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Dating App Lumen Asks Over-50s To Get Their Kits Off For Anti-Ageism Ad

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By Ally Burnie

A dating app for over 50s has persuaded half a dozen people to bare it all in a protest against ageism in advertising.

The ad created by dating app Lumen features models holding nothing but a placard with anti-ageism slogans to cover their naked bodies.

Slogans include: ‘Grey hair don’t care’, ‘Nobody puts Granny in the corner’ and ‘It’s our time to be seen’.

The campaign will be unveiled to commuters on the London Underground from Monday 8 April.

Screen Shot 2019-04-10 at 8.11.29 am

Lumen co-founder and CMO Charly Lester said: “The fact that almost nine in 10 over-50s think that advertising aimed at them needs to change should be a real wake-up call to the industry about the ‘everyday ageism’ all around us.

“Not only is it a case of underrepresentation, but heavily edited images are making older people feel like it’s not ok to be themselves.

Lester added: “We’re calling on advertisers to reconsider how they portray older age groups and show them for the attractive, funny and real people they are.”

The campaign follows research by Lumen which found 86 per cent of over-50s wanted advertising targeted at them to change, with 51 per cent suggesting there is too much airbrushing, and a further 36 per cent put off by models looking like plastic.

Overall, 30 per cent said models and celebrities were made to look younger than their actual age, with 36 per cent saying there was too much emphasis on the “downsides” of ageing.

And, 31 per cent of over 50s believe that advertising is ageist.

By Ally Burnie

Sourced from B&T

At B&T, we believe that advertising like this can shape and influence culture. That’s one of the reasons we created Changing the Ratio, Australia’s diversity and inclusion conference for the advertising industry. Check out the 2019 schedule today.

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Alcohol industry accused of social media ‘spin’ in Australia

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By Rupert Millar

A health foundation in the Australian state of Victoria has questioned the sponsorship ‘spin’ of top Instagram influencers by the alcohol industry but its own findings seem a little inflated too.

VicHealth looked at the top 70 Instagram influencers in Australia and found that over a period of 12 months they posted 477 pictures that featured alcohol.

As both VicHealth itself and other publications have stated, the research found, “almost three-quarters of influencers featured alcoholic drinks in their posts, yet only a quarter fully disclosed when they had been paid by alcohol brands.”

Yet a line in the Guardian noted that of those 477 posts, “12% were likely sponsored mentions”.

In other words, 57 posts were “likely” (and it could be greater) sponsored content featuring alcohol.

As the Guardian post went on: “Of those 61% were disclosed and 39% were undisclosed, meaning they did not feature a hashtag such as #sponsored #ad or #collab or use the “paid partnership” option for brands.”

Again, that means of those 57 sponsored posts, 34 disclosed their sponsorship and 22 did not.

In the span of a whole year, 70 of Australia’s top Instagram influencers posted 57 pictures (“likely”) featuring sponsored alcohol content and 22 failed to disclose this fact. That’s not quite two posts a month.

This fact did not deter VicHealth however, which ploughed on regardless: “The research also found the alcohol industry often partnered with non-alcohol brands like active wear and events such as festivals, allowing the industry to use influencers to promote their products without having to disclose their sponsorship.

“Alcoholic products such as branded glasses of wine or bottles of champagne were often featured as props by influencers, further blurring the lines of what are considered sponsored posts.

“With Instagram and its influencers particularly popular with young people, the findings show the alcohol industry is using social media as a key tool to promote their products as cool and glamourous to an impressionable audience.”

Dr Lyn Roberts, VicHealth’s acting CEO, added: “Our research shows the alcohol industry is employing tactics straight out of the playbook of Big Tobacco, using high profile influencers to make their products appear glamorous and sophisticated to young people.

“What’s most concerning is that influencers and brands can get away with not disclosing paid content, making it really hard for young people to discern when they’re being sold an ad.

“We also know that young people who like or follow alcohol brands on social media are twice as likely to drink at risky levels than those who don’t.

“Alcohol brands spend millions each year advertising their products to impressionable young people and it works – for every advertising dollar spent, young people drink 3% more alcohol.”

As a result, VicHealth announced it was launching a new “competition” called ‘Top Spin’ designed to encourage Victorians to “call out the sneaky tactics” the alcohol industry uses to “keep us drinking and spending heavily”.

Each week of the five-week run AU$1,000 will be offered to winning entries.

 

db view: It’s rich bordering on ludicrous that having cherry-picked some already very selective ‘facts’ from a tiny sample size that VicHealth should accuse the alcohol industry of ‘spin’.

Part of the problem is that Australia does not currently have a national alcohol strategy although there are guidelines which they are supposed to follow.

Whether they do or not is beyond the scope of this piece but VicHealth was about using Instagram.

Again much too broad to examine here is the argument within wine and industry circles about the use of Instagram influencers and how useful/real/helpful they are anyway.

That aside, why shouldn’t brands (alcoholic or otherwise) seek to use new outlets for advertising? They always have and they always will and this is not as insidious as one senses VicHealth would dearly love to imply.

The other problem is that while VicHealth across its site likes to suggest that the alcohol industry uses flawed data, it itself is resting much of its own suggestions on studies that are just as flawed.

Dr Roberts suggests that, “for every advertising dollar spent, young people drink 3% more alcohol”. No supporting evidence or link to any is given to support this nor is there any to support the statement that those that follow alcohol brands on social media are “twice as likely” to drink at risky levels.

The problem that ‘studies’ of this type surrounding social media and advertising routinely make is that they seemingly assume that advertising equals causation. That the mere act of seeing some advertising or even any sign of alcohol or drinking in general makes people go out and drink.

There is indeed a correlation between advertising and drinking as there is for buying washing machines or cars but the idea that people are so slack jawed that mere advertising makes them immediately go out and buy a product should be as laughable as those fears in Cold War America that subliminal Soviet messaging in popular television shows were going to brainwash people into being Communists.

Ultimately, despite finding evidence that some Instagram influencers are not honest about shilling for brands (shock horror), the study comes up with the fat, zero lump sum of absolute nothingness to show that any of those Instagram posts, sponsored or not, actually encouraged anyone to drink, let alone to an unsafe level.

But who needs to measure that when you have a competition to plug?

By Rupert Millar

Sourced from The drinks business

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Dentsu Aegis Launches Sellwin To Consolidate Amazon Expertise

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Dentsu Aegis Network launched Sellwin, an Amazon-focused consultancy, on Wednesday.

The business is made up of six consultants, with access to another 130 specialists across Dentsu’s US agencies for things like ecommerce search, creating product page content and Amazon voice skills, said Sellwin President Travis Johnson.

The consultancy model is new for Dentsu, Johnson said, even though the holding company had Amazon expertise across its agencies.

“What we didn’t have before was an umbrella pulling those skillsets into one offering,” he said.

Sellwin also adds retail capabilities that Dentsu agencies didn’t previously have, like warehousing and fulfillment strategy, pricing and retail negotiations about profit margin.

Amazon prefers vendors use a consultancy model, Johnson said. It means Amazon doesn’t need to match the boots on the ground other online platforms like Google and Facebook have for agencies and brands.

Amazon and Sellwin’s clients also prefer a fixed-rate model instead of giving up a percentage of transactions, the preferred performance marketing and ecom tech model, because it means they keep more if Amazon sales take off.

Brands also work with many teams within Amazon that don’t necessarily communicate, or may outright compete against each other, like a retail promotions team or the Alexa voice group bidding against a brand’s search terms. By consolidating dealings with Amazon into one unit, Johnson said that brands have more leverage in negotiations and can more effectively coordinate efforts across the platform.

Sellwin has 12 clients right now, all preexisting Dentsu brands, including beauty and product companies ramping up Amazon sales. Others, like automotive and financial services clients, don’t have consumer ecommerce practices but still want to use Amazon data for online targeting and work with Amazon on sponsorships or brand integrations like they do with TV networks.

The consultancy’s laser focus on Amazon will eventually broaden to ecommerce marketplaces like eBay, Alibaba, Walmart and Target, where transaction data can be connected to product sales, Johnson said. But Amazon is unlike other US ecommerce and retail players, none of which have media and entertainment channels, music streaming, major search market share, OTT devices or Alexa-enabled hardware.

“Amazon is the biggest challenge and biggest opportunity for many brands right now, so we want to remain focused on that,” Johnson said.

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Sourced from ad exchanger

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Opera 60 puts Crypto Wallets and Web 3.0 in your desktop

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By Ewdison Then

While Google and Mozilla are fighting over becoming the web browser on all platforms, Opera is fighting a different battle. It is waging war against the institutions and companies that would steal people’s information from under their noses. That isn’t just science fiction and it’s pretty much the reality that the likes of Facebook have slapped in our faces. That’s why the browser maker is rolling out Opera version 60, codenamed “Reborn 3” to fight that good fight using blockchains, Crypto Wallets, and Web 3.0.

If you’re still reeling from the whole Web 2.0 hype and buzz just a few years ago, don’t worry. Web 3.0 still isn’t a thing and is primarily pushed by the most ardent supporters of blockchains. It’s one of those technologies that an even smaller number of people understand compared to Web 2.0. In a nutshell, however, it’s all about having decentralized systems with no single point of failure or control, all protected and governed by cryptography.

Since cryptography is the currency of Web 3.0, you’ll need a wallet to keep those keys and coins safe. Opera introduced a built-in Crypto Wallet in its Android app and it’s now bringing that to the desktop as well. More than just storing cryptocurrency, Opera’s wallet also stores your identification for these Web 3.0 sites, services, and apps. For now, it seems that only the Ethereum dApps are supported.

Of course, the release isn’t just about Web 3.0 either. Opera 60 also brings other privacy-related improvements across the board, like a faster built-in VPN service and more convenient ad-blocking. It also improves on sharing content with paired smartphones, including syncing that Crypto Wallet.

Opera 60 “Reborn 3” also gets a facelift that the browser maker calls “borderless design”, almost in line with the bezel-less trends in smartphones. On a side note, Opera has also started a privacy-focused campaign, which includes a short film, that takes a subtle jab at Google in Europe.

By Ewdison Then

Sourced from Slash Gear

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How to get international insights from Google Analytics

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Your international marketing campaigns hinge on one crucial element: how well you have understood your audience.

As with all marketing, insight into the user behaviour, preferences and needs of your market is a must. However, if you do not have feet on the ground in these markets, you may be struggling to understand why your campaigns are not hitting the mark.

Thankfully you have a goldmine of data about your customers’ interests, behaviour, and demographics already at your fingertips. Wherever your international markets are, Google Analytics should be your first destination for drawing out actionable insights.

Setting up Google Analytics for international insight

Google Analytics is a powerful tool but the sheer volume of data available through it can make finding usable insights tough. The first step for getting the most out of Google Analytics is ensuring it has been set up in the most effective way. This needs to encompass the following:

Also read: An SEO’s guide to Google Analytics terms

1. Setting up views for geographic regions

Depending on your current Google Analytics set-up you may already have more than one profile and view for your website data. What insight you want to get from your data will influence how you set up this first stage of filtering. If you want to understand how the French pages are being accessed and interacted with then you may wish to create a filter based on the folder structure of your site, such as the “/fr-fr/” sub-folder of your site.

However, this will show you information on visitors who arrive on these pages from any geographic location. If your hreflang tags aren’t correct and Google is serving your French pages to a Canadian audience, then you will be seeing Canadian visitors’ data under this filter too.

If you are interested in only seeing how French visitors interact with the website, no matter where on the site they end up, then a geographic filter is better. Here’s an example.

Example of geographic filter in Google Analytics

2. Setting up segments per target area

Another way of being able to identify how users from different locations are responding to your website and digital marketing is by setting up segments within Google Analytics based on user demographics. Segments enable you to see a subset of your data that, unlike filters, don’t permanently alter the data you are viewing. Segments will allow you to narrow down your user data based on a variety of demographics, such as which campaign led them to the website, the language in which they are viewing the content, and their age. To set up a segment in Google Analytics click on “All Users” at the top of the screen. This will bring up all of the segments currently available in your account.

Example of user segmentation in Google Analytics

To create a new segment click “New Segment” and configure the fields to include or exclude the relevant visitors from your data. For instance, to get a better idea of how French-Canadian visitors interact with your website you might create a segment that only includes French-speaking Canadians. To do this you can set your demographics to include “fr-fr” in the “Language” field and “Canada” in the “Location” field.

Example of creating a new location-based user segment

Use the demographic fields to tailor your segment to include visitors from certain locations speaking specific languages.

The segment “Summary” will give you an indication of what proportion of your visitors would be included in this segment which will help you sense-check if you have set it up correctly. Once you have saved your new segment it will be available for you to overlay onto your data from any time period, even from before you set up the segment. This is unlike filters, which will only apply to data recorded after the filter was created.

Also read: A guide to the standard reports in Google Analytics – Audience reports 

3. Ensuring your channels are recording correctly

A common missing step to setting your international targeting up on Google Analytics is ensuring the entry points for visitors onto your site are tracking correctly.

For instance, there are a variety of international search engines that Google Analytics counts as “referral” sources rather than organic traffic sources unless a filter is added to change this.

The best way to identify this is to review the websites listed as having driven traffic to your website, follow the path – Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals. If you identify search engines among this list then there are a couple of solutions available to make sure credit for your marketing success is being assigned correctly.

First, visit the “Organic Search Sources” section in Google Analytics which can be found under Admin > Property > Organic Search Sources.

Example of setting websites as "Organic Search Sources" in Google Analytics

From here, you can simply add the referring domain of the search engine that is being recorded as a “referral” to the form. Google Analytics should start tracking traffic from that source as organic. Simple. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work for every search engine.

If you find the “Organic Search Sources” solution isn’t working, filters are a fool-proof solution but be warned, this will alter all your data in Google Analytics from the point the filter is put in place. Unless you have a separate unfiltered view available (which is highly recommended) then the data will not be recoverable and you may struggle to get an accurate comparison with data prior to the filter implementation. To set up a view without a filter you simply need to navigate to “Admin” and under “View” click “Create View”.

Example of creating a view without filters in Google Analytics

Name your unfiltered view “Raw data” or similar that will remind you that this view needs to remain free of filters.

Example of creating a new reporting view without filters in Google Analytics

To add a filter to the Google Analytics view that you want to have more accurate data in, go to “Filters” under the “View” that you want the data to be corrected for.

Click “Add Filter” and select the “Custom” option. To change traffic from referral to organic, copy the below settings:

Filter Type: Advanced

Field A – Extract A: Referral (enter the domain of the website you want to reclassify traffic from)

Field B – Extract B: Campaign Medium – referral

Output To – Constructor: Campaign Medium – organic

Then ensure the “Field A Required”, “Field B Required”, and “Override Output Field” options are selected.

You may also notice the social media websites are listed among the referral sources. The same filter process applies to them.  Just enter “social” rather than “organic” under the “Output To” field.

Example of a filter in Google Analytics to reclassify yahoo.com traffic from referral to organic

4. Setting goals per user group

Once you have a better idea of how users from different locations use your website you may want to set up some independent goals specific to those users in Google Analytics. This could be, for example, a measure of how many visitors download a PDF in Chinese. This goal might not be pertinent to your French visitors’ view, but it is a very important measure of how well your website content is performing for your Chinese audience.

The goals are simple to create in Google Analytics, just navigate to “Admin”, and under the view that you want to add the goal to click “Goals”.  This will bring up a screen that displays any current goals set up in your view and, if you have edit level permissions in Google Analytics, you can create a new one by clicking “New Goal”.

Example of creating new goals in Google Analytics

Once you have selected “New Goal” you will be given the option of setting up a goal from a template or creating a custom one. It is likely that you will need to configure a custom goal in order to track specific actions based off of events or page destinations. For example, if you are measuring how many people download a PDF you may track the “Download” button click events, or you may create a goal based on visitors going to the “Thank you” page that is displayed once a PDF is downloaded.

Example of tracking visitors' specific events by setting goals

Most goals will need to be custom ones that allow you to track visitors completing specific events or navigating to destination pages.

With the number of goals you can set up under each view (which is limited to 20), it is likely that your goals will be different under each in order to drive the most relevant insight.

5. Filtering tables by location

An easy way to determine location-specific user behaviour is using the geographic dimensions to further drill-down into the data that you are viewing.

For instance, if you run an experiential marketing campaign in Paris to promote awareness of your products, then viewing the traffic that went to the French product pages of your website that day compared to a previous day could give you an indicator of success. However, what would be even more useful would be to see if interest in the website spiked for visitors from Paris.

By applying “City” as a secondary dimension on the table of data you are looking at how you can get a more specific overview of how well the campaign performed in that region.

Example of adding secondary dimensions to analyze campaign success

Dimensions available include “Continent”, “Sub-continent” “Country”, “Region”, and “City”, as well as being able to split the data by “Language”.

Drawing intelligence from your data

Once you have your goals set up correctly you will be able to drill much further down into the data Google Analytics is presenting you with. An overview of how international users are navigating your site, interacting with content and their pain points is valuable in determining how to better optimize your website and marketing campaigns for conversion.

1. Creating personas

Many organizations will have created user personas at one stage or another, but it is valuable to review them periodically to ensure they are still relevant in the light of changes to your organization or the digital landscape. It is imperative that your geographic targeting has been set up correctly in Google Analytics to ensure your personas drive insight into your international marketing campaigns.

Creating personas using Google Analytics ensures they are based on real visitors who land on your website. This article from my agency, Avenue Digital, gives you step by step guidance on how to use your Google Analytics data to create personas, and how to use them for SEO.

2. Successful advertising mediums

One tip for maximizing the data in Google Analytics is discerning what the most profitable advertising medium is for that demographic.

If you notice that a lot of your French visitors are coming to the website as a result of a PPC campaign advertising your products, but the traffic that converts the most is actually from Twitter, then you can focus on expanding your social media reach in that region.

This may not be the same for your UK visitors who might arrive on the site and convert most from organic search results. With the geographic targeting set up correctly in Google Analytics, you will be able to focus your time and budgets more effectively for each of your target regions, rather than employing a blanket approach based on unfiltered data.

3. Language

Determining the best language to provide your marketing campaigns and website may not be as simple as identifying the primary language for each country you are targeting. For example, Belgium has three official languages – Dutch, German, and French. Google Analytics can help you narrow down which of these languages is primarily used by the demographic that interacts with you the most online.

If you notice that there are a lot of visitors from French-speaking countries landing on your website, but it is only serving content in English, then this forms a good base for diversifying the content on your site.

4. Checking the correctness of your online international targeting

An intricate and easy to get wrong aspect of international marketing is signalling to the search engines what content you want available to searchers in different regions.

Google Analytics allows you to audit how well international targeting has been understood and respected by the search engines. If you have filtered your data by a geographic section of your website, like, /en-gb/ but a high proportion of your organic traffic landing on this section of the site is from countries that have their own specified pages on the site, then this would suggest that your hreflang tags may need checking.

5. Identifying emerging markets

Google Analytics could help identify other markets that are not being served by your current products, website or marketing campaigns that could prove very fruitful if tapped into.

If through your analysis you notice that there is a large volume of visitors from a country you don’t currently serve then you can begin investigations into the viability of expanding into those markets.

Conclusion

As complex as Google Analytics may seem, once you have set it up right expect to get clarity over your data, as it makes drilling down into detail for each of your markets an easy job. The awareness into your markets you gain can be the difference between your digital marketing efforts soaring or falling flat.

Feature Image Credit: shutterstock

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Helen Pollitt is the Head of SEO Avenue Digital. She can be found on Twitter @HelenPollitt1.

Sourced from Search Engine Watch

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6 Metrics to Measure Content Performance

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By Michael Brenner

All good content marketers know that it’s vital to monitor and analyze the performance of individual pieces of content on a regular basis.

This data will help to not only identify poor-performing content that can be improved, but also to find your best-performing content. Sometimes the content that you think is the best quality just doesn’t resonate with your audience. Data analytics can help you to find the perfect “recipe” for your content marketing, so you can rinse and repeat to ultimate content marketing success.

1. Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood of online content. If nobody is landing on your website, it doesn’t matter how amazing your blog posts are – nobody will read them and so they won’t be doing you any good.

If you really want to strip it back to basics, traffic is one metric that you must measure. Of course, this traffic can be split up into different categories. In Google Analytics, the metrics you want to be looking at are:

  • Users – the total number of unique visitors to your page
  • Pageviews – the total number of times a page on your site has been viewed
  • Unique pageviews – If a single user has viewed your page multiple times, these visits are combined into one pageview to calculate this metric.

You can use the raw data from these metrics to get a rough idea of the amount of traffic coming to individual pages on your site. You can also breakdown the data further to see where your traffic is coming from (both geographically and how they found your site online) and the type of device they used to view your site.

This information can be useful to know for your future content strategy. For example, if you target primarily US customers but you’re getting a significant amount of traffic from the UK, you can tailor future content to your UK visitors. Or if a large proportion of your traffic is coming from one of your social media channels, you can tailor your content based on your social media followers’ data.

2. Sales or Conversions

So people are visiting your site and reading your blog – great. But what else are they doing when they’ve finished reading? Are they clicking your links and reading more? Are they signing up for your newsletter? Completing an e-commerce transaction?

It’s up to you what counts as a conversion. In some cases, the goal of your content might be to make a physical sale, while in others it just might be to raise awareness of your brand and increase your authority. If this is the case you might want to focus more on metrics such as social shares and engagement.

However, if your blog is primarily a sales tool, you’re going to want to track how many sales it generates. You can do this after activating e-commerce in Google Analytics by viewing the page value of all your content under the behavior section.

This will give you the average revenue that each page has generated for you when users have gone directly to make a purchase or complete another goal that you’ve set.

3. Engagement

Sometimes the amount of traffic your content gets is more a measure of how effective you are at getting people to click your links, rather than how good your content is.

To really find out if people are engaging with your content, you’ll need to track how long they’re spending on your site and how many pages they’re visiting in each session.

Obviously, the goal is to keep them on your site as long as possible so they can read more of your content (unless of course, you want to funnel them to a sales page as quickly as possible.)

You can see this information under Audience Overview in Google Analytics. Here, as well as seeing your total number of sessions and visitors, you can see the average number of pages per session, the average session duration, and your bounce rate.

For content that’s designed to be read, ideally, you want a high number of pages per session, long average session duration (depending on the length of your content) and a low bounce rate.

4. Social Media Engagement

Another effective way to measure your content engagement is to see how well it’s performing on social media.

While there are various metrics you can track here, the most important is how many times your content has been shared on various social networks. A share shows that others are finding your content valuable.

This information isn’t available in Google Analytics but if you have social share buttons on each piece of content, they will show you how many times that content has been shared on each platform.

Buzzsumo is another tool for tracking social media shares and is an easy way to quickly identify the top performing content on your site.

You can also track the amount of traffic you’re getting from social platforms, which is another good way of measuring engagement. More clicks from social platforms mean that more people are sharing and interacting with your content. You can find this information under Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals in Google Analytics.

5. SEO Performance

Not all your traffic will come from social media, so it’s important that you’re getting plenty of visitors from search too. You can track the proportion of your site visits that come from search in Google Analytics, but this doesn’t give you much insight into whether your site is performing well in search engines or not.

Instead, you’ll need to measure your SEO performance. There are a few different metrics you can track here. SERP ranking is probably the most important one – this is the position of your page in the search engine results for a particular keyword phrase. Rankings aren’t static and do tend to fluctuate a little, but when you’re tracking your ranking over time you want to see it either static (if you’re already in a good spot) or improving, which shows you are gaining trust and authority.

You can use Google Search Console to identify the terms you’re ranking for and keep an eye on how your ranking changes over time.

Better SEO will lead to higher traffic numbers, more leads, and hopefully more sales and conversions.

6. Authority

Authority is not quite as easy to measure as most of the other metrics, but it’s still important to try to increase your authority over time.

High authority will not only improve your SEO, meaning you get more search traffic, but it will also help to build your brand, increase trust, and improve your conversion rate.

Moz has its own authority metrics that you can use as a rough guide for how Google might judge the authority of your page and site. These DA (domain authority) and PA (page authority) scores range from 1-100, with higher scores corresponding to greater authority.

There’s no definitive answer on what’s a “good” DA and PA to aim for – you basically just want a higher score than your competitors.

While these scores can be a handy thing to keep track of, there are other less definitive ways of tracking your real-world authority. Metrics such as links to your content, mentions of your brand on social media and media coverage are all indications that your authority and brand presence is growing.

By Michael Brenner

Sourced from Marketing Insider Group

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Lastminute.com launches in-housing consultancy Playbook

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By Rebecca Stewart

Having successfully in-housed its own media buying and planning, Lastminute.com has launched a consultancy arm – Playbook – to help other brands do the same.

In an industry where businesses are increasingly bulking up their internal arsenal, Playbook will guide brands through the complex process of internalising core marketing capabilities, including media planning, tech, data and content creation.

Although it’s being pitched as a consultancy, it’s not run by consultants, instead, it will be led by the same team behind Travel People; Lastminute.com’s own in-house media and trading arm.

Playbook and Travel People will both be led out of a new media business within Lastminute.com called Forward. Alessandra Di Lorenzo, Lastminute’s chief commercial officer, will head up this new company as chief executive.

Playbook is already working with several unnamed travel and FMCG clients.

Lastminute.com has been bulking up the services it offers to brands since it launched Travel People 2016, scaling up its programmatic capabilities and finding new sources of revenue by letting other advertisers plug into its adtech stack.

Since last year, it has been giving advertisers the option to build their own microsites propped up by Lastminute.com technology.

Steered by Di Lorenzo, as a way to protect the travel platform’s revenues against the threat of the digital giants like Google and Facebook, Travel People has helped Lastminute.com up its annual media revenues by 40% in three years.

As a brand, Lastminute.com started in-housing its own media in 2016, after pausing its relationship with former planning and buying agency Manning Gottlieb OMD. Although Publicis still handles its above-the-line work, it runs its own media desk.

Di Lorenzo explained how having gone through this process itself, Lastminute.com has “experienced the challenges, solved the problems, spotted the opportunities and honed the process,” of setting up shop in-house.

“We realised that we are perfectly placed to de-risk the process for other businesses, and to help move other brands forward by making their marketing activity more efficient, intelligent and relevant,” she added.

“2019 and beyond looks set to be a tough year for marketers. In-housing proven and repeatable marketing activities is a no-brainer for companies wanting to empower their teams to drive powerful and tangible achievements, faster. But – understandably – many don’t know where to start. That’s where Playbook comes in.”

Playbook will work closely with businesses to help them identify opportunities and successfully build the necessary confidence to in-house core marketing capabilities.

This includes deciding what technology providers to work with and how, building an in-house content function, monetising and making better use of data or upskilling internal teams.

The launch from Lastminute.com follows on from a recent ID Comms report that revealed finding talent to bolster in-house media capabilities was cited as one of the top concerns among marketers in 2018.

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from The Drum

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Services key to channel success in big data and analytics

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By James Henderson

Partners building out IT services are best positioned to capitalise in a big data and analytics (BDA) market set to experience double-digit growth in 2019.

That’s according to new IDC findings, which forecasts investment to reach US$189.1 billion globally, representing an increase of 12 per cent over 2018.

Of note to the channel, IT services will be the largest category within the BDA market this year at $77.5 billion, followed by hardware purchases ($23.7 billion) and business services ($20.7 billion).

Collectively, IT and business services will account for more than half of all BDA revenues until 2022, according to IDC.

“Digital transformation is a key driver of BDA spending with executive-level initiatives resulting in deep assessments of current business practices and demands for better, faster, and more comprehensive access to data and related analytics and insights,” said Dan Vesset, group vice president of IDC.

“Enterprises are rearchitecting to meet these demands and investing in modern technology that will enable them to innovate and remain competitive. BDA solutions are at the heart of many of these investments.”

Meanwhile, Vesset said BDA-related software revenues will be $67.2 billion in 2019, with end-user query, reporting, and analysis tools ($13.6 billion) and relational data warehouse management tools ($12.1 billion) being the two largest software categories.

According to IDC, the BDA technology categories that will see the “fastest revenue growth” will be non-relational analytic data stores (34 per cent) and cognitive/AI software platforms (31.4 per cent).

“Big data technologies can be difficult to deploy and manage in a traditional, on premise environment,” added Jessica Goepfert, program vice president of IDC. “Add to that the exponential growth of data and the complexity and cost of scaling these solutions, and one can envision the organisational challenges and headaches.”

However, Goepfert said cloud can help “mitigate some of these hurdles”.

“Cloud’s promise of agility, scale, and flexibility combined with the incredible insights powered by BDA delivers a one-two punch of business benefits, which are helping to accelerate BDA adoption,” Goepfert explained.

“When we look at the opportunity trends for BDA in the cloud, the top three industries for adoption are professional services, personal and consumer services, and media. All three industries are rife with disruption and have high levels of digitisation potential.

“Additionally, we often find many smaller, innovative firms in this space; firms that appreciate the access to technologies that may have historically been out of reach to them either due to cost or IT complexity.”

By James Henderson

Sourced from ARN

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Facebook Is Changing News Feed (Again) to Stop Fake News

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By  and

Facebook is trying to redefine authoritativeness on the internet as part of its efforts to fight the spread of misinformation and abuse on its platforms.

On Wednesday, the company rolled out a slew of announcements that aim to promote more trustworthy news sources, tamp down on Groups that spread misinformation, and give the public more insight into how Facebook crafts its content policies writ large. The changes, broadly, seek to nurture what Facebook refers to as “integrity” on the platform at a time when many users, regulators, and politicians have come to see Facebook and its other apps—WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger—as the chief propagators of propaganda, hate speech, and fake news online.

By far the biggest change to come from these announcements is the introduction of a new metric called Click-Gap, which Facebook’s News Feed algorithms will use to determine where to rank a given post. Click-Gap, which Facebook is launching globally today, is the company’s attempt to limit the spread of websites that are disproportionately popular on Facebook compared with the rest of the web. If Facebook finds that a ton of links to a certain website are appearing on Facebook, but few websites on the broader web are linking to that site, Facebook will use that signal, among others, to limit the website’s reach.

“This can be a sign that the domain is succeeding on News Feed in a way that doesn’t reflect the authority they’ve built outside it and is producing low-quality content,” Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, and Tessa Lyons, head of news feed integrity, wrote in a blog post.

Click-Gap could be bad news for fringe sites that optimize their content to go viral on Facebook. Some of the most popular stories on Facebook come not from mainstream sites that also get lots of traffic from search or directly, but rather from small domains specifically designed to appeal to Facebook’s algorithms.

Experts like Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, have mapped out how social networks, including Facebook and YouTube, acted as amplification services for websites that would otherwise receive little attention online, allowing them to spread propaganda during the 2016 election. Facing backlash for its role in those misinformation campaigns, Facebook revamped its News Feed algorithm last year to prioritize content shared by friends and family over posts from publisher pages. But at least one study of the platform since then suggests that the change rewards engagement, outrage, and division.

For Facebook, pulling off Click-Gap requires the company to map the internet and all of its inbound and outbound links. In that way, it’s similar to the idea that Google’s cofounders had when they first launched their search engine based on a system called Page Rank. That algorithm analyzed linking patterns between websites to determine which ones deserved the most prominence in search. Facebook’s Click-Gap metric is a new spin on that old concept, using links to assess whether Facebook is an accurate reflection of the internet at large.

Such a change is likely to invite even more attacks from Facebook’s critics, particularly Republicans, who have accused the social network for years of stymying free speech on the platform. On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on that very subject. News sites across the web have already seen their Facebook traffic decline over the last year. It’s Facebook’s attempt to reduce the spread of fake news, but it has sparked outrage among the owners of far-right sites, like Gateway Pundit, who allege they’re being disproportionately targeted. It’s possible those sites could see their reach even further diminished by Click-Gap.

In addition to introducing this new metric, Facebook is also turning its attention to Groups, where so much amplification happens. Private or semi-private Groups have exploded in popularity in recent years, in part thanks to a push by Facebook to promote communities. At the same time, they have become petri dishes of misinformation, radicalization, and abuse. Groups are a particularly tricky part of Facebook’s ecosystem, because they are intimate, insular, and often opaque. Because many are secret or closed, when abuse happens, it’s up to members to report it or Facebook’s automated tools to detect it.

Facebook will now take a more punitive approach for administrators of toxic Groups, and will factor in moderator behavior when assessing the health of a group. “When reviewing a group to decide whether or not to take it down, we will look at admin and moderator content violations in that group, including member posts they have approved, as a stronger signal that the group violates our standards,” Rosen and Lyons write.

Facebook will also penalize these Groups for spreading fake news, which doesn’t always violate community standards. In much the same way the platform reduces the reach of sites that get repeatedly dinged by its partner fact-checkers, Facebook will now downgrade the reach of Groups it finds to be constantly sharing links to such sites. That, the company hopes, will make the Groups harder to find.

All Group admins will now get more clarity into actions Facebook takes against their Group, with a feature called Group Quality. This will provide administrators with an overview of the content flagged in the group, removed by Facebook, and designated fake news. Additionally, starting soon, if people leave a group, they’ll have the option to remove past posts, too.1

As part of these announcements, Facebook is also acknowledging a perennial problem, which is that it could never hire or partner with enough human beings to monitor all of the news published on its platform. This has been a drain on some of the news organizations that Facebook partnered with to fact-check false news. Earlier this year, Snopes announced it was leaving the partnership to evaluate “the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services.” Now, Facebook says it will be consulting with academics, journalists, and other groups to sort out new approaches that can adequately address the scope of the problem.

“Our professional fact-checking partners are an important piece of our strategy against misinformation, but they face challenges of scale: There simply aren’t enough professional fact-checkers worldwide and, like all good journalism, fact-checking takes time,” the blog post reads. One possibility Facebook is considering is relying on groups of users for help with fact-checking, a system that would no doubt introduce the possibility for manipulation. In the meantime, Facebook recently began adding what it calls “Trust Indicators” to news stories. These ratings are created by a news consortium called The Trust Project, which assesses news outlets’ credibility based on things like their ethics standards, corrections policies, and ownership.

Finally, starting today, Facebook will begin publishing changes it makes to its community standards, which dictate what is and isn’t allowed on the platform. This is a lengthy, living document, which Facebook is constantly reassessing. Facebook made this document public last year, but until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to track the changes the company makes to it over time.

For all of the announcements Facebook made Wednesday, there’s a lot missing, too. For example, there was no mention of Facebook’s encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp—a glaring omission given Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to merge WhatsApp with Instagram Direct and Messenger. Instagram and Messenger were barely discussed. Facebook did say it has begun limiting the spread of content on Instagram that it deems inappropriate, even if it doesn’t explicitly violate its content policies, but didn’t provide many details.

As for Messenger, Rosen and Lyons said it will now get verification badges and a Context Button, like Facebook has, which offers users more information on the publisher behind each news article. They’re also introducing something called a Forward Indicator, which signals to users that they are receiving a forwarded message. Facebook added this feature on WhatsApp last year, where forwarding has contributed to the spread of massive disinformation campaigns, to dire effect.

All of this comes just a day after Facebook faced Congress to answer for the role it played in spreading the livestreamed mass murder of 50 people in Christchurch, New Zealand in March. After years of scrutiny into how—or whether—it can keep propaganda, abuse, and misleading information off the site, Facebook is finally coming around to the fact that assuming the role of a supposedly neutral platform for so many years has had some not-so-neutral consequences.

Correction: 1:29 pm ET 4/10/2019 An earlier version of this story stated that people who leave Groups can remove old posts starting today. That change will be implemented soon.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By  and

Sourced from WIRED

 

 

 

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Overexposure is making UK consumers ‘apathetic’ towards ads

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By Imogen Watson

A report from Kantar has shown that consumers are suffering from ad fatigue, with bombardment and oversaturation putting the UK ad industry at risk.

The research firm’s Dimensions report, found that almost three quarters (73%) of UK consumers had seen the same ads ‘over and over again’. As a result, just 11% said they ‘enjoyed’ advertising.

Kantar commissioned the report to examine the risks facing the advertising industry as a result of over-targeting. It is based on the findings of 5,000 consumers in five markets with a combined total ad spend of $352bn.

The study found that Brits’ perception of advertising has been tainted by repetitive and obtrusive ads, with more than half (55%) saying they felt ‘apathetic’ towards advertising, an increase of 2% on 2018’s figure. On the flip side, 61% of people conceded they were open to receiving ads relevant to them.

The report also looked into ad-blocking technology, and found use remains steady. Despite this, the study detailed how better content was continuing to pull consumers towards subscription offers with paid-for TV and video services on the rise.

As one of the 58 brands who contributed to the report, Eve Mattresses’ chief marketing officer Cheryl Calverley said: “What you can’t see from data is the damage you might be doing by re-targeting people endlessly with your products.”

On the matter of rebuilding consumer trust, Kantar’s UK chief executive, Mark Inskip said there needed to be: “More responsible use of data across the industry.”

He added: “By adopting an integrated approach, balancing niche targeting capabilities with mass marketing tactics, brands can provide consumers with a helpful, additive experience.”

The findings of the report echo concerns raised by top brand marketers about oversaturation. Back in 2017, P&G’s Marc Prichard warned of the content “crap trap,” and advised brands and agencies to dig themselves out of exposure overload by creating fewer, but better, ads.

Earlier this year, the thinktank Credos and Advertising Association president Keith Weed launched a study that aimed to tackle consumer trust in advertising. It presented similar findings to the recent Kantar report.

For Credos, bombardment of advertising messages was found to be the biggest issue of all the public concerns about advertising and accounts for half of the ‘negatives’ in the search.

By Imogen Watson

Sourced from The Drum

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