“This isn’t some fad, some flash in the pan,” Kawaja says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.
While it’s still early days in the sector, “We are seeing companies in a variety of verticals, in a relatively short period of time with relatively little capital, garner significant market share, in some cases double digit-market share, away from category incumbents who have been building their brand equity for decades.”
In its D2C BRAND LUMAscape, the investment banking firm identifies more than 400 direct-to-consumer companies. The overwhelming majority are in clothing and apparel, followed by personal/family care and home/furnishings, then food/ drink and travel.
The rise of these companies “has major implications for the marketing world writ large, and our message to traditional marketers is don’t take this lying down,” Kawaja says. “Take a good hard look at what is causing the success of these startups because yes, while like any tech ecosystem, many of them will die but some will live and become major competitors.”
It comes down to a build-versus-buy scenario, but it can be very hard for legacy marketers to create a cool, new direct-to-consumer brand, according to Kawaja. His hypothetical example is a company selling a high-margin product through traditional means. “It’s like having a virus. The antibodies will come out and kill it. Good luck with your new division that’s going to circumvent that and disrupt that. That’s hard for a legacy company to do.”
Companies that have opted for buy versus build include Walmart and its acquisition of Jet.com for $3.3 billion. “Now they’re sort of infusing the culture that Mark Lore developed at Jet to drive Walmart’s broader ecommerce business.
Then there are Unilever and Dollar Shave Club and Procter & Gamble’s purchase of natural deodorant brand. These and other well-established companies “are capturing the growth, capturing the magic if you will, of these DTC brands. Not just for the business per se, but also to sort of infuse that thinking, that culture, that approach to the marketplace,” says Kawaja.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>That may or may not be true, depending on your persuasion. But a 2018 intervention by new blockchain technology could at least improve the quality of agencies’ lives in the foreseeable future.
That was the hope of one big-brand marketer, excited about the prospect for how the infrastructure which underpins crypto-currency could bring a step-change in transparency to the advertising business, speaking on a panel convened by Beet.TV.
The panelists were all members of “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, announced by IBM and Mediaocean at the Cannes Lions festival:
The theory goes that a blockchain – in this case, one powered by IBM’s existing open-source Hyperledger infrastructure and plugged in to technology from Mediaocean, which processes $140 billion dollars of ad spend on an annual basis – should enable traceability for how every fraction of a cent gets decided, apportioned and siphoned off in the ad supply chain. Pfizer and Kellogg are also members of the consortium.
Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics Josh Herman:
“My expectation is that it will be a quality of life improvement. The ease with which you can defend the spend improves your quality of life. The extent to which you have confidence about the numbers that you’re putting in front of the meeting to make actual business decision, improves your quality of life.”
Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise:
“A lot of companies who have fraud running through their businesses. I think we all, as an ecosystem, want to clean that up.
“Our agency partners who are forward-leaning and run transparent businesses are pushing for this. They also want to be involved. We announced the marketers (first) because, at the end of the day, it’s your guys’ money, but the ad agencies are going to also be big participants in the pilot as well and we’re working very collaboratively with them.”
Unilever global media VP Rob Master:
“We spend so much time now around the reconciliation, around massaging the data, trying to track down the data, waiting for things to come in before we can actually spend our full amount of money.
“(Blockchain) allows us to actually spend more time thinking about the consumer.”
IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah:
“We think about this initiative, in baseball terms, as the very first inning. We want to be able to show transparency of the money. The second piece is the speed of reconciliation. Lastly, if we can show any amount of improvement in that percentage of money that gets (ad-)taxed … I think that would be considered a great success.”
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>But a panel of industry executives convened by Beet.TV debated how blockchain technology could usher in a new era of transparency that could unblock this bottleneck.
The panelists were all members of “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, announced by IBM and Mediaocean at the Cannes Lions festival:
A blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymised ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. It is the technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin – but, in theory, those “transactions” don’t have to be monetary.
Pfizer and Kellogg are also members of what IBM calls a “consortium”. Details of how that group will operate are not clear, but the theory goes that a blockchain – in this case, one powered by IBM’s existing open-source Hyperledger infrastructure and plugged in to technology from Mediaocean, which mediates trades between buyers and sellers – should enable traceability for how every fraction of a cent gets decided, apportioned and siphoned off in the ad supply chain.
Moderating, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell said the analyst firm estimated fraud and non-viewable impression wastage at $7.4 billion in 2016, projected to rise. She asked the panel how blockchain will benefit…
Unilever global media VP Rob Master:
“There is a lot of darkness and the lack of transparency and accountability. Are we serving (ads) to actual human beings and not bots? Are people actually able to see our advertising?
“This MVP (minimum viable product) with IBM and the promise of blockchain – actually, really at an exponential pace – scale the opportunity to really clean things up and provide a much cleaner digital ecosystem.”
Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics Josh Herman|:
“There’s been a little opacity as the industry matured and grew up – (there are) logical reasons, as the CMO has to traipse across the Lumascape and figure out how to put the Lego blocks (of software) together. You can only have complexity as a result.
“As a company (like ours) that’s 145 years old, you only have the right to survive or thrive if you either invent transformational technology or identify transformational technology that will allow you continue evolving. And so blockchain is one of those transformational technologies”
Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise
“This blockchain solution is actually going to be across all media – TV, print, radio, out-of-home, all forms of digital – because all media eventually is going to be connected through an IP address. So the plumbing for linear or traditional media is going to look more like digital.
“We think that’s why this solution is not a Mediaocean solution or an IBM solution. It’s an industry solution that we all need to prosper.”
IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah:
“The great thing about what blockchain will do and what transparency provides is, you can figure out who the good guys are and you can figure out who the bad guys are. What we’re doing is setting up the underlying technology to be able to allow everyone to know what’s going on.
“There’s always going to be new issues that arise with transparency. We will catch those issues as they arise, or shortly thereafter”
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>“The digital ecosystem is fraught I think, as we’ve all seen with a host of challenges,” says the VP of Global Media. “We believe that the blockchain is a potential opportunity to help give us a better understanding of how the whole ecosystem works and really empowers us to make better business decisions as we go forward.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Master talks about Unilever’s efforts to monitor ad viewability, weed out non-human traffic and seek brand-safe environments. “There’s a host of things in that ecosystem that we’re tracking,” he says.
He’s hoping blockchain will provide a more efficient and effective way to manage and monitor the whole process.
“It really starts with us as the advertiser with that dollar, and how much of that dollar is actually spent showing our great creative to the consumer. Where along the way are we spending that dollar to make sure it gets to the consumer in an appropriate way?”
Given the circuitous route that “a great piece of creative” can take on its way to a publisher and, ultimately, an audience, “Along the way I think there’s a lot of different things that have to take place to make sure it’s seen by humans.”
Gaining a better understanding of how the amount money invested with various publishers and platforms actually performs will help Unilever determine which ones are most valuable. “And it allows us to prioritize our dollars,” says Master.
“We spend a dollar and a host of things have to take place to understand how that dollar’s being spent. If we could do it much more efficiently and effectively, we could understand much quicker what’s working and what’s not.”
As it stands, it’s not uncommon to be waiting “waiting weeks or months to understand what was spent, whether it was seen. In a potential blockchain solution, we could do it in a matter of hours or days and the efficiency of our spend becomes that much better.”
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>That means being “more conservative than aggressive” because of issues like brand safety and being sure that the ads that show up in Hulu’s environment are appropriate for our environment, Naylor says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. At this year’s event, brand safety was once again front-and-center.
“You’re never going to see our inventory in an open marketplace where anybody can bid on it,” Naylor says. “So far, the advertisers who are willing to engage with how we want to engage and keep them out of harm’s way, keep ourselves out of harm’s way, seems to be working.”
Like many Leadership Conference attendees, Naylor refers to the strident comments from Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed about how some digital platforms—particularly social media—need to clean up their content act.
“He threaded the needle by saying brands need to be marketing in trusted environment,” Naylor says. “It’s not about trust alone but it’s about reputation and brand safety is also budget safety. People are concerned where they spend their money, the company they keep.”
It’s a discussion that will continue to evolve “and you’re going to continue to see the adtech world play a role,” led by the IAB’s Ads.txt initiative, the Trustworthy Accountability Group and the Media Rating Council.
Another big topic of discussion at the Leadership Conference was so-called direct brands, companies that have bypassed traditional supply and distribution channels to form direct relationships with customers. Naylor says the trend is a “wonderful way to reduce friction and increase a relationship” that is two-way as opposed to one-way in nature.
“Hulu resembles what we’re talking about. We have a direct relationship with million and millions of viewers who give us their time as well as subscription revenue,” says Naylor.
Direct brands stand to gain in the modern television and video world because of more precise consumer-targeting opportunities. “The old TV, a lot of people just can’t afford to advertise in the biggest sports or entertainment vehicles. But they can absolutely advertise and market with precision and targeting in the new game, the new arena. That’s enabling them to continue their growth.”
According to Naylor, the majority of Hulu viewers choose the ad-supported model.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“The cool thing is it’s working,” says CEO Brian O’Kelley.
That turns out to be an understatement considering that AppNexus is now one of the world’s largest video platforms. In the fourth quarter of 2017, the company signed as clients three of the biggest media companies in the world. From January 2017 to January 2018, its video spend was up 260%.
“So we saw this explosion of our video marketplace,” O’Kelley explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Besides working directly with premium publishers—more than 150 using the AppNexus Video SSP—one advantage has been its decision to charge “a very low take rate,” which O’Kelley pegs at “half of what the other video SSP’s charge.”
One thing has led to another, and now AppNexus is taking a closer look at the linear TV space.
“A year ago, I’d have said there’s no way we’re going to touch linear, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that these worlds are converging so quickly that there’s actually a huge opportunity,” O’Kelley adds.
Some of the company’s biggest buyers are asking it to integrate with linear TV platforms. “And I think if we do that we can provide a holistic way to help these brands transition from linear to digital and help curate a digital environment that feels a lot more like TV in the sense of high quality content.”
He sees the company’s role as being able to provide “an alternative for Keith Reed or Unilever to a platform like Facebook or YouTube, where there’s really no way to know what’s going to happen next.”
His rationale: “Can you really afford to have your ad appear next to somebody who’s tasering rats on his balcony? That’s just not good for your brand, I don’t care what brand you are. Maybe if you’re a taser brand.”
While broadcast will always be different from addressable, one-to-one programmatic, where those worlds are converging is that “we’re having more and more capabilities, especially through IP and set-top boxes, to sort of bridge that gap. We can do insertions for more and more content down to the set-top, household level.”
He believes the United States is just three or four years from reaching the point where linear TV is in, say, the Netherlands, where “it’s just gone completely off the cliff. So I want to be ready. And I think to be ready we have to start helping those companies transition to programmatic and then to start shifting more and more to an audience-targeted model.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>The IAB announced this week that Schiller is the newly elected Chairman of the IAB Board of Directors. He has served in that position since October 2017 due to board executive changes, according to an IAB news release.
As was the case at last year’s event, when Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard and other brands were outspoken about the shortcomings of the digital ecosystem, this year that role was filled largely Unilever’s Keith Weed. Together they “set the stage at the high level of what the bigger, more established companies are thinking,” Schiller, who is EVP, GM, Marketing, Advertising & Client Partnerships, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Meanwhile, smaller companies are always emerging on the landscape with their own hopes and needs. “The industry needs to work with this disparate group of companies,” he adds.
As regards the ecosystem, media sellers need to keep finding new ways to make dealing with them as smooth as possible. “We have to be more thoughtful in how we transact and we have to be focused on bringing results whatever they are to our clients,” says Schiller.
Sponsored content and the creation of branded content is becoming increasingly important “as so much of what we do in the media business is algorithmed or commoditized.” How advertisers find their way into content is critical for two reasons: It can enhance the consumer experience and “The money that comes from sponsorships is what ultimately fuels in large part great content,” Schiller says.
Asked about NBCU’s ongoing coverage of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, he mentions its Total Audience Delivery solution and how the event has not only always been a “hotbed of change” but also “a great example of what’s going to happen.” The Olympics were the first place that “digital really came together with television.” Now the natural emphasis is measuring all viewers on all possible devices.
“From a programming and marketing perspective, you’re seeing us try everything with every platform that makes sense.”
Apart from the IAB, more discussion and education are needed to help everyone find their way forward, unlike the pre-digital advertising and media world.
“In the old days it was very clear. The brands did what they did, the agencies did what they did and the consumers ingested it. Today everyone does everything,” says Schiller.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“The swamp isn’t very transparent,” says Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed, whose speech at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting was intended to prod online platforms to foster inclusivity as opposed to divisiveness. In this interview with Beet.TV, Weed says that simply threatening to withhold advertising dollars from digital platforms while expecting them to solve their own content challenges isn’t the proper course for the industry.
“They all have their different challenges. All of them are seriously engaging them,” says Weed, adding that he wants to see “an acceleration and bigger commitment to this moving forward.”
He believes that, like Unilever itself upon its founding in the 1880’s, digital behemoths like Facebook and Google intended to make the world a better place, but the horse of progress has galloped off without the cart of good intentions.
“I think what’s happened with technology is the acceleration of unintended consequences has happened very rapidly,” Weed says.
He notes that even as negative headlines about the hygiene of the digital media ecosystem—both for advertisers and consumers—proliferated at the time of last year’s IAB gathering, Unilever did not walk away from the table. “Not only did we stay with YouTube, and we still are, we very publicly stayed with YouTube.”
Aside from its collaborative approach to problem solving with digital platforms, Unilever is actively harnessing technology to protect its own interests by experimenting with blockchain to achieve complete transparency on various kinds of online and offline transactions. In the everyday supply chain, the company has used blockchain to keep tabs on the path taken by tea as it makes its way from farmers in Africa to supermarket chains in the U.K.
“We’re finding it’s really helping us understand where the value exchange is and the different people” involved along the way.
If the same thing could be done with digital media transactions, it would solve lots of issues. “If you can manage to get each and every player to engage in the blockchain, this could take out a lot of the noise,” Weed says.
Unilever is working with IBM iX on its blockchain initiative, which the company’s EVP of Global Marketing, Babs Rangaiah, explains in this interview.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“Blockchain was built exactly for that kind of friction in a supply chain,” says Babs Rangaiah, Executive Partner, Global Marketing, at marketing services provider IBM iX, which is assisting Unilever in the blockchain project.
Unilever’s effort will come in several phases, the first “in the next few months” being reconciliation of digital data—from measurement to viewability and everything possible in between.
“One of the things that happens when you have so many middlemen is discrepancies become rampant,” Rangaiah says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Leadership Meeting, following a presentation by Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed. “And so you typically can’t reconcile that until the end of a flight, and by then it’s a mess. What blockchain does is allow you a single, unified view of how that media buy occurred, and there’s one number.”
Ultimately, Unilever would like to “put the payment system directly into the blockchain for a seamless buy” before moving on to using the technology in the real-time-bidding of digital ad inventory.
Another sought-after benefit is the high-quality, first-party, encrypted consumer data that blockchain will enable. The goal would be that “each member of a blockchain has the appropriate key for the data they can see, but the real advantage of the system is that you’ll get laser targeting like we are not able to do today.”
Even farther down the road, Unilever could use blockchain for various iterations of television media, including over-the-top, “bringing that all together and really putting a whole media buy through blockchain.”
In referencing Weed’s remarks to the IAB attendees, in which the CMO threatened to pull ad dollars from tech platforms that create societal division or don’t protect children, Rangaiah cites the term “In brands we trust.” He believes what will “improve and enable advertising to move forward is to get that trust back in the supply chain and that’s what blockchain does. This is a great solution.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“I think it’s going to have the effect of dramatically reducing hidden fees, hopefully eliminating them, and increasing the amount of spend from marketers that gets all the way to publishers,” O’Kelley says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Leadership Meeting of the Internet Advertising Bureau. “Trust means we have to provide transparency.”
Steps taken by AppNexus include publicly disclosing its “take rate” for its supply-side business, which it says is “by far the lowest in the industry.” It’s extending its transparency on take rates all the way through to the brand.
“So any brand who says ‘where did my money go through my DSP to AppNexus,’ we’ll tell you exactly how much the publisher made,” O’Kelley says.
Partners in this effort include Adobe and third-party auditor Amino Payments.
O’Kelley says the AppNexus DSP, called AppNexus Programmable Platform, is fully transparent for every fee.
“We should see publishers making more money, marketers seeing better outcomes and a dramatic reduction in the inefficient intermediaries that we’ve seen in this space for two decades now.”
He traces the path to opaque digital practices in part to the shift to audience buying in the last decade or so. Brands didn’t seem to care where their ads appeared as long as they were told they were targeting the right people.
That indifference has given way to extreme concern by brands large and small, most notably Procter & Gamble and Unilever, whose Chief Marketing Officer, Keith Weed, used the occasion of the IAB gathering to issue a public threat to pull spending from digital platforms.
“Imagine you’re a marketer. You think you’re buying relevant data but it turns out that’s fraud. Really what you’re spending this on is terrible for your brand and having no known outcome.” O’Kelley says.
In the not-to-distant future, he foresees brands reducing the breadth of inventory they’ll buy, working only with quality publishers “maybe one hop away. But this multiple hops isn’t going to work.” They will also reduce their purchases of third-party data “unless it comes directly from a source” and there will be “a lot fewer intermediaries in the space. I think it’s going to be amazing.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>Enter the Moat Video Score, a new impression-level metric for measuring digital video exposures that focuses on length of creative, plus its sound and viewability, along with the portion of a user’s screen in which it appears.
“Interestingly, we’ve never really asked questions about what we call screen real estate,” Moat CEO and Co-Founder Jonah Goodhart says in an interview with Beet.TV at the the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “So for the first time we’re asking if you have an ad, is it on 10 percent of the screen or 100 percent or 50 percent.”
While it may or may not impact effectiveness, “we think it’s important to understand how much of the person’s attention did you potentially get and for how long,” says Goodhart.
One of the things that makes video “incredibly exciting” right now is that so many platforms are becoming video-first in their approach to content and advertising, according to Goodhart. “The question we ask is how do you effectively measure video. What are the right questions to ask when you’re measuring video?” he says.
The Moat Video Score, which is census-based and uses a scale of 0-100, has early supporters in brand marketers like Unilever and Bank of America, media agency GroupM, Condé Nast, Fox Networks Group, Hulu, NBCUniversal and Snap Inc.
The jury is still out on what video ad experience will rise to the top of consumer preference, according to Goodhart.
“What we know for sure is we’re changing the way we consume content and we know it’s increasingly mobile and increasing video,” Goodhart says. “How that plays out is anyone’s guess, but I think it’s going to be fun to watch.”
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.
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