/ An inside look at the business of digital content

Monthly Archives: March 2015

Between Consumers, Innovators and Open Internet, FCC Chooses All of the Above

March 19, 2015 DCN

Last week, the FCC released the details of its Net Neutrality order. Looking past the sound bites from both sides of this debate, the FCC appears to have a struck a delicate balance that will ensure consumers can continue to enjoy access to the digital content and experiences they love and, at the same time, preserve the ability of current and future content creators to innovate.

The crux of the order is the ban on blocking, throttling or prioritizing content. Rightfully, the FCC is seeking to preserve consumers’ unfettered access to content or experiences on the Internet. Just as importantly, however, the order also protects the ability of content creators to reach their audience without having to seek the blessing of the ISPs.

In the absence of this order, future content creators might have to pay ISPs just to receive fair treatment of their content or, worse, find themselves shut out in favor of content created by affiliates of the ISP. To be clear, large and established corporations would probably do very well in a world where broadband providers served as gatekeepers of the Internet – the small and game-changing innovators, well, not so much. The FCC should be applauded for going to great lengths to ensure that the consumer experience and content creators are protected.

Another key component of the order is the requirement that a broadband provider provide transparency about “the network management practices, performance, and commercial terms of its broadband Internet access services.” This kind of transparency is vital to helping consumers fully understand the internet services they have purchased and whether they are getting full value. This information is also critical to content creators who need to know that new applications, content and services will operate as expected.

The FCC also declined to waive (or “forebear”) the consumer privacy requirements under Title II although they won’t apply them immediately. Instead, the commission intends to hold a workshop to explore how the Title II privacy provisions should be implemented to protect consumer privacy. As the FCC rightly notes, “broadband providers serve as a necessary conduit for information passing between an Internet user and Internet sites or other Internet users, and are in a position to obtain vast amounts of personal and proprietary information about their customers.” As we’ve written about before, and the FCC agrees, consumer trust is critical to harnessing the full potential of broadband internet services.

We argued in our comments to the FCC last summer that the FCC should focus their work on the consumer experience. With this order, the FCC has taken important steps to encourage investment and innovation in content creation for consumers, and ensure that the Internet is an open platform that supports consumer choice and the open exchange of ideas and information.

DCN-Research | Perspectives

Financial Times Research Shows Context Matters for Digital Advertising

March 18, 2015 DCN

Publishers would have you believe that environment matters more than ever when it comes to the effectiveness of digital advertising. The Financial Times wanted to make this more than a theory. To that end, on March 4^th, 2015 Daniel Rothman, director of marketing and insight at the Financial Times, presented The 2015 Halo Study – new research that set out to test (and prove) that environment matters more than ever in digital advertising. While this is not the first time this type of research has been conducted (i.e., BBC’s Advertising Dress Test, IAB’s VW campaign test, and DCN’s Branding on Display Research), it’s easy to understand the need for regular updates to this research given the constantly evolving digital landscape.

“This research highlights for advertisers the importance and relevance of websites affiliated with traditional media companies and helps educate (in Halo’s case, using neuroscience) how brands are clearly viewed depending on the environment that they appear within,” Rothman said.

The FT study coined and defined the term “Observable Halo Effect”: the subconscious perception that brands that have ad placements next to high-quality content benefit from the “halo” of that publishers brand, creating trust, and positive measures for their brands. The FT research looked at six brands and nine content providers; brands with ads on the more established content providers (FT, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg) garnered significantly higher brand perceptions, or Observable Halo Effect, compared with brands with ads on emerging sites (Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Drudge Report, Twitter and LinkedIn).

Rothman noted that “Commissioning a project such as our FT Halo Study is a significant financial and time commitment. Many brands and even smaller agencies may be unable to make investment into projects such as this. We are happy to share all the findings with all marketers and agencies– and have already begun to do that across the US and UK.”

Additional findings from The 2015 Halo Study:

Not all content providers are equal. Established content providers are more likely to be perceived as high quality, trustworthy, and more prestigious than non-traditional media owners.
You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole. When consumers act like media planners, they place 50% more ads in established content sites compared with emerging sites.
Right environment = implicit added value to a brand. Customers implicitly have a higher perception of the brand and a quicker reaction time indicating the best natural fit with established content providers. The same attributes — especially high quality and trustworthy — are what people look for in new products and services.

After presenting his findings, Rothman moderated a panel of marketers and agency executives to discuss the results. The panelists were Christine Bacon, Head of Advertising at Allianz Global Investors, David Rosenbaum, EVP, Group Account Director – LVMH at Havas and Matt Hickerson, Managing Director, Marketing & Communications at Macquarie Group.

Some takeaways for agencies and marketers from Rothman’s panel:

Ask questions. Before picking content partners, brands must ask themselves:
What is the brand’s DNA?
What are my goals and what am I trying to accomplish?
What is the right audience?
Is the content provider the right environment for my brand?

Brand reputations matter. Brand perception can change based on platforms. Smart brands want to be in smart environments.
Quality over quantity. Brands are looking for quality interaction and will only make an impact if there is the right integration. Being on many different platforms and in front of a myriad of audiences is not always the answer.
Content adjacency is key. Content adjacency problems are an ongoing issue. Brands can mitigate risk with high quality and collaborative briefs that focus on desired goals and outcomes.
Thoroughly evaluate platforms. Well-established brands are not always looking to rush into new environments. And in certain categories (such as financial institutions and luxury products), many choose not to unless there is proven success by similar brands. Brands should properly evaluate each platform they partner with – it’s not always about being the first.

“The Halo Study is an example of the commitment that FT has to providing our clients and the advertisement community at large with unique market insights. One of the advantages of the Financial Times is that we invest significant funds into analytics, which include campaigns performance analytics, brand lift studies, brand tracking studies as well as larger macro industry trend pieces,” said Rothman. While The Halo Study may not repeated for another two to three years, we can expect to see more research from the FT this year, including a study of Opinion Leaders and a Media Engagement study.

Innovation

Forbes Pictures a Social Future for its Apps with Camerama Acquisition

March 17, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director—DCN

Forbes Media has announced the acquisition of the private photo sharing app Camerama. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Effective immediately, the founder of Camerama Salah Akram Zalatimo will join the company as VP of Mobile Products, reporting to Forbes Media Chief Product Officer Lewis D’Vorkin. According to D’Vorkin the move does not signify an interest by Forbes to be in the photo sharing app business. Rather, Zalatimo will assume the responsibility of building on Forbes’ mobile strategy by developing a platform of apps for the company that leverages their core technology and feature set—such as profiling, notification, and sharing–which served as the foundation of Camerama.

According to D’Vorkin, “We have a vision for a platform of niche, or vertical, social apps where we build an experience around passionate members of communities, which is very different from a strategy to develop just another distribution channel for what we already have.” That strategy, says D’Vorkin includes creating an opportunity for like-minded groups of professionals to “discover each other, communicate, and be part of each other’s professional lives under the Forbes umbrella.”

He and Zalatimo discovered that they were like minded when they met socially last year and found that they were interested in each other’s businesses and in exploring the possibility of working on the future of mobile together. D’Vorkin points out that, given its DNA, Forbes is always interested in those with entrepreneurial vision and he admires both Zalatimo’s technological acumen, but also his business savvy and background, which includes stints at McKinsey & Company, Sony Music Entertainment and Bain.

That business savvy will come into play as he develops the Forbes mobile strategy D’Vorkin alluded to. “Advertisers like scale and reach,” he says. “They also like to reach targeted audiences.” With this acquisition, and with the addition of Zalatimo to the Forbes team, D’Vorkin sees a future that will allow his company “the ability to provide scale as well as targeted audiences in a social app setting.”

Industry-Research

How Millennials Get News

March 16, 2015 Research Team—DCN

Millennials consume news and information in strikingly different ways than previous generations, and their paths to discovery are more nuanced and varied than some may have imagined according to a new report by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Among the study’s findings:

While Millennials are highly equipped, it is not true they are constantly connected. More than 90 percent of adults age 18-34 surveyed own smartphones, and half own tablets. But only half (51 percent) say they are online most or all of the day.
Email is the most common digital activity, but news is a significant part of the online lives of Millennials, as well. Fully 69 percent report getting news at least once a day — 40 percent several times a day.
Millennials acquire news for many reasons, which include a fairly even mix of civic motivations (74 percent), problem-solving needs (63 percent), and social factors (67 percent) such as talking about it with friends.
When Millennials want to dig deeper on a subject, search is the dominant method cited by 57 percent (and it is the one cited most often as useful), followed by news sites (23 percent). Only 7 percent cite checking Facebook to learn more.
And when Millennials do dig deeper, the most important qualities that make a destination useful are that they know the source well (57 percent) and that this digital source is transparent and rich with references and links (52 percent).

Read the API’s full report, How Millennials Get News: Inside the habits of America’s first digital generation.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Behind the Scenes of National Geographic’s Killing Jesus Digital Strategy

March 16, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director—DCN

For better or worse, history does have a way of repeating itself. In the case of National Geographic’s “Killing” documentary series—based upon Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s books Killing Lincoln and Killing Kennedy—creating a robust complementary digital experience is a strategy that has worked well in the past, and one National Geographic plans to repeat with the latest addition to the series: Killing Jesus.

The Killing Jesus microsite was created by the Emmy-winning team behind the network’s Live From Space digital experience, the Emmy-nominated team behind Killing Lincoln and the multi-Cannes-Lion-winning team behind Killing Kennedy. National Geographic learned a great deal from creating companion sites for its Kennedy and Lincoln projects—both positive and negative—which factored into the creation of the new site. Besides, as Matt Zymet, executive director of digital media and digital content for National Geographic points out “we don’t want to be a one trick pony.”

In every case, the digital strategy was part of the overall content and marketing planning from inception. “The idea with all of these is to build buzz ahead of time, extend the viewing experience, and create a long tail effect that generates traffic well after the show has aired,” says Zymet. However with the first two in the Killing series, they’d emphasized creating a synchronized second-screen experience during viewing, which they are not doing for Killing Jesus. While National Geographic has been successful with this type of experience for other programming, the sync experience didn’t work nearly as well for these deep historical documentaries, which people wanted to sit back and watch.

That said, as with the earlier documentaries, there were ample opportunities to enhance the audience experience around the subject matter online. The Killing Jesus companion site is designed to give viewers an even deeper dive into the time of Jesus from three key perspectives, each symbolized by a different crown: a crown of thorns representing Jesus and his followers, a crown of laurels representing the Romans led by Pontius Pilate, and a headdress representing the Jewish high priests of the time. This allows visitors to explore every element of the story through each perspective. The site is broken into eight chapters, reflecting pivotal moments in the story of Jesus. Each chapter contains three or four key scenes that can be explored through the three different viewpoints.

Unlike the Kennedy and Lincoln sites, which Zymet points out had the luxury of access to archival photos and footage, the Jesus site required a bit of a rethink on the content approach. Like its predecessors, it includes information about making the film. But “short of building a time machine, we knew we couldn’t do the same thing here.” Besides, through his experience working on other sites for National Geographic programming, such as Brain Games and Live from Space, Zymet knows that a digital experience needs to be reflective of both the programming content, but also the experience that the given audience expects. For Killing Jesus, Zymet says they took a sort of “graphic novel approach” to produce something he thinks of as “The greatest story ever told, through the lens of Rashomon.”

It’s essential, says Zymet, to be authentic to your identity when creating digital experiences. Unlike other networks, which might focus on scripted drama or science fiction, he says “National Geographic it is about packing in a lot of information, folks look to us for that.” So whether it is a question of fascinating “cocktail party facts to discuss or uncovering the amazing hidden parts of the world, we focus on finding the most interesting stuff for our audience.” And the digital experience is an extension of that. In the case of Killing Jesus, the site allows the viewer to explore a wealth of complementary content of interest such as Jesus in popular culture, what Jesus may have looked like as seen through world art, and what happened to the apostles.

This maximizes National Geographic’s investment by creating what Zymet calls “engagement engines.” In this case, the site was designed for the type of people who “stop and read every placard when they visit the Museum of Natural History.” Given that both the Killing Lincoln and Killing sites have generated some of National Geographic’s most remarkable traffic to date, Zymet is confident that Killing Jesus will be successful in building audience for the documentary as well as providing the sort of ongoing education, info-taining experience that National Geographic audiences expect and enjoy.

Killing Jesus premieres on Palm Sunday, March 29, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on National Geographic Channel in the United States, globally in 171 countries in 45 languages and in Spanish on Nat Geo Mundo.

Industry-Research

On-Demand Streaming Audiences Signify Opportunities and Challenges

March 12, 2015 Research Team

According to Nielsen’s newly released Total Audience Report (Q4 2014), consumers’ time and attention around media is in flux. Increased video viewing on digital platforms to both native digital content and TV-produced content, as well as the rise of subscription-based video on-demand (SVOD) across all platforms, are changing the way we look at the consumption of traditional media.

Neilsen finds that increased consumer time and attention creates opportunities for content owners, though the economics in digital remain challenging for all but a few, particularly given the raft of new competitors in the space (they liken it to a “modern day gold rush”).

Nielsen reports that:

Over 40% of U.S. homes had access to an SVOD service as of November 2014, and 13% of homes boasted multiple streaming services. Homes with subscription streaming services have both a penchant for TV-connected technology and, perhaps more importantly, display the greatest usage of these devices—nearly 50 minutes more than a typical TV home.

Homes with subscription streaming services have both a penchant for TV-connected technology and, perhaps more importantly, display the greatest usage of these devices—nearly 50 minutes more than a typical TV home. These homes average 10 more minutes daily watching time-shifted TV and double that in terms of time spent using a multimedia device (such as Apple TV and Roku) than a typical TV home.

New York Times Analysis of the research:
Nielsen Charts Reach of Video Streaming

Perspectives

Building a Business Case for Keeping Comments Sections

March 12, 2015 Mark Glaser, Executive Editor of PBS MediaShift & Idea Lab

There was a time when online comments below stories enhanced and strengthened the stories with added commentary, smart insights and timely corrections from readers. Unfortunately, that only lasted until the first ad hominem attacks came. Then spammers. Then outright harassment.

So publishers are torn between wanting to keep readers engaged (and on the site) or streamlining operations and content so they don’t get pulled down into the swamp of trolls. Lately, publishers such as Re/code, Chicago Sun-Times, Bloomberg and Reuters have eliminated some or all comments. But others, like the New York Times, value reader comments but limit them to certain stories and close them after specified time periods.

The bottom line is that each community is different, with a site like Popular Science wanting to ward off climate-change deniers and a place like Reddit trying to keep things as open as possible. And what fits one business doesn’t fit another. Local news sites typically want more engagement with readers who live in their community, while a wire service like Reuters doesn’t really “live” in any community.

No Comment
There are many reasons to cut comments entirely. A recent study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard found that comments can change readers’ perception of the article. “Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself,” she and her co-author Dietram Scheufele wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed.

Another important reason to kill them is that comments and conversation have moved on to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, where articles are being shared. Thus, publishers begin to question the resources required to moderate comments (The New York Times has 13 moderators) if they don’t pay enough of a dividend.

Dan Colarusso, executive editor for digital at Reuters told me in our recent PBS MediaShift Mediatwits podcast that they hadn’t seen a drop-off in engagement on Reuters after removing comments from news stories. “The normal organic users to our site weren’t engaging,” he said. “It was a fraction of 1% increase in engagement on our site from comments… So we decided to cull them out of there. And our wire service reporters don’t have the time to interact.”

It makes more sense for Reuters.com to keep comments on blog posts and opinion pieces, Colarusso said, because those stories, and their writers, are already associated with providing opinions and personal views. Reuters, as a brand, is not.

Moderate Comments
There are middle grounds, too. The Huffington Post, for example, banned anonymous comments in 2013 and has since instituted a system where readers must log in using their Facebook accounts. Though this has earned mixed reviews from its readers, some of whom don’t like giving personal information to Facebook, it’s proved useful for HuffPost in terms of accountability. “We’ve seen a marked [decrease] in the number of fake accounts in our system. It’s also helped with getting more quality comments and positive conversation as opposed to criticisms or insults,” Huffington Post community director Tim McDonald told Digiday last year.

The Engaging News Project released a study recently that showed that there are ways to increase civility in online comments. If journalists interact with commenters, the tone usually improves. Plus, some publishers such as Gawker do a better job of designing comments to highlight the best ones. And algorithmic systems that automatically flag cursing or spam in comments can help.

In the end, news outlets have to analyze the purpose of their comments to make the business decision that’s right for them. Is the purpose of commenting to encourage a community that fits in with the news organization’s brand? If so, then perhaps keeping a commenting system in-house is a must, so the organization can maintain control of that brand and identity. But if the purpose of comments is to drive engagement back to a news website, then referrals from social media — and therefore, commentary that takes place on social media — might be the best fit.

Or if the point of commenting is to encourage high-level discussions, then perhaps you have to make the process of commenting attractive only to those who really care — like Tablet Magazine’s announcement that it plans to charge would-be commenters.

We’ve seen social media take on so much heat and discussion, but publishers will have to weigh whether they want to improve commenting and discussion on-site or cede another territory to the social giants.

Listen to the whole Mediatwits podcast discussion on online comments here:

Perspectives

Sharethrough Takes A Neuroscience Perspective to Look at Mobile Native Advertising

March 11, 2015 Research Team—DCN

Sharethrough, a software company that enables leading websites and apps to manage their in-feed, native ads, commissioned a study “A Neuroscience Perspective: Asessing Visual Focus, Message Processing & The Ability To Strengthen Associations Through Mobile Native Advertising” from Nielsen to determine how consumers visually process mobile ads. What’s interesting about this particular study is that instead of the usual survey-based research, it applied eye tracking and neuroscience—the study of subconscious reactions in the brain—to mobile advertising.

According to Sharethrough:

Unlike survey-based mobile measurement, which evaluates a consumer’s conscious reactions to ads, neuroscience taps into the brain’s subconscious reactions as well. This is critical: the subconscious is the motivating force behind many of our actions, including which brands we buy from.

To understand the effectiveness of mobile advertising, the study (conducted in accordance with Nielsen’s proprietary methodology) compared native ads and banners, both placed in-feed. Nielsen worked with ﬁve premium advertisers, including Boeing, creating mock ads from similar creative elements that were optimized for each format. Study participants were shown a video simulating the experience of scrolling through an editorial feed. The feed is paused and the participant is shown either a native ad or an in-feed banner. Using a combination of EEG data— measurements of neural activity in the brain—and eye tracking, Nielsen quantiﬁed where and how the participants’ focus was being directed.

Among the key findings, which Sharethrough explores in more detail, are:

Native Ads Appear to Receive Two Times More Visual Focus than Banners
Banners Are Processed Peripherally
Native Ads Are Being Read
Native Ad Headlines Can Be Optimized to Trigger Associations
Brand Assets Impact Brand Resonance Lift

Quartz’ Alice Truong takes a look at the research in her article:
Scientific proof that no one pays attention to banner ads