The pandemic changed how people checked the weather – but the usefulness of a weather forecast never ceased.
“Weather is still a part of our users’ lives, but it’s different,” said AccuWeather President Steven Smith. “We had to adapt, learn from what we’re seeing, and then adapt again.”
Instead of checking a forecast before a morning commute, people were looking for the best time to take a break from working from home to walk their dog or go for a run. Since mid-March, use went up 30% across AccuWeather’s site and mobile app.
And AccuWeather found new ways to be helpful. It created a class, which has since become a summer camp, called AccuWeather School, to enrich kids’ remote learning. And it built a coronavirus tracker, to providing free severe weather updates to outdoor COVID-19 testing sites.
“We are a trusted source for weather and data, but also a trusted source for maps,” said Smith. “And we saw a lot of bad data and bad maps out there. Our tracker was getting over 2 million daily views at its height.”
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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 Andrew Kraft, a principal at AQKraft Advisory Services and a former ad tech executive, most recently at Maven and AppNexus.
Eighteen months ago, well before the recent protests against systemic racism, I was approached by a colleague at Maven about the terms blacklist and whitelist. My colleague was a Black professional – a leader at the company – who, after I had given an internal presentation on our whitelisting and blacklisting strategy, asked me to have the company stop using those particular phrases.
He explained that it didn’t matter that the etymology of the terms had nothing to do with racism. The term blacklist was first used in the early 1600s to describe a list of those who were under suspicion and thus not to be trusted, he explained. But regardless of the words’ origins, my colleague went on to impress upon me the discomfort he felt everyday living in a world where black was equated with bad and white with good.
It reminded me of an iconic BBC interview with Muhammad Ali in 1971 where he recalled that all the positive things he grew up with were white, from White Cloud tissue paper to the White House, while all the negative things, from the bad luck of a black cat to the term blackmail, were black. Nearly 50 years later, that linguistic measuring stick is alive and well.
The conversation changed the way I think of the language we use, for it was then that it truly struck me: Language creates culture far more than culture creates language. The words we use matter.
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"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column by Steven Golus, founder at Steven Golus Consulting, is the second in a series that will present the fundamentals of how TV advertising works and how it is changing.
In our previous article, we discussed pre-upfront presentation activities – how marketers and agencies think about budgeting and goals and how networks formulate their upfront strategy, pricing and yield management. In this column, we will focus on what happens between the upfront agency presentations until the upfront season is closed.
The standard upfront process is going through a transition this year. Given the COVID-19 uncertainty and the movement of consumers and dollars to OTT, the conventional broadcast calendar planning cycle is in question.
And if you think about it, the idea of the upfront is antiquated. The original intent of the upfront was to help automotive manufacturers promote new car models. With the changes in consumer viewing habits and the fragmentation of the video buying marketplace, this process seems ripe for change.
The biggest change being advocated is moving from a broadcast year, which runs from the fourth quarter to Q3 of the following year, to a calendar year to align with other budgeting cycles and allow for more stability during the pandemic. The article will largely focus on the traditional upfront calendar.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Clock’s Ticking
TikTok is beefing up its army of lobbyists after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened to ban the app along with other Chinese social media platforms on Monday. TikTok, which is growing like gangbusters in the United States, is bringing on five lobbyists with experience in privacy, defense and politics to resist scrutiny of its ownership by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, CNBC reports. The Trump administration has been dragging TikTok into its ongoing spat with China since last year, when the US Committee on Foreign Investment began an inquiry into whether TikTok shares data about its users with the Chinese government. And TikTok’s regulatory woes don’t end in the United States: The app was recently banned in India and pulled out of Hong Kong after China imposed its new security law on the city.
Searching For Revenue
Google will take a 7% revenue hit thanks to declining search investments, according to estimates from Needham. The firm lowered its previous forecast, which predicted a 5% revenue hit, after speaking with sources and reviewing similar predictions from eMarketer in June. Google’s revenue will grow 2% to 3% overall for the year, with declines driven by travel, auto, media, entertainment and retail brands, which will remain weak “until COVID-19 is controlled enough that the economy strengthens and consumer demand returns,” Needham analysts said. Consumers are spending less during the crisis, thus lowering advertiser ROI from search, CNBC reports. Plus, Google is losing search share to Amazon as more consumers shop online during the pandemic. These factors amount to a “structural attack against Google’s search product,” the analysts said.
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Consolidation has opened up better measurement solutions in podcasting – and big brands are jumping in.
On Wednesday, Omnicom said it will invest $20 million upfront into podcasts on Spotify in the second half of 2020, The Wall Street Journal first reported. The deal also gives Omnicom access to exclusive and original content globally and the opportunity to develop branded podcasts for clients.
While it’s not unprecedented for advertisers to buy podcasts upfront, it’s the first deal of its kind for Spotify, which has grown its presence in the space majorly since 2019. Early that year Spotify acquired Gimlet and Anchor, followed by Parcast in March. It then bought Bill Simmons’ The Ringer in early 2020, and in May, it inked an exclusive, multiyear licensing deal with podcast juggernaut Joe Rogan.
But it’s not just content that attracted Omnicom to the deal. At CES in January, Spotify launched the ability for brands to dynamically insert ads into podcast streams on original and exclusive shows and measure whether a listener actually heard the ad. That moves podcasting away from the faulty download metric and gives brands a better understanding of ROI – at least within Spotify’s walls.
“The growth in audio in the last couple of years has been impressive,” said Catherine Sullivan, chief investment officer in North America for Omnicom Media Group. “Between content, technology and consumer growth, the ability to make it addressable will be exciting.”
Omnicom previously bought podcasts as particular shows, or to reach an audience through dynamic ad insertion. The agency plans to spend more on podcasts as listening grows, content becomes more accessible and consumption moves to streaming, making listenership and ROI to easier to measure.
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The mobile commerce marketing company Button on Wednesday unveiled a product suite called Evolution, including pilot partners Uber Eats, Groupon and BuzzFeed, with more tools for attribution and personalization.
For some marketers, the word “affiliate” has such a reputation for banality, it’s like Voldemort — nobody wants to hear the name, said Button co-founder and CEO Michael Jaconi.
“But right now there’s a renaissance of innovation happening,” Jaconi said.
Evolution’s new features lets publishers and advertisers target audiences more deliberately, and to use more advanced attribution models to judge results, which are typically last-touch for affiliate networks.
Advertisers could use Evolution to adjust their commissions and pricing based on first-party audience or CRM data, so they don’t have to default to platforms like Google and Facebook where they have more granular controls over targeting, said Bob Glazer, CEO of the affiliate agency Acceleration Partners.
Uber Eats, an Evolution beta partner, used those controls to place higher commissions on lapsed users and other high-value audiences, such as by increasing rates for people who live near restaurants that use the delivery service, while lowering its price for potential users who aren’t served by Uber Eats.
These types of segmentation are common in search, social and programmatic advertising, Glazer said, but affiliate marketers still mostly use a single rate regardless of target audience or publisher context.
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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 Hugo Loriot, partner and managing director at 55.
For the vast majority of marketers who have never visited a GitHub repository, now is the time to do so, because this is where important conversations around the future of biddable media are taking place.
You might think there is no connection between GitHub, where ad tech engineers collaborate on iterations of software codes and the future of audience planning. However, marketers’ 2021 retargeting strategies probably rely on what that unfriendly Git branch says.
This is a problem, because digital marketing questions should not be addressed by engineers only.
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Amobee is making its suite of tools for TV and connected TV planning, targeting and measurement available on a self-serve basis starting Wednesday.
The solution, called TV Amplifier, was first released as a managed service last year.
Automation is needed in an increasingly fragmented media landscape, particularly with streaming consumption rising during the pandemic, said Philip Smolin, Amobee’s chief strategy officer.
“We’re going to see an inflection point soon where a TV amplification strategy goes from a cool, optional add-on to a requirement,” Smolin said. “That’s because media fragmentation is accelerating around TV audiences in general – and even faster because of COVID-19.”
Although traditional TV is still the go-to for mass reach, there are some audiences that buyers simply can’t touch through linear television, said Corey Tolbert, VP of programmatic strategy at Horizon Media. (See: cord cutters, cord shavers and cord nevers.)
Horizon has worked with Amobee since 2016 to help with TV audience amplification across CTV and digital. It used TV Amplifier as a managed service and plans to start tapping into the self-serve option soon.
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This article is sponsored by Experian.
Identifying the right prospects has always been an important first step for any successful marketing campaign, but in the current COVID-19 landscape – and the new normal that will soon follow – it’s crucial to connect with the right audience. The pandemic has created a fluid situation for people, and it’s impacted everyone differently. Marketers need to understand the struggles people are facing and lead with empathy.
But the challenge was the same even before COVID-19. With the proliferation of devices, marketers are facing data fragmentation, siloed data platforms, data freshness and the move toward a cookieless environment – all of which threaten a marketer’s ability to resolve customer identities across devices and platforms, resulting in disjointed campaigns.
For instance, the average household now uses 11 different connected devices, according to a 2019 Deloitte survey. This device proliferation creates disconnected data streams that can wreak havoc on audience-building strategies. As a result, less than 25% of marketers feel comfortable in their ability to manage customer IDs across devices.
In many of the most data-driven consumer markets – such as the auto industry – a lack of proper audience identification can be a costly mistake that wastes valuable budget on consumers who have no intention of leasing or purchasing a vehicle. But more than that, communication to an out-of-market consumer may be perceived as insensitive and potentially ruin a long-term relationship down the road – particularly in the current environment.
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TikTok is graduating into self-serve.
On Tuesday, TikTok made Ads Manager, its self-serve ad platform, globally available in a move that should help usher in more ad budgets, particularly among small and mid-size businesses.
To further woo SMBs, TikTok will donate $100 million in ad credits so that SMBs can promote themselves during the health crisis, the company also said on Wednesday.
Both existing advertisers and SMBs that are new to the platform are eligible to apply for a one-time free ad credit, which tops out at $300 and must be used by the end of the year. TikTok will match any additional spending beyond the $300 credit limit on a dollar-for-dollar basis up to $2,000.
It isn’t hard to see why TikTok would want a slice of the SMB market.
Millions of SMBs spend so much on Facebook, for example, that Facebook still brings in billions of ad dollars despite the advertiser boycott.
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