian Changing Summit 2015 in London today, Guardian News & Media deputy CEO David Pemsel said advertisers in the US, where The Guardian is building a business, want to see scale. The Guardian itself reports the launch as a defensive play against dominant ad platforms offered by Facebook, Microsoft and Google.
Pangea will facilitate trading of display ads and ads via trading desks but even including native ads. The Economist is also a launch partner.
Collaborations in the competitive news publisher space are rate, especially amongst the fierce rivalry of the British newspaper market. But last November three local UK newspaper publishers – Johnston Press, Newsquest and Local World – also teamed to launch 1XL, a joint advertising network.
]]>The news broadcaster announced the product in April, including live-updating contextual information around real-time shows and scroll-back access to previously-aired stories.
“You’re no longer at the mercy of the broadcast,” says Rajin Persaud, VP of next-gen business at the company. CNNx is available today on your iPad, it will be available in a few weeks on your desktop and, before the end of the year, it will be available on your set-top box.
“We’re in conversation with multiple partners right now to think about creative ways we can inlude ad inventory in to this product.”
Persaud spoke with Beet.TV at The Cable Show.
]]>Time Inc is saying goodbye to current editor-in-chief Martha Nelson and installing Pearlstine, in the new position of EVP and chief of content, reports New York Times.
Time Inc may be spinning out of Time Warner, but its exit from the stable that owns broadcaster CNN doesn’t mean it lacks a video strategy.
“We look on it now as an independent family, we look on it as brands rather than magazines,” said J.R. McCabe, Time Inc’s recently-appointed first SVP of video, who took pains to stress the company’s multi-media credentials during a Beet.TV summit.
“With video, we are going to bring to life our brands with relevant content. We’re going to be able to take that content in to the video space and television.”
McCabe has been building a new video unit for the Sports Illustrated publisher, complete with producers and a new studio, with a particular focus on live programming.
But that live emphasis doesn’t mean Time Inc is reliant on traditional broadcast – watch the full video from the Beet.TV summit on cross-platform monetization, hosted by Starcom MediaVest Group and sponsored by Dailymotion, to hear McCabe say the publisher can broadcast just fine with online networks.
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