No more clickbait, digital marketing pivots to relevance

by | Sep 20, 2016 | 0 comments

By Jacqueline Koch

There are hopeful signs that the web publishing industry is finally waking up to the perils of clickbait and bad online advertisements in general. A look at ad blocking figures alone reveals a sector that has been hitting the snooze alarm for too long.

Clickbait

A 2015 Adobe and PageFair report found 200 million monthly active users have adopted ad-blocking technology globally, costing publishers US$22bn in blocked advertising revenue in 2015. In 2016, the figure is estimated to nearly double to $41.4bn. Hello online content providers! It’s time to embrace the new day.

“Consumers’ tolerance for annoying, disruptive, irrelevant or offensive advertising is waning rapidly,” writes John Murphy, VP of Marketplace Quality at OpenX writes in the Huffington Post.

He urges publishers to take stock of the negative impacts of bad advertising and suggests a new tack: look at the next frontier of digital advertising by embracing ad quality. Digital advertising, he writes, “is at an inflection point where its future hinges on all players in the ecosystem implementing and upholding higher standards for ad quality.”

At this inflection point is a dizzying scramble to shore up revenue streams across global publishing and Murphy’s advice is all but impossible to ignore. Moreover, the shift from desktop to mobile continues its inexorable march forward, shrinking real estate and placing an added premium on space.

Is there a quick fix? No, but there is a common thread: relevance. And it is pushing publishers and ad tech companies alike to abandon the false promise of high click through rates and investigate meaningful forms of engagement, content monetisation strategies and improving ads.

Mea culpa and crawling toward relevance

For many, the mark of a new era was ushered in at the 2015 Guardian’s Changing Media Summit, when Upworthy’s cofounder Peter Koechley issued an apology for the media site’s sensationalised clickbait headlines.

“We sort of unleashed a monster,” Koechley said. “Sorry for that. Sorry we kind of broke the internet last year. I’m excited going forward to say goodbye to clickbait.”

Upworthy, known as an online media juggernaut, suffered a significant drop in traffic in the wake of Facebook’s clickbait crackdown. Moving to a native advertising model, frequently embraced as a friendlier form of advertising, and channeling more resources to video, Upworthy topped 200 million views on Facebook in January.

Clickbait

Koechley’s new tack appeared to have worked: “We will do it by sharing powerful stories that put you in someone else’s shoes to help you see the world in other people’s eyes.” In so many words: We stop tricking you with bombastic headlines.

Including ad tech in the ecosystem

Fast forward to 2016 and media and news organisations continue to discover new ways of monetising content while engaging their consumers. However, the next frontier of digital ads is a two-way street and moving forward cannot rest on online publishers alone. Ad tech companies also have to innovate.

“There’s a fair number of options to monetise content sites,” said Kerstin Gibson, VP and General Manager of Search for Infospace, pointing to Outbrain, Taboola and Google AdSense as examples. “We tested everything out there and there just wasn’t an option that brought together both monetisation and relevancy.”

Gibson pulled back the curtain on Infospace’s recent launch of LinkFuel, a contextual advertising platform that uses content from the entire page to display highly contextually relevant linked search ads from the Bing Network.

Clickbait

“We started out with a product that looked like Outbrain,” Gibson explained, “But our model morphed. We then coupled our search technology with the Bing Network to serve ads that are directly relevant to the content on the page, which ultimately delivers more revenue for publishers.” LinkFuel, Gibson added, is strengthened through intelligence gained from powering 2.2 billion Infospace searches every month to identify the best performing keywords.

According to Gibson, LinkFuel performs best for publishing sites that have deep verticals in health and money, as well as tech, home and auto. “We figured out what works. We see that the terms are more relevant and that is why we can deliver a better user experience.”

It may hurt, but it’s good for you

There will always be a challenge to managing the tension that exists between monetising a limited amount of space, while preserving the user experience. However, in a recent Forbes article, Eric Eichmann, CEO of ad tech firm Criteo, sees the rise of ad blocking as an unexpected win in the publishing industry, specifically for ad tech.

“While this may mean even more consolidation in the future, those companies that are willing to disrupt the status quo of digital advertising by delivering consumer-centric experiences will survive and thrive in a world where consumers hold all the power,” he writes. “And, as online advertising continues to improve and deliver value to consumers, there will no longer be a need to block them.”

Data-driven storytelling: Making sense of facts and figures

by | Sep 6, 2016 | 0 comments

By Janinne Brunyee

 

In today’s fast moving data-driven economy, being “scared of numbers” is becoming a major liability for both readers and writers. However, data also provides a great opportunity to uncover insights, discover connections and move knowledge forward. The challenge then is how to empower writers to tell the stories revealed by data in such a way that an average maths-averse reader can understand and embrace.

 

Maths-anxiety is “a thing”

Maths anxiety has been defined as feelings of “tension and anxiety that interfere with the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in a wide variety of ordinary life and academic situations.” According to a study by researchers at the University of Granada, tension, nervousness, concern, worry, edginess, impatience, confusion, fear and mental block are some of the symptoms of this disorder. For the average person, this means that the very thought of having to interact with numbers makes them queasy.

The power of data

More and more magazines and newspapers, as well as their branded content studios, are recognising the power of using data to identify and tell stories. According to Virtualization and Cloud News, approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. This number will continue to grow as smartphones, tablets, wearable technology and connected homes produce more and more data.

But for journalists and other writers, the data they really want to access is called “open data.” According to the Open Data Handbook, open data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute. But it’s not just for journalists. In March this year, as part of the 2016 International Open Data Day, cities, states and federal agencies tackled some of their biggest issues using data. From school enrolment to international aid distribution to tracking terrorism, the open data community tackled some of the world’s most pressing issues.

Portland, OR-based journalist Lee Van der Voo who is also the managing director of the non-profit journalism organisation InvestigateWest, told The New School’s, Ashawnta Jackson that journalists have come to see data work as an opportunity to do more with less. “Using open data makes us incredibly more efficient in analysing trends. It helps us look for newsworthy patterns in everything from contract spending in state government to budget analysis, and enables us to look very closely at particular data sets, for example traffic stops made by police or accidents on state highway.”

Bringing meaning to data with storytelling

For the many people afflicted with math anxiety, the growth of data-driven journalism may not be music to their ears. What’s more, according to Jennifer Aaker, Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, studies show that we are wired to remember stories much more than data, facts and figures. However, when data and story are used together, she said, audiences are moved both emotionally and intellectually.

In his book, Facts Are Sacred, Simon Rogers suggests that data analysis isn’t about graphics and visualisations; it’s about telling a story. “Look at data the way a detective examines a crime scene. Try to understand what happened and what evidence needs to be collected.” According to Rogers, the visualisation will come naturally once the mystery is solved. The focus is the story.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Jim Stikeleather cautions that done well, a visualisation should tell a story through the graphical depiction of statistical information. “The visualisation needs to tell a story to the audience. Storytelling helps the viewer gain insight from the data,” he said.

Data-driven storytelling done well

During the final week of last November, The Wall Street Journal published an article each day under the title: Our Demographic Destiny. The seven-part series tries to answer the question: What will the world be like in 2050?

Data Storytelling

Topics covered included “The end of cheap labor,” “Gender gap” and “Tastes like chicken,” which explored the challenges food producers face in satisfying the world’s appetite for meat. In addition to a rich narrative describing each trend and the people who are impacted, each article included photographs and visualisations of demographics along with companion anecdotes. Put together, the series helped readers envision how we will work, age and live. Readers who have virtual reality (VR) headsets could even watch embedded VR movies or interact with the content using their keyboard, game-board or mobile device.

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