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When your well-meaning mother posts something on Facebook, Snopes is where you go to fact-check.
In fact, one reader was so appreciative of the ability to send her mother links correcting her Facebook posts, she donated to Snopes, according to Chief Operating Officer Vinny Green. He’ll read off some recent notes of gratitude that accompanied donations during this episode of Social Distancing with Friends.
Diversifying revenue through a membership program, ecommerce and tip jar is a relatively new venture that’s part of Snopes’ goal to make its revenue more sustainable and in line with its mission of independence. The site is trying to rely more on readers – and less on advertisers or platforms – to fund its fact checking and its increasing focus on investigative journalism.
But to focus more on consumer revenue, Snopes has also had to improve its ad tech. Early into the pandemic, its team connected with the Washington Post’s Zeus and switched to faster ad tech in order to improve its readers’ experience.
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"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column is written by Philip Inghelbrecht, co-founder and CEO at Tatari.
Facebook has largely weathered most of its criticism unscathed. Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, Facebook’s user base has ballooned to 2.6 billion monthly actives and the stock price is up another 50%.
This time will most likely be different. Facebook knows that it is at the heart of some of the most toxic and divisive discourse in the country, yet it refuses to do much of real significance about it, further exemplified by Mark Zuckerberg’s initial silence. The dollars that power the Facebook engine and helped it overcome past public outcries have had enough of it. Brands such as Unilever, Levi’s and Coca-Cola have joined the StopHateForProfit pledge, withdrawing from the advertising platform and loudly demanding change.
To the extent that Facebook fails to make amends, brands will increasingly reallocate their dollars to other channels, streaming TV being one of them. In this process, they are likely to learn that connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) TV have as much, if not more, to offer than Facebook as many advertisers reach a point of diminishing returns on Facebook.
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Playing Politics
Facebook is considering nixing political advertising this year in the leadup to the 2020 US presidential election, Bloomberg reports. That decision would mark a major change for Facebook, since CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists on the importance of enabling political discourse and outreach on the platform, including in ads. But if Facebook is looking for a respite from the pummeling it’s been receiving from Democrats – ain’t gonna happen. Data-driven advertising pundits on the political left have tried to get Facebook to take a harder line on organic content, such as sham news publishers and misinformation posted by political accounts, rather than just removing paid media capabilities. A political ad ban could actually undercut voter registration and get-out-the-vote operations, while controversial content and shady organic tactics – see coordinated news-sharing across a network of accounts – would still be able to operate.
A TikToking Time Bomb
TikTok’s national security drama is dragging on. In a memo sent on Friday, Amazon asked its employees to delete the app from their phones in order to retain access to Amazon email on their mobile devices, citing unspecified security risks, The Wall Street Journal reports. But an Amazon spokesperson says that the memo was sent in error and there is “no change” in company policy on TikTok. Be that as it may, the memo was clearly written and in the hopper, even if someone over at Amazon had a twitchy trigger finger. Perhaps the memo was drafted because Amazon is getting its ducks in a row for an eventual ban. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday the administration is considering a ban of Chinese social media apps, which he claimed threaten national security. Amazon did not discuss the decision with TikTok, and TikTok said in a statement that it does not understand the decision. “We welcome a dialogue so we can address any issues they may have and enable their team to continue participating in our community,” a spokesperson said.
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Add Bayer to the list of brands pausing paid media on Facebook for the month of July.
The consumer health and pharma giant confirmed the pause with AdExchanger, but declined to share details on whether the move is directly connected to the broader Facebook boycott spearheaded by civil rights groups such as Color of Change, the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League.
“We are humbly doing what we feel is right and not looking for coverage of it,” a spokesperson for Bayer told AdExchanger. “We have serious concerns that Facebook, through its policies, is not promoting a culture of inclusion, equality and respect for all.”
Other pharmaceutical brands have also halted their Facebook ad campaigns in July, including Pfizer, Novartis and AbbVie.
Just under 400 companies are listed on the Stop Hate for Profit website, up from nearly 250 brands that had committed to the Facebook advertising boycott at the start of the month – a campaign spearheaded by civil rights organizations.
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"Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Mario Diez, CEO at Peer39.
Our country is currently gripped by two nation-altering storylines, the likes and scale of which our modern news media has never seen. COVID-19 is so all-encompassing that the story has touched all content verticals since March, extending well beyond the news and health categories to sports, entertainment, finance and business coverage. And since late May, the Black Lives Matter movement has been equally prevalent across online content, ranging from educational pieces, book recommendations and news on peaceful demonstrations to coverage of riots, violence and police brutality.
Many have noted that Zoom was forced through a decade’s worth of innovation in three months after Americans began using it en masse while working from home. The scale at which these twin news cycles have impacted content has forced a similar rate of evolution in the brand suitability conversation.
Buying programmatic ad space within almost any category right now requires moving beyond the outmoded idea of safety and identifying the suitable content that fits the brand. These two massive news cycles – which continue to this day – are rewriting the rules, forcing every brand to reconsider its guidelines and test new brand suitability measures.
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Imari Oliver has treated his career like a video game.
“The goal is to level up and keep reaching new levels,” says Imari, founder and CEO of Bond & Play, a consultancy and holding company for media, tech and entertainment IP with a focus on esports and video gaming.
After realizing that banking wasn’t for him, Imari pivoted into what became a 20-plus-year career in Agency Land with stints at Havas, AKQA, McGarryBowen and Omnicom-owned sparks & honey.
It was while at sparks & honey circa 2014 that Imari, a gamer since childhood – 1980s-era arcade game Defender was one of his first loves – realized that esports was a major opportunity for brands, but no one on Madison Avenue was paying much attention at the time.
“People were playing games, but no one was talking about it,” he says. “It was like the biggest sport you never heard of.”
Imari banged the drum about esports to his clients, which included AT&T and Pepsi, at every opportunity. Today, both brands are big supporters of esports, which plays a major role in their respective marketing strategies.
Although esports audiences and concurrent interest from advertisers have grown rapidly for the past few years, the pandemic has seriously accelerated that momentum. People still crave the return of traditional live sports, but Imari considers esports “the heir apparent.”
But he has some advice for brands: Don’t treat esports as a one-off. “Esports and video games shouldn’t be a box that you check,” he says.
Also in this episode: What agencies need to consider as part of their diversity initiatives, why getting into gaming can’t just be about meeting KPIs, how we’re already living in the “multiverse” and we don’t even know it and that time Imari went to Samurai school in Japan.
Subscribe to AdExchanger's Social Distancing With Friends podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts.
“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant.
Remember all the times that media owners complained about how the majority of advertisers’ budgets end up in the pockets of Google and Facebook?
Today a growing number of global and local advertisers are joining the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign, boycotting Facebook and other social media networks and demanding stricter hate speech policies.
One would think that media owners would feel vindicated and use the controversy to articulate why those budgets would be more wisely spent on quality media. This would be the perfect opportunity to offer advertisers an alternative to the social networks’ quicksand and their (real) brand safety issues.
Instead, media owners have been busy limiting the damages of keyword blocking in the programmatic open marketplace, which has condemned many of them to near irrelevance, stuck among legions of less reputable sites. That programmatic open marketplace is plagued by almost equivalent issues to those suffered by Facebook and social media in general.
The industry finds itself in a catch-22 situation, in which there is a lack of scaled viable alternatives to social media and the programmatic open marketplace. This means that the best advertisers can do is to move their ad spend from hate speech and fake news on Facebook to the murkiness and problems of the open marketplace.
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A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Fighting Up Streams
NBCUniversal will likely launch the streaming subscription service Peacock next week without Roku or Amazon Fire TV distribution deals, CNBC reports. That’s a tough pill to swallow, considering the two platforms own about 70% of the connected TV market. NBCU’s disputes with Roku and Fire TV underline their differing approaches to streaming video strategy. With Roku, the issue is inventory control: Roku wants the right to sell more of Peacock’s ad space than NBCU is willing to give up. Amazon is less greedy for impressions, but insists that Peacock list on Amazon Channels – giving Amazon a cut of subscriptions in perpetuity and disintermediating the direct relationship with subscribers. Disney Plus managed to sign a Fire TV distribution deal without listing on Channels, so there is precedent for horsetrading.
Chinese Wall
ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, is reevaluating its corporate structure as concerns mount about possible national security regulation by the US government. The company might create a new management board for TikTok and establish a headquarters outside of China, Bloomberg reports. TikTok shares an HQ with ByteDance, but its five largest offices are in LA, New York, London, Dublin and Singapore. In addition to national security pressure, the app faces scrutiny from the FTC and child privacy advocates in the United States because of how it handles minors’ data. TikTok, which has been downloaded more than 2 billion times globally, is making moves to distance itself from its Chinese roots, most recently with the high-profile hire of ex-Disney exec Kevin Mayer as CEO.
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In January, Google Chrome said it would phase out third-party cookies over the next two years.
No problem, right? The W3C, which creates common standards for web browsers, will figure out an alternative.
Except, man, it’s certainly taking its sweet time.
Two years might sound like ages but it’s not, when you consider how foundational third-party cookies are to managing identity on the open web. We’re talking about a wholesale pivot here. And ad tech leaders involved in the W3C’s Web Advertising Business Group are frustrated that progress isn’t faster.
This week on The Big Story, we’ll dive into the myriad issues that are cropping up on the road to 2022 – from the Google ads team seemingly ceding their position to the Google Chrome team, to the lack of marketer involvement in key business groups.
Also in this episode, we’ll look at the unique positioning of OTT inventory in Amazon Fire TV. Roku, Hulu and YouTube started earlier, but Amazon has been bringing its coveted data to bear for Fire TV inventory. And it’s positioning the inventory as true premium OTT – none of that longtail stuff advertisers often run against in Roku or the user-generated content they get on YouTube.
Clearly, Fire TV has a lot to offer when it comes to attribution. But that strength can also be a limitation. OTT providers are out there boasting about their ability to capture incremental reach – which doesn’t yet seem to be a selling point for Fire TV.
