As part of the expanded agreement announced late last month, Twitter will provide broader sales support for NBCUniversal’s advertising partners, which empowers global, national and local marketers .
For an overview on the scope of the alliance, Beet.TV interviewed Joe Cady, SVP Strategy and Development at NBCU. He explains that this is part of an overall global expansion as part of the NBC Universal One Platform that was announce late last year.
According to NBCU, since kicking off the partnership in 2013, NBCU and Twitter have enjoyed significant growth and engagement. Total campaign growth has exceeded a 10x trajectory and in 2020, global video views for all NBCUniversal Twitter handles have grown 26% on average, alongside a 25% increase in campaigns year over year. And in late 2020, NBC Olympics and Twitter extended their innovative content partnership, working together to amplify NBC Olympics’ vast coverage of both Tokyo and Beijing.
]]>This week, Facebook banned a so-called liberal site sponsored by the Russian effort, as she noted in her report. The project achieved very modest reach, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV
The real problem is homegrown: Misinformation coming from a super divisive political conversation, with “fake news” being bigger than ever – much of this fed by the President, she explains.
Having gotten more adept at blocking foreign interference, the platforms are focused on identifying and labeling misinformation from domestic sources.
With regard to paid media, Facebook has just announced they will ban new political advertising starting one week before the election, Dworskin reports today.
]]>But what does a brand’s Twitter engagement look like these days?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Twitter’s VP of Americas, JP Maheu, explains the offering.
“Fundamentally, Twitter has become the news app for the world … news about any passion point that you have, whether it’s music, sports, entertainment, or politics,” Maheu says.
Product launches: “The way brands have been using Twitter is basically to support their launches.”
Conversation: “To connect with what people are talking about. Wendy’s has been one of the best brands on Twitter because they have a voice on Twitter and they really understand how to connect with culture, how to connect with what people are talking about.”
“Think of Samsung launching a new mobile device,” Maheu says.
“It’s a cycle from pre-launch to the launch phase to post-launch.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando, 2019. The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Payouts to our publishing partners grew 60% over 2018 and they did the same in 2017,” says Laura Froelich, Twitter head of US content partnerships, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Twitter has content supply deals with more than 950 publishers. Its payouts come from the gamut of relationships and ad products – including for exclusive content productions and simply returning money for ads placed against publishers’ material. Twitter also discussed that hike with Digiday.
Froelich tells Beet.TV publishers can work the ad sales relationship however they like: “Either they can do what we call ‘lead-the-sale’ or oftentimes Twitter will lead the sale.”
At the NewFronts, Twitter is touting a slate of publisher offerings to advertisers:
NewFronts is a season when digital media properties tout their upcoming content roster to tie down upfront ad sales,
]]>Now the publishers are getting more vocal, however. In recent months, we have heard from the likes of BBC News, News Corp and The Economist and now Vice Media protest that news is actually a great place to be seen.
And Twitter is happy to fight in the publishers’ corner. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Twitter head of US news partnerships Nick Sallon says: “News organizations in general … create a tonof high-quality journalism … and that represents a large volume of content on our platform from the news organizations that we work with.
“I see it as an opportunity for brands to associate themselves with really great news content and target Twitter audiences at scale.”
Twitter sees itself as a platform that allows advertisers, as well as consumers and news organizations, to engage with breaking events at the speed of culture.
And Sallon made his pitch for why marketers should take part in the conversation.
“It’s an incredibly important time for news organizations to have options to build sustainable revenue and business model,” he said. “The combination of user engagement, users coming to discover, talk about what’s happening in the public sphere, combined with a really compelling model for news organizations to make money sustainably, that combination, I think is an important ingredient in the world today.”
Twitter’s Sarah Personette also recently told Beet.TV her social network “created over 950 content deals with unique publishers around the world over the course of the last year”.
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.
]]>But new digital platforms are collapsing the marketing funnel as we witness the emergence of ad units which tick both boxes.
That is the view of Twitter’s VP of global client services Sarah Personette, who says brands can have the best of both.
“We’re seeing this migration from a siloed world of ‘performance’ on one side and ‘branding’ on the other … to a collapsing of a world that’s really focused on performance branding,” she says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
That’s how it looks from where Personette sits. Twitter says it can help drive both branding and performance goals.
“A lot of our ad solutions actually allow you to, in one unit, experience the storytelling power of video from advertisers, and then actually drive down to understand more about that product, be able to buy that product directly, or be directed to a site where you’re able to do some sort of direct-to-consumer buy,” Personette adds.
She tells Beet.TV Twitter has made over 950 content deals with publishers around the world over the last year, and explains that the platform’s modus operandi is helping brands connect to conversations that “move at the speed of culture”.
For its latest quarter, Q3 last year, Twitter reported advertising revenue of $650 million (up 29% year-over-year), whilst ad engagements increased 50% year-over-year and cost per engagement (CPE) decreased 14% year-over-year.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>While the People’s Choice Awards had long been owned and produced by Procter & Gamble, “We wanted to make it new young and fresh in E!’s voice. And we recognized that if we just did it in the linear space it really wouldn’t be new and fresh. So we had to use our partnerships to offer marketers even greater opportunities for their content they were doing with us,” Molen says.
In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, she explains how NBCU custom builds programs for marketers that span various channels and platforms in “one cohesive plan.” At the awards ceremony, Ebay sponsored backstage views while Subaru had a commanding presence near the red carpet, as Variety reports. Metro by T-Mobile sponsored a “live look-in” of a music performance by Rita Ora that garnered 2.3 million social media views—an audience that was 90% composed of 18-24-year- olds, according to Molen.
“So it’s that kind of impact that we’re looking to help marketers make by distributing their content wherever the consumer is. On Telemundo, we see this all the time.”
NBCU has social partners that include Snap and Twitter, while its Social Synch offering makes it easy for brands to reach audiences across various social media platforms.
“We sell all of our content, even if it’s distributed across other people’s platforms,” Molen says. “We give our marketers one cohesive plan, making it very easy for them to buy.”
She draws a parallel between premium content and most of social media because “that’s where the conversation is around premium content and long-form content.” Her conversations at CES include improving the commercial experience so that consumers enjoy the content better “but they also engage more deeply around a marketer’s brand.”
Some advertisers are rediscovering the value of premium content, having seen “a lot of shiny objects” and had issues with certain platforms. “Working with NBCUniversal we can give them the things that they need in data, in distribution, in commercial innovation, in ROI and attribution.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“Given this challenge there’s a real need to go beyond the install and go beyond the user acquisition and focus on engagement,” Jeger adds.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference, Jeger talks about the ways of measuring the value of app marketing campaigns and the role that companies like Criteo are playing in that effort.
AppsFlyer helps its app marketing customers collect and surface data “to understand, for example, the impressions and clicks and installs and then further down the funnel within the app all the events that happened and attribute these to a specific source.”
A typical example could be an advertiser running multiple campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and some Tencent social apps in China, according to Jeger. It would want to try to make sense of the performance and how much each of the campaigns cost versus the revenue generated.
“We enable them to do that by having partnerships with all of these companies and being official measurement partners for those companies and putting revenue against cost,” says Jeger.
One of AppsFlyer’s more than 4,000 partners is retargeting specialist Criteo, which “focuses on one of the huge pain points of app marketers. Getting users into the app and then retaining them and keeping them engaged. There’s a huge retention issue when it comes to apps and Criteo is fighting that head on by providing campaigns to get users back into the app.”
Moving beyond user acquisition to focus on engagement, using very personalized and non-intrusive messaging, “is the holy grail of where we need to go as an industry,” Jeger says.
But there’s a learning curve that could be steepened if more people knew the kinds of data that are available and the most sophisticated ways of employing that data. “I think we should be seeing more and more apps in the next year being at the place where they can get to that kind of level of communication.”
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.
]]>Twitter first embraced “What’s happening?“, the prompt to create new tweets, back in 2009.
But, this time, the company was making some product changes, to better emphasise its role at the heart of global user conversations and events.
And that’s an enhancement which the company’s head of media says came just in time for some of the world’s biggest events – the soccer World Cup.
“Being able to follow these events, these topics, and not just accounts, is a really great way for us to surface relevant content to consumers as they’re in this discovery mindset and they’re looking for content of what’s happening,” says media and entertainment MD Jennifer Prince.
Twitter in June said it would introduce:
The service has a page for every game of the World Cup.
]]>He also traces the arc of a digital content ecosystem that is in a sort of “retrograde” phase as live content becomes more prevalent amid the decline of linear television viewing.
“The mantra of the week: premium content at scale. Original content being produced by publishers, really in response to cultural trends,” Gilbert, who is Head of Digital, Midwest, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
It’s premium not just in the various big-name publishers that are generating content but also in the “production values that is elevating this content to a premium level.”
While many content partnerships were announced at this year’s NewFronts, they were accompanied by other collaborations, for example publisher-to-publisher and publisher-to-platform.
“As well as even partners such as Hulu trying to hold themselves more accountable through the likes of measurement partnerships with Nielsen, IRI as well as others,” says Gilbert. “That to me as a marketer, as an advertiser, as an agency lead is critical to defining success for the future ahead of our clients and brands.”
He also heard “the loud and continued cry towards personalization and creating authentic resonance with consumers, ultimately helping to also ensure brand safety along the way.”
Gilbert’s perspective includes a view of the marketplace for live content that for him suggests a “retrograde” of how the digital marketplace has been built and where it’s going.
“Digital video has really been build off of traditional both long-form and short-form content that gets uploaded and then lives in perpetuity,” he says.
This stands in contrast to linear TV, which has largely been live and which still draws “a wealth” of live audiences.
“In order to draw more audiences away from linear and traditional channels to digital platforms, we are seeing the likes of ESPN, Twitter and Facebook live. We also heard it last night at YouTube’s Brandcast is they’re continuing to double down with YouTube TV. So I expect we’ll continue to see that grow in the years ahead.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>“Because, in fact, we are everywhere the sports fan wants us to be,” Howe explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “One of the core messages we wanted to get across today is wherever the sports fan is in the digital ecosystem, we are their voice of sports.”
While ESPN’s owned and operated platforms garner the largest audience of its 81 million fans a month, “Social is a critical aspect of it, most importantly because that’s where some of our fans want to consume their sports content.”
ESPN customizes sports content on Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter in sync with user expectations that vary by platform. “We do not treat them the same.”
Twitter “is a great place for live breaking news. Snapchat is there for digestible content and Facebook is there to tell the story,” says Howe. “Each of those platforms has a very different purpose in terms of communicating with the sports fan.”
He considers the recently upgraded ESPN app to be “one of our crown jewels.” ESPN+, the company’s long-awaited sports streaming service, will feature thousands of live games and original programming for $4.99 a month, and will live inside the ESPN app, as The New York Times reports.
“What’s important about our app is that it engages with 23 million unique fans. Capturing that audience is very important to us and we take it very seriously.”
Two main features of the app are personalization and direct-to-consumer sports.
Personalization ensures that “every single fan who comes to our app gets a unique and different experience based off of their preferences and fan behaviors.”
He calls ESPN+ “the first direct-to-consumer sports property, which allows us to give the sports fans more. ESPN+ allows us yet another outlet for our fans to engage with even more sports content around some of the best leagues and sports in the industry.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Meredith used its NewFronts presentation to announce additions to its over-the-top PeopleTV service, including “Chatter,” a live talk show hosted by actress Rosie Diaz that will appear on both PeopleTV and Twitter. Meredith also debuted “Search History,” a comedy in which Michelle Collins “digs deep and peruses through the phones of unsuspecting, shocked bystanders.”
In this interview with Beet.TV, Kozo, who is in addition to being Manager, Digital Partnerships, at Initiative is a self-professed comedy lover, reacts to Meredith’s latest efforts “as a marketer who has seen everything being pitched to me that’s under the sun.” She also discusses the benefits and pitfalls for brands that engage in live content.
“I definitely thought Meredith did a great job with who they brought on to represent and to showcase the programs and the live feeds that they’re doing,” Kozo says. “I mean, clearly it worked. Everyone in the room was laughing and was enjoying what they were engaging with.
“I know I’m going to start looking at People now and Chatter. I don’t even, like, really use Twitter and I’m like, ‘I should get back on Twitter.’ I just want to follow this program because it’s funny and it’s light, but it’s also doing a good job of connecting with their consumers,” she adds.
Kozo thinks live content is “a great opportunity” but cautions that brands “need to have a lot of trust in who you’re aligning with, especially since it’s typically fairly unscripted. You can’t plan for how things are going to go and you can’t really take back your message after it’s been shown.”
More to the point, live content entails advertisers giving up a large degree of control, “which I think is really tough for marketers to do.”
Nonetheless, she thinks live is a great opportunity.
“I think it’s when people are most leaned in. People want stuff right away. They want to be cutting edge. People are always connected and they just want to be at the forefront of whatever’s happening.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Whether it’s Twitter and ESPN or Disney and Tastemade, “To me, that was very encouraging seeing all these partnerships form and bringing premium video into a more expanded space,” Francois Lee says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Among the deluge of announcements at the NewFronts, Disney revealed that the launch of the Disney Eats brand, partnering with online foodie network Tastemade to develop original content, as Deadline reports.
As someone who works primarily in the television space, the EVP of Video Investment at media agency Assembly is always on the lookout for “places where we can find premium TV-like video in a brand-safe environment with scale.”
Besides acknowledging the nexus of digital and traditional TV, Lee comes away from the NewFronts presentations impressed by the increasing number of publishers launching their own over-the-top channels. “It’s definitely table stakes now,” he says.
While content was front and center at the NewFronts, performance metrics or guarantees were less so. “I think there’s an expectation that if you’re in digital video you’ll be able to provide digital video like metrics, which is not always the case of course.”
Lee is encouraged by better TV-targeting options from the likes of OpenAP, calling it a “healthy trend.” While measurement still needs to advance, “from an attribution model standpoint there’s a lot more we know about what networks what dayparts what programs are driving ROI.”
The missing piece is incremental improvement on ROI on the back end of campaigns.
“We need the networks to say, ‘if you’re going to create this data-led approach then you need to guarantee me ROI on the back end,’” for example guaranteeing performance on age/sex demos plus one of an advertiser’s own targets. “We want an actual ROI on the back end, which I think would really put skin in the game for the networks,” Lee adds.
“We’re definitely seeing improvements from last year to this year. We’re not quite there yet, but I think we’ve made quite a lot of progress in a year.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>The content partnerships represent a pool of integration opportunities for advertisers, Prager explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts 2018.
“We have premium publishers and we’re creating an environment for brands that is brand safe, where they can surround the conversation that’s associated with the publishers that we’re bringing on board,” Prager says. “You don’t have to compromise brand safety for scale.”
Twitter likes to call “the world its oyster” when it comes to which publishers should use its platform. “The publishers come on board based on the volume of the conversation. We always mine that conversation to find these spaces for the brands to surround and inject themselves.”
How brands get involved is dependent on their relationship with the publishers, according to Prager.
ESPN is planning to launch five shows and programming initiatives for Twitter, two of which were detailed at Twitter’s NewFronts session, as Variety reports. In a separate interview with Beet.TV, Kay Madati, Global VP & Head of Content Partnerships at Twitter, talks about how the company represents an extension of the reach of content providers in their constant search for eyeballs.
Asked about issues like brand safety and viewability, Prager references Twitter’s Matt Derella at this year’s NewFronts in saying that he was “very clear that gone are those days when we’re going to sacrifice those things.”
Adds Prager, “We want to feel that those brands can be measured against the things that matter to them, whether it’s viewability, whether it’s ROI. We are very transparent across all those things and those things have become a very first-class citizen on our platform.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Video views on Twitter have nearly doubled in the past year, the company said during its Digital Content NewFronts event this week.
“Where we first start is, we look at the conversation that’s already happening on the platform. The goal is to actually marry the organic conversation that’s happening on the platform with the content that they’re talking about,” Kay Madati, Global VP & Head of Content Partnerships, says in this interview with Beet.TV. “The marriage of those two things deliver quality content for our audiences and real distribution and engagement.”
NBCU will be sharing live video and clips from properties including NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC and Telemundo, as TechCrunch reports.
Twitter has been working with NBC for many years. The new expansion gives it the opportunity to now work with seven different brands inside the organization.
“Part of what I think the value that we provide for our content partners is that we end up being an extension of their reach,” Madati says. “The ability for a producer like NBC or the Ellen show to be able to reach our engaged audience on our platform.”
Linking content with social conversations and tying in advertisers provides opportunities for all types of publishers, according to Madati. “We’re not trying to dis-intermediate their businesses. We’re here to extend the ability to tie the conversation that’s happening around their content on our platform and allow us all to take that out to market.”
Twitter is “excited to see what we can do with Telemundo around approaching Hispanic conversations on the platform, we’re excited to see what we can do with E Networks, NBC news.”
The deals stem from the core understanding that “eyeballs in this new world of multi-platform, multi-device consumption are going everywhere,” Madati adds.
He believes that one of the best things about Twitter is that communities and movements that use the platform to disseminate their messages are self-organized. “When I think about the violence in Florida with guns and how a couple of students got together, joined our platform and a month, two months later they have millions of people listening to them, that in its essence is what Twitter is fantastic at.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Media technology provider 4C Insights cut its teeth on digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others. As it shifts into the linear television space to enable more precise audience targeting, it’s an instance of TV “borrowing a plan from the digital playbook,” says Chief Product Officer Anupam Gupta.
In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Gupta explains some of the more important learnings gained from the social media space and reflects on the company’s programmatic venture with NBCUniversal.
Given their advanced advertising infrastuctures, which enable granular audience targeting, the big social media platforms provide fast measurement for campaign optimization.
“Those are good and those are learnings that I think you can apply to, let’s say, the world of TV where you want to target better, you want to have more programmatic tools and you want to measure and optimize faster.”
Another learning is that the data in social media “is huge and it’s real-time,” providing brands with consumer insights that can be used to identify the kinds of consumers they want to target. “We call it the unlimited focus group,” says Gupta.
The third learning he cites is the huge reach of social media. “So when you’re doing a true cross-channel campaign and if you need to find more reach or more frequency, you can use social media as an additive channel let’s say to television.”
Asked about the industry’s quest for uniform cross-platform audience measurement, Gupta says the focus should be on business objectives. Some brands are after upper-funnel lift, others actual sales impact and yet others everything in between.
“At the end of the day yes, there is a strong desire to measure things, but to has to tie back to the objectives that a marketer has,” says Gupta.
In a deal announced in October, the 4C platform has programmatic access to NBCU inventory that isn’t sold in the Upfront.
“Now you can bring the audience intelligence to bear against that inventory, build a plan that essentially hits the audience you’re going after and execute on that just like you do digital campaigns,” Gupta says.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>With NBCU making its television inventory available via application programming interfaces, “it was pretty natural for us to come together,” says Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights.
Since its founding in 2011, 4C has brought data science together with workflow to facilitate smoother and more efficient media planning and buying, beginning with digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and LinkedIn. “We started doing that with social, but of course social is not the be all and end all,” Gupta says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we’re trying to get to is cross channels. TV of course is a big share of eyeballs.”
4C decided just over a year ago to expand beyond social, choosing linear TV as opposed to video. “In the TV case, some of the brands that we work with are bringing CRM data to linear TV, which hasn’t necessarily been done before.”
In a deal announced this month involving retailer Target, 4C has access to NBCU inventory “that is available to buy, let’s say, over the next couple of months. So therefore in the 4C planner you can plan a campaign and out comes a media schedule that says ‘here is how you want to allocate your budget to reach the goals that you have across the various programs on NBC,’” Gupta explains.
With the Mediaocean combination announced in September, 4C’s platform brings together inventory bought in both the Upfront and scatter markets. “It was very important that we cover both the use cases. We tap into the inventory, build an optimized plan and push that plan back into Mediaocean by integration.”
Gupta says that in the last six months or so, everyone is talking about applying “audience centricity” to linear television “and frankly television more broadly speaking. It’s the same thing that’s been done in digital advertising.”
Calling it the best parts of digital advertising now coming to linear TV, he welcomes the ongoing wave of buyers and sellers pushing the envelope of innovation.
“I think the people who are going to be successful down the road are the ones that are experimenting with these things now, getting the kinks out of the system, learning and then moving along,” Gupta says. “And I think next year you’re going to see a lot of the stuff happening at scale is my prediction.”
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>The deal with 4C “allows us to juxtapose the value of our inventory within the same buying console that they’re buying this other inventory,” says Aaron Radin, NBCU’s SVP of Partnerships & Portfolio Products.
This means that among other things, buyers will be able to decide whether buying a 15- or 30-second ad on the hit show This Is Us “will be a more effective use of a client’s marketing spend than a three-second autoplay video in a news feed,” Radin says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“What’s particularly notable about this relationship is that 4C has been used to buy social media platforms” including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn. And while they are still considered to be social media platforms, nearly half of the advertising transactions that occur on them are for video inventory.
“We saw this as an important place where we could provide the efficiency and targetability that clients have been able to enjoy on those platforms,” Radin says.
Retailer Target is the advertising partner kicking off the self-serve offering, which in the future will expand beyond NBCU’s linear TV inventory to digital as well.
“We’re super lucky to have Target as our launch client for that partnership. I think they’re the perfect client to do so.”
Target is known for its digital targeting prowess and CRM savvy. It’s also been “laser focused on being able to leverage that information against television inventory,” says Radin.
NBCU has created application programming interfaces for its television inventory, a move that Radin describes as “a landmark” in the industry.
“The initial results have been super exciting. We couldn’t be more excited not only that we got it off the ground but about the types of opportunities it opens up to our clients by being able to present our inventory to the market in this way.”
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>“I think it’s one of the things we’re kind of missing,” Dave Penski, CEO of Publicis Media Exchange Americas, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
Although he’s encouraged by conversations at Cannes about such a value exchange, it’s still very much a work in progress.
“For a very long time in this business, the reason that commercials weren’t an issue is because the consumer realized they had to watch those in order to get the content they wanted,” Penski says. “Now with so many different options on getting that content without the commercial viewing experience is where it’s challenging.”
In the meantime, he feels that reducing ad loads would be an improvement, but it has to be balanced somehow. “Our clients are not going to pay a 100% premium to cut ads because it doesn’t feel like it’s quite their responsibility. I think it’s going to be a mixture of how you value that impression,” he says.
Part of achieving a value exchange requires that agencies evaluate “what we are producing, what type of ads we’re putting against it and what is that value exchange for the consumer.”
Having attended Cannes for about a decade, one of the things that strikes Penski as a “large surprise” this go-round is the number of U.S. clients on hand and their level of engagement.
“You expect the digital and tech clients, but it’s really across all of our categories,” he says. “They’re looking at this as a place to kind of stop, pause and think about what they’re looking for from an innovation standpoint.”
Mentioning Snapchat and Twitter, Penski has a more positive view of them as partners because they realize they need to do a better job of “putting the advertiser first and having the right ad experience for our clients.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>in this video interview with Beet.TV, Twitter agency development director Stephanie Prayer says the network is trying to soothe brands’ concerns over the safety of environments in which ordinary folk publish their own content.
“Twitter can solve a lot of their brand safety concerns,” she says. “We have really stringent abuse policies. Coupled with the machine learning that we’re starting to use, any not-safe content on the platform is removed instantly.
“We’re doubling-down on video because it brings us the ability to bring in a depth of content that’s premium and publisher-based. We can weed out the UGC and make this an environment that’s safe for advertisers, to alleviate a lot of concerns.”
Twitter has been less impacted than YouTube by this year’s consternation over the appearance of brand advertisers’ messages against questionable content.
But the social service is also on its own mission to gobble higher video ad CPMs by launching a range of video services and partnerships live.
Prager points to recently-inked deals with Bloomberg, Cheddar and others as examples.
“We’ve made video a first-class citizen not he platform,” she adds. “We have a scaleable solution across 200+ premium publishers that brands can attach their preroll ads to. There’s no UGC.”
]]>“From an advertiser perspective, we’re seeing a lot of that right now. Brands that are actually taking sales impact as a KPI and then adjusting all of their media tactics to meet that,” Feigenson says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
Meanwhile, on the publisher side, what interests Feigenson, who is Chief Revenue Officer at Nielsen Catalina Solutions, “is a wholescale embracing of this.”
The company has about 90 million households worth of frequent shopper data garnered from retail partners frequent shopper data. “That means we can go really deep in terms of creating segments for activation or in doing closed-loop attribution,” Feigenson says.
That data is complemented with insights from the Nielsen Homescan panel, “which allows us to create a representative view of what’s going on in the market beyond the retailers that participate with us through Catalina.”
Since the beginning of 2017, Nielsen Catalina Solutions has announced new relationships with Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify.
With regard to business outcomes for advertisers, TV is still an easier medium to mine, according to Feigenson.
“It’s somewhat easy to look at effectiveness because you have one format and you can take that format and put it against a media mix model and get pretty predictive about what results are going to be,” he says.
Digital involves many different formats and ways of targeting, so outcomes can vary widely. “So from a publisher perspective, first and foremost they need to show that what they’re doing works.”
Some publishers exceed these expectations by using outcomes to influence their own product strategy. “In other words, they use outcomes as a way to figure for them what works, they work backwards to make it better.”
At Cannes, Feigenson is optimistic that all parties can come together in the common interest of advancing the ad industry and lifting certain clouds that have lingered overhead, among them digital ad fraud.
“I’m hoping here we address issues honestly and creatively and we come up with ways to make this industry better.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At this year’s festival, Twitter will spend a lot of time talking about the value of experiences, how it’s doubled down on live streaming and what it takes for brands to create a value exchange with the platform’s users, the company’s Director of Brand Strategy, Stacy Minero, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“We talk a lot about how you can creative feed-first content,” says Minero, who joined Twitter three years ago following stints on the buy-side at Mindshare and ZenithOptimedia. “Everybody’s talking about mobile-first and we’re focused on feed-first.”
Some of the best work done on the social platform by brands involves designing memorable experiences. “We know that consumers skip ads but they don’t skip experiences,” Minero says.
Foremost among these are brands becoming live broadcasters, the increased use of 360 video and harnessing the power of bots. One example she cites is when fast-feeder Wendy’s teamed up with Twitter during the NCAA final four playoffs, which enabled fans to create their own team brackets on the rails of Twitter, as ADWEEK reports. “It was a really interesting way to capitalize on that heat moment but to bring consumers into an experience that was more immersive,” Minero says.
The company’s feed-first approach is based on the knowledge that “people are more likely to scroll or to swipe than they are to stop on content.” Among its suggested best practices for brands are “having a bias to short form,” engineering the front end to create stopping power and adding captions to content.
To create a value exchange with users, brands need to understand their mindsets and motivations, but also their need states “so that you can either deliver entertainment or some type of utility.”
Twitter has “doubled down” on live streaming because while people are attracted by content, being part of the conversation keeps them engaged. It’s the result of the “first screen” and “second screen” melding together for shared experiences.
“There’s a lot of opportunities for brands to not only draft off of live streaming and be a part of it but to actually create their own live stream content,” says Minero.
This segment is part of the Beet.TV lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. 2017. The series is presented by Storyful. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>As she looks ahead to the 2017 Cannes Lions festival, in this interview with Beet.TV Tamara Ingram talks about pregnancy customs in China, her passion for video and predicts there will someday be a Cannes brand “experience” award.
As an example of successful product utilization with the aid of technology, Ingram explains JWT’s award-winning work by its Shanghai office for the Elevit brand in China. A device designed to share the early sounds and emotions of being pregnant turned into a vehicle for changing some of the traditional mores regarding gender participation.
“Very interestingly, in China men do not go to their women’s first scan. It’s just not acceptable,” says Ingram, who took the worldwide reins at JWT in 2016, as Advertising Age reports. “But a lot of men want to see their babies and hear the baby’s first heartbeat.”
Elevit captures fetal heartbeats and, when placed on the father’s chest, enables him to share those sensations. “It enabled a conversation in China that it wasn’t happening about the role of men and women during the whole process,” says Ingram. “And it created some cultural connection between Elevate and people who purchased the brand and people who engaged with it.”
Within 24 hours of its launch, the campaign video garnered 3.5 million views and became the top trending topic on Weibo, the Chinese platforms that combines features of Facebook and Twitter.
Ingram “passionately believes in the value of video because of its ability to immerse and engage the audience.” She points out the paradox of people patiently binging on long-form video content but also willing to ingest short snippets of video content.
“What I think is marvelous is that one can use film in many ways. To be very fast in the message, very present very now and then be very immersive, be very informative.”
She’s also very interested in what she describes as “street and experience” and thinks all things experiential will eventually come to the fore at events like Cannes.
“I think the uniqueness of experiences and brands owning those experiences will be increasingly important as, oddly enough, platform explosion becomes so broad and so available that people want something that is special to them,” says Ingram.
This segment is part of the Beet.TV lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. 2017. The series is presented by Storyful. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Personally I think there’s never been a more exciting time to be in the news business,” says Keith A. Grossman, Global Chief Revenue Officer for Bloomberg Media.
In this interview with Beet.TV during the 2017 NewFronts, Grossman has a very straightforward expectation. “At the end of the day, I hope people walk away and say ‘Wow, the people at Bloomberg are really thinking smartly about their product, how to integrate with the product and how the product ultimately adds value to the consumer,’” he says.
Bloomberg Lens users can click on news articles on any website, click “scan with Bloomberg” and see a distillation of the article drilling down to specific companies along with Bloomberg news reports associated with the article and how the companies are performing financially. “It’s something that adds utility to the user at the end of the day,” says Grossman.
Bloomberg Trigr “looks at data plays as it relates to stock market volatility,” he explains. “As we see swings one way or another it allows advertisers to align their messaging against those swings.”
The company’s goal with Apple TV is to make digitized video streams more interesting and engaging. “What we like is it allows us to port in a lot of different data streams so we can all of a sudden add depth to the video experience,” Grossman says.
With regard to so-called fake news, it’s clear that Bloomberg considers itself to be high above the fray. Many came to think that all audiences are the same, “Until people realize that the quality of the journalism, the contextual relevance and the environment are all really important to how consumers are engaging.”
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.
]]>The company announced a dozen new collaborations for hundreds of hours of new exclusive, live original programming, live games and events, live syndications, extensions of existing live deals and new always-on live streaming premium content to the platform.
Among those deals was a live streaming 24/7 news network to launch this fall in partnership with Bloomberg Media along with news collaborations with The Verge, BuzzFeed News and Cheddar.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Berland explains how Twitter gathers insights from users to fuel what it can provide to advertisers, some of which have been with the company since it launched its advertising platform six years ago.
“You get all these interesting perspectives and insights and we also get that insight and feedback from our agency partners and our brand partners,” says Berland. This process yields marketer opportunities “even more valuable than they can get from anyone else. These partnerships run very deep.”
In the last quarter, Twitter streamed more than 800 hours of live premium content from leading brands across sports, news and entertainment. At the NewFronts it detailed 12 new live deals.
In the sports realm, Twitter is adding, among other offerings, live streaming of WNBA games, a new three-hour, once-weekly live stream MLB program and a “24/7 linear experience” called STADIUM that will integrate exclusive live collegiate sporting events, extensive highlights, classic games and daily live studio programming.
“Twitter is live, we’re open and the entire world is watching,” says Berland. “When we bring video and real time events and live experiences together and marry that with the conversations on Twitter, it is above and beyond.”
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 the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
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