editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

Unilever and Kraft Heinz criticized by lawmaker over porn site advertising

December 4, 2019 No Comments

Consumer goods giants Kraft Heinz and Unilever have been criticized for advertising products on Pornhub, a site where users can upload and watch pornographic video content.

According to a report by British newspaper The Sunday Times, advertising for the Unilever-owned Dollar Shave Club ran on the site earlier this year, with one ad stating: “If you use our bathroom products you won’t have to visit this site as much.” A campaign for Kraft Heinz frozen food brand Devour ran on Pornhub in January, stating “Hot food porn. Never just eat, devour,” according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Pornhub does not permit videos of under-18s or those that show violence and says it removes any such content, but The Sunday Times found clips of school girls that were secretly filmed, and men performing sex acts in front of teenagers on buses.

In an email to CNBC, a Unilever spokesperson said the company does not support advertising on porn websites and is “extremely concerned” about the reported ads from Dollar Shave Club, adding that the company retains operational independence since being acquired by Unilever in 2016. The spokesperson confirmed that Dollar Shave Club ran a short campaign on Pornhub earlier this year, but said Unilever was not aware of it at the time, or of the specific ad mentioned.

Kraft Heinz took over Pornhub’s homepage with its “food porn” campaign for one day in January, as part of its wider Super Bowl ad activity, which it described at the time as an “unconventional and provocative advertising campaign,” in an online release. A spokesperson for Kraft Heinz confirmed to CNBC via email it had run advertising for Devour on the Pornhub site for one day earlier this year.

“Kraft Heinz has pledged not to advertise or promote any of its brands on this site or other similar sites,” the spokesperson added. “The brand was explicitly talking about #Foodporn, which has become a cultural phenomenon on Instagram.”

Labour party politician Yvette Cooper, chair of the home affairs committee, a cross-party organization that monitors Britain’s interior ministry, said the findings were “horrendous” and called for a police investigation. “This material is illegal and dangerous. There is no excuse for complacency or claiming ignorance when children are being put at risk by the proliferation of this poison,” she told The Sunday Times.

A spokesperson for Pornhub said the site has a team of reviewers who monitor videos and report illegal content to the authorities, in an email to CNBC. “Child sex abuse material is horrific, disgusting and illegal content that must be eradicated by any means necessary,” the spokesperson added.

The spokesperson said that videos described as “hidden camera footage” are often legal, consensual and professionally produced to cater to particular tastes.

Brands are very particular about where their ads appear, with Disney, AT&T and Nestle withdrawing campaigns from YouTube in February for fear of appearing next to inappropriate content, and removing ads from Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” after the host’s comments on immigration last December.

Meanwhile, Unilever is a member of the “Unstereotype Alliance,” a body of advertisers and the United Nations that formed in 2017 to “eradicate outdated stereotypes in advertising.”

Pornhub claims to average 100 billion video views a year, with 100 million daily visits. It also operates the YouPorn and Redtube adult content sites.

The Unilever spokesperson added: “This type of content is deeply troubling, and we will ensure that none of our brands advertise on Pornhub again, or on any other porn websites. Dollar Shave Club has also confirmed that they will not advertise with Pornhub again, or on any other porn websites.”

Feature Image Credit: A still from an ad campaign for Devour, a food brand owned by Kraft Heinz. The company has been criticized for running adverts on a porn site in January 2019. Kraft Heinz

By Lucy Handley

Sourced from CNBC

In News

New Google Data Shows What Matters Most to Online Shoppers

December 4, 2019 No Comments

By Peter Roesler.

Google surveyed consumers around the world to find out which factors drive people to make an online purchase.

It’s November, and the official start of the holiday season is right around the corner. In fact, some consumers began their holiday shopping back in October. However, the biggest shopping days of the season are still ahead of us, and business owners need to think about the best ways to create effective online marketing campaigns. To help business owners and marketers achieve their goals for the 2019 holiday season, Google has released some data about consumer behavior and how to create online campaigns that move people to action.

Google conducted a study in four international markets to help identify the things that matter most to consumers in that region. The data provides insight into shopper motivations in the U.S., U.K., India, and Brazil.

Contrary to what many people think, social media isn’t the grand motivator that some marketers think that it is. Social media content can increase awareness about a product. However, simply having something on Facebook or having an Instagram influencer promote the product isn’t enough to sway hearts and minds. After years of being bombarded with products and images on social media, many consumers in the U.S. are looking for more when they make online purchases.

Most Americans consider getting a good price on a high-quality item is more important than other factors. When ranking the factors that matter most to them, Google’s survey respondents noted that getting the lowest price for an item, free shipping, as well as deals and discounts are what motivate Americans the most when it comes to shopping online.

In the report, Google suggests, “When you can beat the competition, make sure you show it. And keep an eye on the market to get a sense of what specific products might be worth undercutting.” The report also notes, “Consumers in the U.S. are much more interested in fast shipping times than in-store pickup.”

The responses from the survey participants also showed how popular online shopping is with consumers in the U.S. For example, the average user bought more than four items of hard goods (i.e., not digital purchases) every month Similarly, the average person spent more than $150 on recent online shopping trips. The survey was conducted in October, so the rate purchase and the amount spent is likely to increase in months like November and December.

Marketers may be surprised by which things mattered to consumers. For example, having the ingredients listed for a product is more important than popularity on social media and even more important than recommendations from family and friends or loyalty rewards program.

For the most part, consumers in the U.K. were motivated by the same things that North American’s found enticing. However, because of the different tax systems in Europe, and the international shipping needed for many online transactions, U.K shoppers need to pay attention to other factors that could raise the price beyond what the person is willing to pay.

As Google stated in the report, “U.K. shoppers may pay more attention to customs, taxes, and shipping times in the near future, which might affect the rank and order of their values.”

Marketers should look at this recent report from Google to figure out what matters most for their target audience and for the goods they sell. The document breaks up the results for hard goods, soft goods, and everyday essentials. Using this data can help marketers create more compelling online campaigns.

For more information about tools that marketers can use to create better campaigns this holiday season, read this article on new ad options from Google.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Peter Roesler

Sourced from Inc.

In News

Ex-Facebook head says company ‘profits partly by amplifying lies’

December 3, 2019 No Comments

By Matt Binder.

Facebook’s former head of Global Elections Integrity Ops left after six months on the job — and now she’s speaking out about the problems she faced when trying to fix the company’s political ad problems.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post on Monday, Yaël Eisenstat, who joined Facebook after working with the CIA and the White House, says she tried to sound the alarm at the company leading up to the 2016 election. Recently, Facebook said it would let politicians lie in ads in the name of “free expression.”

“I didn’t think I was going to change the company,” wrote Eisenstat. “But I wanted to help Facebook think through the very challenging questions of what role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy.”

Eisenstat explained that while employed at Facebook, she saw firsthand how ad tools and features were misunderstood by users and how the company pushed back on any suggested moves to fix the problem.

She said that she believes that when the company approves political advertisers, and provides them with a checkmark and a “paid for” label, it adds credibility to the posts. In reality, Facebook and its partners don’t fact-check any of this content.

“The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools…” “The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers custom-target people, show us each a different version of the truth and manipulate us with hyper-customized ads — ads that, as of two weeks ago, can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they’re run by a political campaign,” she continued. “As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, they can’t avoid damaging democracies.”

According to Eisenstat, many of her Facebook colleagues agreed with her push to fix some of these political advertising issues. They still do, according to a recent letter signed by hundreds of Facebook employees.

Facebook’s leadership, however, did not agree.

“Ultimately, I was not empowered to do the job I was hired to do, and I left within six months,” she says.

In addition to sharing her own experience at the company, Eisenstat makes the case as to why Facebook’s ad transparency tools don’t cut it.

“True transparency would include information about the tools that differentiate advertising on Facebook from traditional print and television, and in fact make it more dangerous: Can I see if a political advertiser used the custom audience tool, and if so, if my email address was uploaded? Can I see what look-alike audience advertisers are seeking? Can I see a true, verified name of the advertiser in the disclaimer? Can I see if and how your algorithms amplified the ad?” she writes. “If not, the claim that Facebook is simply providing a level playing field for free expression is a myth.”

Eisenstat doesn’t believe in an outright ban on political advertising, as companies like Twitter have instituted. However, she believes the time for the government to step in and regulate the social media platform is well overdue.

Feature Image Credit:Facebook’s former head of Global Elections Integrity Ops is speaking out about her time at the company. Image: chesnot / Getty Images

By Matt Binder

Sourced from Mashable

In News

Four arguments why B2B marketers should spend more on brand building

December 3, 2019 No Comments

By James Wood

B2B marketers can be very focused on the short term, and who can blame them? Sales are putting on the pressure for a constant stream of leads and business leaders have quarterly targets to hit to keep the shareholders at bay.

It’s this short term thinking that means the majority of activity produced by B2B marketing teams is below the line, bottom of the funnel, sales ‘activation’ activity (call it the boring stuff) and not the bigger, fame and brand building advertising activity that the majority of B2C brands seem focus on (the glamorous stuff).

Now, couple this with the fact that the average tenure of a CMO is now just 43 months (and that new incumbent wants to shake things up and make their mark on the business), and it’ll come as no surprise that only 4% of B2B marketing teams measure impact beyond six months.

But a new report from the B2B Institute and LinkedIn, packed with research from Advertising Effectiveness stalwarts Les Binet and Peter Field, says this short-sightedness is damaging the growth potential of B2B brands.

According to ‘The 5 principles of growth in B2B Marketing’, in order to grow, B2B marketers need to start shifting efforts (and budgets) towards a 50/50 split between short term activation activity and long term brand building (the stuff that makes you famous).

However, it’s pretty clear we are starting on the back foot. B2B marketers are incredibly sceptical about the value of brand building and many have a misconstrued view of the effect brand building has on the business.

Just 30% of B2B marketers, for example, believe advertising has an effect on pricing power and only 50% believe reach is a strong predictor of success. It’s pretty clear businesses need to start thinking differently about longer term brand building. But as with any shift, there has to be a strong reason to do so.

So, we have distilled the findings from the report into four arguments you can take to your board/sceptical CMO to convince them to put more budget into longer term brand building, B2B advertising and fame defining campaigns and activities.

Argument one: “Look! You can’t argue with the facts – brand building will build our market share and our bottom line.”

Let’s start with a fundamental rule. The share of voice rule. A rule that has been known and stayed consistent for the last 50 years. The rule goes thus: brands that set their share of voice (share of all category advertising expenditure) above their share of market, will tend to grow.

This has been well known in B2C, but Binet and Field have shown the trend is true in B2B – a 10% extra share of voice, for example, will lead to a rise in market share of 0.7% per year.

Put simply: shout louder than the competition in a way that gets you noticed and you will expand. That alone is worth the investment.

Argument two: “We can kill two birds with one stone with this! Not only will brand building attract new customers, but it’s a great way to reassure our current customers they have made the right choice and feel proud about being our partner.”

Put simply, brands grow in two ways, either by gaining more customers, or by selling more to current customers. In B2B, the focus is often put on the latter thanks to new customer acquisition costs being high. But this piece of research shows us that actually the best way to achieve real growth is to acquire new customers, meaning more has to be put into activity to attract them.

But shifting budgets to attract new customers doesn’t have to come at the cost of current customers – putting money into brand campaigns also helps reassure existing customers they have made the right choice (and means they can show off to their mates in the pub about working with a cool, well known brand.)

Argument three: “Don’t trust me, trust Danny Khaneman! We need to be the brand that is the easiest to choose when a potential customer is shopping around.”

While everyone seems to think B2B buyers are purely rational beings, the truth is just like anyone else, many of the decisions they make are not made on purely rational thoughts or processes but on brands, products and services that are the most ‘mentally available’. As the economist Daniel Kahneman says, “the brain is largely a machine for jumping to conclusions”.

This is due to the Availability Heuristic – a rule that says given the choice between several options, people prefer the one that comes to mind most easily. It’s the reason that when you are shopping you are most likely to pick up Fairy washing up liquid and Kelloggs cornflakes, rather than unknown brands.

Maximising mental availability, or being the easiest brand to choose to buy, is just as important in B2B as in B2C and the best way to do this is to build fame through brand building campaigns.

Argument four: “A suit isn’t a shield for emotions! After all, Business people are people too, they just happen to be at work. So we need to use the power of emotion to ensure people engage with our brand. And guess what? The best way to do that is long term advertising campaigns.”

As a marketer, one of your key aims should be to make people feel positively towards your brand, even if they can’t say why. That comes from creating emotions and feelings around your brand and positioning yourself in a way that becomes more firmly embedded in a buyer’s memory than functional product messages.

This will translate into real business results, thanks to the fact that if we like a brand (or feel a positive emotion towards it) we are more likely to hold positive beliefs about its benefits. And it shows in the results – emotion based, fame building campaigns outperform rational ones by a margin of 10x. Even the tightest CFO can’t say no to that.

B2B marketers need to need to take off those short term blinkers and start thinking about how we build brands that grow, become famous and build the business over the long term. While the short term activation activity is still key, we need to start readdressing the balance and we hope this starts today.

A big thanks to The B2B Institute, LinkedIn, as well as Les Binet and Peter Field, for their excellent research on which this whole article is based. You can download the full research report here.

By James Wood

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Emotion: The Super Weapon Of Marketing And Advertising

December 3, 2019 No Comments

By Valentin Saitarli.

Conventional marketing tactics usually lead to typical outcomes — what if we try something different? I’m sure each of us has a dress, shoes, a tie or a bag that we bought only because a salesperson in the shop was kind to us, or just because we were in search of positive emotions. Most of us strive to be happy in our personal lives, so we often seek ways to feel good and are willing to pay for them.

Emotional connection plays a significant role in the choices we make as consumers. As reported by Psychology Today, “functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows that when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences), rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts).” So as marketers, why not aim to trigger the right feelings and make an emotional impression to attract attention to your product or service and boost sales?

I’ve worked with many clients on fixing some of the major issues with their marketing. Some of these clients were delivering an outstanding product to the market that, unfortunately, failed. And it was because their marketing strategy never emotionally engaged their target customers. Many companies seem to have a really hard time understanding how their particular product can make their clients happy. They forget that even though we’re in the age of digital marketing, there are still real people — a real Jake, Melissa or Jessica — on the other side of the screen, and those people care, laugh or cry the same way that we all do.

As a result of this tendency, when our team brings emotional marketing to the table, we’ve found that 80% of our clients seem to doubt the strategy — until we deliver results. For example, 10 months after bringing one client’s medicine-related app to the market using the emotional marketing strategy, the app doubled its revenue and our client saw a significant increase in brand recognition. We helped another client, a skincare company, hasten their sales growth and attract new investor funding by concentrating marketing efforts on triggering customers’ emotions.

So just how potent is it, this magical emotional connection? American poet Maya Angelou is often quoted as having said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Emotional engagement inspires a potential customer to notice and remember your marketing campaign if you do it right.

Research further illustrates the power of emotional advertising. Fast Company reports that “in an analysis of the IPA dataBANK, which contains 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns, campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) as those with only rational content (and did a little better than those that mixed emotional and rational content).”

Some brands seem to organically make emotional connections with consumers, while others have to work at it. But in my experience, any product can evoke an emotional response. So where do you start?

First, recognize that you can’t always aim to evoke happiness with your marketing. Research from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow found that we have only four basic emotions: happy, sad, fear/surprise and disgust/anger. So determine which feeling you intend to inspire. This will give you the right insights for copywriting, graphics, photos, music, etc.

Then, to get in touch with your customers’ emotions, identify their critical motivators. We strongly recommend putting more effort into research to discover the sole critical motivators that are typical for your niche and target audience. It’s crucial to provide customers with what they genuinely need, though they may not always be able to say what that is. Try to figure out what your customers care about, whether it’s standing out from the crowd, well-being, freedom, a sense of belonging or the environment. And make sure to leverage that. Their motivators may be secondary to the underlying emotions that drive them, but take them seriously. They can provide you with a more in-depth understanding of your customers’ emotions.

Once you understand what drives your customers, use these insights to create a broad marketing strategy based on making emotional connections. This strategy should include every link in the chain, from product launches and sales to marketing and service. Storytelling can be an indispensable tool here. Stories can be compelling and easy to share. They can help trigger the emotions you may need to get your desired outcome.

Dale Carnegie once said, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.” Emotional connections in the marketing field are not a secret strategy anymore — but they can be a real advantage. To be successful, find out how your customers feel and what they need and be able to identify what motivates them. This customer-oriented attitude and strategy can help you inspire customers’ devotion.

By Valentin Saitarli

Managing Director at Exclusive PR Solutions, overseeing Brand Strategy and Marketing. Read Valentin Saitarli’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Facebook Isn’t Just Allowing Lies, It’s Prioritizing Them

December 3, 2019 No Comments

“First, do no harm,” a doctrine typically associated with the practice of medicine, is the right ethic when it comes to decisions surrounding Silicon Valley’s paid promotion technologies and their effects on elections and democracy. A desire to avoid harm — in particular, the spread of misinformation — is part of what persuaded Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, to announce that his company will no longer run political ads. And Twitter is not alone: LinkedIn, Pinterest, Microsoft and Twitch also refuse political ads, while Google accepts them in some states but not others.

Facebook is now the outlier, and it is increasingly hard to understand why it is insisting on accepting not only political advertising, but even deliberate and malicious lies if they are in the form of paid advertisements. Given how much can go wrong — and has gone wrong — the question everyone is asking is: Why does Facebook think it needs to be in this game? Naïveté is at this point the most flattering explanation.

It isn’t, as some think, just about making money, for as a revenue source, the money at stake is minor. But the money does matter, in a different way. Paying for promotion is how, on social media, some speakers gain priority over others. This creates an advantage unrelated to actual popularity. Paired with the freedom to lie, the effect is to give political lies and paid misinformation campaigns a twisted advantage over other forms of election speech (like “the news.”) Even as Facebook’s “integrity” teams try to stamp out other forms of deception, paid promotions gain access to the full power of Facebook’s tools of microtargeting, its machine learning and its unrivaled collection of private information, all to maximize the influence of blatant falsehoods. What could possibly go wrong?

If the idea of prioritizing lies over truth doesn’t sound very appealing, Facebook’s defenses of its policy are almost their own misinformation campaign. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communications, has suggested that Facebook sees itself as providing the “tennis court” where politicians play the game of politics. But tennis actually has strict rules; Facebook has embraced, instead, the norms of a fighting cage. More important, Mr. Clegg is hiding the more fundamental question: Who ever said Facebook needed be the tennis court in the first place?

Facebook, which for years has declared it is not a media company, is now asserting that it is a medium necessary to a fair electoral process. That’s the implication of the tennis analogy, and also of Mr. Zuckerberg’s favourite defence of his policy, that Facebook must run political advertisements, even blatant lies, to help political challengers take on incumbents. Having personally run on a ticket against an incumbent, I am sympathetic to measures that might level the playing field. But not only is there no evidence to back Facebook’s assertions, there are many other, more obvious and less dangerous ways to fight the advantages of incumbency, like the public matching of campaign donations. It is ludicrous to suggest that allowing paid political lies online is what’s really necessary to help out the little guys.

So strange is the policy, so confusing even to Facebook’s own employees, perhaps it really is nothing more than an effort to placate Facebook’s conservative critics — giving Mr. Zuckerberg space to loudly declare that he maintains a fair and balanced policy when it comes to political speech. Leave aside that this is unlikely to mollify mainstream conservatives, whose real concern is that Facebook’s filtering of hate speech will enshrine “political correctness.” It is the effort to mollify itself that should raise red flags.

What we are learning is that Facebook can, by tinkering with its rules for political ads, give itself a special, unregulated power over elections. Just that possibility gives Facebook political leverage and politicians reasons to want leverage over Facebook. And we are speaking not of the local television station, which is bad enough, but the nation’s dominant social network, creating the kind of monopoly influence over politics that the framers of the Sherman antitrust law were concerned about. By refusing to stay out, Facebook is in effect building the case for its own breakup.

It is a dangerous game, with enormous potential for corruption, which is why Mr. Dorsey and most of the rest of Silicon Valley are right to steer as far clear as they can. It may well be that Silicon Valley one day studies its role in elections and comes up with some kind of salutary town hall of the future. But false neutrality is worse than nothing. Lacking any certainty that they can do more good than harm, both Facebook and Google need to get out.

In Jobs

SEO Associate

December 2, 2019 No Comments

Dotdynamic, Longford

Dotdynamic is looking for an SEO Associate to join us in helping our amazing clients create great online experiences. We are looking for someone who will be able to implement search engine and inbound marketing strategies using all relevant online channels and a superior knowledge of online marketing to put our clients way ahead of the competition.

As an SEO Associate, you will likely have had a few years of experience in some engine marketing disciplines (either with another company or agency, or through your own projects), and we want to help you take things to the next level. You will be working with us in creating and implementing exceptional online marketing campaigns and will eventually take on accounts and campaigns of your own. As your experience grows, you will need to be able to work across a variety of online marketing disciplines.

Primarily this role is focused on driving traffic and increasing ROI for our clients. Day to day this position could involve a range of tasks including developing and executing SEO strategy, keyword research, competitor analysis, analysing data, reviewing the technical aspects of a client’s website, optimising on-site content and landing pages, creating and analysing progress reports, collaborating with colleagues on holistic online marketing strategy, communicating with clients, and pitching content to online publications.

This is a full-time position based in our Longford office location.

REQUIREMENTS

One to two years of experience in search engine marketing or a related online marketing related discipline.
Technical SEO knowledge including the ability to audit a site for common SEO issues, make written best practice recommendations, and implement or oversee site improvements.
SEO research, strategy and optimisation skills including keyword research, competitor analysis, and the development of link earning content strategies.
Commitment to the continuous development of your search marketing skills. Staying up to date with industry news and blogs, and staying ahead of industry trends.
Very disciplined, organised, & self-motivated.
Excellent problem solving, decision making, data analysis, and communication skills.
Drive and ambition to learn and do bigger and better things.
Good writing skills.
Results driven with strong attention to detail.

PREFERRED SKILLS
Any of the following skills will make you a much stronger candidate for this position:

Knowledge of local, national, and international SEO strategy.
The ability to analyse and work with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.
Public Relations.
Marketing strategy development and writing skills.
Working knowledge of Google Analytics
Knowledge of Inbound Marketing

DUTIES
Working with and reporting to the Inbound Marketing Specialist, your duties will include:

Continually developing and leveraging skills such as Inbound Marketing; on-site, off-site and technical SEO; and Digital PR to contribute to the delivery of holistic online marketing campaigns.
Developing and executing creative search marketing campaigns on behalf of our clients.
Market, audience, keyword, and competitor research to develop online marketing strategies and tactics.
Developing and communicating on-site SEO advice for clients in areas such as content marketing, information architecture and technical issues.
Developing and communicating off-site strategies for content promotion, link acquisition, and brand coverage.
Creating reports to communicate the outcomes of our work to clients and ensure we are meeting their goals and more.
Continually developing new creative strategies and tactics to increase our client’s online visibility, reach and influence.
Assisting the team with development of online marketing proposals.
Working with the Director to develop and execute online marketing strategies to market Dotdynamic.

LOCATION
The successful applicant will work with us from our new Longford office location.

SALARY

Salary is negotiable based on experience.

PERKS

There will be opportunities for advanced training after completing your first year of employment.
Training and opportunities to obtain relevant certifications will be provided and encouraged throughout your employment.

Click HERE to apply for this job.

In News

How platforms abandon their homegrown creators

December 2, 2019 No Comments

By Simon Owens

Facebook is currently rolling out what it’s calling a “News tab,” a dedicated section on its platform that aggregates news story links from about 200 publishers, and for reasons that I can’t fathom it’s actually paying some of these publishers upward of $3 million a year for the privilege of linking to them (most agree that this is a PR stunt that will help Facebook’s efforts to wave off antitrust probes).

As with most Facebook actions, this one has generated its fair share of controversies, especially in its decision to include racist hate site Breitbart among the publishers. But lost within this debate is the persistent throughline of how large platforms discriminate against independent publishers in their efforts to court mainstream media companies.

There are currently tens of thousands of publishers that try to leverage Facebook’s enormous reach to drive eyeballs to their content, and every time Facebook carves out prime real estate for select publishers it hand picks, it’s depriving these smaller publishers of attention, making it that much harder for them to surface their content in front of audiences.

It’s not just Facebook that engages in this type of behaviour. In fact, it should be considered a law of the internet that any sufficiently large platform will eventually abandon its homegrown creators in order to court mainstream media and celebrities.

YouTube is a prime example of this law in action. Few platforms can lay claim to a more cohesive and vibrant community, one that has spawned some of the most creative filmmaking of the 21st century. Yet in YouTube’s quest to scale its advertising revenue to tens of billions of dollars a year, it’s slowly shifted its priorities away from this community in favour of promoting traditional media companies and celebrities.

I’ve written in the past about how YouTube’s done this with its trending video tab, lowering the bar for mainstream television networks while making it nearly impossible for organic YouTubers to be featured. But this week we’ve seen some new data on how YouTube is funnelling advertising money away from independent creators and toward their mainstream counterparts.

Back in 2017, YouTube came under fire for running advertisements next to what some considered extremist content. The outrage that emerged in the wake of these revelations resulted in what many have termed the “adpocalypse.” Essentially, creators saw their advertising revenue crater virtually overnight as an opaque algorithm determined whether their content was “brand unsafe.”

YouTube also launched a program called “Google Preferred,” a category that brands could opt into. In exchange for paying higher advertising rates, brands could ensure their ads would run against the most premium, brand-safe content the platform had to offer.

To calculate whether a video qualified for Google Preferred, YouTube assigned it a “P Score,” a number that, when it reached a certain threshold, allowed the video access to this more lucrative advertising inventory. The P Score was meant to be hidden from creators, but some enterprising coders discovered the P Score hidden in YouTube’s source code. They then examined the score across thousands of the most popular channels to see what kind of content qualified for Google Preferred.

And you won’t be shocked to learn that the channels that generated the highest P Scores all hailed from mainstream TV shows: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert; Late Night with Seth Meyers; The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Virtually no homegrown channels made the top 10. Just as YouTube has been lowering the bar for its Trending tab, it’s also done the same for Google Preferred. “I think this confirms our long time suspicions that ‘homegrown talent’ is being pushed aside in favour of ‘advertiser friendly’ late night TV hosts,” YouTuber Nicholas DeOrio told FFWD.

I wrote a recent column about how we often leave out the independent creator community when assessing the health of the media industry, and that this community now comprises hundreds of thousands of content producers who collectively generate somewhere north of $10 billion in revenue. But because they often operate on the edges of media, they’re the ones most likely to be negatively affected when a major platform shells out $3 million to a mainstream content company to aggregate its content. As an independent creator, you can spend years building up an audience and a solid revenue base, but it only requires a single tweak to a platform’s algorithm to take it all away.

By Simon Owens

Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at [email protected]. For a full bio, go here.

Sourced from WNIP What’s New in Publishing

In News

Happy 30th Birthday, Internet! Now We Need to Fix You.

December 2, 2019 No Comments

By Ariba Jahan

“A human is worth more if they’re addicted, polarized, outraged, misinformed and narcissistic because that’s better for producing an effect in human attention.” This strong statement from Tristan Harris describes the era of attention capitalism and it catapulted the day for one of Bloomberg’s largest tech events. At “Sooner Than You Think” (STYT), technologists, policymakers, educators and journalists gathered to talk about the impact of technology on our society and the balance between innovation and obligation in the industry.

I found myself mixed with concern, anger and optimism as we explored the crossroads and paved a path forward. Read on to see the three critical themes I took home with me.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Maybe we shouldn’t? Creating fakes isn’t a new concept – many of us have used Photoshop to add a mustache to a friend’s face or make it look we’re in a picture with our favorite TV characters. But now we have the technology to create fake audio and video that’s incredibly believable and imperceptible to the human eyes and ears. We also have the ability to distribute this fabricated content to the global masses or to a micro-target audience with the help of algorithms. The reality is that this deep fake-making technology is amoral, its use can be benign like making comedic satire or it can be weaponized by placing women’s faces in pornography or by creating messages of hate.

Check out this deep fake Jordan Peele made by using AI on a video of Barack Obama.

In this video, Jordan Peele calls on us to be more vigilant about what we trust on the internet. Shamir Alibhai mentioned at STYT that not only is it easier to create deepfakes, but eventually the deepfake creation technology will outcompete deepfake detection technology. It only takes about 15 minutes of human work to make a deepfake by leveraging cloud computing to do the rest. You can literally download this and make one today, and I just googled that.

Alibhai emphasized the urgent need in creating a system to authenticate critical content and videos that have an evidentiary character, such as film captured by a bystander, security footage or a camera on a police officer’s car. We shouldn’t let technology and our inability to detect fakes with our naked eye get in the way of due process.

Scary thought: Just imagine someone deepfaking a benign video of you speaking and making you appear to say something racist, and then it goes viral on twitter? Could you be fired or sued? How do you prove that it’s fake?

Check out these other fakes that have taken over the internet.

Free speech vs. paid speech

Fake news that proliferates, aggravates, incites action and polarizes us has been the topic of discussion for the last few years. Shamir defined fake news as “deceptive blogs with a veneer of newsworthiness being shared online.” According to an MIT study, fake news spreads six times faster than true information on Twitter.

At SYTY, Brittany Kaiser (pictured above in the second chair from the right) who used to run business development at Cambridge Analytica (CA) took the stage and spoke about how they leveraged the tremendous amount of Facebook user data to identify and target the “persuadables”, those who haven’t made up their mind yet and could be persuaded to decide in a specific direction. For the 2016 election, CA bombarded these “persuadable” users with over 5 million pieces of customized content to create a desired perception of the world that CA wanted them to have. You can watch The Great Hack or read Vox’s op-ed to learn more.

The panel pointed out that while Facebook shut down over 2 billion fake user accounts in three months this year, they still won’t fact check political ads or posts by candidates, even if it violates the site’s hate speech rules. This decision came from Facebook’s desire to be neutral during the election, but this may further proliferate misinformation and malevolence being spread by those that can afford to create and promote fake news.

This stance upset the staff at Facebook, leading them to write an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg demanding a more active stance on misinformation. They suggested solutions “where they submit campaign ads to fact-checking, limit microtargeting, cap spending, observe silence periods or at least warn users.”

What can we do about the state of misinformation?

The speakers shared some advice for us to consider as we grapple with the current state and look towards the future with optimism, here’s what they said:

Don’t give up

Actress Kerry Washington shared that it’s important to be aware and active during the election off-seasons, so we can make sure that we’re selecting the right leaders to represent our community. Speakers also suggested readers should be mindful of what to follow and who to trust.

Make products with privacy in mind

DuckDuckGo, Density, and FourSquare shared how they’re leading profitable companies without commoditizing user data and only tracking what’s necessary. Jeff Gleuck of FourSquare emphasized how they even have a blacklist of locations they do not share to protect groups from harm, like locations of Planned Parenthoods and LGBT spaces. Also, give your users a “terms and conditions” they can read and understand. Yes, please!

The Chief Information Officer of Equifax relayed that you should store data assuming that you’ll have a data breach, so ask yourself “How can we store less valuable information?”

The government needs a new framework

Former FCC commissioner, Mignon L Clyburn (pictured above on the far right) points out that the reason the government hasn’t been able to regulate big tech is that “we’ve got a 19th-century framework for 21st-century problems”. She also points out that as long as we’re all working in our own silos, we won’t make progress. Instead, lawmakers, regulators, ethicists and technologists need to actually hear each other, get past their own industry cultures and work together.

Tom Bossert, who served as the homeland security advisor to two presidents, emphasized that this new framework of rules and standards needs to account for the current and evolving state of technology and a process of accountability and responsibility.

Take a stance.

Many panelists suggested that leaders need to take a stance on where they stand and use it to inform their organizational decisions.

Well, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter took a stance on misinformation this Wednesday. He tweeted that he’s banning ads from candidates on Twitter globally:

Twitter also won’t accept payments to promote tweets or other ads that take a position on policy issues, such as immigration, health care, national security, and climate change.

The worldwide web turned 30 years old this year and it’s still learning and evolving, and us with it. The creators built it to efficiently share information from computer to computer, from person to person. They probably never imagined a day where the internet would need passwords, rules and protections. So by design, it was open, vulnerable, and a big unknown.

Similarly, we may be making new technology today with unforeseeable repercussions. So it’s critical that we’re having these conversations about truth, trust, and responsibility while demanding ethical standards and challenging business models anchored around selling user data and creating digital addictions.

By Ariba Jahan

As the Director of Innovation at the Ad Council, Ariba is charged with creating digital products that make a measurable impact, scaling design thinking practices and exploring future-forward technology for the organization. With over 10 years of experience in user-focused product design and leading workshops for entrepreneurs in global cities, Ariba leverages her life experience as an immigrant, startup mindset, and scientific approach to create digital products for social good and empower an innovative culture. In her spare time, she teaches underprivileged high school students UX design, advocates for inclusive design, goes on mountain-climbing adventures (Mt. Kilimanjaro is her favorite), and knits more scarves than she’ll ever need.

Sourced from AdLibbing

In News

A Megatrend Set to Disrupt the Business World

December 2, 2019 No Comments

By Natan Pollack

Today we navigate our way across cities, pull up electronic tickets, purchase items, monitor our health, and, of course, stay connected with friends and family on our smartphones. The smartphone is one of those innovations that make us think, “how did I ever function without it?” Smartphones revolutionized our personal lives, but there’s a megatrend set to disrupt the business world; it’s called augmented analytics.

Augmented analytics is on the cusp of becoming the business world’s next significant evolution.

Gartner identified augmented analytics as to the number 1 top trend for data and analytics technology in 2019, and market leaders are already starting to invest in this burgeoning industry.

SAP recently acquired augmented people analytics company Qualtrics for $8 billion, shelling out a price equivalent to over 20x the company’s current revenue. A newcomer to the game, Denver based startup Nodin raised $5 million in funding this past March, a month before even launching its platform.

The global market for augmented analytics is forecasted to reach $29.86 billion by 2025. But just what is augmented analytics, and what makes it such a hot new trend?

Data or die

According to a recent study by Forbes Insights and Treasure Data, only 13% of companies can be considered “leaders” in leveraging the full potential of their customer data. The full potential of the customer data is significant, as 55% of executives think these insights to be valuable in achieving disruptive innovation.

Companies must now collect, clean, and translate their raw data into insights they can use to build better products and reach target audiences.

In today’s fast-paced business world, data-driven decisions are no longer a nice to have; they’re a necessity to stay competitive and on top of market volatility. To get ahead, significant players from Booking.com to PepsiCo are relying on teams of data analysts to collect, clean, and analyze the surge of data now being generated.

SME’s are also leveraging their data to gain a competitive advantage in a sea of new competitors popping up every day. The problem is that data analysts are not only scarce in number; they’re also costly, especially for SMEs.

Even for companies that do have data scientists on board, the sheer volume of the data we’re now collecting through various platforms and tools means that they spend more of their time on activities like data preparation and visualization, leaving less time for actual analysis.

Augmented analytics harnesses the power of AI and machine learning to automate these tasks and generate insights.

Let’s say you’re an ecommerce store that’s seen a sudden decrease in sales on your Shopify account. To find out why you’d have to comb through your company’s data and find insights by:

Logging in to Google Analytics to analyze patterns in your website traffic.
Checking out the performance of your social media accounts and ad campaigns.
Reassessing your keywords on Google Adwords.
Investigating new competitors or changes in the market.

Instead, augmented analytics tools collect and analyze all your data together to identify potential causes and automatically generate reports with actionable insights.

Here are three significant ways augmented analytics will disrupt the business world:

We’re in a data race – the winner takes the money.

With most businesses adopting artificial decision-making capabilities, we’re now in a race to see who can make the faster, better business decisions. Our businesses are like data-guzzling V12 engines that need data to fuel growth. Automating this process, and using augmented analytics to spot growth opportunities in your data, before your competitors, means you win the race.

Gartner believes that by 2020, over 40% of data science tasks will be automated. The automation will allow data scientists to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on strategic analysis and decision-making. Not only does it take the manual labor out of their job, but it also does it faster and eliminates the potential for human error.

Bring together the whole picture.

At the moment, most company’s data lives on several different platforms – isolated. Only 34% of executives agreed they have one aggregated view of all their customer data points. Not only is this inefficient, but it also blocks businesses from making informed decisions. We shouldn’t be looking at how each part of the engine works separately but how it all works together.

Having data points integrated into a rapid reporting system, such as Aerialscoop or DataBox, allows you to track the entire customer journey on one platform, all the way from lead generation until earning your first Dollar from the client. It also provides for better cohesion and collaboration across the organization. It’s not just ‘how is my marketing team doing on their KPIs?’ — but how are the marketing team’s results directly impacting my revenue growth and retention rates?

Democratize your data analytics.

Meanwhile, for smaller companies that don’t have the means to hire a team of data scientists (currently the global average salary is $90k), augmented analytics will make data-driven insights accessible to the masses. The accessibility is expected to be a major wave of development for the next five years.

According to Gartner, through 2020, the number of citizen data scientists will grow five times faster than professional data scientists. This means everyone from executives to marketeers will have the power to make data-driven decisions, without having to rely on data science professionals to provide the information they need.

Having the information easily accessible to all opens doors for SME’s to accelerate their growth at an exponential rate across departments. If there was ever a time that smaller, more nimble start-ups were able to pose a real threat to major companies, the democratization of data analytics ought to be the catalyst.

Much like smartphones have become the tool we can’t imagine our lives without, augmented analytics will set a new standard for business growth.

Those who start to leverage this technology early on will reap the benefits that faster, aggregated, and accessible data can bring. Where will your company stand in the data race of the future?