The Identity for Advertisers component of the mobile operating system is how advertisers can gather and connect aspects of app users’ identifier.
Apple has been due to make that visibly opt-in by default starting with iOS 14 this September, but will now delay the move until early 2021.
Still, Washington Post tech reporter Reed Albergotti thinks the move will understandably hurt Facebook and could benefit Apple.
“It also can give Apple a bit of a business advantage,” Albergotti tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Apple has its own advertising platform. At this point, it’s mostly search advertising. People go on the iOS app store and look for apps, and Apple will show an advertisement based on the search. And they use a lot of personal information for that. So it does give Apple an advantage.
“And if Apple ever expands those advertising offerings, down the road, as it has attempted to do in the past with programmes like iAd, it would have an even bigger advantage or potentially even bigger business reason to make this move.
“So that’s one thing people pointed out to me who work in the advertising industry.”
Apple shut down its iAd app network in 2016.
The tech industry is being divided up between companies those that depend on advertising interest and those that don’t.
Google has a clear interest in maintaining an open, web-based ecosystem.
Apple is intent on driving an app-centric ecosystem, driving by in-app payments and privacy controls that increasingly limit ad targeting’s more sophisticated capabilities.
The IDFA move comes after a series of pro-privacy, pro-choice industry moves.
GDPR and CCPA regulation have tipped the scales toward explicit opt-in consent requirements.
Third-party cookies have been deprecated by some browsers and are due to be eradicated by Chrome by 2022.
The IDFA change poses a strategic risk as swathes of mobile users are likely to turn off IDFA permissions when first asked to do so by iOS.
That is going to hurt a lot of companies that depend on advertising for revenue.
So much so that Facebook this summer penned a blog post citing The Value of Personalised Ads to a Thriving App Ecosystem.
But, to reporter Albergotti, that is just a natural consequence of the privacy hot water into which Facebook has got itself in recent years.
“Facebook has had a lot of, I’d say, privacy issues in the past,” he says. “And some of those issues were focused on this very thing – Facebook’s ability to track people outside of Facebook, across the internet.
“So I think it’s very easy for Apple here to look at Facebook and say, ‘Come on, this is just Facebook sour grapes. They’ve violated people’s privacy, and you shouldn’t pay attention to what they’re saying’.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series title Advertising in a Time of Privacy-Centricity presented by AppsFlyer. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Time after time, newspapers which have made the switch – at least, the big ones – have hailed a stronger offering for advertising brands, not a diluted one.
That has been one discovery of Joy Robins, four months after joining The Washington Post as chief revenue officer, after serving the same role at Quartz.
“We think of everything through a subscriber lens,” Robins says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “They drive two thirds of our page views. They’re incredibly engaged. The more that we have been able to bolster the subscriptions, the more that the overall engagement of the site.
“The more that we are engaging with our subscribers, the more that we are essentially breeding loyalty at scale.
“That’s something that we then can ultimately really be consultative to our brand partners about. It also starts to open the dimension of, ‘How do we create utility and tools for subscribers that ultimately brands can underwrite or better understand?'”
The rise of subscription and paid-for content, in a digital world that was once all about ad funding, is causing some ad buyers palpitations – the size of the available content hole is shrinking.
That comes after a period in which many news publishers sought hyper-inflated global audiences in pursuit of the massive scale that big brands crave.
But half-way subscription meters give publishers an opportunity to tell buyers the door is not shut, whilst many publishers say they are able to use an enhanced set of data from newly-loyal paying subscribers as part of a more attractive advertiser offer.
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>But the unit called Arc Publishing thinks the future is going to be orders of magnitude different – for better or for worse.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Shailesh Prakash, Washington Post CIO, outlines the evolution from rudimentary AI to a sophisticated future.
“It’s early days. “Most of it is still so called ‘narrow AI‘,” he says. “It’s good at doing a particular task, but it can’t then be generalized to do other tasks.”
“With companies like Amazon and with Google we are working to see if some of the narrow AI that they all have can be leveraged for publishing, and how much of it can be used elsewhere.
“For example, can we use some of the face recognition technology that’s available to then help our reporters identify where a particular person in a photograph might have also appeared in our archives.”
Arc’s line-up also includes:
For all the hype, AI today is still rather rudimentary. Whilst features like semantic analysis and sentiment analysis are available easily to customers of large cloud services through API and others can even train their own models, results can be sketchy.
But Prakash sees an emerging world of “general AI” which will make the world “fundamentally different within 30 to 50 years”.
“It could be utopia, it could be dystopia,” he admits. “It could be a world where we eradicate diseases and we stop fighting with each other, and we live in peace and harmony. Or it could be dystopia or, as Elon Musk says, ‘Are we summoning the devil with this kind of general AI’?
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Products under the Post’s “Arc Publishing” studio include many more than when Beet.TV last wrote about Arc two years ago:
They were built not just to service the Post itself, but are offered to all comers – beginning with university newspapers, then growing through small papers, US metropolitan titles and around the world.
Then, in December, Arc announced it would be branching in to broadcat, too – powering websites and apps for 39 Raycom Media stations.
Arc Publishing (@wapoarc) to power 42 websites and 39 native apps for Raycom’s TV and radio stations: https://t.co/Va5kjDCa1w. @WapoEngineering
— WashPostLife (@WashPostLife) December 13, 2018
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Shailesh Prakash, Washington Post CIO, explains Arc’s, well… arc.
“It’s a CMS (content management system), if you will – but it’s an end-to-end set of tools that are loosely coupled together,” Prakash says.
“And ‘loosely’ is important because you don’t have to buy the whole thing in order to take advantage of it. You could still use your own editor and use our planning tool, or you could just take the video tools that some of our broadcast customers have taken, or you could take advanced services like content generation, automatic content generation, or recommendation engines.”
In adopting some of Arc’s offering, Raycom joins other users like Willamette Week, Alaska Dispatch News, La Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Philadelphia Inquirer, La Parisian in France, El Pais in Spain, Infobae in Argentina and NZME in New Zealand.
But Raycom’s use of Arc’s tools isn’t just about powering its CMS text. Prakash says its ownership by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos has helped it branch out.
“We are fortunate that we have a very strong tie-in with Amazon, given that we know somebody there,” he explains.
“Our video suite under the covers is powered by Elemental, which is a company that Amazon bought. It’s a startup, a video startup. And what that helps us do is to build on top of Elemental and offer broadcasters a very quick way, a seamless way to get their broadcast content onto the web and on to their apps. So, the cycle is more efficient, and it’s real-time clipping of what they do in broadcast.”
Raycom won’t be the last stop Arc makes on the video journey.
“We haven’t announced yet, but we have another large broadcaster that we’ll announce shortly,” Prakash hints.
Welcome Graham Media Group! Arc Publishing signs another large US broadcaster with affiliates in Houston, Detroit, Roanoke, San Antonio, Orlando and Jacksonville @WapoEngineering @wapoarc https://t.co/UrMeFxmS4F
— Shailesh Prakash (@sprakash007) February 14, 2019
Following this interview, Arc announced it would serve Graham Media Group, which said it would use Arc’s tools to enable journalists to quickly and efficiently cut and publish live video to the web, mobile, social media and other channels, as well as publish breaking news video during a broadcast.
“And we have a very large broadcaster called RTL in Germany that’s using Arc. And we hope that broadcast is a vertical that can benefit from some of the video technology we have powered, we’ve partnered with Amazon to bring up for them.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>“I think the way we think about AI is how to strengthen our journalism,” Jarrod Dicker, Washington Post’s Head of Commercial Product & Technology, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
“How can we create more stories in a broader scope that are more factual, that allow us to be able to take artificial intelligence and API’s to help us bring our journalism farther.”
What he finds particularly interesting right now is how companies like his are using AI to benefit their advertisers. This is important when some people are questioning whether brands are funding fake news and whether “fake advertising” exists, according to Dicker.
“I think it’s up to the publishers to build in certain products and technologies and investments on our site and really bring them from point A to B faster,” he says.
Washington Post’s effort in this regard is Postcards on the Post, which allows it to identify each consumer’s consumption habit based on content type. It’s used for branded content.
As ADWEEK reports, the initiative breaks down an immersive piece of branded content into its multimedia components, which can include infographics, video, text and photo galleries. These can all be turned into standalone units that are then targeted to individuals using available data on their content preferences.
“You look at how different publishers are delivering their stories and it’s always the same thing,” says Dicker. “Headline with the description, similar to what the front page of a paper looked like in 1950 and 1960 a lot of modern home pages look exactly the same.”
This ignores the reality of how people consume content and how data brings these preferences to light.
“So if we know that a consumer prefers video over text, over images, then why don’t we deliver that medium to them directly where that promotion sits?” Dicker says.
Postcards on the Post delivers branded content “in a very seamless and authentic way” that our users are most likely to consume “at that given point wherever they are.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Indeed, Beet.TV has already chronicled how the Postbuilt its own in-house ad server (Prizm),software to write better headlines (Bandito) and a semantic software analysis tool (Clavis).
That may sound like a departure for a newspaper company. But the Post’s technology efforts go even further than that. The Post’stech development is happeninginside a dedicated unit it’s calling Arc Publishingthat doesn’t only exist to give the paper alone a leg-up – Arc also wants to put its tools in the hands of rival publishers, advertisers and agency buyers.
In doing so, Arc wants to take control, to disintermediate the ad-tech vendors out there still swarming around publishers. And the number of products Arc already counts is growing.
As AdWeek puts it: “One year ago, the Washington Post decided it was done working with third-party ad-tech partners and instead started building its own slick tools and ad formats to tackle industry problems like speed, fraud and viewability.”
In this video interview with Beet.TV,Washington Post ad product and technology head Jarrod Dicker says Arc created a separate sub-group – the Research, Experimentation and Development (RED) team – to ensure the Postwas building products for commercial teams, not just editorial staff.
“We saw a huge opportunity to really start investing in experimenting different ideas just for the commercial side of the business,” he explains. “Can we replace third-party technologies and be the premier vendor within the space that helps build ad products for agencies, brands and other publishers that take in to account everything we know about experience … and the sales cycle?
“We’ve launched 10 proprietary products under the RED group which we do license to other publishers, agencies as well as sell on our site.”
The latest is FlexPlay, softwareadvertisers can use to customize a standard pre-roll video ad or 30-second TV ad for a plethora of digital deployments, including vertical and text overlay.
Dicker says more than 40 advertisers so far have used FlexPlay, including Morgan Stanley.
So, what’s the big idea? For Dicker, it’s about ensuring that product improvements made in the name of consumer experience for editorial teams also produce a better commercial experience, too – the two are intertwined.
“At the Post, we’ve broken down those silos,” he says. “We are very much like church-and-state when it comes to editorial, but our technology is like Switzerland – let’s identify trends and be first to market on both sides of the fence.”
In a year-end memo this week, the Post’s publisher reveals the company is profitable and planning to continue growing newsroom headcount in 2017.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Many publishers have spent the last few years locked in a pattern to acquire social followers, and to distribute content on social platforms, in the hope of bringing audiences back to their sites. Now some are not so sure if that is the right strategy after all.
But others seem happy with their choice. In an interview recorded before the algorithm change, The Washington Posts’s revenue chief said keeping WaPo readers on Facebook had not hurt.
“We publish over 750 articles a day on Facebook Instant Articles,” Jed Hartman told Beet.TV. “We said, ‘No, we’re not going to accept the traffic back to our site, we’re happy within Facebook Instant’, and we’ve seen engagement on our site go up as a result of that.”
Hartman says WaPo US traffic has grown from 40m to 70m unique users, whilst overseas traffic has more than doubled from 10m to 24m.
Of course, social distribution is not the only driver. Under new owner Jeff Bezos, the Post has been investing in software technology it says is necessary to grow business.
“You have to be great at both technology and content if you want to succeed,” he adds. “We’ve created anything from our own CMS to various widgets within the CMS that help scale and engage content – from a headline tester, to a personalization engine, to a viral predictor.”
This video part of “Beyond the Pre-Roll: the Transformation of Video Advertising,” a series produced at Cannes Lion 2016, sponsored by ConvertMedia. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>WaPo made headlines late last year, when, like some other publishers, it began serving a range of responses to users running ad blocking software – from email captures to subscription invitations.
“At some point, you do have to pay for the content – either with ads or a subscriber model, or not being able to access the content,” The Washington Post’s senior director of product strategy and operations, Jeff Burkett, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Luckily, we are producing the kind of content people are willing to pay for.”
Ad blocking indicators vary by research house. One recent stat shows 27% of Italians use the software, for instance. The practice has received a boost from Apple’s support for web content blocker add-ons in iOS 9.
For Burkett, the rise and rise of ad blocking is a symptom of a clear cause – bad ads.
“Ad blocking is, in some ways, very good for us in the publishing space,” he says. “While we may lose some revenue … Consumers are using ad blockers to communicate back to us ‘this is not the right experience for us’. We finally are all waking up to this fact.”
So WaPo has been working on delivering pages where the “ads and content fit together”, where “the ads aren’t repulsive”, Burkett adds: “While we may have a fantastic ad experience on the Post, all it takes is of someone to go to another site that’s terrible and they decide to install an ad blocker.”
A quick survey of Twitter users’ views shows ongoing frustration, however…
NY Times, Washington Post, Wired are now blocking ad-blocker users. Would you rather unblock or buy a subscription?
— Smashing Magazine (@smashingmag) March 10, 2016
Hey @washingtonpost, this is why people use ad blockers. No ad blocker on the left. Ad blocks ALL content. Obnoxious pic.twitter.com/BIubWzM8iT
— Barret (@_barretme) March 2, 2016
Okay, @washingtonpost. The number of intrusive ads on ONE PAGE? I can't imagine dealing with you sans ad blocker. pic.twitter.com/lkBkVEu1l2
— Eric Robbins (@ThayerAvenue) February 19, 2016
Great xp reading on @washingtonpost. Can't imagine ever running an ad blocker again (!). @MicrosoftEdge TPL please pic.twitter.com/MXVqgrTL3r
— Jordan Hofker (@jhofker) November 30, 2015
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Since acquiring the paper in 2013, the Amazon CEO has put money in to journalists, video and new technologies, with the result that the paper overtook The New York Times for unique users last December, according to comScore.
Now the Post under Bezos is innovating on ad products – by cutting back on ad volume, for an audience of readers growing tired of mobile ad overload.
“You can’t clobber them over the head with advertisements,” Washington Post product strategy senior director Jeff Burkett says in the video interview with Beet.TV.
“In the new Washington Post app (we call that ‘Rainbow‘, which was a vision from Jeff Bezos), the mandate from the top was ‘zero latency’ and ‘big and beautiful’. Ads had to meet the same criteria as the content did.
“We ended up building our own ad server called Prizm that is able to accomplish that. That integrates in with the CMS to publish the ads alongside the content. You never have a spinning wheel.”
AdAge has previously covered the development of WaPo’s in-house ad server. But that’s not the only software a publisher that is also now a technology maker is working on. The company has also written a tool that rewrites headlines to better effect. Alongside Prizm, then, stands “Bandito“.
“We’ve built a technology that, in real-time, is testing multiple headlines across different platforms, in different goes, against different audiences, and is determining what is the optimal headline to be used at this moment in time, and then is dynamically changing the headline,” Burkett adds. “Nobody is going back in and manually changing it.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>The lid was recently lifted on Clavis, a software project at the Post in which algorithms analyze, understand and categorize the content of news articles. That can make it easier for the Post’s systems to recommend and link between related stories. But it also has a commercial pay-off, according to programmatic advertising sales head Rohan Stevens.
“It’s a collaboration between the newsroom and the sales organisation,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It helps our advertisers pinpoint readers down to the topic of interest that they might have.
“This is one example of many where you can see the influence of Jeff Bezos in our engineering culture in the company.”
Stevens says Post web traffic has doubled since January 2014.
We spoke with him earlier this month at the Teads conference on video advertising
]]>
Gentzel joined the Post in May of last year from Forbes.
We spoke with him earlier this week at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
]]>
This opening up of video is key to WaPo senior video editor Andrew Pergam. “We know a lot of people want to see video in context- when they see an article page, they click on it,” he tells Beet.TV.
“What’s really important to me, though, is that we are producing videos compelling enough that people want to share them.
“What I’d really like to do is increase our social aspect, so that people are seeing a video you posted on your Facebook page and watch it right there; they don’t need to watch it on our site. That’s what’s going to grow this in to a much larger business for all publishers.”
Pergam was a speaker at the Beet Retreat executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico
]]>