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How ads follow you around the internet

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By Cleo Abram.

Hint: It’s why every site asks you to accept cookies.

You’ve seen the pop-ups: “This site uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept cookies.”


 

It’s true, cookies do improve your experience. They function as the website’s short-term memory. With each new click you make, cookies help the site identify you as the same person. Imagine every time you add something to your cart and click away, it disappears. Or each time you load a new page on Facebook, you have to log in again. Without cookies, the online world we know today wouldn’t exist.

But that world relies on advertising, which gives three kinds of companies a strong incentive to repurpose cookies to track your online behavior. Brands want to sell products by serving you ads for things you’re likely to buy. Platforms and publishers want to make money by serving those ads when you’re on their site. And middlemen are in the business of ensuring the ads from the brands are delivered to the right people.

A building block of our online world has become a tool to track you wherever you go in it. And now that browsers like Safari and Firefox are fighting back, the digital advertising industry is looking for new ways to follow you online.

In this video, we explain how cookies work and what you should know about how they’re being used. We even get a little help from the man who invented them.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And join the Open Sourced Reporting Network to help us report on the real consequences of data, privacy, algorithms, and AI.

By Cleo Abram

Sourced from VOX

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Publishers are using a Starbucks Wi-Fi program to hunt for new readers

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By Max Willens.

These days newspapers are scrupulously focusing on eliminating the ways that people can circumvent their paywalls. But some news publishers are finding that a Starbucks pilot program that launched late last year appears to be a worthwhile exception to that rule.

The test, which began as a response to a Starbucks decision to stop selling physical newspapers at its stores, lets anybody who logs into the Wi-Fi service at a Starbucks venue free access to several newspaper websites; many of them usually maintain a paywall.

The program launched in October with seven titles, including The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, as well as local titles such as the Seattle Times and the New York Daily News. In November, the program expanded to 23 titles, including five papers of the McClatchy chain, the newly independent Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, plus additional titles belonging to the owners of some of the program’s inaugural participants such as Gannett, Dow Jones and Tribune Publishing.

While Starbucks isn’t paying the participants, the publishers involved said they see the program as a good source of new readers. For example, Megan Parzych, vp of marketing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, called the pilot program a way to put Inquirer content in front of new audiences. A McClatchy executive said he envisioned the Starbucks program as a small source of new readers that are arriving through a unique front door, giving the company the chance to observe a specific cohort of people that it hopes to eventually turn into subscribers.

News publishers have begun spending more money to hunt for subscribers among individuals who are not currently visiting their owned and operated properties. Yet many publishers might prefer to add subscribers by building on the direct connections they have with readers. Partnerships like the Starbucks program give news publishers a way to put their product in front of new readers in a setting where they can spend a lot of time reading it and hopefully form a habit.

“We’re really trying to give [these readers] an opportunity to kick the tires,” said Grant Belaire, McClatchy’s vp of digital audience growth. His team is using with the Starbucks program-associated readers less aggressive marketing tactics and waiting longer before attempting to gather customers’ email addresses, for example. “This has helped us build up some benchmarks,” Belaire added.

While the number of visitors the Starbucks program attracts is small — typically in the low thousands each week for a publisher — they have qualities that make them attractive to the participating publishers. In McClatchy’s case, most of the Starbucks visitors tend to be totally new ones, meaning they haven’t visited McClatchy sites in the past, Belaire said.

A source at one publisher said that the program’s lack of geotargeting options, combined with the low traffic, have made his company’s participation a low priority. That same source noted that his team had to expend significant technical effort to make sure the paywall was properly lowered for Starbucks readers.

But with so many publishers now operating tighter paywalls, some of them are happy for a chance to show off all the work their publications produce. “Our website and app have been vastly improved within the past six months, and we’ve made significant investments in our journalism,” said Josh Brandau, the chief revenue officer of the Los Angeles Times. “A big part of what we’re doing is reintroducing people to our product.”

By Max Willens

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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Despite being banned, Big Tobacco is still on social media

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Smoking giants are flouting rules set by Facebook and Instagram, says Andrew Rowell

ig Tobacco likes to stay ahead of the curve – to survive, it has to. Its fundamental problem is that one in two of its long-term users die from tobacco-related diseases. To hook a new generation into addiction, it has to try every advertising and marketing trick in its playbook.

And it has to be innovative. As one ex-marketing consultant remarked: “The problem, is how do you sell death?” He said the industry did it with great open spaces, such as mountains and lakes. They did it with healthy young people and iconic images. So the Marlboro Man became a symbol of masculinity and, for women, the industry promoted smoking as a “torch of freedom”.

For years, the industry fought regulators who slowly and belatedly restricted where and how it could advertise. Then came the internet, which was a dream come true for a tobacco marketeer. The industry could run riot in an unregulated haven. One commentator noted in Wired magazine in 2017 that the internet was a contemporary incarnation of the wild west.

The old rules no longer applied, and Big Tobacco began using internet platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, to bypass advertising bans. They began paying social media influencers to promote traditional tobacco products as well as e-cigarettes. And they were very successful at it.

In August 2018, the New York Times investigated Big Tobacco’s social media influence. The paper found 123 hashtags associated with companies’ tobacco products, which had been viewed a staggering 25 billion times. Robert Kozinets, a professor at the University of Southern California, told the newspaper that what the industry was doing was a “really effective way” to get around existing laws to restrict advertising to young people.

Big Tobacco is reaching Instagrammers and Facebook users (iStock)

Cease and desist

The pressure on the industry to act increased in May 2019 when 125 public health organisations called on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat to immediately end the promotion of cigarettes and e-cigarettes. This included banning the use of social media influencers. The social media companies ignored the request.

In December 2019, in a landmark decision, the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled against British American Tobacco and three other firms for promoting their products on Instagram, after a complaint by Action on Smoking and Health, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Stopping Tobacco Organisations and Products, of which the University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group is a partner.

In a follow-up statement, Facebook and Instagram announced what many saw as a long-overdue update to their policy on tobacco. It said that branded content that promotes goods such as vaping, tobacco products and weapons “will not be allowed”. The statement made the bold claim that their advertising policies had long “prohibited” the advertisement of these products. The platforms promised that enforcement would begin in the coming weeks.

 

A 1929 advert for Chesterfield cigarettes that featured in Cosmopolitan magazine

Headlines touting the new policy made it clear that the platforms would ban influencers from promoting e-cigarettes and tobacco products. For example, a BBC headline announced: “Instagram e-cigarette posts banned by ad watchdog.” But they missed three crucial points. First, Facebook’s policies are designed for companies that play by the rules, not for tobacco companies whose playbook is to find ways around them or flout them.

Second, those who track the industry’s activities online say it is notoriously difficult to understand which posts come under Facebook’s “branded content” bracket. On Instagram, Big Tobacco’s influencers post glamorised images of vape products with hashtags such as #idareyoutotryit and captions such as “feeling Vype AF”. They don’t post content that simply says “paid promotion of British American Tobacco”, for example.

Finally, serious doubts remain about how any of this will be enforced. The reality is that Big Tobacco needs Instagram to survive and can’t afford to be excluded. A market research company, Klear, recently noted that 96 per cent of all brands use influencers, with Instagram the most popular platform. Klear found that global Instagram influencer marketing activity increased by 48 per cent in 2019.

Caroline Renzulli of Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids told me: “In the weeks since the announcement that influencers would be banned from promoting tobacco and e-cigarettes, tobacco companies have continued to exploit influencer marketing on Facebook and Instagram to advertise addictive products to young people without consequence.”

She added: “Facebook and Instagram are uniquely positioned to cut off Big Tobacco’s easiest access point to kids and young people around the world – but without swift enactment and strict enforcement of new policies, the announcement is yet another hollow statement from a company that no longer has any excuse for inaction on this issue.”

Feature Image Credit: The online world is a wild west for regulations – and the tobacco cowboys are desperate to stay logged in ( iStock )

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 is a senior research fellow at the University of Bath. This article was originally published in The Conversation

Sourced from Independent

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Retouching Will Never Go Away

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In a world looking for more honesty and truth, one element of photography has become more and more pervasive. As the list of companies going “retouching free” grows, we are forced to take a step back and take a look at the practice. Is retouching really the problem it is perceived to be?

Let’s play a little memory game. I want you to think of the face of someone close to you. Now, what are you seeing? Their jawline, eye color, nose shape, and maybe their smile. Are you thinking of the open pores on their face? Their poor makeup application? Or the pale white hairs on their cheeks? No? Then why should their photos reflect that?

Retouching, in many cases, is about bringing back what you actually see. Whether it’s the lighting or the cameras we use, there are many reasons why retouching is a necessary tool; yet, we’re being told that this is the reason why many people are having confidence issues. In this article, I will try to dispel this idea and suggest what might be the bigger issue with advertising.

Cameras Aren’t Telling the Truth

Here are two photos. This is what my camera thought was right. Are these photos telling the truth? No. The model on the left isn’t this orange, the model on the right wasn’t this soft. These were what the camera thought was correct with zero adjustments. Why should we leave it up to cameras to tell us the story we’re trying to tell? Even when you shoot JPEG or shoot with your phone, it’s basically making automatic adjustments that aren’t real. There’s nothing natural or perfect with what your camera is doing. Even now with cameraphones, there’s artificial sharpening and HDR being included that add to what your eyes don’t see.

These ones are specifically poor due to the use of studio lighting, but that doesn’t make this point any less true. There are many issues that cameras can’t adapt to, like multiple lighting sources with different color temperatures and in some cases, how lighting affects people of varying skin tones.

Camera Sharpness Is Insane Now

This goes along with the last point. We are getting to a place where our cameras are giving us maybe a little too much definition. Back in the film days, nothing was this defined; you weren’t seeing pores like we are now. With the way film was processed and the specific tones you’d get, we were seeing moments. It was much easier to look past the photo’s little details and see the image for the story it was trying to tell. Snapshots with disposable cameras allowed you to capture a moment, but that’s not what we’re seeing now. With today’s technology, we’re capturing visually accurate representations of what is happening.

Unless your family had a really nice SLR, you didn’t see or care how sharp a photo was. You just hoped in those 24 frames there was at least one where everyone’s eyes were open.

This is why I have no problems with people using filters and softening skin in their photos for Instagram. They’re making it less about them and more about the moment. With a photo today, you have so much time to dissect every element of a person. If you want to isolate someone’s looks, you can do that, even though you would never do that when you’re seeing a person real-time. But in the days of extreme sharpness, you’re seeing a new level of definition that’s more than we’ve ever needed for public consumption.

Looking back, a great comparison to this would be the switch to HD in 2008. The television and makeup industries had to change to accommodate the new technology. On-screen personalities had to adapt to the new level of sharpness that their viewers would be seeing. This was especially challenging for middle-aged adults, as outlined by Michael Ventre. Many makeup artists and production teams were very worried about how wrinkles, poorly maintained skin, and bad makeup would look after the transition.

Just remember, this was also 12 years ago. Think about the advancements we’ve made since then. Skincare and makeup application have only become more important because of 4K.

Studio Lighting Isn’t Natural

Compare a photo of yourself taken in your bathroom with those crappy, small bulbs above your head and then one from a cloudy day outside. You’ll notice a big difference in how your face and skin texture look in both. This is the same problem with studio lighting compared to natural light photography.

What you need to understand is skin is very thin; by using very powerful flashes, you’re showing everything that’s underneath and magnifying every little pore on your face because of the distance and angle of the lights. It’s like shining a light through a piece of paper: you’re going to see what’s printed on the other side. This is great for creating sharp, consistent photos, terrible for giving an accurate representation of what you look like. For most people. your pores aren’t what people are looking at or even notice. Why should that be the most defined characteristic on your face when your photo is taken?

None of these little hairs on the face matter for the final image. Why should they stay?

Outdoor lighting diffused by clouds or even a large scrim will be softer on the skin, and instead of harsh pores, you will get a softer texture. This doesn’t mean acne and pores won’t show up; they’re just not as extreme — a big difference compared to studio lighting, but really dependent on the day and available light you have.

Things like pores, uneven skin, and little hairs might all be a part of you, but they are only magnified and intensified under studio conditions. In any normal situation, those are characteristics that no one knows or cares about, so why should they be in your photos?

Marketing Is About the Product and Not the Person

Here are two photos from an outdoor fashion story. If I were to describe these as portraits, I’d say this is X and she is wearing a Gap top. If these were an advertisement for Gap, I’d say this is a Gap top modeled by X. Do you see the difference in this? The subject in the first description is the model; in the second, it’s the top.

In advertising, the subject is almost always the product being sold. Everything else surrounding the product is there to complement it. You want the model to be the demographic for the top, and you want the location (or background color) to complement the top. Anything there that doesn’t emphasize the top is a distraction. This can be anything from removing a scar to replacing a face that doesn’t match the mood of the rest of the faces in the group.

So, why is this important? If this was a beauty campaign for a hair product, how do stray hairs help emphasize the product? How do nose hairs and acne help emphasize the real subject, the hair? They don’t. This is why they are removed. If this was a portrait, I would care less about imperfections.

I also shoot headshots, and when I do, I don’t retouch them anywhere near my beauty work. Most of the time, I just have to remove stray beard hairs, nose hairs, redness, and acne, as they aren’t permanent to the subject and only distract from the final photos. I try to make it a realistic interpretation of the person and remove anything that takes away from that.

In my beauty work, I try to make it the best interpretation for the product. I understand the problem people have with this idea; I’m making what many see as unattainable skin for people. I just don’t see it that way. Going back to what I said previously, I’m making the people look like they would if you saw them any other time in public. Those little white hairs under the lip, you will never notice those on anybody unless you’re inspecting them with a magnifying glass. You’ll never be inspecting the texture of someone’s skin by looking at their pores. So, why should you see that in the photos? When people see you wearing the product or you’re looking at someone with the product, you’d never see those small details.

Good Retouching Isn’t That Noticeable

Normal people don’t know what retouching is. For many, the practice of retouching still means airbrushed skin and overbrightened eyes. I wrote about how not everyone looks at photos like a photographer; what I mean is we all have our own perspective and toolbox of knowledge that change how we see a photo. When it comes to the end consumer, they’re not seeing the dodge and burn work or what was actually removed. All they see is a beautiful woman on the cover of a magazine, and they compare that to what they saw in the mirror with the terrible lighting that morning.

The reality is a lot less grim: most retouchers these days are trained in retaining skin texture. Look at Julia Kuzmenko’s work. You’ll see the texture of the pores and skin still intact. The days of blurry skin and too much frequency separation are coming to an end. Some people are still learning from rogue YouTube educators, but most retouchers these days doing actual work are keeping the texture.

You can see the skin texture in the highlights come through and the skin isn’t blurred into oblivion.

Unfortunately, just like influencers, you only hear about retouching when it’s linked to something bad. Anytime someone tries out a retoucher from Fiverr, it becomes a story that reflects on the entire industry, even though those retouchers would never be anywhere near any actual commercial work. This goes for any viral retouching story; they don’t reflect the actual industry.

The Dark Side of Retouching

So, here’s the part where we talk about body modifications. Things like shaving off pounds with the Warp tool are obviously a different story than what I’ve been talking about. When you retouch a normal-sized model into a toothpick, you’re setting terrible standards that do negatively affect many women in society. At that point, you’re no longer enhancing the look the model already has; you’re now pushing the boundaries of reality.

Are there any times when body modifications are okay? Some. I do it fairly frequently to fix a hunched back or shoulders that are too high in a photo. This isn’t me lying to the general public about the model, just making the photo look more natural with something I didn’t achieve in-camera from a posing mistake.

Models Will Always Be the Best Versions of Us

To be a successful model, you need to have great skin and confidence in front of a camera. It doesn’t matter if they’re a toothpick or a curve model, they all have some type of extensive health and wellness routine that keeps them fresh and ready for whatever the shoot entails.

Great skin means continuity and less time in post-production. So, even if you don’t edit the photos, they will still most likely be much less attainable than a retouched photo. Do models still get acne? Of course, but they are doing everything they can to reduce the chance of it, because that’s their job. What’s great about Instagram and IG Stories is you’re now getting a much more detailed look behind the scenes than ever before. Many models will talk about their skincare routine and daily workouts.

As for confidence, they need to be able to do the job, whatever that means that day. Sometimes, that means having a great fake smile or being able to give the exact face and pose a photographer is asking for. When it comes to beauty, every little movement matters, so a model needs to be able to make those slight adjustments and dissociate from the idea that what they’re doing is unnatural.

When I shoot headshots and portraits with nonprofessionals, you can sometimes see the gears turning in their head on how they think they look. They don’t trust me or the camera at first. They are already thinking of how terrible it’s going to be, and that shows in their face. It takes time to gain that trust, and sometimes, it never happens. With a model, it’s basically instant.

This is why there will always be a difference between professional photos and selfies. Models have great skin, great lighting, and all the confidence. Unless you plan on starting a four-step skincare routine every night, having a rigorous gym schedule, and you enjoy being in front of a camera, you won’t be like a model. And this isn’t even getting into the intangibles like defining genetic characteristics that make you stand out.

Should we be removing these things so people feel equal? Of course not. Advertising is all about creating a moment and idea that catches your eye. They want you to feel something. They want you to look at the photo and see yourself in the model laughing and smiling while eating Ben & Jerry’s. They want you to use their volume-enhancing mascara, so you can have eyelashes as defined as the model who was specifically picked for their already-incredible eyelashes.

What Should We Do?

I want to acknowledge that I don’t think the way we advertise is perfect by any means; I just don’t think the issue to focus on is retouching. Look at who is on the cover of every magazine. It’s thin, beautiful women, and they are usually only white or black. I truly believe more inclusion of all races and sizes is more important than seeing mustache hairs in a photo. We want to see ourselves in these photos, and for many, that’s just not always the case.

I do think it’s getting better, especially on the commercial end. We’re seeing more of everyone when we go to large retail markets and in subway cars, but it can still get better. As we create more opportunities for everyone, we create an image for young people that lets them know they don’t have to look exactly one certain way to be beautiful. There are people that look just like them that are able to be in magazines and star as leading roles in movies.

At the End of the Day, People Just Want to Be Seen

When you hear people talk about what they don’t like in advertising, it’s always: “I’ll never look like that.” When a large portion of advertising uses models who all look exactly the same, you’re going to create self-conscious people, especially in the digital age when we have access to hundreds of photos and advertisements a day. By showing a more diverse group of models in all areas, you’ll find people will start seeing themselves more in the ads they see.

For many, this just isn’t the case currently. As a white male, I don’t know what it’s like to just not have a place in media, but as we see actors like Pedro Pascal and Awkwafina get more prominent roles, we see how that affects people with similar backgrounds. So many stories have been written about people finally seeing themselves in places like Star Wars or in these box office hits like Crazy Rich Asians. When I see these stories, I’m able to sort of understand what it must be like to not see that in everyday life.

Final Thoughts

Retouching is a practice that means many things to many different people. My definition might not be the same for you or someone else. But for me, it’s about keeping what matters in a given context and removing all unnecessary distractions. It’s also an incredibly complicated process that is tough to keep to one definition, especially for the general population. This is why it is bound to be misunderstood and distorted, because there’s no proper meaning.

The purpose of this was to give reasoning for the practice to be around. This doesn’t mean we can’t do better. There are always opportunities for growth and change in all aspects of life; just because I think something is right doesn’t mean what I’m doing is perfect or justified. I will be interested in seeing where the industry goes from here; I’m just hoping we don’t make reactionary changes that drastically affect the work released today.

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Sourced from Fstoppers

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The Power Of Testing

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Sourced from AdExchanger.

“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view.

Today’s column is written by Maha Madain, head of marketing at Union Bank.

How does the marketing of a regional brand with a limited budget win in a market dominated by national brands?

That’s the challenge that many organizations face today. Resources are limited, and priorities are vast. Like other regional banks, share of voice for Union Bank has historically been dwarfed by the large brands with three to four times our marketing spend. To make an impact, we knew we would have to get creative while remaining grounded in data and insights.

Our journey began by assessing and understanding where we stood in the market in terms of brand health, perception and differentiation. Based on research, we confirmed that our strengths and focus on being client-obsessed did indeed matter to our target audiences.

However, the research also uncovered a big challenge: a lack of awareness and differentiation for our brand outside of our client base. While our existing clients are highly engaged and perceive us as different from the pack, Union Bank is often overlooked by those considering a new financial services partner.

Improving brand awareness and sales on a tight budget

To do more with less, we first decided to concentrate our marketing spend in one market. The objective was to deliver a strong share of voice rather than a generic peanut butter approach that would spread our efforts and resources across multiple geographies, ultimately with less impact.

Next, we identified the best test market that would provide scalable learnings. For us, that was San Diego – a large enough market with ample target clients, but with reasonable media costs and relatively neutral brand health. With San Diego selected, we then optimized our production spend to deliver creative assets that could flex across multiple channels and deliver a variety of messages.

What we delivered was a 360-degree campaign that included digital marketing, TV commercials, radio spots, out of home and even a new smart prospect site that supported the new brand and drove conversion. All of this was supported and amplified by PR, social media, a new brand voice, training and a new style guide and attire for our local employees that was on point with our newly evolved brand.

Outcomes in San Diego

Five months after launching the campaign, we experienced more than 50% growth in the number of new clients joining the bank in the San Diego market compared to the same period the year before.

We also saw a large year-over-year lift in other key business metrics, including checking and home loans, all of which we closely continue to monitor.

While we are early into the test and continue to absorb and act on the learnings, we’ve already identified a few key takeaways.

First, we learned the value of getting senior leadership to buy in early. By focusing the investment and the learnings while providing a clear road map to measuring performance, they are more likely to provide support.

We also learned that we needed to surgically test and go deep vs. going broad right away. This helped us to ensure that our resources were maximized while also delivering measurable learnings for optimization and scalability.

Senior leadership buy-in was critical, but it was also vital to get our associates excited about our efforts and test; local buy-in goes a long way to ensure success.

Finally, by limiting the test geography, it’s possible to operate with more agility, have more opportunities to measure outcomes and, as a result, have more chances to course correct.

But this is only the beginning. With what we’ve delivered and learned, we now have a methodical and analytical approach to make a future business case for expanding into additional markets and delivering more revenue for the business.

Follow Union Bank (@UnionBank) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Sourced from AdExchanger

 

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Payment instalments are now a fashion marketing play

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By Maghan McDowell.

Brands are advertising partnerships with startups like Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay to acquire customers.

Key takeaways

  • As customer acquisition costs climb online, brands are treating payment instalment services as a marketing tool.

  • Deferred payment options are attractive to younger, price-sensitive customers who are new to the concept of layaway.

  • While positioned as an alternative to promotions and credit cards, brands are treading carefully.

SAN FRANCISCO— Style360, a New York Fashion Week event organised by publicity firm A-List Communications, is known for hosting celebrity fashion presentations. Last autumn, Serena Williams’s S by Serena collection made its debut; Kim Kardashian West, Eva Longoria and Ashley Graham came before her.

This season’s featured star is decidedly more technical. Klarna, a Swedish bank that partners with brands to let e-commerce customers pay for goods through instalment plans, is hosting the Klarna Style360 shoppable presentations and pop-up event. Klarna clients including Saski Collection and Just Drew will debut collections that guests can then buy. It’s similar to the “see now, buy now” retail model that designers like Rebecca Minkoff and Tommy Hilfiger have adopted, the difference being that customers don’t have to put down the full payment at once. In lowering the barrier to purchasing, the marketing message is “buy now, wear now — pay later”.

Klarna’s fashion week sponsorship is part of a surging courtship between payment companies and fashion. Online retailers already offer an assortment of services like Paypal, Shopify Pay and Apple Pay that help customers breeze through checkout. Now, retailers are partnering with companies that let customers pay in instalments, sometimes with no interest, including Affirm, Afterpay, Four, Quadpay, Viabill, Sezzle and others, in addition to Klarna. Investors are fuelling competition in the category: in 2019, payments-related companies accounted for $12 billion of the total $40 billion in financial tech funding in 2019, tripling in the last five years, according to Venture Scanner.

A modern spin on layaway, these payment instalment startups are being used by retailers as a marketing tool. They serve a similar function to promotions, but without the discounts: a Revolve shopper considering a $140 Jeffrey Campbell shoe, for example, will see that it can be had for four monthly instalments of $35, securing a purchase that otherwise might have been out of reach. And they can help draw customers in at a time when dollars spent on social media are getting brands less visibility. Women’s footwear startup Birdies shouts out Affirm in its online ads; when Kylie Jenner’s cosmetics brand began offering instalments, she enthusiastically promoted it on Facebook to her 22 million followers.

A different customer acquisition cost

Klarna, used by brands and retailers globally including Farfetch, Marchesa, Givenchy and Burberry, charges retailers between 4.5 and 5.9 per cent of each transaction depending on each retailer’s negotiated rates; in exchange, the retailer is paid upfront, and Klarna assumes the risk of collecting payments.

This is more expensive than credit card companies, which typically charge up to 3 per cent plus 30 cents per transaction. Klarna head of US David Sykes says “community” benefits are built into the cost. When Klarna onboards a major retailer, it will typically invest in a co-marketing campaign, he says. When the company launched with watch brand Daniel Wellington in New York, for example, it contributed to funding a campaign wrapping the city’s subways. It also promotes brand partners to customers, targeted based on shopping history, and emails relevant discounts to its 70 million US users.

He says Klarna can drive new customers to stores thanks to its marketing effort, which Sykes compares to the cost of paid social media, adding that partners should think of it as an affiliate marketing channel. One apparel startup CEO says that some of these platforms will go so far as to supplement advertising costs, depending on the size of the business, with the stipulation that the payments platform is mentioned.

The cost of paid social customer acquisition is on the rise, and it’s squeezing margins for fashion and direct-to-consumer brands, says eMarketer principal analyst Andrew Lipsman. The RealReal’s CAC, for example, averaged $139 per person in 2018. Norwest Venture Partners general partner Sonya Brown, whose firm has invested in Birdies and luxury handbag brand Senreve, says investors are looking for increasingly diversified customer acquisition strategies.

Senreve, which offers instalments through Quadpay, has been “extremely scrappy” when it comes to paid marketing spend, says CEO Coral Chung, adding, “We also realise it’s really important not to be too reliant on any single platform.”

Los Angeles-based workwear brand Argent partnered with Afterpay before scaling its digital advertising efforts this year. Founder and CEO Sali Christeson says that an instalment service is complementary to digital marketing because it might be more appealing to a customer who discovered the brand through a Facebook or Google ad.

“We made Afterpay a priority because we know that more new shoppers mean less familiarity with our brand and price point, and for some of those shoppers an instalment-based payment lowers purchase barriers,” Christeson says.

The Klarna Style360 is one of many recent fashion marketing partnerships.

© Klarna

Klarna

Conversion without discounting

With instalment payments, brands can lower the barrier to making a purchase without relying on discounting. This format is particularly appealing to young consumers who may not yet be able to afford upfront the fashion brands they aspire to buy but are wary of credit cards.

Jamie Slye, founder and designer of an eponymous Seattle-based hat brand, recently began offering instalment payments through Miami-based Four in part to appeal to younger, price-sensitive customers. The payment option is promoted in a banner on her brand’s website. While payments haven’t typically been part of her marketing strategy, she wants customers to know that they don’t have to pay full price, which can range between $140 and $225, upfront. Otherwise, she says, someone who is price-conscious might be deterred. “I really like the idea that I can expand my audience,” Slye says.

Birdies wanted a pay-over-time provider after learning that 65 per cent of shoppers avoid credit cards for retail purchases. Co-founder and CEO Bianca Gates says that the brand ultimately chose Affirm because it offers customised repayment options; Birdies customers often prefer to divide payments over three months, she says. Birdies promotes Affirm on product pages and in its online advertising, emails and social campaigns. Gates says it’s especially popular with the brand’s younger demographic.

Younger customers see new payment options as “ubiquitous and necessary”, says Gartner senior director analyst Derek Stubbs. “Consumers are going to places to make a purchase and not necessarily thinking about payments. But if a purchase can’t be made by the platform they expect to use, they just won’t go there.” That includes offline purchases. Klarna has now expanded into physical retail, including H&M and trials with Good American, and is seeing comparable traction there, Sykes says.

While younger customers are a primary target, Revolve co-CEO and co-founder Mike Karanikolas says that customers who use Afterpay on his site are not exclusively of a younger demographic. “We find it’s universally appealing,” he says. Revolve has promoted Afterpay through its influencer network, and during marketing moments throughout the year.

In addition to promoting Afterpay on product pages, Revolve has promoted the partnership through its influencer network and in other “key marketing moments,” such as #RevolveSummer.

© Revolve

Revolve

Credit with caution

For its deferred payments option, Canadian apparel brand Kotn chose New York-based Quadpay, which Kotn’s chief digital officer Ben Sehl says has led to better conversion and a slightly higher average order value. But the brand doesn’t actively promote it, in part because of concerns that customers will use deferred payments as a “try before they buy” service while only having to pay for a quarter of the merchandise upfront.

Others have criticised instalment plans for encouraging financial irresponsibility and disguising the fact that many still make money off of customers who are unable to pay their balances in time. Afterpay, for example, made about 19 per cent of overall earnings from late fees in 2019.

Ultimately, fintech startups hope that fashion brands will increasingly see pay-over-time services as a way to make high-value purchases more accessible; Shopify director of product Andre Lyver anticipates that merchants will increasingly diversify payment methods with instalments, micro-payments and split payments in the years ahead.

But while Klarna might sponsor the fashion week shows of emerging brands, a luxury brand might be less inclined to broadcast instalment plans with a splashy marketing campaign. “Brands are, quite rightly, very conscious about how they position their brand,” he says. “It’s going to be a slow process, and there’s always going to be hold-outs, but when you think about so many of these retailers, they’re chasing a millennial audience.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Afterpay made 25 per cent of overall earnings from late fees last year. That figure was from 2018, not 2019.

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By Maghan McDowell

Sourced from Vogue Business

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How Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon became the most manipulative advertisers on TV

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The biggest ads from the biggest brands in big TV moments used to be dominated by cars, candy, and beer. Now—like everything else—it’s Big Tech.

For 32 years, USA Today’s Ad Meter has measured the popularity of Super Bowl ads, and this year’s list looked different than ever before.

Google nabbed the No. 3 spot, Amazon No. 7, and Microsoft No. 9. Even Facebook, which ranked much lower at No. 39, was airing its first-ever Super Bowl spot but still managed to beat out such TV ad stalwarts as GMC, Audi, Coke, and Pepsi.

Seemingly out of nowhere (although after years of building up to it), Big Tech has finally become the kind of major TV-advertiser class that used to be the sole domain of legacy brands—those TV ad staples in such popular categories as autos, beer, and candy. For most of their history, these companies scoffed at traditional media. Can’t measure it, can’t convert viewers into customers, not enough real-time data. Yet here are the 21st century’s most dominant brands behaving like their counterparts of the late 20th, using TV as a key tool to build image and consumer loyalty. Taking a half-step back, this development is a bit rich given that other than Microsoft, these are companies whose businesses are working, through digital advertising dominance and streaming content, essentially to destroy the modern TV industry.

The Super Bowl and most other high-profile TV opportunities like the Oscars and Grammys are now where the biggest tech companies go to forge the kind of emotional relationship with consumers that helps prevent us from becoming too critical, too nervous, and too creeped out by their actions.

It could not have been scripted better.

Big spenders

Microsoft was one of the biggest TV ad spenders in tech last year, shelling out half a billion dollars. On its Surface brand alone, the company boosted ad spending by almost 20%, to an estimated $219.1 million, according to measurement firm iSpot.

Amazon spent more than $1.25 billion overall in 2019, boosting TV ad spending for Prime, for example, by a massive 487% to hit about $210 million. Also notable for Amazon, it more than doubled TV ad spending on its home security system Ring, hitting about $79 million in 2019, compared with $32 million in 2018. Given that the company was recently accused of providing user data to Facebook and other companies without making Ring users aware that their data was being shared, adding to its other privacy scandals, it’s going to need all the brand loyalty it can muster.

Facebook is the smallest of the big tech companies, and it correspondingly spent just $300 million on TV marketing last year, with more than half of it, according to iSpot, going to burnish Facebook’s brand.

The ads, the strategies

After Google ran its Super Bowl ad on Sunday night, Twitter lit up with posts about its emotional effectiveness.

Microsoft received similar kudos for its ad profiling 49ers assistant coach Katie Sowers, which hit the perfect balance of product, brand, and a message of female empowerment that Secret and Olay, both of which have been marketing to women for as long as they’ve existed, couldn’t manage to find.

Amazon was back at its goofy celebrity best, this time teaming with Ellen DeGeneres to wonder what life was like before Alexa.

And then Facebook dropped in with an homage to eclectic Groups, with a side dish of Sly Stallone and Chris Rock.

All the game needed to have a Big Tech full house was Apple, but even Cupertino managed to launch a new spot yesterday for its Arcade video game subscription service.

Anyone wondering why the planet’s biggest and most successful tech and digital media companies are increasingly turning to good old-fashioned TV ads need look no further for a reason than what comedian and talk-show host Desus of Desus and Mero had to say:

As I wrote on Sunday, Facebook made its users the focus of its Super Bowl ad to draw as much attention as possible away from its myriad of corporate issues. Each of the companies chose the largest advertising stage and its most strategic products—Facebook Groups, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft Surface, Google Search—as the device with which to build a narrative and emotional connection with users.

Back in 2018, Google CMO Lorraine Twohill heralded the brand’s ads “Parisian Love” (which became Google’s first-ever Super Bowl ad) and “Dear Sophie” as the spark for what’s become the company’s strategy around humanizing its products and itself. When she joined the company in 2009, the marketing formula was more tech nerd than Mad Men and went something like this: We have to launch a new product, here’s a blog post, and here is a video of the product manager explaining its features. Please watch the video.

“In the early days, we had a Chrome digital-only campaign, which was about three things: safety, simplicity, and speed. Very rational,” said Twohill. “That did get us so far, but no one gets out of bed in the morning and says, ‘I need a new browser.’ What changed the game for us was to go out and create ‘The web is what you make of it,’ which is essentially a brand campaign about people using the web to make their lives better.”

Replace “web” with soap, cars, beer, insurance, or burgers and it becomes pretty clear that these companies we see as among the most innovative in the world still rely upon some of the most hardy advertising tropes in existence. Amazon’s humor is no different than VW in 2011’s “The Force” that charmed us all just before the company’s reputation imploded under the emissions scandal. Or how Snickers uses it to avoid us looking too closely at the sustainability and labor challenges of the chocolate industry. Facebook’s Groups spot is the direct descendant of any commercial gleefully celebrating human gathering, from McDonald’s “You Deserve A Break Today” back in the ’80s, to the longstanding idea of Miller Time.

Microsoft’s Super Bowl ad was fantastic, but let’s face it, the point was Sowers’s story and her accomplishment, not a tablet computer, and could’ve easily been a spot for paper towels. Kind of like P&G’s long-running “Thank You, Mom” Olympic campaign. And while Google’s “Loretta” expertly uses its own products to make those human connections, it hinges on tying human connection and emotion to the brand, a tactic perfected in spots like Coke’s classic “Hilltop” and Budweiser’s “Puppy Love.”

Back then, we were being charmed by companies that we knew—or had some sense—that they were connected to such serious problems as obesity, pollution, addiction, and more. Those, of course, still remain, but say what you want about beer or fast-food burgers, they don’t lead to issues of data privacy and misinformation, among others.

The emotional connections forged by these ads seek to paper over all of that, at least for 30 seconds at a time.

Oh, and add in a CEO tweet for good measure.

What’s next

These challenges—and Big Tech’s need to cultivate as much goodwill as possible—aren’t going anywhere, so expect this type of TV ad spending to continue to grow, at least until they actually do kill broadcast TV. This will be most acute during major events like the Super Bowl, Oscars, World Series, and anywhere else our fragmented media culture manages to come together in anything even remotely resembling a collective cultural experience. The more we love their ads, the more likely we’ll be to buy and use their products, and therefore less likely to address potential concerns, vote to have monopolies broken up, or otherwise question their motives.

On the bright side, though, at least Big Tech didn’t try to sell us a baby peanut.

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Facebook boosts parental control in Messenger Kids

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By Yanitsa Boyadzhieva.

Facebook announced new tools and features for parents to control their childrens’ experiences in the Messenger Kids app, in an effort to increase online safety on the service.

Parents will be able to see recent contacts and chat history of their children, along with a log of photos and videos in their inbox which they can delete if deemed inappropriate.

Other features will provide parents with access to a list of reports logged by children, along with details on any blocks they imposed. There are also options to remotely log children out of the app and to access information the service stores about users.

Another amendment hands control over blocking and unblocking contacts to children, though parents will have oversight of any communications in the case of the latter.

Facebook said it developed an in-app activity tracker to inform children about the types of information others can see about them, including messaging content which only parents can delete.

The company updated its privacy policy “to include additional information about our data collection, use, sharing, retention and deletion practices”.

“We don’t use children’s data from Messenger Kids for advertising. There continue to be no ads in Messenger Kids and no in-app purchases. And as the updated privacy policy reaffirms, we don’t sell any of your or your child’s information to anyone, and we never will”, Facebook stated.

The company faced scrutiny from governments related to online safety after plans to add end-to-end encryption to the service.

In early 2018, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) called for the app to be discontinued due to concerns about the use of social media by children.

Messenger Kids launched in December 2017 targeting children aged six years to 12 years-old, initially in the US, and expanded globally in June 2018.

By Yanitsa Boyadzhieva

Yanitsa joins Mobile World Live as a Reporter based in London. She has more than 5 years’ experience at various media outlets in her home country Bulgaria. She started her career as a political reporter, followed by taking editor roles…Read more

Sourced from Mobile World Live

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To What Extent Are Large Companies Outsourcing Marketing Services?

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Sourced from Marketing Charts.

Merkle Outsourced Marketing Services Feb2020

There have been numerous discussions around outsourcing – and insourcing – including the agency vs. consultancy debate. But how much do larger companies outsource? Of course it depends on which work area, but a recent study [download page] from Merkle suggests that data sourcing is at the top of the list, with survey respondents estimating outsourcing almost half (48%) of work in this area.
The debate around which areas marketers should bring in-house or outsource to partners is a continuous one. On the client-side, the desire to achieve cost-efficiencies is a driving factor, while agencies have argued that their capabilities in areas such as customer insights and analytics will garner increased demand for their services.

This latest research by Merkle, based on responses from 150 marketers at companies with revenues of $200 million and up, illustrates that the balance between in-housing and outsourcing differs significantly between capabilities.

Which areas are the most heavily outsourced?

As mentioned above, close to half of data sourcing work is estimated to be outsourced, the highest proportion of all the services analyzed.

Following closely behind are call center services, at 47%. Given that consumers aren’t yet entirely convinced by entirely automated customer service options and their preference for speaking to humans rather than chatbots, this may persist for some time.

Again on the data theme, analytics is an area heavy in outsourcing, as some 46% of work in this area is estimated to be outsourced.

Separately, although the ANA reports that the majority of its members have an in-house agency, there are still many large firms outsourcing elements of their advertising operations. Large swatches of creative development (46%), programmatic media (46%) and other media buying services (45%) services are outsourced, per the marketing executives surveyed. But the future trends for these can vary.

Where has there been a shift to more outsourcing in the past 12 months?

Even though some of the key services offered by advertising agencies are being frequently outsourced, the changes between them in the past year are somewhat different. For example, while 39% of large companies say they have made a shift to outsourcing their programmatic media, only around one-quarter (27%) have done the same with creative development.

Other areas where larger companies are shifting to outsourcing include web development (40%), SEO (39%), and marketing technology (38%). This makes sense given that hiring skilled professionals is a key challenge for more than half of firms and that marketing technology now accounts for up to 30% of North American marketers’ budgets.

Towards the bottom of the list, only around 3 in 10 have shifted to outsourcing areas such as marketing strategy (31%), user journey development (31%), campaign operations (31%), other media planning (31%), and email (29%).

Where do companies plan to outsource more in the next 24 months?

Looking forward, it appears that there is desire to make some changes to outsourcing practices. Despite an already high degree of outsourcing right now, 31% plan to shift their programmatic media to external partners in the coming two years, as programmatic continues to see strong spending growth overall.

For other technical and data areas, it appears that more companies will continue to seek outsourced assistance, with around 4 in 10 planning to use external partners in services such as web development (41%), data management (40%) and analytics (40%).

The full report is available for download here.

About the Data: Figures are based on a survey of 150 executives at companies with a 2018 pre-tax revenue of at least $200 million.

Sourced from Marketing Charts

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How a country, a major publisher and top global brands are upping the ante on fake news

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CNN recently reported that Finland is winning the war on fake news. It is doing so by training children in critical thinking skills that help them spot fake news. This is critical for democracy, and for news publishers, because these are the future voters and news consumers.

Some publishers are already working at building reading habits in students to ensure that they become future subscribers. It may be worthwhile to consider a strategy which includes equipping current and future readers with the ability to spot fake news.

“First line of defense is the kindergarten teacher”

The Finnish school program is a part of an anti-fake news initiative launched by Finland’s government in 2014. It seeks to teach residents, students, journalists and politicians how to identify and counter false information.

It’s not just a government problem, the whole society has been targeted. We are doing our part, but it’s everyone’s task to protect the Finnish democracy. The first line of defense is the kindergarten teacher.

Jussi Toivanen, Chief Communications Specialist, Prime Minister’s Office, Finland

The French-Finnish School of Helsinki, a bilingual state-run K-12 institution, recently partnered with Finnish fact-checking agency Faktabaari (FactBar) to develop a digital literacy “toolkit” for elementary to high school students learning about the EU elections.

It includes exercises which call for examining claims found in YouTube videos and social media posts, comparing media bias in an array of different “clickbait” articles, probing how misinformation preys on readers’ emotions, and even getting students to try their hand at writing fake news stories themselves, according to CNN.

What we want our students to do is…before they like or share in the social media they think twice – who has written this? Where has it been published? Can I find the same information from another source?

Kari Kivinen, Director of Helsinki French-Finnish School

Dismaying inability to reason about online information

Although they are “digital natives,” studies in the US and the UK have found that a lot of young people have no idea about the source of the online information, or even why they are reading it. A study by the Stanford History Education Group evaluated the online reasoning skills of 7,804 students across the US.

The researchers found a “dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet.” They had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles, or identifying where information came from.

Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite to be true.

Sam Wineburg, Lead Author of the report and founder of SHEG

The situation is no better in the UK. A report from the Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills in Schools, found that only 2% of children and young people in the UK have the critical literacy skills they need to tell if a news story is real or fake.

All of which makes the Finnish initiative a powerful strategy. “What we have been developing here—combining fact-checking with the critical thinking and voter literacy—is something we have seen that there is an interest in outside Finland,” says Kivinen.

Representatives from many EU states, as well as from Singapore, have come to learn from Finland’s approach to the problem. And that may be one of the biggest signs that Finland is winning the war on fake news.

Stanford also offers an online program for educators that offers free lessons and assessments to teach students how to evaluate online information.

“Better understand the tangled landscape of information online”

Further, the findings from two studies conducted across 3,446 participants, suggests that “susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than it is by partisan bias per se.”

And that’s something the NYT’s The News Provenance project looks set to address. The publisher has been experimenting with blockchain technology over the past year to make its data (beginning with images) tamper-proof. At the same time, it will be offering additional contextual information to readers, making it easy for them to distinguish fake from genuine.

Sasha Koren, Project Lead, The News Provenance Project, refers to how The Guardian changed the way the dates of its old articles are displayed. The publisher did so after it observed spikes in traffic on stories about years-old events, that had been shared as new, and with incorrect context, on Facebook. The News Provenance project seeks to go further in trying to make the origins of journalistic content clearer to audiences.

The publisher is using blockchain because the technology makes the records of each change traceable. Any updates to what is published are recorded in a sequential string (or “blocks” in a “chain”) with the string of those changes adding up to create a provenance.

It has begun with NYT’s photojournalism, because photos can be easily manipulated and circulated widely online via social platforms, messaging apps or search engines.

In altering how we produce and present what we publish, news outlets may be able to help readers better understand the tangled landscape of information online, especially on social platforms and messaging apps. What if we could provide them with a meaningful way to differentiate between misleading content and credible news?

Sasha Koren, Project Lead, The News Provenance Project

The changes include “drawing more attention to details that could inform a person’s gut reaction, like age and caption of a photo, writes Emily Saltz, UX Research, Design, and Strategy at the NYT, on Medium. “We also incorporated prompts and resources to support more critical thinking, and to help people make sense of potential dissonance between a mis-captioned photo and its original context. Finally, we provided more photos and article links related to the event depicted in a photo to help people explore a story more on their own.”

Source: NYT Open/ Medium

Misinformation is an everyone problem

“The idea seems relatively straightforward. In an age when images are manipulated and deepfakes get more sophisticated each day, using blockchain technology to show readers and viewers where and how an image, static or moving, has been changed can be an important way for consumers to understand where the image actually came from—trusted source or not,” comments Josh Sternberg, Tech Editor at Adweek.

Marc Lavallee, Executive Director, R&D at The New York Times, told Adweek that the company is looking at how it can help build an ecosystem of solutions, not just conduct fact checks or have a reporter on the misinformation beat.

“It’s about finding multiple seeds and starting points of collaboration,” he said. “We’re trying to do two things: figure out from different angles what different parts of the solution look like, and two, the opportunity to use the name recognition of New York Times to get everyone to work together. It’s not just tech companies but other news organizations. Misinformation is an everyone problem.”

The uncommon collaboration needed to change the game

And that includes some of the world’s biggest brands like Unilever, P&G, Mars, Lego and Adidas. These companies have outlined a plan to curb harmful content online by ensuring that those spreading it don’t have access to advertising dollars.

“Along with Google, Facebook, several ad agency networks and trade bodies, around 40 household names have been involved in designing the blueprint,” reports Rebecca Stewart, Senior Reporter at The Drum.

It’s a three pronged strategy, that aims to “prevent advertisers’ media investments from fuelling the spread of content that promotes terrorism, violence, or other behaviours that inflict damage on society.”

The key tenets of the plan include:

  • Developing and adopting common definitions about harmful content.
  • Creating tools that let brands and media agencies take better control of where their media spend is going.
  • Establishing shared measurement standards so that marketers can assess their ability to block, demonetise, and remove harmful content.

This is the first big initiative from the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a  cross-industry working group founded by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) in 2019. According to the association, a collaborative approach is needed to fight fake news.

Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at P&G, said, “It’s time to create a responsible media supply chain that is built for the year 2030—one that operates in a way that is safe, efficient, transparent, accountable, and properly moderated for everyone involved, especially for the consumers we serve.”

Rob Rakowitz, Initiative Lead for GARM told The Drum, “Previous approaches to harmful content have been in part a reactive game of whack-a-mole. We are convinced this uncommon collaboration is what is needed to change the game.”

By Faisal Kalim

A longstanding business journalist, Faisal rose to become Editorial Manager of The CEO Magazine before turning his attention to developments in media and digital publishing. His specialised focus is on the latest revenue generation strategies available to publishers.

Sourced from WNIP What’s New in Publishing

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