News You Can Use

Maximizing OOH Impact: ARF Event October 30, 2017

• Posted: November 8, 2017

ARF’s Chief Research Officer, Paul Donato, kicked off the half-day event focused on Out of Home (OOH) media. The three key takeaways from the event were:

• Advances in digital signage are expected to accelerate growth of the medium with projections of $10 billion in advertising revenue by 2018.
• A more mobile society is a plus for the industry.
• Innovative tools are expanding the scope of OOH research.

Barry Frey, CEO, DPAA – Notable research advances include “digital detection” services, such as Quividi. The latter can identify the gender, approximate age, and even the mood of those who pass digital OOH screens. Digital OOH is not subject to the issues facing digital advertising to consumers’ devices such as ad blocking, brand safety, fraud, and viewability.

Andy Stevens, SVP, Research & Insights, Clear Channel Outdoor (CCO) – The company’s product, Radar, consists of a planning tool, an attribution tool, and a mobile amplification estimation tool. The geolocation data enable Clear Channel to track people’s routes and generate estimates of the number of people exposed to their billboards.

Sony advertised a promotion for its PlayStation® in an OOH campaign with Clear Channel Outdoor. Consumers who had recently visited electronics stores were identified and billboard locations were selected to maximize reach. The stores that were offering the PlayStation® were geofenced. A consumer was counted as a visitor to a particular store if their mobile device was within the store’s geofenced boundaries for a dwell time of one minute or longer. Campaign results: 35% of those exposed to the 10-day campaign visited one of the geofenced stores, compared to 21% of those not exposed.

Katie Brown, Associate Manager, Advertising and Marketing Intelligence, and Christian DeBonville, Director, Advertising and Marketing Intelligence, ESPN – The sports network has been receiving data from Nielsen’s PPM Panel on out-of-home viewing to ESPN TV programming. These data capture viewing across a spectrum of locations, adding to existing in-home audience levels.

• The lift in viewing is higher for younger people.
• OOH viewing audience is more female than its in-home (36% vs. 28%).
• There is a significantly higher rate of viewership in OOH audience among Hispanic viewers (14.5% vs. 7.3%).

Emma Carrasco, Chief Marketing & Engagement Officer/SVP of Global Strategy, National Geographic & Stephen Freitas, CMO, Outdoor Advertising Association of America – Joel Sartore, a celebrated photographer, has dedicated himself to taking photos of endangered species. To date, he has photographed 7,000! The OAAA partnered with National Geographic to create a campaign around Joel’s work, dubbed “Photo Ark” images.

Photo Ark images appeared on 72,000 out-of-home screens and signs, including street furniture and digital place-based screens, equivalent to $45 million in donated space. By the time the campaign ended, it had reached 50 million people through OOH media.

How Bots and Fake Accounts Work

• Posted: November 8, 2017

Bots have always played a major role in our internet ecosystem, but now more than half of internet traffic consists of bots. Consider this: not all bots are “bad”. Some bots are used to make our search experiences more accurate, but then there are “bad” bots used to spread fake news and similar. These bots make up roughly 28% of internet traffic.

Bots are programmed to perform simple internet tasks repeatedly: You can program a bot to like, share, or comment on something. Fake news perpetrators create fake stories that are often amplified by a network of bots that automatically like, share or comment on the content. Algorithms elevate content that is popular, further amplifying the effect.

The Internet Research Agency is the source of many Russian bots: It employs a large staff to spread fake news and disinformation and has been using bots to spread Russian propaganda for years. But bots don’t just spread fake news — they can create it. Distil Networks, a cybersecurity company that focuses on bot detection and mitigation, says it’s continually warning its digital publishing clients about ways bad bots are used to skew online polls.

Traffic breakdown by visitor type

Sara Fischer. How Bots and Fake Accounts Work. Axios Media Trends.

Hidden Dangers: Trust in a Connected World (an Introduction to Kantar TNS’s Annual Study, Connected Life)

• Posted: November 8, 2017

Companies face a crisis: how can they build and maintain trust in this rapidly-changing world? Drawing from research across 56 countries, 70,000 people, and over 100 in-depth interviews, Kantar TNS presents six of the key trends uncovered by Connected Life and explains what brands need to do about them.

Selected responses on issues of trust in a connect world:

Trust in Technology – “I completely object to the idea of talking to an automated bot on social media, even if it means my question is answered faster.” Globally, 39% Agree, 33% Completely object.

Trust in Data – 40% Globally and 60% in the U.S., agreed with, “I am concerned with the amount of personal information that companies know about me.”

Trust in What I See – 35% Globally agreed with, “Most of the information I see on social media is unreliable.”

Trust with My Money – 64% in China agreed with, “I would prefer to pay for everything with my mobile phone.” But 54% in the U.S. chose the other option, “I don’t want to pay for anything using my mobile phone.”

Click the link below to visit Kantar TNS and fill out a form to receive a PDF summary of the report.
http://connectedlife.tnsglobal.com/

Overexposure, Not Anthem Protests, Blamed for NFL’s Ratings Woes

• Posted: November 8, 2017

Media executives are rallying around an explanation for the National Football League’s declining TV ratings: too much football available in too many places. Total NFL ratings through the first seven weeks have declined 5% compared with last year and about 15% versus the same stretch in 2015, which was a very strong season for the League.

The League’s aggressive media strategy in recent years has led to a flurry of new offerings: an increase of Thursday night games; games available on Verizon mobile phones and Amazon’s streaming service; highlights on the NFL-owned cable channel RedZone and social-media platforms; and full-game replays on an NFL subscription service called GamePass. The fear among TV executives is that this has backfired, devaluing the programming.

Another theory is that the controversy over players protesting during the national anthem has turned off viewers. Yet there is no evidence of a significant red-state boycott, according to data compiled for the The Wall Street Journal by measurement firm Samba TV, which analyzes data from 13.5 million smart TVs across the country. Through seven weeks, the share of TVs tuning in to NFL games was down 8.7% on average in the “red states”, while in “blue states” viewing was down 10%. “The anthem protests have been less a factor than some people have claimed,” said Michael Mulvihill, EVP of Research at Fox.

Joe Flint, Alexandra Bruell, and Amol Sharma. Overexposure, Not Anthem Protests, Blamed for NFL’s Ratings Woes. The Wall Street Journal.

Chart – How Viewer Choices Have Changed

• Posted: November 8, 2017

Presented by Jes Santoro, Head of Sales for Adobe Ad Cloud TV, at the October 2017 ARF event, “OTT: Is TV by Any Other Name Still TV?”, the chart below demonstrates how viewer options from the past 15 years fragment the landscape and shake-up the pre-2000 ecosystem.

The marketplace has fractured

Marketing Today with Alan Hart Episode 67: From the Smurfs to the Olympics to Neuroscience, Horst Stipp has Seen (and Researched) it All

• Posted: November 1, 2017

Alan Hart, Creator & Host, Marketing Today with Alan Hart published a podcast with the ARF’s EVP Research & Innovation Horst Stipp. Hart says: Dr. Stipp’s decades of experience have helped him glean many insights from today’s fragmented media landscape, not the least of which is particularly pertinent in the way consumers today enjoy entertainment programming.

Prior to joining the ARF in 2011, Stipp enjoyed a 40-year career in consumer research for NBC, where his insatiable curiosity led him to do everything from finding ways to optimize the Smurfs to helping the network understand the broad appeal of the Olympics.

Stipp says, “On the one hand, [fragmentation] makes it harder to reach a mass audience. But on the other hand, it also makes it easier to target specific audiences because now there are programs directed at smaller segments of the audience.”

Highlights from this week’s “Marketing Today” podcast include:

• Stipp discusses his 40-plus years at NBC. (1:45)
• Stipp explains the ABC’s of the ARF. (3:30)
• Stipp’s take on the ever-evolving media landscape. (5:22)
• The art and science of media measurement. (11:21)
• “Narrow targeting on the cheap won’t grow your brand.” (15:54)
• Neuroscience in the marketing world. (21:30)

Listen to Marketing Today with Alan Hart Episode 67 at CMO.com.

MPA Introduces Social Media Metric to Track Magazine Engagement

• Posted: November 1, 2017

The MPA, the magazine media trade association, has introduced a new metric to its Magazine Media 360° Social Media Report to compare magazine brands’ social media performance across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. The metric, called the Social Media Engagement Factor, found that audiences are more deeply engaged with magazine brands than non-magazine brands on social media.

The metric is designed to measure audience engagement by comparing the number of social actions (likes, comments, favorites, retweets, repins, sharing) to the number of posts on social media by publishers.

Using this methodology, an average Social Media Engagement Factor is developed for each magazine and non-magazine brand across the four social networks, and a median Engagement Factor is reported by network and content category (such as auto, business and politics).

The report includes social-media statistics for about 200 magazine media brands from 36 companies. The top five magazine brands with the most total likes or followers across social networks were National Geographic Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, Vogue, Time and The Economist.

Sara Guaglione. MPA Introduces Social Media Metric to Track Magazine Engagement. MediaPost.

Cynopsis Interviews Tania Yuki, CEO of Shareablee: Making Social Audience Measurement Add Up

• Posted: November 1, 2017

Cynopsis Interview: What is the biggest obstacle to precise social-audience measurement right now?

Tania Yuki: There’s so much confusion, and we need a single voice to understand what is most important – lack of consensus and currency is killing our industry right now. To get there, researchers must be very transparent about what’s being measured and how it’s calculated so marketers can make the right decisions. Social is so specialized it can sometimes be hard for marketers to know what to ask.

There’s also still a legacy focus of reporting on big numbers, such as fans and followers. The numbers look good, and make us feel good but don’t give us an accurate picture regarding people who care about a company or TV shows. It needs to be the exact representation of what people are focused on and what the real audiences are.

Cynopsis: What can be done to set standards of measurement?

Yuki: Bringing key leaders to the table from the publisher, agency and advertiser side is the place to start – to agree on a currency everyone is comfortable with. We also need to uncouple the performance component from the measurement component. When people talk about social-audience measurement, they ask about ROI. But first you need to learn how to count what you’re getting and then, of what was counted, how good is the information?

Cynopsis: Which metrics matter most, and do they vary from one business to another?

Yuki:  Focus on the quality of the consumer interactions—how loyal are they to this show versus everything else they can spend their time on. Will they share about the show with friends and family? The currency metrics you should be looking at are the unique engaged audiences, and how willing people are to go out to bat for you with their friends and family.

Lynn Leahey. Making Social Audience Measurement Add Up. Cynopsis.

Radio Rules Music Discovery in the U.S.

• Posted: November 1, 2017

According to the 2017 edition of Nielsen’s Music 360 report, 49 percent of U.S. consumers discover new music via FM/AM radio as opposed to just 27 percent who find new music via online music services.

Personal recommendations are also popular when it comes to finding new music, with 40 percent of the respondents relying on friends and family to stay up-to-date. According to the survey results, social media plays a surprisingly small role in music discovery with just 25 percent of the respondents saying they find out about new music on social networks.

Felix Richter. Radio Rules Music Discovery in the U.S. Statista.

Turner Stresses to Industry: Change Now or Get Left Behind

• Posted: November 1, 2017

Turner, together with Fox and Viacom, announced OpenAP, an advanced audience platform that brings a digital buying mindset to television. Its goal is to simplify audience buying for brands, while utilizing a third-party auditor in Accenture.

For Turner, this launch was the culmination of years of work in advanced advertising and further positioned the company as a leader determined to drive strong outcomes for brands. Donna Speciale, president of Turner Ad Sales, shares what this all means for the future of advertising.

Q: Was that the goal of OpenAP – to simplify audience targeting?

A: Yes. The clients asked us to come together. They needed it to be scalable. We can’t revolutionize advertising if we are all working in silos. We needed partners like Fox and Viacom to raise their hands and understand that when this is successful, we and our partners win. Television is a platform—we all own just a piece of it. And it doesn’t stop here. Client input will continue to inform our capabilities and decision-making. It is crucial in the evolution of platforms like OpenAP.

Q: Earlier this month, Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard spoke at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference about the importance of one-to-one marketing, at scale. If this topic is resonating with marketers, why are some hesitant to come on board with audience buying?

A: The why is complex. It’s having more leaders like Marc step forward and push for this level of connection and innovation. And the marketers need to prepare by deepening their understanding of their own target segments, building out the right systems to inform these types of buys, and providing agencies the greenlight to make it happen. At Turner, we need to share more of the ROI wins to better educate the community. We already transformed our entire framework. The people, technology and the systems needed to be overhauled. We invested in that process and have seen huge amounts of value. And through it all, we’ve learned through testing and have since simplified the process for our partners.

Donna Speciale. Change Now or Get Left Behind. AdAge.