Each month Denise Shrivell from MediaScope curates a series of must read articles and insights for the digital media community to help you stay up to date and informed.
– Breaking News & Views from April – make sure you’re across all the local Australian breaking media related news and views through this handy list.
– Programmatic Workflow MediaScape – new MediaScape mapping the flow of a programmatically traded impression between consumer, marketer and publisher.
– The Next Tech Bubble is About to Burst (The Kernel) – “My timer for the bursting of this tech bubble currently stands at nine months. That’s when investors & venture capital markets will stop throwing around billions in Monopoly money, companies without any profits will lose their suspiciously optimistic valuations, and startups will crater. Unicorns will die, skies will fall, and parents’ basements will be resettled”.
– Enlightenment – The New Golden Age of Marketing (GroupM’s Rob Norman) – “The 20th century was the golden age of supply side optimization. Less people, less plant, less energy, less everything. Less, manifestly, was more. From global brands to multi-model vehicle platforms and….television spots, even those that were not especially good, that worked by combining 10% inspiration and 90% repetition.”
– Trust Issues: How Can Publishers Navigate the Opacity of Ad Exchanges (TheMediaBriefing) – “Programmatic trading has a trust problem. The proprietary nature of open ad exchanges means they are, by necessity, an environment in which parts of or the entire process is shrouded in opacity. As a result, the veracity of the transactions is questionable, to the point that there is still no real consensus on how much programmatically bought ad space is fraudulent. One such study at the tail end of 2014 found that over 70 percent of ad impressions being offered on the Financial Times’ website were fraudulent, only ever to be viewed by bots.”
– Confessions of digital ad pioneer John Battelle: We got a lot of grief for the banner ad (Digiday) – “A year and a half after we started HotWired. We brought up the question, should we charge people for the content? And we basically all agreed that was not going to work because people were already paying for their access to the Internet. We just thought that was impossible. And it was having to pay for that that we got the banner ad. We got a lot of grief for that. The first banner had like a 70 percent click-through rate. I think for the time we were right. I think now people are willing to pay, but they have to see the benefit. And the core benefit of a great publication is membership.”
– Utter Doom: The Anniversary – (Bob Garfield – MediaPost) – “Ah. The death rattle. Right on schedule. This was published over the weekend, documenting a drop in U.S. broadcast and cable TV revenue in the first quarter of 2015: Overall TV — all national TV, syndication, local TV, and cable — slipped 1% for March and was down 6% for the first quarter of 2015. For the quarter, local TV spot revenues were down 12%, syndication was off 14%, and local cable ad revenues were up 5%. The 2014 upfront market was down. The 2014 scatter market was down. The 2014 gross ad revenue total was down — from a 2013 number that was also down. Magna Global predicts a 7% decline in the 2015 upfront. The recession has been over for 4 years. But network viewing erodes year after year, and TV watching overall by the most coveted demographics is plummeting. Viewership is remaining stable only in the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation.”
– The future of digital TV advertising, in 5 charts (Digiday) “The dominant players in online video advertising today are YouTube and other short-form content providers. But that won’t last much longer. YouTube and its ilk will lose their lead to companies distributing television programming through “over-the-top” (OTT) connected devices, according to a new report from media research firm The Diffusion Group. That OTT programming is mostly the same long-form content people watch on a traditional TV broadcast — from AMC’s “The Walking Dead” to ESPN’s “SportsCenter” — but served through connected devices such as Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast that enable digital measurement and ad-serving.”
– Every day realities of digital transformation (Which50) “We mostly hear about digital transformation in connection with big changes and disruption on a grand scale — how whole industries will change and the very business models companies are built on will have to change. To a large degree this is what digital transformation is about, but there is another side to it that is just as important: how companies and organisations will handle questions about employees’ access to digital tools and how easy or complicated that access will be.”
– Jumping In bed with Facebook: Smart or desperate? (MondayNote) – “Several major news organizations are said to be in negotiations with Facebook for a hosting deal. This throws the media sphere into an intense debate: Is this a path to prosperity or a dangerous surrender? The digital media odyssey’s latest chapter: According to a March 23rd New York Times article, half a dozen news organizations are currently in discussions with Facebook for a distribution deal. Cited as candidates for the experiment: The NYT itself, but also BuzzFeed, the National Geographic and even Quartz. (No one actually confirmed the information.) Under the putative deal terms, instead of simple links, Facebook would host media contents. In exchange, the media would get a cut of the ad revenue generated by the arrangement.”
– The Mice and Men of the Advertising Industrial Complex – (Andrew Reid – Dentsu-Aegis) – “I’m often held up by the question of advertiser-side programmatic media trading, where an advertiser chooses to invest in their own trading systems. Is it a concern, or more pointedly, an existential threat to the agency business model? Let me answer it this way: if there is a categorical threat, it will appear within an enterprise that falsely calculates an immediate cost-benefit as long-lasting, ignoring the opportunity costs of self-serve in a market that thrives on technology iterations, partnerships and economies of networking, and by extension, economies of scale.”
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