Publishers at risk by relying on transactional subscription technology
Transactional technology that enables transactional customer relationship is the base of the digital publishing ecosystem for the past two decades. This is how it works- attracting a reader, showing them a headline or a few words or an article, then coming up with a paywall to buy a short subscription package and moving on.
Every potential subscriber is treated as any other e-commerce customer with the same conversion funnel. We have built complex tech- stacks to support this approach and the ad-focused tools and subscription products remain unchanged and operational at certain levels in the digital customer journey. Till now, the flexibility in the customer experience was never a question. The journey was straight, simple, and direct with a single focus -deliver content, monetize on it, and maintain engagement. However, this transactional approach no longer caters to commercial or customer needs.
Lately, people are accustomed to making their own choices- which product is suitable for them, opt for premium or family packages depending on their needs and likes. The growing subscription economy has altered the way a customer perceives their product and services.
A successful recurring relationship is built on personalization when a customer can choose the product or package right for them and leave the rest. Jim Barksdale rightly said, “There are only two ways to make money in business. One is to bundle, the other is to unbundle.”
Businesses should be able to answer important questions like which one to pick, where, and how.
Presently, to answer the questions, publishers are enforced to hack the existing transactional tools and development teams are still investing their efforts on the complex system instead of building new products to grow revenue. Marketing teams want to explore with fine-tune new customers but are hindered by the same old inflexible technology.
Ultimately, publishers suffer badly due to lack of innovation, low ad -yields, complex technology, high costs, and no personalization for consumers. In simple words, the industry’s technology is unfit and outdated and it is worrisome considering the future is about dynamic products and personalization and automation. By relying on transactional technology with all limitations, publishers are at risk, and growth is restricted in this new economy.
Coronavirus led digital publishing growth
With COVID-19, the subscription economy has changed in six weeks which could have taken longer otherwise. The UK’s largest subscription site, iSubscribe witnessed its digital magazine subscription jump 400 % jump in volume. The traffic to the Financial Times website saw a jump of 250% Y-o-Y in the past month. There is an all-time high in the industry conversion rate.
But the question now is, will this continue post coronavirus crisis when the audiences find themselves with subscriptions that are not required?
So what next to sustain this?
Commercial teams need to set up a highly personalized customer journey without reaching to their technical team for help each time. They should independently learn, test, and change a range of products, packages, and revenue models.
This implies publishers should not rely on years of coding experience to handle but need integration of tools across the customer journey- offering personalized outcomes to every potential subscriber. Publishers need tools that don’t require coding to ensure that every client, prospect, and visitor is handled by the organization and the power to build change is in the hands of the specialists who know the market.
The world’s largest publications are using this platform to get ahead of the curve and be ready to steal the thunder once the markets settle -which might not take too long.
Project Agora Co-founds the New EMEA Video Advertising Platform- Union
Union, the joint venture of five leading technology providers has now launched a new video advertising platform in London for Europe, Middle East and Africa(EMEA) to help local content providers access to video ad spend from global brands who want to support local media at a time when trusted content is the need of the hour for their readers. At the same time, it enables international advertisers to activate video campaigns on the sites that really matter to their local audiences.
Union empowers local publishers to cater to the premium inventory demand by global brands. With a total of over 300employees located in 34 cities, Union and its founding members – regional technology providers PlayAD, Project Agora, ShowHeroes, Video Intelligence and Viralize enjoy strategic relationships with thousands of local market websites across EMEA region providing video content, monetization and technology to publishers.
This strategic partnership helps Union bring a blend of pre-roll and out-stream video formats to the market for advertisers to target. This is achieved using a powerful combination of programmatic and contextual targeting to reach nearly 300 million users on relevant, brand safe and trusted publishers. Union’s publisher partners involve global brands like Marie Claire, Elle, Vanity Fair, and CNN, as well as leading local publishers such as Aller Media, Axel Springer, Stryia, Libero and Funke Media Group.
Steven Filler has been announced as Managing Director for Union and will lead the launch across EMEA focusing on London, Paris and Amsterdam agency buying hubs.
With 20+ years of experience in the digital industry, Filler has held major commercial roles across a range of leading companies including The Guardian, AOL, and upon his appointment, he said:
“The current global crisis has highlighted the continued importance of local quality media in providing the truth and guidance to readers, so that they can be informed citizens. At the same time, advertisers demand more quality, brand safe video inventory and Union makes this possible through a single-entry point while also allowing brands to support the publishers that really matter to their local audiences.”
Odysseas Ntotsikas, founder of Project Agora, said:
“The launch of the Union is further reinforcing and expanding the reach of Project Agora’s mission to Keep the Open Web Open. Local Publishers so far unable to attract advertising budgets from international advertisers and trading desks can now see an uplift in such revenues by working with Project Agora, Union’s founding partner in Central, SE Europe and MEA. For local advertisers looking to advertise out of their home market there is now a unique opportunity to see their brand in the top local sites of every European market that people trust for their news and entertainment”.
IAB GCC Report: Ramadan Budgets Shift Towards Performance based Ad Spends
Advertisers are changing their digital ad spend due to the ongoing coronavirus crisis affecting the businesses and the economy. The Dubai based Interactive Agency Bureau(IAB) that empowers GCC based media and marketing industries surveyed the marketing teams of nearly 30 Agencies and Clients between April 6 to April 12, 2020, for the impact of COVID-19 on Advertising.
Here are some main points from the report:
The findings suggest a huge downturn with 48% of respondents expect less than 30% of budget cuts in April and 41% of respondents see a decline in ad-spending or paused post-June.
With the Holy month of Ramadan expected to begin within weeks, there are still 34% of respondents who are yet to take decisions on Ramadan budgets while 51% are unsure about the directions of second-half budgets in this unprecedented period. This suggests that the majority of marketers are in ‘wait-and-see’ mode.
The report also states that 59% of respondents are suggesting that they will significantly increase the ‘Performance-based’ ad spend. This indicates marketers are in favour of Performance media in the second half.
Even though advertisers might be working on leaner budgets but are opportunistic to see 17% growth in Digital display in the second half. They also expect a rise in the audience and programmatic buying.
Lastly, 77% of respondents see COVID-19 will have a significant impact on the MENA advertising market than the 08/09 financial crisis.
Take a look at the pictorial images of findings and methodology from the report.
There is a wave of optimism about the second half right now and are looking ahead of a post-pandemic world whenever it is possible. Definitely, there is a pendulum swing in the minds of advertisers whether to decrease ad spend or pause it entirely to what we hope for a clear picture very soon.
AdLedger, Madhive Releases Study on Ad Tech Industry, Only 6% Satisfied with Current Digital Ecosystem
A survey by Industry Index suggests that just 6% of the industry is satisfied with the current digital advertising ecosystem. The survey was released by Adledger, non-profit research and development consortium developing the global technology solutions for the digital media in partnership with Madhive, a TV advertising solutions company.
More than 100 brands, advertisers and publishers were surveyed to understand the current and future state of adtech with only 6% are satisfied with the present ecosystem of digital advertising. Another 92% of respondents believe there is a need for an industry-wide revolution. Christiana Cacciapuoti, executive director at AdLedger said,
“Digital advertising is still suffering from the same issues of transparency, fraud and fragmentation. And it’s because we just keep slapping band-aids on a fundamentally broken system, when we need to be developing a new infrastructure that’s driven by innovative technologies.”
The figures come into light as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) commences its inquiry into the adtech industry which it has described as ‘opaque’ and also calling for feedback from the industry.
“The AdTech ecosystem absolutely needs to be changed,” said Alysia Borsa, EVP/Chief Business & Data Officer at Meredith Corporation. She further added,
“There is a lack of transparency which leads to fraud, which leads to low quality, which leads to poor performance. It’s a really bad cycle.”
The other findings of the survey include, 83% of respondents believe cryptography can be used to create transparencies and efficiencies, most often agreeing that cryptography could improve problems associated with fraud (66%) and the ability to track results (66%). And 72% believe we will see significant integrations in the next five years.
Adam Helfgott, CEO at MadHive said,
“Sooner or later, the industry is going to realize that this dysfunctional relationship has got to end, and the only way to fix it is with next-generation technologies,”
“And with blockchain and cryptography already weeding out fraud and solving similar issues on OTT, it’s only a matter of time till the industry stands together and overhauls the system.”
MadHive, TEGNA and IBM originally founded AdLedger to unite the advertising industry towards developing next-generation technology standards that solve the current issues in the ecosystem.
Google Gives A New Look For Attribution Reports in Google Ads
Google this month updated the attribution report in Google Ads. The name is also changed from Search Attribution to Attribution which means reporting is limited to Google ads universe. This new update streamlines the reporting. Google in its blog said,
“ The new experience can help you quickly understand how customers interact with your marketing throughout the purchase cycle, making it easy for you to take action in the areas that are driving results.”
Along with the overview report, attribution reports in Google Ads include top paths, path metrics, assisted conversions, and model comparison.
The revamped overview report helps advertisers to visualize the customers’ path to conversion. You can note the percentage of customer conversions after multiple clicks on your ads. Device analysis shows customer conversion from more than one device.
Charles Huyi, Product Manager, Google Ads in the announcement said,
“Every business is different, so reports cover a range of insights – from the most common sequences of ad interactions leading up to a conversion, to how much credit is assigned to each interaction along the way,”
The model comparison report helps advertisers to compare cost per conversion and return on ad spend for different attribution models such as last click, rule-based and data-driven attribution.
Google Ads offers several attribution models like the last click, first click, linear, time decay, position-based and data-driven.
The streamlined reports make it easy to navigate but you may not find the same things as in the old reports. In order to access attribution reports in Google ads, click on the Tools icon in the upper right, under Measurement, select Attribution.
Amazon Tests Customer Service Chat bots With Original Dialogue Capability
Amazon takes one more step towards its mission of being ‘Earth’s most customer-centric company’ by working on commercial service customer chatbot to generate original dialogue in real-time using recent major developments in AI language.
The retail giant said that most text-based online customer service system includes automated agents that can handle simple requests. Generally, these agents are governed by rules – flow charts that have specific answers to particular customer input. If any other request that does not follow under the flowchart, the automated agent transfers the request to the human customer service representative. So, now the company is rolling out a separate consumer-facing chatbot that uses neural networks than rules to match human-authored response template to customer requests.
This project marks one of the first tests in the customer service market with modern and new natural language processing technology that researchers believe has the power to boost the progress in this field. This model has leading-edge systems like OpenAI’s GPT-2 that draws on massive training datasets and predictive texts to generate realistic dialogues.
Most chatbots in the market today despite technological advancements in machine learning still run on automation than AI. While Microsoft’s DialoGPT has used a new language for a generative chatbot before, they are yet to see a commercial application.
Jared Kramer, an applied-science manager on Amazon’s Customer Service Tech team wrote in a blog post,
“It is difficult to determine what types of conversational models other customer service systems are running, but we are unaware of any announced deployments of end-to-end, neural-network-based dialogue models like ours”
According to the research paper, Amazon is hoping to safeguard its generative model for a chatbot with Response-ranking AI. In this scenario, a generative AI will list down possible responses to customer requests and a neural network will select the most pertinent response. Each model is trained on approximately 5 million conversation-response pairs from around 350,000 past interactions related to specific customer service issues.
Presently, random trails consist of two types of customer service issues: return refund status and order cancellations. An internal metric is used to measure the success of the new AI chatbots. According to the metric, the new AI chatbots have significantly outperformed the old ones that account for the successful completion of the transaction and whether customers have to follow up within 24 hours.
Facebook Will Shutter Activities For Mobile Web and In-Stream
Facebook on April 11, 2020, will shut down the Audience Network and no longer fill any requests to web and in-stream placements. Now, mobile marketers will face problems who administered ad campaigns through Audience Network. As per their blog post, Facebook will record data in its server for six months after April 11, granting access to active accounts.
The exact rationale behind this move is unknown but sources said the decision is a response to recent changes made by the browser companies to turn off cookies in the mobile web environment, plus protecting brand safety along with limitations on data sharing.
Ruben Schreurs, CEO of Ebiquity said,
“There’s not just a dotted line between Chrome’s third-party cookie ban and this – it’s a direct result of the movements by Safari and now Google.”
However, a Facebook spokesperson said,
“We’ve made this decision based on where we see growing demand from our partners, which is in other formats across mobile apps.”
In 2014, Facebook launched its Audience Network offering advertisers to extend its Facebook ad campaign to third-party apps. In 2016, it expanded its network to mobile websites which include big names like Tik-Tok, Tinder, and Pandora to name a few.
The financial impact of the shutdown is still unclear on Facebook advertising revenue but based on estimates, the mobile web arm represents a tiny part of Facebook’s overall $70.7 billion in revenue for the fiscal year that ended on 31st Dec 2019.
According to the Audience Network by Facebook website, it paid more than $1.5 billion to publishers and developers in 2018. A marketer called the closing of the Audience Network web arm a fair move and further said,
“The web part is the riskiest — brand safety, ad fraud, viewability concerns and also space where Google and others are so dominant.”
In 2015’s fourth quarter, the Audience Network had a $1b revenue run rate in ad spend when it was just catering to mobile apps and Facebook hasn’t provided any updated number since then. The revenue split between the Audience Network’s web and app arms is unclear but sources suggest apps segment contributed a higher proportion.
On Facebook’s full-year 2019’s earnings call, Facebook CFO Dave Wehner said,
“We are seeing headwinds in terms of targeting and measurement, but as I noted, the majority that impact lies in front of us.” He pointed to three main factors causing headwinds: global privacy regulations, Facebook’s own privacy settings such as the’ Off-Facebook activity tool’ and “product changes and future plans” announced by operating systems and browsers such as Apple and Google, which will limit Facebook ability to use signals received on third-party sites.
Facebook, four years ago shut Live Rail, a video ad exchange business it had acquired for $400 million to $500 million just two years prior, citing ad fraud and viewability issues. That same year, Facebook’s pullback in ad tech includes the closure of FBX, a desktop ad exchange built in-house. Later that year, Facebook started to shut down its Atlas ad-buying platform it had purchased from Microsoft in 2013. In early 2019, Facebook stops Audience Network’s connected TV service.
It is a fair bet for Facebook to get out of open programmatic and prefer owned-and-operated apps, where it can have a 100 percent margin for any ads sold compared to selling ads on other properties where it would have to enter into a revenue-sharing contract. Facebook properties are growing steadily and its app portfolio has been a front-runner in social networking and messaging. In Q4, users and revenue grew while ad prices remained stable showing people are spending more time with Facebook apps. By having a software development kit for gaming, dating, and music apps, Facebook can share its performance-advertiser demand with the titles where users spend most of their spare time on their mobile.
The open real-time bidding environment is under scrutiny from regulators in Europe where U.K’s data protection authority has called on ad tech companies to clean their act or face penalties under the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe. Therefore from a regulatory point of view, it makes sense for Facebook to limit its exposure to data leakage and Consent management issues as Audience Network might extend beyond its walled garden.
As of now, Facebook will continue to work with app publishers and remove mobile web publishers from Audience Network because growth is with apps, and so, a Facebook spokesperson said “focusing our resources there moving forward.”