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What the Advertising Industry Could Learn from Bots

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The application to the advertising industry is so obvious it is like a slap in the face with a wet fish.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Lately, social media has been all about heated exchanges and distribution of fake news. And right in the thick of these skirmishes are Twitter bots. They have certainly earned themselves a bad reputation, tweeting on behalf of politicians and driving troll trains through the media landscape with abandon.

But, not all bots are bad, according to a boffins at USC’s Information Sciences Institute. Computer scientist Emilio Ferrara undertook a large-scale experiment designed to analyse the spread of information on social networks. Ferrara teamed up with some Danish boffins from the Technical University of Denmark to deploy a network of “social bots,” programmed to spread positive messages on Twitter.

“We found that bots can be used to run interventions on social media that trigger or foster good behaviours,” says Ferrara, whose previous research focused on the proliferation of bots in the U.S. election campaign.

But it also revealed another intriguing pattern: information is much more likely to become viral when people are exposed to the same piece of information multiple times through multiple DIFERENT sources. Says Ferrara, “This milestone shatters a long-held belief that ideas spread like an infectious disease, or contagion, with each exposure resulting in the same probability of infection. Now we have seen empirically that when you are exposed to a given piece of information multiple times, your chances of adopting this information increase every time.”

To reach these conclusions, the researchers first developed a dozen positive hashtags, ranging from health tips to fun activities, such as encouraging users to get the flu shot, high-five a stranger and even Photoshop a celebrity’s face onto a turkey at Thanksgiving. Then, they designed a network of 39 bots to deploy these hashtags in a synchronised manner to 25,000 real followers during a four-month period from October to December 2016.

Each bot automatically recorded when a target user retweeted intervention-related content and also each exposure that had taken place prior to retweeting. Several hashtags received more than one hundred retweets and likes. “We also saw that every exposure increased the probability of adoption – there is a cumulative reinforcement effect,” says Ferrara. “It seems there are some cognitive mechanisms that reinforce your likelihood to believe in or adopt a piece of information when it is validated by multiple sources in your social network.”

This mechanism could explain, for example, why you might take one friend’s movie recommendation with a grain of salt. But the probability that you will also see that movie increases cumulatively as each additional friend makes the same recommendation.

This discovery could improve how positive intervention strategies are deployed in social networks in many scenarios, including public health announcements for disease control or emergency management in the wake of a crisis. The common approach is to have one broadcasting entity with many followers. But this study implies that it would be more effective to have multiple, decentralised bots share synchronised content.

Advertisers, mull this over. Bots can be your very best friend.

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Facebook follows Google to enable advertisers to evaluate their campaigns with new cross-platform ad tool

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By Taruka Srivastav.

Facebook has introduced Facebook Cross-Platform Brand Lift in the US and UK which along with Nielsen Total Brand Effect with Lift will help advertisers optimize their Facebook and TV campaigns using actionable results according to a blog post.

The platform will see Facebook will match rival Google which launched Brand Lift for TV some years back in order to help marketers understand how YouTube campaigns can impact metrics such as awareness.

Facebook’s advertising partners who are expanding from digital advertising into cross-media campaigns will be able to leverage Facebook Cross-Platform Brand Lift solution.

Margo Arton, senior director of Ad Effectiveness at BuzzFeed said: “Now that Buzzfeed has begun to diversify our media strategies to include both Television and Digital, having the option to leverage solutions such as Facebook’s Cross-Platform Brand Lift and Nielsen Total Brand Effect with Lift presents a great opportunity.”

“We look forward to using cross-platform brand lift measurement to both receive valuable insights about our multi-media campaign performance in a single reporting surface, and also to optimize campaign elements such as spend and creative across both platforms.”

Facebook cited an example of household brand Shark’s campaign which was deemed a success as measured by Nielsen Total Brand Effect with Lift.

Ajay Kapoor, VP, Digital Transformation & Strategy, SharkNinja said: “We proved that Facebook video ads are a natural complement to TV campaigns. We experienced better brand results among people who saw ads on both versus just TV or Facebook alone. We saw the ‘better together’ impact first-hand. Facebook and TV are powerful individually, but deliver a stronger message to our audience when used in tandem.”

Facebook recently introduced more ways to help marketers re-engage offline audiences.

By Taruka Srivastav

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Facebook exec says focus on mobile helps soften the impact of FMCG giant’s reduced digital spend

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By Shawn Lim.

As the world’s biggest advertisers like Unilever and Proctor & Gamble continue to operate on lower advertising budgets and spend less on media buys in 2017, Facebook believes that putting its faith in mobile advertising will help it ride the storm going into the next year.

Ever since P&G’s top marketer Marc Pritchard announced that the Ariel and Pampers advertiser will review all of its agency contracts and called for more transparency in the media supply chain at the start of year, the advertising industry has seen some major shakeups.

Unilever dropped half of its creative agencies under its employment and reduced spend to $200m, while P&G reduced up to $140m of its ad spend and stopped investing in areas where it was unsafe for its brands, on top of its move to stop targeted ads on Facebook in 2016.

The cutbacks by the FMCG giants were necessary to clean up the supply chain and remove fraudulent inventory, acknowledges William Platt-Higgins, vice president, global client partnerships at Facebook in an interview with The Drum in Singapore, and notes that it is in everybody’s interest that fraud be eliminated from the ecosystem.

“We have seen various marketers and agencies taking a hard stance on this publicly and some clients very surgically try and cut out as much of that as possible. They have done so without any negative impact on their business because the inventory that they are weeding out is actually not good inventory to begin with,” explains Platt-Higgins.

“It won’t be eliminated completely, but I think all the clients that we work with in all regions of the world are focused on reducing fraud as much as they can and getting transparency into the supply chain by using third party verification.”

While Facebook has previously come under fire for reporting miscalculated metrics and for a lack of transparency because of its closed marketplace around its user data, brands and agencies still trust the social media giant, according to Platt-Higgins, which is why all Facebook verticals are growing, including FMCG.

He also accuses critics of being green-eyed about Facebook’s strong, growing partnership with P&G and other big FMCGs, claiming that it is being brought earlier into the creative and strategy planning stages.

“They (Unilever and P&G) are very focused on maximising value for their investments and cleaning up as much of their supply as they can. They are looking to hold all media choices, not just digital media choices accountable,’ says Platt-Higgins.

“One of the things we are starting to hear is the advantage of any digital investment is it is more measurable than traditional offline investments. Digital channels, because they are measurable, the amount of data available on their efficacy and attribution to sales is large.

“What we are seeing from these conversations is ‘It is great that I am holding all my digital investments super accountable, because that is the right thing to do and I want to hold all my other investments as accountable as well’. What you will see increasingly is that investments will flow to media channels that are providing the higher returns of investment and the higher value, and they will recede from those that aren’t.

He also repeats a well-trotted out company line about its closed marketplace, as he says that the Facebook ecosystem does not qualify it as a ‘walled garden’. He explains that people are jealous of the quality of its data and its desire to protect its data, which comes as a result of its commitment to user privacy.

“We certainly hear it (walled gardens) and I don’t think that we would agree with that,” he adds, adding that the requests tend to boil down to various people or entities wanting more data on individuals, which breaches Facebook’s terms of service and the trust that people give when they join.

“That is something that we will and must protect. So that’s our stance on it,” asserts Platt-Higgins.

Quoting a book called ‘How Brands Grow’ by professor Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Platt-Higgins says Sharp’s words inspired Facebook to shift its focus to mobile advertising to cope with the FMCG giants’ lower ad spend and media buys. Sharp wrote that in order for brands to grow they need to bring new users into the franchise, and that consumers are not uniquely loyal to brands and instead tend to shop on a ‘consumer regiment’ of products because of mental and physical availability.

He claims that this approach by Facebook has seen it reach 500,000 households in the Philippines for Nestle’s all-purpose cream product campaign using Facebook and Instagram. While in the UK, 37 FMCG campaigns that made use of its tools drove a 3.7% increase in sales, and of those people buying those products 60% were non-brand buyers. In the US, 200 campaigns on Facebook and Instagram drove an increase in household penetration, bringing new users in 72% of the time.

“Over the last number of years, as people shifted to mobile devices, the concept of both mental and physical availability has changed. If you are in the business of growing your brand, what you need to master is mobile marketing,” says Platt-Higgins.

“This is where we have been spending most of our time. Not only is Facebook and Instagram driving sales, but they are disproportionately driving household penetration and bringing new users in because of mobile.

“In Indonesia or India, where there might be power outages from television, the opportunity to reach people with mobile and bring top-of-mind awareness and mental availability is huge.”

However, Platt-Higgins admits that simply porting assets from television onto mobile does not necessarily work and Facebook is constantly reminding itself that the way people consume content is different. He adds that if a brand is not building for the mobile environment intentionally and with craft, care, seniority, thoughtfulness and senior stakeholder-management stewardship, as well as optimising for mobile, then it is a missed opportunity.

“Brands need to optimise in three areas. One is the reach, where often what we find is that clients have gone too narrow with their reach and that can be a drag on their results. We see that the frequency is not optimised and not reaching people enough or too often. The most important thing is how the creative is being optimised for mobile,” explains Platt-Higgins.

“We spend a lot of time trying to audit and show whether or not the work has been optimised for mobile and if it has, how we can make it even better.

“If we can get those three things right, we find that we can disproportionately drive sales and Facebook has a direct attribution to sales. That is the only equation that people are interested in.”

Platt-Higgins’ advice on mobile certainly carry weight, as a report by eMarketer found that FMCG brands are expected to invest 28% more in mobile advertising in 2017 in the UK.

By Shawn Lim

Sourced from THEDRUM

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More than 600 global brands are advertising on fake news websites—and they don’t seem to care

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By Frédéric Filloux

Storyzy’s business is alerting brands to their presence on fake news sites. By and large, the advertising community’s response is simply appalling.

French startup Storyzy spotted six hundred forty-four brands on questionable sites ranging from hardcore hyper-partisan fake news sites to clickbait venues hosting bogus content with no particular agenda, except making a quick buck.

Storyzy showed me the list of brands that fund the fake news ecosystem, but didn’t want Monday Note to publish it. Never mind. With 600+ advertisers, you can expect many household names to show up. And they do: tech companies, banks, retailers, airlines, cosmetic companies, luxury goods companies, universities, and NGOs. Reputed media brands ended up on hyper-partisan and fake news sites. As shown below, The New York Times was spotted on RealtimePolitics and The Wall Street Journal on America’s Freedom Fighters:

from original
(Monday Note)

While some advertisers know and choose to turn a blind eye, most of the brands feeding the fake news industry do so completely unaware of their complicity.

In fact, they are caught in a combination of negligence and greed from media buyers and the cohort of intermediaries that rule the digital advertising sector.

The real surprise comes from the brands’ reaction once they are notified. Normally, one would expect most of them to take radical measures to notify the chain of intermediaries, such as media buyers or trading desks.

To alert advertisers caught on junk or blatant fake news sites, Storyzy sends them an email with eloquent screenshots attached.

We contacted about 400 brands, says Pierre-Albert Ruquier, marketing director and co-founder of Storyzy. Reaction varies. Some clearly don’t care and don’t even bother to respond. The biggest advertisers usually refer us to their media buying partners. We talk to most of them, even though we are often received coldly. Weirdly enough, we are also sent to large consulting firms that advise big clients on brand safety issues. The vast majority of advertisers don’t know where their ads land. Or choose to ignore it. That’s why when they refer us to their media buying agency these won’t budge. The reason is that almost all campaigns are ROI-based, a field dominated by behavioral targeting and retargeting.

In other words: Most of the brands don’t really care where their ads show up as long as the overall return on investment is fine. “One of the world’s largest hotel chains told us they don’t mind showing up on questionable sites if it is the result of a retargeting process,” which is a convenient way to say that, as long as they can invoke deniability, performance supersedes any damage caused to the brand, or ethical considerations such as fueling a vast network of misinformation. And if by chance the brand does care, they can’t always trust intermediaries whose incentives are tied to the campaign’s financial performance.

Such a combination of deniability and greed is toxic. It explains the millions of dollars that contribute to the well-being of a fake news/junk news system, one that needs not worry about survivability. (Misinformation media are, in addition, super efficient at maximizing bang for their own buck: their production costs are but a tiny fraction of those required for legit sites.)

Storyzy derived its current business from expertise in fact-checking that goes back to 2012. At the time, the startup was called Trooclick; its goal, using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, was detecting false information in financial news.

Five years later, the initial product expanded to a more general quote verification system called Quote Verifier.

Currently, the service is available via a paid-for API (access to the web site, however, is free). This function is at the core of the company’s fake news detection.

According to Ramon Ruti, CTO and co-founder of Storyzy, extracting quotes in a reliable fashion—and being able to find and properly attribute indirect quotes—is complex and requires layers of techniques: sentence splitting to detect misleading sentences boundaries like in certain acronyms; morphosyntactic analysis, to understand the nature of each word; topic and named entities extraction; reported speech extraction, for both direct and indirect speech; and other tweaks to deal with language ambiguity and newswriting imprecision.

Each day, Storyzy collects and sorts 50,000 new quotes in English lifted from 5,000 trusted and untrusted sources. The quote is a quintessential element of journalism—especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. Quotes are also the most often forged and the most hijacked items used by fake news sites. Even if a fake quote can be debunked in a matter of hours, the delay is largely sufficient for broad viral propagation on social nets. Hence the utility of the quote verifier to quickly pinpoint false information. Combined with other “signals,” it proves quite effective at fingering fake news sites.

Quotes also have great value for documentation purposes. Storyzy is currently building a private website for a global media brand to be used by journalists, fact-checkers, and moderators who will verify quotes, attribution, and context; the service will be plugged on the publisher’s CMS to warrant the accuracy of archived quotes.

For its brand safety-related business, Storyzy is just warming up. A few months ago, the company started to provide a list of 750 questionable websites to its customers, and more bad sites are added at a rate of 20~30 a month. Storyzy is also working on a full monitoring service to ensure brand safety—for those who are interested.

Careless advertisers and media buyers’s are actually harmful to everybody:

  • Their negligence supports an information apparatus that is both powerful and dangerous for society at a time where democracy is globally receding.
  • While three-quarters of digital ad money flows to Facebook and Google, every dollar counts for legitimate news outlets which rely on an ever-shrinking slice of advertising.
  • The vast ecosystem of clickbait and fake news sites relies on large volumes of ads carrying ultra-low CPMs. It is a race to the bottom in terms of quality of product promotions—a race that keeps fueling the massive deflation we observed over the recent years.

By Frédéric Filloux

Sourced from Quartz

This post originally appeared at Monday Note.

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What you need to know in advertising today

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BuzzFeed believes that its growing slate of originals are approaching TV territory in terms of audience size and viewer loyalty.

Take the show “Worth It,” which feature two buddies comparing meals at high-end restaurants with cheap alternatives (like $13 ribs versus $225 ribs, or $2 New York pizza slices versus $2,000 pizzas). It’s not uncommon for episodes, which run 12 to 16 minutes, to generate 10 million views on YouTube.

To read more about how BuzzFeed is selling this story in an attempt to get a slice of TV ad budgets, click here.

In other news:

Millions of people are watching Steven Lim, star of the BuzzFeed show ‘Worth It,’ eat his way across the globe. “Worth It,” features Lim and co-star Andrew Ilnyckyj comparing high end menu items like $70 cheesecakes with $4 variations.

People are outraged by a ‘racist’ propaganda video that a Chinese state media agency made about India. The video features a Chinese actor who is shown wearing a turban and a fake brown beard as he recites monosyllabic lines in a mocking Indian English accent.

Nike is under fire for ‘supporting’ Trump. Grassroots advocacy group Courage Campaign  is circulating  a petition calling for the sportswear brand to relocate its flagship Niketown store  from New York City’s Trump Tower and end its financial support for Donald Trump.

Mic has laid off 25 staff as part of a pivot to video. Most of the staffers are from Mic’s news and editorial departments, as the company switches focus to “visual journalism.”

Gab, a social network popular with the alt-right, has raised $1 million through crowdfunding, even as it was booted from Google’s Play Store for hate speech. The company was founded by Andrew Torba, a Trump supporter thrown off the Y Combinator startup program for speaking in a “threatening” way to other founders.

Business Insider spoke with fired Google engineer James Damore, who compared being conservative at the firm to “being gay in the 1950s.”  He also claimed the memo which got him fired “empowered” women.

Hollywood Reporter traces how the Kardashians exploded into the zeitgeist. The stars and producers of the megafranchise reveal how a billion-bollar brand was built.

As Walmart’s e-commerce business grows and it becomes a significant digital player, brands have realized that Walmart.com is a lucrative ad vehicle, reports Digiday. Walmart offers both insertion order-based media buys and programmatic display through Walmart Exchange, a media network the company introduced in 2014.

AT&T lawyers are talking with the Justice Department about terms of its $85B takeover of Time Warner, the Wall Street Journal reports. This suggests that the deal’s success is imminent.

Feature Image Credit: Lara O’Reilly/Business Insider

By 

Sourced from Business Insider UK

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What you need to know in advertising today

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Last month, Apple Music debuted a gritty black-and-white ad featuring country star Brantley Gilbert during a NASCAR race, evoking an unapologetically Americana feel. But Apple’s tone in this ad shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Marketers have been rethinking how they cater to “middle America” in recent months. They are taking guided tours of cities to help them understand people in this consumer group better, and doing research on core middle-America values for their marketing.

To read more about how brands and ad agencies are trying to understand, incorporate, and cater to middle America, click here.

In other news:

Disney is dumping its exclusive Netflix deal in 2019, and launching its own streaming service. The company announced Tuesday that it would launch its own ad-free Disney-branded streaming service (in addition to an ESPN one).

Google’s decisive response to its sexism crisis makes Uber look even more flat-footed. The search giant’s reaction to its employee releasing an anti-diversity memo has been swift, decisive and emphatic, while Uber was slow, dismissive and non-responsive, say branding experts.

Meanwhile, the engineer Google fired over the diversity memo has filed a complaint with federal labor officials. The complaint against Google was filed on Monday according to the National Labor Relations Board website.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s daughter asked if there are biological reasons why fewer women are in tech — here’s how her mom responded.  

Oracle is quietly becoming the most intriguing company in advertising. The company is betting that its acquisition of Moat gives it a leg up on competitors.

An early investor in Facebook and Google has slammed them for ‘aggressive brain hacking.’ Roger McNamee, a famous early investor in Google and Facebook, says he regrets helping to create today’s internet giants because they are hacking our brains to sell more ads.

Walmart has spent more than $18 million on tear-jerking ads to fix its infamous reputation. In recent years, the big-box retailer has been making major efforts to ditch its reputation as an anti-worker company that values profit above all else.

A brief history of the hypocrisy-laden $50 billion plus-size clothing market. Plus-sized fashion has come a long way since Lane Bryant was founded in the early 1900s.

The Association of National Advertisers has released another of its trademark bombshell reports, alleging a number of improper practices in the advertising production sector, the Wall Street Journal reports. Allegations in the latest report range from agencies steering production contracts to their own in-house shops by rigging the bidding process, to agencies receiving incentives for filming in certain locations and not passing those on to clients.

Follow us at @BI_Corporate   to be among the first to hear about news and updates from Business Insider. 

Also, sign up for the Executive Summary , a new biweekly newsletter that brings the latest marketing news, trends, and company updates straight to your inbox.

Feature Image:  Brantley Gilbert in a still from Apple Music’s recent ad Apple    

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Sourced from Business Insider UK

 

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WCRS director of technology and innovation on out of home advertising and how AR has changed the playing field

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By Danielle Gibson–

Out of home (OOH) advertising has been making fast changes and progress over the past few years, especially in the digital space but according to director of technology and innovation at WCRS, Dino Burbidge, there is still space for traditional OOH. Digital is boundless but it is overly misused and sometimes paper and paste get the job done.

Talking to The Drum ahead of his appointment as a judge for the Creative Out Of Home Awards 2017, Burbidge speaks candidly about OOH and how augmented reality (AR) has changed the playing field.

What has been the most innovative thing you have seen from the industry this year?

What has really impressed me is augmented reality. It is fundamentally going to change the game and that is something I rarely say.

As an example, developers have taken Apple’s ARkit and recreated the Ah-Ha Take on Me music video and that was brilliant. Essentially you look through your camera and augment the singer into your world through the camera. AR may start to challenge out of home in their own back yard.

Imagine in 10 years’ time when nobody is really looking through their eyes anymore because they have augmented eyes. All of a sudden you don’t need a billboard anymore because the advert can be mapped onto a building. You’re looking through a camera and augmenting adverts around you. So, in 20 years’ time, media owners who have a big square attached to a building might just seem a bit weird.

What do you think are the key trends right now?

I am seeing a resurgence in effort from creatives to look at the location of a billboard. But it’s happening in hotspots. Many creatives have become used to writing a big line in their ad and make it fit every billboard. Whereas I’m seeing some interesting examples like the one from BBC World Service who did a really good one in America. It was about seeing both sides of the story and therefore they only put their billboards on corner placements so it had two sides to it. They were using the location to benefit the message.

I think mobile interaction is really interesting. OOH can be very much a passive thing. You see it and you walk away. Whereas if you interact with a mobile you can not only control the screen but also an advertiser has the possibly give you something on your phone that you walk away with. So, it’s not a simple transient experience anymore. It helps that we’re seeing the majority of screens becoming internet connected.

How is location tracking and beacons changing OOH?

Quite frankly they’re not. Beacons are only useful in very small cases. I think they are the big white hope that didn’t deliver. They only work if you have an app that can talk to the beacon. Therefore, if you are an Asda customer and you walk past the screen outside Asda then your app can do something, but for everybody else it’s useless.

Where it will become interesting is the new version of the Apple iOS. It has indoor mapping so you can now go onto Apple Maps and it can map somewhere like Gatwick Airport and tell you where all the shops are. It does that through Wi-Fi beacons but only because Apple Maps can read them. I think it will become useful, but beacons specifically, as an agency, we have never needed to use them and they are only a very closed loop experience.

What is the current mood of the industry?

I think it’s really exciting because nobody knows what is possible and that’s the sort of mood I felt when Flash first came along in the industry. The internet was boring, then along came Flash and it attracted creative people and all of a sudden, they started to question things, break things and make awesome things happen.

Nobody quite knows whether you should be tracking somebody’s phone, taking pictures of them in the street and making them the centre of the billboard, making the billboards move or have them augmented with light projections. Nobody quite knows how exciting it should really be.

Where do you see the industry going in the next 12 months?

A lot of the big media owners are updating their screens with internet connections and so on, but they still have the same people or structures in place and don’t know what to do with them. Where I see OOH going in the next year is people getting their head around the possibilities or getting the right people in to make those choices for them. Right now, it’s a very male dominated industry (many of us have grey hair too) and that’s a diversity problem.

How is digital changing OOH?

Paper and paste is still brilliant for certain things if you don’t want it to change and you need it to be low cost, needs no energy and is very environmentally safe. It’s the carpet bombing of advertising, you need to know it’s there.

Digital is great but it is underused. So, when we say digital, what a lot of people do is still deliver the same printout but they just deliver it as a JPEG and it sits there on a big digital screen and it doesn’t move.

I don’t think the creative agencies have really caught up yet with what the possibilities are. You have someone like Clear Channel and Ocean Outdoor putting amazing screens in everywhere, spending a lot of money doing that and then we are essentially delivering creative that doesn’t take full advantage of it.

The main thing about digitisation at the moment, is anything is possible but I don’t think anybody really has the time to engage with it. That has to change.

As a judge for The Drum Creative Out Of Home Awards 2017, what do you want to see from the entries this year?

Simplicity. Agencies can tend to put their practical brain away when they come up with ideas. I want to see people using the location sympathetically and use it with a mischievous twinkle. It needs to tell a beautiful story and make people stop and look at it. I also want to see something commercial. I think too many charities get though because they have less KPIs to worry about. I want to see a beautifully executed commercial project, that you can say was brave and brilliant.

How important do you think these are awards are to the industry?

It crosses the boundary between advertising and creative and OOH which is a different world altogether. We never interact with media owners and OOH is something that is part of what we do. So The Drum getting involved joins the gap.

Feature Image: Dino Burbidge on out of home advertising and how AR has changed the playing field.

By Danielle Gibson

Sourced from The Drum

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VR Ads Are Almost Here. Don’t Act Surprised

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By Elizabeth Stinson

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re inside a virtual reality world. You look to your left and an open door appears, beckoning you to walk through it. You enter and suddenly find yourself in the middle of an advertisement—a branded world you can explore and manipulate. Forget banner ads and auto-playing videos. The advertisement of the future is immersive, almost game like. And it’s nearly here.

Last week, Unity, the world’s largest VR development company, announced Virtual Room, a new type of interactive advertisement it plans to roll out later this year. Unlike the standalone VR marketing experiences you’ve seen before, Virtual Room ads will surface across a wide network of VR apps, similar to the display ads you see on your laptop or the video ads you see while playing games on your phone. Don’t act surprised—you knew this was coming.

Like any new medium, VR must be monetized, says Tony Parisi head of Unity’s VR and AR strategy. “Developers want to make money,” he says. “We want to help them do that.“ Until recently, though, it was unclear how, exactly, that would happen. Most VR developers make cash from micro transactions and in-app purchases, but that’s pennies compared to what advertising can bring in.

Google

To capitalize on the opportunity, other VR companies have already begun exploring what ads might look like in this new medium. In a recent blog post, Google showed off a concept for a floating cube that players can tap or gaze at to start video advertisements—sort of like auto-play, but in VR. The format is simple by design. “VR ad formats should be easy for developers to implement, native to VR, flexible enough to customize, and useful and non-intrusive for users,” writes Aayush Upadhyay and Neel Rao of Google’s Area 120.

Google’s vision nods to the legacy of existing digital advertisements, which many in the ad industry are trying to avoid. “Our hope is that VR creates new opportunities that don’t replicate advertising the way that mobile originally did with repurposed 30-second TV spots,” says Eric John, deputy director of video at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the organization responsible for setting guidelines for web, mobile, and now VR advertisements.

The IAB is working with Unity to build guidelines around Virtual Room, which outline everything from how long an ad should play to how often it should surface. For now, Unity says branded content will be opt in for both developers and players. It will surface for no more than two minutes every hour, and those ads will be highly targeted as to not alienate the person interacting with them. They’ll likely pop up at points of friction—when a player is having trouble or after a level is completed—similar to ads on mobile games and television.

What will change is how the player interacts with advertisements. People won’t passively watch Unity-created ads; they’ll play with them. “Ads are usually linear,” says Julie Shumaker, VP of business development at Unity. “And there’s nothing linear about VR.”

To play to the medium’s strengths, Virtual Rooms will first appear as a floating, glowing door somewhere in the player’s field of vision. Shumaker calls this the Alice in Wonderland effect. “If you choose to enter, you’re going to drop into a completely different experience than the one you were just in,” she says, adding that the experience is meant to be transportive, not jarring. From there, players can explore the branded world for anywhere from 30 seconds if they’re not interacting to 60 seconds or more if Unity’s tracking software detects deep engagement.

For its pilot advertisement, Unity partnered with Lionsgate to craft a Virtual Room for the gory movie Jigsaw that will surface in apps across Unity’s growing VR ad network. Though they haven’t finished the creative content, Shumaker says the goal is to build something that will hit people on a visceral level and engage them just like a VR game engages players.

That’s an appealing sell to advertisers. Creating compelling content that doesn’t feel like an advertisement is one way to avoid audience burnout. Still, developing high caliber content is prohibitively expensive. Shumaker says they haven’t finalized pricing yet, but Virtual Room is going to be a premium product that commands premium rates.

According to a recent report from Forrester, developing a single 360 video ad can cost in the tens of thousands; developing a fully interactive ad could cost upwards of $500,000. “I think a lot of brands will be reluctant to invest in that,” says Thomas Husson, one of the Forrester analysts who authored the report.

For advertisers, the cost might be too high for what’s still essentially an experiment. But Unity has reason to bet on it. There might not be many people using VR headsets today, but if Virtual Room becomes a de facto ad standard in what’s projected to be a growing field, Unity has a lot to gain. Plus, virtual reality offers advertisers one thing that no other medium can accomplish. “You have 100 percent of the audience’s attention,” Shumaker says. In today’s frenzied media landscape, that’s worth a lot.

By Elizabeth Stinson

Sourced from WIRED

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Will marketing agencies always be nothing but sweatshops?

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By Samuel Scott.

There are so many slaves in the marketing industry that we should create an underground railroad beneath all our office buildings.

Following the recent news that the Japanese advertising firm Dentsu has been charged in the suicide of an illegally overworked employee, I collected stories from my own personal experiences, what I have read in the press, and what others have told me or posted online. Identifying specifics and situations have been removed. The anecdotes are from several countries.

But first, I will present data that compares agency and in-house salaries in the PR, advertising, and digital worlds in the UK, US, and Canada. (For those who want more information, the UK recruitment agency Major Players partnered with The Drum to release this 2017 salary report as well.)

The salaries

Public relations

The Works PR and communications recruitment agency in the UK conducts a salary survey every year. Here is part of the 2016 findings:

For the US, I pulled data from PayScale. The chart in the top left corner shows the median nationwide salaries for various job titles at PR agencies. The other boxes are in-house salary details of some of those listed agency jobs:

For Canada, I used the latest data from The Creative Group:

Advertising

For the UK, I could not find side-by-side comparisons of agency and in-house salaries. But I did find the following two data sets for agency positions in the Major Players 2017 salary report:

Here is the corresponding US data from PayScale. The chart in the top left corner shows the median nationwide salaries for various job titles at ad agencies. The other boxes are in-house salary details of some of those listed agency jobs:

A comparison for Canada:

Digital

For the UK, I used a report from The Candidate staffing firm:

US and Canada:

I could not find such side-by-side salary comparisons for digital agencies and in-house jobs in the United States and Canada, but I did find this 2016 agency survey conducted by Moz cofounder Rand Fishkin that includes both countries:

What it means

For most positions in all three countries, the salaries at marketing agencies are moderately to significantly lower than those for in-house positions – especially at the inexperienced end of the spectrum. The ‘gap between the rich and poor’ also seems to be larger within agencies.

However, I can attest from personal experience and stories from others that many agencies effectively give even less than these figures – and that they do it with a straight face.

Public relations

In the PR world, many agencies consist of a few well-paid strategic executives and an army of low-level, underpaid publicists who make countless phone calls and write untold numbers of emails to get as much news coverage as possible. Most are salaried but work so much overtime that they are effectively paid only a couple of pounds, dollars, or euros per hour. Many are students or recent university graduates who are officially – and often illegally – unpaid “interns” who are there only to “learn” and not work.

It’s a huge problem that no one is acknowledging – because the old have always taken advantage of the young.

Agency stress is also higher. Companies take weeks or months to hire and fire in-house staff, but many clients feel that they can change agencies within days. As a result, agency staff are under constant pressure to respond at all hours to multiple ‘bosses’. The young are on the first line of communication from clients and bear the brunt of the workload.

In a case that rattled the entertainment industry and beyond, the US studio Fox Searchlight settled a lawsuit last year from an unpaid intern who argued that he had learned nothing from his work on the film Black Swan and was essentially free labour. (For those in America who think that their rights have been violated, the Huffington Post published a list of tips on how unfairly unpaid interns can get their due wages. Here are the US Department of Labor’s specific rules.)

When any agency advertises openings for interns, the business goal is almost always to get cheap labour. No agency makes money by altruistically devoting time to teaching something to someone who will leave in six months.

Still, the problem does not stop with interns.

Advertising

Take a look at this archived Reddit thread from 2015 on “Why agency people are so unhappy.” Two of the comments summarise the problem well:

“The money just doesn’t make sense to me at this point for the amount of time you have to work sometimes… Most of my peers look at it as more of a long-term game. Low pay up front, but bust your ass long enough, and with a little luck, you’ll never have to worry about money again. That’s a little unrealistic for most of us, but the few optimists I know look at it that way.”

Here is more:

  • An anonymous advertising industry blogger simply called agencies “white collar sweatshops”.
  • MGH Advertising itself once placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal claiming that the ad industry was full of sweatshops (see main image).
  • “Goodvertising” author Thomas Kolster wrote in a column for The Drum that the industry needs to stop the overworking culture and make it fun and worthwhile instead.

The Twitter satire account Adweak, which is as funny as it is truthful, put it perfectly:

Digital

On the digital side of things, the situation is a little different. Online marketers should not be surprised at the low salaries at agencies. People who routinely proclaim that they know multitudes of quick and easy ‘hacks’ have only themselves to blame when their retainers and salaries are hacked down as well. Why should anyone pay a lot of money for someone to do hacks?

Instead of creating long-term, integrated campaigns, digital marketers all too often suffer from short-termism and think about numbers of social media followers, blog spam, and rankings of keywords – and those activities occur with high turnover rates that lead to lower retainers. Of course, the good agencies know that true SEO is a complicated, long-term process – but the constant promotion of ‘hacks’ by hacks is not doing anyone any favours.

So, between ad agencies and digital ones, guess which ones are paid more? Companies often choose to go with digital agencies when they need something done quickly and cheaply.

I do not want to name names, but I know the owner of a digital agency in a certain country with global, well-known clients. I respected the person greatly – until I found out that the owner was paying gross salaries of $18,000 per year to young employees in the agency’s large, metropolitan and expensive city.

A friend of mine who once worked at a ‘content agency’ in a certain country told me this:

“At my content agency, they defended the rights of the client at the expense of the employee. We had very stringent goals on a monthly basis which were impossible to meet. At one point, I had almost 30 blog articles I had to write in one month, many of which were extremely technical and required 2,000 words.

“Days off were allowed, but it was known that they give a really hard time and try to make you work on vacation days. I took off in April to be home with my family. I took one week off after being there almost a year and never even taking a sick day.

“About a week before the vacation, I get called in for a meeting: ‘Congratulations! You have a new client! They only require 12 more articles a month – starting now.’ I was furious. I had told them about my vacation and they never even took it into consideration.

“This is the situation in many agencies. More work is more money and employees are expected to go to all lengths to to get the work done without being included in the conversation in the first place and saying whether or not it’s possible to even accomplish.”

Sweatshops kill agencies

Among my circle of friends in marketing, most of us agree that agencies are places to learn early in one’s career – but that everyone should leave as quickly as possible. Those with talent and ability eventually end up in-house. (Many of us have also sworn never to work for agencies again following the bad experiences.) It’s why sweatshop conditions lead to short-term gain but long-term pain for owners – everyone ends up leaving.

And the agencies have no one but themselves to blame.

In 2016, Farmer & Company chief executive Michael Farmer, a 25-year advertising veteran, published ‘Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies‘, a book that Keenan Beasley summarises in Forbes with this question: “How did America’s darling Mad Men go from rolling in it to barely holding on?”

The answer, according to Farmer, is a combination of outdated compensation models, an inability to measure results, and the pressure to spread themselves too thin. In the Forbes interview, he also says:

“Executives at these large agencies somehow continue to eke out profits through these sweatshop conditions, and they get huge bonuses for doing so. They’re all just praying they retire before the whole system blows up.”

The timer might already be ticking. Two years ago, marketing consultant Mark W. Schaefer cited reports from the Association of National Advertisers and the Society of Digital Agencies to show in the Harvard Business Review that companies are bringing more and more marketing in-house. In the first half of 2017, an increasing number of brands purchased agencies themselves.

Gerry Moira, the retired chairman and UK director of creativity at Havas London, put it more bluntly:

“If I were starting out now, I’d much rather be client-side. It’s the future… Agencies have had their day. They are sweatshops whose output has become so much more prosaic because of social media.”

So, what’s the answer?

Of course, not every agency is like the underground work camp in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Most bosses are not going to rip out hearts and wheel people down into lakes of lava – unless perhaps you work for Meryl Streep’s Anna Wintour-inspired character in The Devil Wears Prada.

But far too many agencies are, in fact, sweatshops.

Agencies typically compete with other agencies and in-house alternatives with either their expertises or their pricing. In other words, they market themselves by saying that they are either better or cheaper. Those that compete based on price are usually sweatshops that deserve to implode more quickly than Lindsey Lohan’s acting career.

Once the sweatshops close, the marketing agencies that remain will deserve to remain and will be those that focus on the one thing that differentiates them: creativity. Agencies need to reassert the value of creativity to get higher fees, and agency employees need to do the same to justify higher salaries.

Creative people get bored easily. It’s why agencies have typically delivered the best ad campaigns. (Just remember that the doomed Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot was created by an in-house ‘content creation arm’, a fact that reveals the results when marketers who do not know advertising are the ones creating the ads.) People who work on a single brand will eventually run out of ideas. The ability to work on multiple accounts keeps the creative juices flowing.

As I discuss as a frequent marketing speaker, the problem is that creativity is being increasingly devalued in the marketing world today. Marketers think more and more about data, automation, and analytics – and, therefore, what typically results in direct-response campaigns.

Just read this eye-rolling column from Jesse Williams of Mindbox Studios:

“Marketing is no longer design, it’s no longer messaging, it’s no longer SEO, or social, or branding. It’s data –  and the rock stars of modern marketing are the ones who can find and interpret that data.”

Unfortunately, this pile of malarkey is what drives a lot of discussion today. Too many people think that they can merely press a couple buttons, insert a few keywords into website metadata, target and track the best individuals, spread blogspam, or write a social media post in a certain way and then the sales will start pouring in.

In response to such drivel, creative staff need to communicate that direct response campaigns are only one tool of many and that a lot of the data is completely wrong anyway.

Creativity can save agencies

Creativity is something that the tech world will never replace – and that creativity is what builds brands and can be used in areas ranging from television to print to social media to email. Creativity is the only advantage that premium agencies can offer because all of the others compete on price and therefore offer a value proposition that is not viable over the long term.

But I guarantee you that some martech person somewhere will soon develop something he will call ‘AI-powered content marketing’. It will purport to use artificial intelligence and real-time analysis of one thing or another to create instant blog posts designed for goals such as ranking in Google search results or maximising conversion rates.

And the posts will be loads of tosh because they will be more boring than Daft Punk’s autotuned-to-death song One More Time. They will do nothing to build brands. Creatives need to remind people that at the end of the day, the brand is the most important thing. It’s the only way that agencies – and the people who work for them – will survive.

Creative agencies of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your existence. Come together to advocate for brand advertising and against the hacks the dominate modern marketing. Show the world the benefits of creativity. Demand higher fees, not lower ones. Pay your workers more, not less.

But will all of this work? I admit that I’m skeptical. As conditions will either remain the same or worsen, I think that we will instead see more unionising along the lines of what boutique consultancy Modern Craft co-founder Randy Siu recently saw in Canada:

Unless agencies can raise their fees to cover the higher salaries that workers deserve, such unionising will merely slow down the approaching agency extinction rather than prevent it.

So, in the meantime, will marketing agencies really ever stop being sweatshops by another name? Sadly, it’s as likely as a bloke building a time machine, going back to the year 2000, and dating all three members of Atomic Kitten at the same time.

But please prove me wrong.

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by Samuel Scott, a global marketing speaker who is a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

By Samuel Scott

The Promotion Fix is a​n ​exclusive biweekly column for The Drum from Samuel Scott, a global keynote marketing speaker who is a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry. Follow him @samueljscott.

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Virtual Reality Shopping is Here — And This is What Consumers Want From it

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Customers want to use VR to design rooms, customise products and shop with friends from across the world. Retailers – get ready for v-commerce, because others are already offering it.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Virtual reality shopping is on the way — and now new data shows how consumers want to use it.

Early tech adopter consumers are eager to use virtual reality technology to:

-Design rooms by visualising furniture and accessories assembled together in virtual “rooms”

-“Trying on” and customising products like jeans and eyeglass frames

-Taking virtual shopping “trips” with friends from across the country or around the world.

Many people said that they would like to use virtual rooms to see how items purchased online would look in their own rooms.

Those are among the key findings of a survey of 1,000 early-adopter consumers by global management consulting firm L.E.K. Consulting. The results show that “v-commerce” – a blend of e-commerce and brick-and-mortar shopping – is nearly here.

Savvy retailers will respond by investing in virtual reality technologies and starting to plan v-commerce strategies. Some, like Alibaba, The Gap, and Sephora have already started down this route.

“V-commerce brings the potential for entirely new shopping experiences and new kinds of added value,” says Dan McKone, Managing Director at L.E.K. “But there are risks for retailers – the initial investment is significant, and there are high costs for getting it wrong. Retailers need to do what they’ve always done – look to their consumers to point the way.”

Retailers are ramping up investment in two kinds of v-commerce technology. Firstly, there is “virtual reality” (VR), where consumers use headsets to enter a completely digital world. Secondly, there is the more-accessible “augmented reality” (AR), where the customer uses their camera-equipped smartphones to get information (such as prices and colour selections) overlaid on a picture of the physical showroom or shopping space.

“For retailers, the appeal is obvious,” says L.E.K. Managing Director Rob Haslehurst. “These technologies are a new way for retailers to do what customers want them to – create compelling shopping experiences and have rich communications with them.”

The L.E.K. survey of 1,000 consumers who had already experienced VR and AR technology was conducted in in the spring of 2017. Among the findings that help point the way for retailers:

  • Eighty percent want to use AR or VR to design a room or physical space by browsing virtual or physical showrooms, getting information about furniture and décor, and “seeing” what it looks like. Retailer Wayfair uses VR showrooms where customers can see a room come together as they fill their basket with products. Lowe’s Holoroom lets customers design a virtual room and then tour the space. Alibaba’s “Buy+” VR app allows consumers to browse and buy from the aisles of a virtual store, no matter where they are in physical space.
  • Seventy percent want to use v-commerce to try on clothes and accessories and to customise them. Consumers can start with an image of themselves on their smartphones, then search for the perfect shade of makeup or an eyeglass frame that perfectly suits them. The Gap and Sephora are already offering these AR applications.
  • Seventy percent are strongly interested in virtual shopping, where consumers use VR headsets to shop in a virtual store with a friend who isn’t physically present, or with an AI “virtual shopper” similar to Alexa or Siri.

V-commerce offers retailers considerable benefits. L.E.K. Managing Director Maria Steingoltz says “It can create new, special experiences that would otherwise not be possible, and that leads to greater consumer engagement. It enables retailers to unify physical and digital channels – brick-and-mortar retailers can bring digital capabilities into the store experience, and online-only retailers can create virtual ‘stores.’ And the rich experience can generate more sales — a customer can ‘see’ a sofa in his or her own living room, and then be shown the cushions, lamps and side tables that go with it.”

Retailers that want to take advantage of the v-commerce opportunity should:

  • Act immediately to make AR and VR a part of their digital strategy. “They’re not far out on the horizon – the time to think about them is now,” says Haslehurst.
  • Establish a compelling value proposition and define the business model. “Make sure customers understand from the first encounter how the technology solves their pain,” says Steingoltz. “And make sure to define the resources, concrete goals, and metrics for the project.”
  • Consider making alliances with technology leaders. “Retailers don’t need to be technology experts,” says Haslehurst. “Look for alliances that provide access to world-class technology and give technology makers a good story to tell.

“The future of v-commerce is still developing — but it’s time for retailers to start investing in it and creating consumer experiences that fill baskets and the revenue pipeline,” Steingoltz says.

 

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