BuzzFeed has tapped former Huffington Post head Greg Coleman as its new president. The hire follows the loss of Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeed co-founder, former president and COO, who left in May to pursue other opportunities. (Last month, Steinberg joined The Daily Mail’s Web site, Mail Online, as its North American CEO.) “It brings Greg, [BuzzFeed Chairman] Ken Lerer and me all under the same roof again," BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti stated, referring to the Huffington Post alums. Along with overseeing sales, creative services, marketing, ad products and business development, Coleman will be expected to expand BuzzFeed overseas. Coleman comes directly from Criteo, where he led the ad technology company as president for about three years. Formerly, he served as president and chief revenue officer at the Huffington Post and executive vice president of global sales at Yahoo. He also served as president of Platform-A at AOL from February to April of 2009. Tapping into the social-media revolution better than most publishers, BuzzFeed has become a master at reaching young consumers. In particular, millennials -- who now find most of their content on customizable news feeds like those powered by Facebook and Twitter -- count BuzzFeed as one of their top 10 content-discovery resources, according to a recent study from SDL. BuzzFeed’s popularity among young consumers has not been lost on agencies. WPP’s Mindshare recently formed a strategic partnership with BuzzFeed, which is designed to identify and activate real-time media and marketing opportunities for clients. Per the deal, Mindshare is receiving detailed access to BuzzFeed Fre.sh data, which analyzes and ranks how its stories move across social media, while Mindshare has made a commitment to buy ads on BuzzFeed. A hot commodity, Disney was reportedly interested in buying BuzzFeed earlier this year. “Talks apparently broke down over price -- with BuzzFeed said to have sought upwards of $1 billion -- and are not believed to still be active,” Fortune reported in April.
AOL on Wednesday released its Q2 2014 results, and once again programmatic was a large part of the story. AOL Platforms -- the division which houses the company’s ad tech stack -- accounted for $247.1 million in revenue in the second quarter, up 54% year-over-year. In fact, at this time last year, Membership Group and Brand Group accounted for more revenue than the Platforms unit, but now the ad tech business is AOL's main revenue driver, with programmatic at the forefront. “In Q2 2014, 34% of our advertising business was programmatic versus less than 5% a year ago,” Tim Armstrong, CEO and chairman of AOL, told Real-Time Daily. Overall, the company’s total revenue grew 12% year-over-year, totaling $606.8 million last quarter. Excluding Adap.tv -- the programmatic video ad platform AOL acquired one year ago for over $400 million -- the Platforms unit still saw 20% year-over-year revenue growth, which AOL attributes to “growth in sale of premium formats across AOL’s programmatic platform.” “AOL's future as a scaled media technology company continues to get stronger. AOL grew consumer usage, video, programmatic advertising, branded content, and ad pricing throughout the first half of 2014,” Armstrong said in an earlier statement. The company had previously noted that programmatic advertising was one of the largest reasons 2013 was AOL’s most successful year in a decade, and ad tech was once again highlighted in the company's Q1 2014 earnings report. AOL has been intentional about building out its Platforms unit, too, setting itself up for continued growth via programmatic advertising. The company recently acquired attribution modeling platform Convertro and TV audience targeting platform PrecisionDemand as it gears up to launch a revamped programmatic buying platform featuring its entire tech stack, dubbed ONE. In other words, AOL is doing what it can to make sure programmatic's importance to the company is not a flash in the pan. “For the second half of the year in the platforms area, [the plan is] to continue to scale our complete programmatic advertising stack called ONE by AOL,” Armstrong told Real-Time Daily. “We recently announced the addition of Havas global digital agency to the customer list of ONE … and added significant assets to our strategy with the acquisitions of Convertro and PrecisionDemand.” Armstong added that PrecisonDemand will open up Adap.tv and the ONE platform to linear TV advertising via programmatic, and that Convertro will “reshape the measurement of omni-channel advertising.” Following the Q2 earnings report, shares of AOL jumped over 7% in price.
Chrysler Group's Dodge division hasn't put a lot of wax on Dart for a while, but now the chamois is on the hood to buff the model to a blinding gleam. Just don't touch it. A new campaign for the car features comedian/actors Craig Robinson, probably best known for "The Office," and Jake Johnson from "Let's Be Cops" with a theme: "Don't Touch My Dart” that launches this week. The effort, launching this week, comprises vignette ads in which Robinson owns a new Dart and Johnson, his neighbor, wishes he did. The launch spot sets the theme and successive ads go from there, with Robinson ever more obsessed with keeping the sheet metal absolutely pristine. The effort, via Portland, Ore.-based Wieden + Kennedy, also uses original music by Robinson in some of the spots. Olivier Francois, Chrysler Group CMO, said each chapter will focus on different Dart product attributes and features. "[The comedians] deliver that while maintaining the essence of the Dodge brand spirit, character and full-of-life attitude," he said in a statement. The company says it will have 24 variations of 5-second TV billboards and 15- and 30-second commercials both for digital and TV. The first three ads start this week on CBS’ “Mike and Molly” and “Under the Dome”; ABC’s “NY Med”; NBC’s “America’s Got Talent”; and the dedicated site, www.DontTouchMyDart.com. In one of the ads, Robinson does not subscribe to the idea that the first scratch on a new car is a rite of passage -- a necessary one. Another takes protectionism to an extreme with the idea that Robinson doesn't even want a car touched with his friend's voice, while touting Dart’s Uconnect touchscreen media center. The company says forthcoming spots will air on network and cable entertainment, sports and news programs. Also, Dodge is partnering with CollegeHumor.com for native, contextually relevant content around “Don’t Touch My Dart,” meaning that it is suitable for "a more mature audience," per the automaker. Then, later in the month comes an interactive element to the Web site, where, on a YouTube extension, people can get a humorous response when they try to "touch" Robinson's new Dart.
In a bid to strengthen its mobile offering, WPP digital creative shop Possible has acquired Denver-based Double Encore, a mobile app specialist that Possible has worked with on numerous projects. DE will be rebranded Possible Mobile over the coming months, according to the agency. Terms were not disclosed, but the holding company reported that DE’s unaudited revenues for 2013 totaled $8 million. The acquired company’s clients include Major League Soccer, JetBlue, PGA Tour, Kingston Technology and Meredith Corp. DE employs 55 people. To remain a leader in creative innovation, "Possible must continue to expand its capabilities in mobile, including helping clients develop engaging apps specific to their brand needs,” said Shane Atchison, global CEO, Possible. “The acquisition of Double Encore contributes to the agency’s ongoing growth strategy, while furthering our ability to deliver world-class mobile experiences for the ‘on-the-go’ consumer.” Possible said the DE team “brings strong user-experience, creative design skills in application development, highly sophisticated technology skills and a culture of creating what's next in mobile, not what's now.” Commenting on the deal, Ben Reubenstein, CEO of Double Encore, noted that in addition to strengthening Possible’s app development chops, it would provide DE clients with a broad array of digital services beyond the mobile space. “Having worked on many projects together, we see a natural fit to our work styles and ability to think creatively on behalf of our clients. This is an exciting period of growth for Possible, and we look forward to helping fuel it.” WPP said the acquisition reflects its continuing investment in rapidly growing sectors such as mobile and digital. WPP's digital revenues totaled more than $6 billion in 2013, approximately 35% of the Group's total revenues of $17.3 billion. WPP has set a target of 40-45% of revenue to be derived from digital in the next five years. Possible is part of WPP Digital, which develops new digital services, provides common data and technology platforms for WPP clients and agencies and coordinates relationships with leading digital media and technology companies.
Grapeshot, a UK-based digital ad tech company, has continued its U.S. expansion with the appointment of Chris Stark as senior vice president of product marketing. Grapeshot’s tech analyzes the content on a page (for keywords) for advertisers buying via real-time bidding (RTB). Stark will be based in Grapeshot's New York office, which grew earlier this year after the company raised $3.3 million. He previously worked at Infectious Media, Videology, Lotame, AOL Advertising. Since 2007, he has been in the UK, and prior to that he was in the U.S. with AOL Advertising and IBM. “I have had the good fortune of being able to join companies who were earlier pioneers in their fields and so I've grown accustomed to the excitement of new tech and new boundaries,” Stark said to Real-Time Daily. “Grapeshot's proposition is no different as it looks to make it possible for buyers and sellers to objectively trade with one another via keywords.” Stark’s -- and Grapeshot’s -- long-term goal is to make keywords an ad currency on the Internet. In the short-term, Stark says he will start by educating advertisers on using keywords when buying programmatically. Stark also shared some thoughts with Real-Time Daily on the programmatic and RTB marketplace as a whole. Real-Time Daily: What is the most daunting challenge the RTB industry at large faces? Chris Stark: RTB faces a number of challenges across several fronts but these will get solved because the business needs to remain profitable. What's daunting is the dizzying increase in complexity. Folks like me are eagerly pushing the boundaries of tech but that boundary gets further and further from the understanding of the people who rely on the tech on a day-to-day basis. Perversely, I think this leaves our real customers feeling increasingly like they haven't any control -- or that they must log into 10 different systems and screens in order to understand. Unlike solving other problems, the industry isn't necessarily incentivized to keep things simple, because ads must be bought and people don't want to be left out of the next big thing. But long term, sustainable growth is possible only if we don't leave our customers behind. RTD: How does the industry work on dealing with that challenge? More granularly, how does an individual person and/or company within the industry work on dealing with it? Stark: 'Objectivity, transparency and control' are three core ideas I've heard proselytized from a number of sources. I think the industry needs to keep moving forward and upward, but we have to focus on the ability to show what happened on a given ad campaign and be able to objectively explain why. At the granular level, the end-user should demand objectivity, transparency and control -- and not feel ashamed to push to get to the bottom of the complexity. Whether they are a brand owner or a campaign manager at an agency desk, this should be a basic requirement: 'Do I understand the tech I'm using?' If not, don't spend on that method until you do. And the suppliers of this tech should similarly ask themselves: 'Have I made this objective, transparent and able to be grasped by the end user?' This doesn't necessarily mean go out and make a self-service tool (which often glosses over the real function), but instead to build and design their products so they can be objective, transparent and able to take input from the client. RTD: Any other comments on programmatic in general? Stark: Programmatic and digital marketing has been a great area of innovation and I look forward to seeing other industries (particularly education or public services) benefiting from this innovation.
With the threat of Fox now over, after pulling its Time Warner offer the day before, Time Warner posted strong results for its second-quarter earning results -- including higher revenue for HBO and its Turner networks. Time Warner reported a 3% higher quarterly revenue to $6.79 billion, with net income 10% higher to $850 million. The gains were largely the result of increases from premium TV service HBO, which witnessed a 17% revenue gain to $1.4 billion. Breaking this down, HBO subscription revenue rose 10% (or $101 million) and content revenue soared 56% ($98 million), with licensing of HBO content to Amazon Prime as a big driver. Turner networks inched up by 5% to $2.75 billion, with 8% growth ($99 million) coming from subscription revenues and a 1% hike ($13 million) in advertising revenues. Advertising in the period benefited from two 2014 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship tournament semifinal games and higher pricing. Some of this was offset by lower audience delivery and demand. In terms of the current scatter period, Time Warner executives say scatter pricing is up in the third quarter, but not higher volume -- in general, what has existed through most of the current TV season for many networks. Company executives expect third-quarter volume will be “flat to down in the single digits [percentages].” Warner Bros. witnessed revenues sinking 2% ($71 million) to $2.9 billion due to tougher comparisons to a year ago when the studio’s theatrical slate included “Man of Steel,” “The Hangover Part III” and “The Great Gatsby.” Time Warner stock was down 12%, from $74.89 in midday Wednesday trading.
Against the backdrop of Walt Disney posting a strong financial second quarter, top company executives believe the TV upfront malaise could right itself in the scatter period. Bob Iger, chairman/CEO of Walt Disney, told analysts in an earnings call: “Some of the money just wasn’t expressed because advertisers are choosing to essentially commit the spending much closer to the time that the spots actually run. You’re going to see some of the money that wasn’t in the upfront expressed in scatter and some of it clearly move to new platforms.” With broadcast networks dropping around 7% in volume for this year’s upfront market and cable networks losing around 5%, according to estimates, many believe that money may have moved to digital advertising. But Iger said: “I don’t think all the money that’s flowed away from broadcasting in the upfront necessarily flowed directly into new digital platforms, even though I believe that these platforms have siphoned off some money from the traditional broadcasters.” Good news for Walt Disney’s powerful ESPN -- it bucked this overall trend, with higher upfront volume. Iger says: “It happened late so it basically just ended, but there the numbers were very compelling in that you had absolute increased volume of spending over last year. So not just increased rates or increased units sold but increased dollars committed to ESPN in the upfront.” Iger believes the draw of the immediacy of sports programming has brought new advertisers to the network -- as well as seeing existing advertisers raise budgets on ESPN. ESPN witnessed 10% growth in second-quarter advertising revenues, largely due to the World Cup. But without the World Cup, ESPN was still 5% higher. Jay Rasulo, senior executive vice president/CFO of Disney, says ESPN continues to pace higher in the third quarter. For its fiscal third quarter, Walt Disney posted a 8% gain in revenues to $12.5 billion. Net income was 22% higher to $2.2 billion.
I recently spoke with Forensiq’s David Sendroff, founder and CEO, and Dean Harris, the company’s chief marketing officer, about digital ad fraud in the programmatic space, which the company was founded to combat. Rather than letting numbers tell the story, Sendroff showed me what digital ad fraud actually looks like. It left an impression on me, so I have devoted today's RTBlog to thoughts on ad fraud. Digital ad fraud is deceiving, dishonest, unscrupulous and the like -- but unfortunately, it is also rather clever and inventive. For example, if a consumer has botnet malware on their computer, the fraudsters can load a hidden browser as a background process, so the consumer will never see it. That browser then goes to legitimate Web sites to store cookies on the consumers’ computer. The hidden browser can then load a Web page that does nothing but serve dozens of ads in multiple iframes. Since these iframes can hide the true page URL, Sendroff explained, the advertiser never sees where the ads really appear. "Instead, they see domains based on certain categories like automotive, healthcare and insurance," Sendroff noted. "These domains contain scraped articles disguising themselves as blogs and news portals." Because the botnet in this example craftily stored cookies on the consumers’ browser, the ads that are being served are from legitimate brands that think they are retargeting recent visitors. What a waste of money. In a different example, each ad appeared on the screen for one second -- which meets the Media Rating Council’s standards for a viewable impression, and costs the advertiser more money. Such ads can "appear alongside illegal copyrighted content, which users often play in full screen with the ad burning through impressions during a 2-hour movie or are served inside of a hidden 1x1 pixel iframe," Sendroff said. After the one second is up, a whole new wave of ads are served, and the cycle continues. It’s rather hypnotic to watch -- kind of like this gif of the Joker burning money. These are just two examples of a fraudster’s tactics, but they are eye-opening. It’s also interesting to note that botnets can play on and take advantage of consumer habits, not just advertising tactics. For instance, the botnet in this above example wouldn’t have been able to do its thing if the consumer hadn’t ended up with malware on their computer in the first place. Of course, no consumer is impervious to malware scares -- and not all fraud schemes rely on malware -- but it just goes to show that not every part of the war against digital ad fraud is in the hands of the industry. (Or maybe it is, because one could argue that even if a consumer had botnet malware on their computer, it wouldn’t matter if the advertiser was never duped into buying fraudulent impressions. It’s a chicken or egg debate.) Sendroff believes digital ad fraud is a solvable problem -- and I plan to do a deeper dive on who it’s a problem for and how big this problem is. Stay tuned.
The mantra for the digital age is “content is king.” But without context, content is a king without a crown. Context is the surrounding environment adding relevance and meaning to content. Unless content is placed in the right context, with consideration to the reader’s intent, it will be worthless. Before advertising started to turn to third-party advertising networks and audience re-targeting, the relationship between content and context was clearer. Certain publications targeted specific audiences, and advertising could be placed where it made the most sense while reaching what was assumed to be the right audience. Think Norwegian Cruise Lines being advertised in Condé Nast Traveler, for instance. Now that digital display is focusing more on audience targeting, advertisers seem to be hitting the right audience, but unfortunately, often at completely the wrong moment. The finesse is in serving content that is not just fine-tuned for the specific audience but also to the context of the surrounding content the audience is viewing. After all, a site visitor might not be interested in deals on cruises when she is looking for advice on a snapped Achilles tendon. The user is in a completely different frame of mind. Another classic example of advertising being placed out of context is when premium brands unknowingly place their ads on sites that are anything but premium themselves. Think Swiss Bank advertising on Uncle Tony’s summer fun blog. Re-targeting can also provoke a stalking sensation, which should be another wake-up call for the industry. I booked, paid for and took a trip to New Zealand two months ago. Despite how much I enjoyed it, I am unlikely to need another hotel there any time soon. Please stop showing me ads if they are no longer relevant! Making context integral to content In this framework, context is the measure of matching a user’s profile with relevant content in the right environment. As targeted advertising and programmatic buying become de facto in ad sales, systems need to become more sophisticated and more human. Brands need to move beyond targeting people based solely on who they are, and shift toward targeting based on what that individual is doing right now. Content (advertising or otherwise) needs to be responsive to the total environment in which it is served. Digital advertising and content recommendations precisely targeted to the right users are complex processes, but emerging technologies manage the complexity and source insight from existing and real-time behavioral and contextual data. Reconnecting the disconnect While media buying becomes more programmatic – focusing largely on cookie-based, isolated information about a user – emerging tools enable publishers to target not only the right users, but the right users while they are in the right frame of mind. Publishers are at last in a position to offer efficiency, targeting accuracy, and effectiveness based on an understanding of a user’s intent at a given moment. These systems are built specifically to create great contextual user experiences: ensuring that the mighty “content” king is never left without his “context” crown again.
It’s surprising how long it has taken the industry to get to shoppable mobile video ads. Mobile, after all, has advanced to service the on-the-go consumer. Mobile marketers have strategized to take advantage of those decisive, targetable moments that take place in any given day, but they’ve lacked this technical capability to fulfill on the promise. Automotive, CPG, and consumer electronics brands — as well as any direct-response advertisers — would benefit from a mobile interface that supported easier shopping and instantaneous purchases. It has taken time, but we’re finally inching toward making this convenience a standard, especially in light of YouTube’s launch of shoppable ads for mobile. As data continues to demonstrate that the path to purchase increasingly runs through smartphones and tablets, how do we optimize visuals, message and conversion mechanics within mobile video to make the environment ultra-shoppable? The challenge is using compelling creative formats to enable the purchase-inclined consumer to take action with a seamless user interface. Gone are the days when viewers were exposed to a product and then asked to patiently click through a bunch of pages to get to execute the purchase. Thanks to wider implementation of more direct paths to purchase, a consumer now can hover over an item and click or tap through to the purchase page. Ubiquitous options like PayPal help also. As a result, video ads, always great for branding, now often lead directly to sales transactions. Practical thinking and technical innovation have successfully eliminated the cumbersome barriers between viewing and purchasing. So, what are the best approaches for publishers and marketers to take to fully realize the potential? There are a few practices that are yielding quantifiable results: