Topic: Advertising
P&G Chief Brand Officer Lays Into Facebook and Google in Big Speech – Marketing Week (Feb 13, 2017)
I’ve changed the headline here to make it a bit more specific, but there’s actually quite a lot more to this speech, and although the article is a little hyperbolic, I do think this is important. Procter & Gamble is the world’s biggest advertiser, so its views and policies with regard to digital advertising are worth paying attention to. Its chief brand officer just gave a speech in which he railed against programmatic advertising and the broader opaque digital advertising supply chain, the power of Facebook and Google, inconsistent standards for measuring ad viewability, and more. Some of the very same things big ad-centric companies are constantly touting as key to their businesses are the same things that are causing consternation among major advertisers, and that’s a tension that isn’t going away anytime soon. Facebook is making strides on its metrics screwups from late last year, but programmatic – which Google talks up every quarter – is getting terrible press at the moment in relation to ads showing up on unappealing sites, and it feels like there are changes coming here. Worth reading the whole article just to see some of the big frustrations advertisers are working through and the possible impacts.
via Marketing Week
‘Planet Earth II’ Snapchat Show Will Promote BBC TV Series – Variety (Feb 6, 2017)
More evidence that Snapchat is TV for millennials? (As Ben Thompson, Kerry Flynn at Mashable, and today Christopher Mims at the WSJ this morning have each suggested.) Perhaps more interestingly, though Snapchat has been described as trying to win over TV advertising dollars, this is actually a promotion of sorts for a traditional TV show itself, with shorter-form, vertically-oriented videos on Snapchat as a sort of taster. There will actually be ads within this video as well, so this isn’t advertising per se, though its goal is clearly to drive viewership on BBC America here in the US. As with its Google relationship, Snap’s relationship with TV is likely to be complicated, as it both seeks to steal ad dollars from TV while also taking ad dollars (and content) from the TV industry. At any rate, if you haven’t seen Planet Earth II yet, I highly recommend tuning in when it airs – it’s fantastic.
via Variety
Pinterest introduces Search ads with Keyword and Shopping campaigns – Marketing Land (Feb 1, 2017)
I don’t follow Pinterest closely, but this has been a long-anticipated change to its ad products, and an important one – search advertising continues to be the best way to deliver the killer combination of timeliness and relevance to a user. Most of Pinterest’s ad products so far have been focused on relevance – pins within the context of a topic-based board or within the overall feed of new content, which are somehow related to other things the user has looked at or pinned recently. This move also reinforces the idea that search is in some specific categories migrating off general purpose search engines and into specialized ones, with Amazon and shopping being the most prominent example. The article says that Pinterest sees two billion searches a month already, and that’s a massive base to insert ads into.
via Marketing Land
Facebook Tunes Into Television’s Market – WSJ (Jan 31, 2017)
Facebook’s quest to find new places to put ads continues. It’s far from clear what this Apple TV app will actually look like yet – whether a simple feed of all the videos from the user’s News Feed, or something more. Making the jump to TV from mobile is really tough – Facebook on a smartphone neatly fills all those moments during the day between things: waiting for a bus, killing time during a commercial, and so on. I’m not convinced it can make the transition from the thing you do while watching TV to watching TV itself. It’s another one of those cases where the reasons why Facebook would do it are obvious, but the reasons for people to actually use it are far less so.
via WSJ
Facebook Improves Transparency and Deepens Partnerships Around Metrics (Jan 31, 2017)
The other bit of news from Facebook today addresses the recent problems it’s had with unreliable metrics for advertisers and publishers. Some of this is just about providing more metrics for measuring performance on Facebook across various channels (Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network within its own products can be compared with TV and/or print data from wider campaigns), but there’s also news on the third party verification front, which advertisers have been asking for. It now has deeper partnerships with Nielsen and ComScore, and is deepening its viewability measurement tools, as well as adding some additional partnerships. There’s lots here, the detail of which won’t be all that interesting unless you’re directly involved in this stuff, but Facebook is showing some promising willingness to open up more to outside measurement platforms its partners trust as a way of offsetting the embarrassing errors which turned up late last year.
via Facebook
Snapchat’s Streaks Drive Usage But Perhaps Not Ad Viewing – Bloomberg (Jan 30, 2017)
I changed the headline here both to capture the main point of the article and to avoid a different connotation with the word “streaker”, which appears in the original. Teenagers in particular, but also some young adult users, work hard to keep “streaks” of activity between themselves and friends on Snapchat alive as long as possible, much as Apple Watch users might try to keep a stand or move streak alive. But the Snapchat behavior verges on obsessive or addictive, and much of the actual sharing between friends ends up becoming meaningless as user post for the sake of posting. Snapchat deliberately encourages this kind of behavior, and it drives usage of the app, but it doesn’t necessarily drive meaningful engagement, which is technically something different. Those users aren’t necessary spending emotionally significant time in the app, and they’re not necessarily looking at the parts of the app where they’re likeliest to see ads. When Snap makes its IPO filing public, digging for signs of this disparity between usage time and real engagement with content and ads is going to be key. It’s really the Discover and other content tabs rather than the one-to-one sharing features that will drive ad viewing and revenue, and Snap needs to be transparent about where users are actually spending time.
via Bloomberg
Digital media fell in love with Snapchat, and now Snapchat loves TV – Mashable (Jan 28, 2017)
This is a great bit of reporting on how Snapchat’s Discover feature has evolved since it first launched, and how Snap’s relationship with publishers and content providers has evolved with it. Discover continues to be the most obvious place for Snap to deliver growth in ad revenue, and having quality content is a big part of achieving that goal. Snap is also putting more emphasis on competing with TV for millennial viewers, an audience which is both overrepresented on Snapchat and underrepresented in traditional TV viewership. There are lots of good comments in this piece from publishers who have worked with Snap and seen good results, some of them driving decent profits from their channels and others merely experimenting with a new format. Well worth reading the whole thing.
via Mashable
Facebook wants you to watch longer videos, so it’s going to show you longer videos – Recode (Jan 26, 2017)
“Facebook wants to sell mid-roll video ads, so it’s going to show you more longer videos” would be an even more direct reading of this situation. Facebook recently began introducing mid-roll video ads, but of course those don’t do any good if the videos people watch are too short to hit the point where an ad would be shown. And Facebook has arguably trained its audience and content providers to prefer short videos, because those tend to grab attention better and lend themselves better to the soundless auto-play scenario that dominates video viewing on Facebook now. In order, then, to feed users more video ads, Facebook needs first to feed users longer videos, and it’s tweaked its algorithms to show more longer videos than before. On the surface, this is about fairness – percentage completion rates are always going to be lower for longer videos for short ones, and so some weighting is required to measure performance fairly. But this is really a fairly transparent way to provide yet more slots for Facebook ads, as with this week’s testing of banner ads in Messenger. As with that announcement, Facebook is here going to begin bumping up against the natural limits of how many ads its users will tolerate, and will have to be very careful.
via Recode (official blog post here)
The Trump bump: Twitter is getting a second look from brands – Digiday (Jan 25, 2017)
I’ve had lots of calls from reporters ever since the election about whether Donald Trump was going to be the thing that finally turned Twitter around, and I’ve said no every time, for several reasons. Firstly, he’s far from the most followed account on Twitter – the first time I was asked this question, he was only number 100 on the list of accounts with the most followers, and though he’s risen the ranks since then, there are still many above him. Secondly, Twitter’s biggest challenge is that even when it’s in the news, most people who see the news won’t see it on Twitter but on TV, on news sites, or even in the newspaper, meaning that Twitter doesn’t monetize the vast majority of the attention it receives. Thirdly, lots of advertisers have decidedly mixed feelings about wanting to associate their brand with a Trump-led resurgence in interest in Twitter, and Twitter employees have had similar reservations. This article covers some of that, but suggests that interest in Twitter (though not spending) among advertisers has risen since the election. I’m still very skeptical that we’re going to see any kind of meaningful bump for Twitter off the back of all this.
via Digiday
Facebook is testing News Feed-style ads inside Messenger – Recode (Jan 25, 2017)
It looks like Facebook has finally caved and started testing what are effectively banner ads within Messenger on a limited scale. The closest parallel is the right rail ads on Facebook’s desktop site, because almost all the other ads Facebook shows across both the core product and Instagram are essentially native – that is, they borrow the format of the content itself, and Facebook has never done plain old banner ads on mobile at all. This is just a test, but it’s certainly starting to feel like Facebook is pushing up against the limits of what consumers will bear when it comes to ad load. Though it’s been warning that ad load was going to near saturation in 2017, it doesn’t seem to have quite given up on finding yet more places to show ads, and this feels like one of the least inspired efforts we’ve seen from Facebook so far. I’m very curious to see if the test ends up making it into the finished product, but ads in communication services are notoriously tough – they get in the way of the user, and feel far more invasive than in other settings, especially on mobile. I’d hope that Facebook would think long and hard before pulling the trigger on releasing this to its broader base.
via Recode
Google’s 2016 Bad Ads Report: 1.7 billion ads removed, including fake news ads – Search Engine Land (Jan 25, 2017)
The quality of online advertising continues to be one of the big challenges for any company making a business out of selling ads. Between scams, predatory practices, and more recently fake news (and fake news sites), there are lots of ways online advertising can be abused, and Google reports each year on how it’s clamped down on some of this behavior (the report itself is here). Fake news doesn’t actually get a mention in the report directly – the closest link is sites pretending to be news sites for clicks, and then attempting to sell something such as weight loss products. But we do know that Google also shut down advertising on some fake news sites that were using its ad products in 2017. Draining scammers and predators of funds from Google goes a long way to breaking their business model, so we need to see more of this kind of thing.
Snapchat Is in Talks for Big Ad Deals Ahead of IPO – WSJ (Jan 25, 2017)
Another day, another story about Snap trying to grow its ad revenue, this time focusing on getting up front commitments from major ad agencies’ ad buying arms. Given how nascent Snap’s ad business is, convincing potential investors that it has a predictable run rate for ad spend is critical to a successful IPO, so getting some promises from major buyers to increase spending in 2017 would be a useful first step. But of course that increased spend will only come if the ROI is there, which has been the other piece of this puzzle for Snap over recent months, trying to demonstrate that advertising on Snapchat can be more than just speculative.
via WSJ
Google Privacy-Policy Change Faces New Scrutiny in EU – WSJ (Jan 24, 2017)
Europe continues to be the locus of a lot of regulatory effort aimed at paring back perceived privacy invasions by big US online advertising companies, notably Facebook and Google. In this case, Oracle is part of a coalition that seeks controls on Google’s tracking of user data, and the focus of the current complaint is the change Google made to its terms and conditions last June, pursuant to which it now combines data on its users across its various services and DoubleClick. No action has been taken yet by European regulators, so this is only a complaint by one of Google’s biggest foes at this point, but this area has proven a thorny one for Facebook already, and could yet become one for Google too.
via WSJ
DCN report shows publisher revenue from Google, Facebook, Snapchat – Business Insider (Jan 24, 2017)
This article (and the report it’s based on) frustratingly focuses on average numbers across a range of very different publishers, rather than providing something more detailed, which limits the usefulness of the data, but there’s some interesting stuff in here regardless. For one, this reinforces the sense that publishers are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to supporting the major new content platforms – on the one hand, they feel they can’t afford to be absent, and on the other systems like Facebook Instant Articles and Google’s AMP don’t seem to allow them to monetize as they do on their own sites. One surprising finding is how strongly Snapchat shows here relative to its overall share of ad revenue. The picture is muddied by the fact that the report covers both video and news content, and so YouTube makes a very strong showing overall too. The key takeaway for me is that these companies continue to tread a difficult and dangerous path as they work with these platforms, ceding a lot of control to them and potentially seeing less revenue as a result.
Update: the actual report is now available here in full.
via Business Insider
Snapchat Discover Takes a Hard Line on Misleading and Explicit Images – The New York Times (Jan 23, 2017)
There’s a certain irony in the fact that Snapchat is now trying to remove some of the lewder images from its Discover tab, when its early reputation (somewhat undeservedly) was that of an app that existed specifically so that users could send each other such images of themselves. But this is the sort of thing we see as apps and services that have been allowed to run relatively unfettered begin to ramp up efforts to court advertisers in preparation for an IPO, which is exactly what Snap is doing. Cleaning up the Discover tab should provide some more comfort to advertisers about the context in which their ads will be seen, though there’s nothing in these guidelines about racy images that are relevant to the Stories behind them, which I’d say many of the images I see in the Discover tab arguably are. The other side of this effort could be increased user controls around the content they see on the Discover tab, since some users would prefer not to see those images or the Stories behind them at all – balancing the needs of publishers, advertisers, and users is always the hardest balancing act for any ad-backed business.
via Snapchat Discover Takes a Hard Line on Misleading and Explicit Images – The New York Times
Errors in Facebook ad metrics could lead to more independent audits – Silicon Valley Business Journal (Jan 19, 2017)
This is the fallout from Facebook’s series of admissions towards the end of 2016 about its metrics relating to both content and ad performance: major advertisers are now going to be calling for more third party auditing of ad performance on Facebook. To the extent that Facebook is already said to be working with some outside groups on this, that effort needs to accelerate and come to a rapid conclusion to satisfy advertisers. On the other hand, it’s also clear from the same survey that Facebook is far from the only company whose ad metrics are mistrusted by advertisers – only Google has the confidence of over 50% of buyers, while AOL has the confidence of just 26%. But having said all that, advertisers don’t seem to feel they have alternatives to the big two, on which they plan to continue spending more money this year than last.
Your real-world purchases will soon determine what ads you see on Snapchat – Mashable (Jan 19, 2017)
Here’s further evidence that Snap is evolving Snapchat’s advertising targeting capabilities, something it badly needs to do to ramp up ad spending ahead of a potential IPO. But that also means going back on some of the commitments Evan Spiegel has made in the past to avoid “creepy” targeting. The reality is that Snapchat has captured a nice little share of ad spending purely on the basis of having a great target market for a certain generation at a general level, but if it wants to capture more targeted advertising, it needs to provide the tools that Facebook, Google, and others already provide. That means buying in data from Oracle (as in this deal, and further to a previous deal with Oracle for measuring ROI) or other data collection houses (as Facebook already does) in order both to target advertising and to capture information about subsequent purchases to prove an ROI. Though Snapchat’s target market is generally more open to ad-based business models and the attendant privacy implications, there’s a point at which even millennials will balk, and Snap has to be careful not to cross that line.
via Your real-world purchases will soon determine what ads you see on Snapchat – Mashable
Google’s Big Marketing Push Pays Off for its Pixel Phone Over Holiday – Bloomberg (Jan 19, 2017)
This piece is an interesting counterpart to a couple of others I’ve recently linked to – another quoting Wave7 estimates for Pixel sales, and this WSJ analysis from earlier today on how hard Alphabet has been pushing sales of its hardware on Google search, given what this piece says about heavy TV advertising by both Google and Verizon around the Pixel. It’s also worth reading this Verge piece, which takes a much harsher stance on what these sales numbers and the supply shortages mean, though it focuses almost exclusively on the 128GB model. The point is, Pixels are in short supply, and there’s an estimate in this Bloomberg piece of around half a million sales, so this is a very different supply shortage from Apple struggling to meet demand for over 70 million phones per quarter – in other words, this isn’t about hitting up against theoretical maximum capacity for building phones, but about very conservative planning on Google’s part. Half a million isn’t bad, but it’s fairly clear sales could have been a lot higher with better supply. Presumably Google will learn from this experience as it looks to update the Pixel, possibly later this year.
via Google’s Big Marketing Push Pays Off for its Pixel Phone Over Holiday – Bloomberg
Google Uses Its Search Engine to Hawk Its Products – WSJ (Jan 19, 2017)
This is a really fantastic bit of a analysis commissioned by the Wall Street Journal. It found that for 91% of searches relating to top consumer electronics categories, a Google or Nest product was in the top ad slot above the results, and in 43% it had the top two slots. This is Google competing with its own advertisers, and Google apparently was so taken aback by the analysis that it tweaked its strategy when the WSJ spoke to Google about it, and the numbers are now much lower. Google’s hardware push therefore not only puts it in conflict with its OEMs, but also with its biggest customers – advertisers. I’m intrigued to know how other big consumer electronics brands feel about this, but the challenge of course is that they have few alternatives – Google dominates search, and so it also has a dominant position in pitching its own products. There’s a close analogy here to Amazon’s hawking of its hardware on Amazon.com, but competitors know what they’re getting into there to a greater extent.
via Google Uses Its Search Engine to Hawk Its Products – WSJ
Ad spend on Snapchat by clients hit $90 million in 2016: WPP CEO – CNBC (Jan 18, 2017)
One of the big challenges for Snap ahead of its IPO is ramping up advertiser spending from experimental to more serious levels, and WPP is one of the biggest funnels through which those ad dollars flow. $90 million is three times what WPP expected its clients to spend on Snapchat at the beginning of the year, but of course it’s a tiny fraction of what those clients spend on Facebook and Google. Getting advertisers to spend more means providing more of the tools and analytics other large online ad platforms provide, and Snap has been somewhat resistant to that approach, although it appears to recognize the need to evolve on this point going forward.
via Ad spend on Snapchat by clients hit $90 million in 2016: WPP CEO – CNBC