Publishings Digital Health
Program Areas
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Around the world citizens (link is external) and governments (link is external) are putting efforts toward limiting the marketing of unhealthy foods to children in order to address the growing obesity (link is external) epidemic worldwide. In the US, Congress and the Federal Trade Commission rely on weak self-regulatory industry standards, but under Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the government of Canada wishes to see restrictions placed on the marketing of food and beverages to children. This was a goal written directly into the Health Minister's mandate letter (link is external) signed by Trudeau in October 2017. As a result, Health Canada, the department of the Canadian government with responsibility for national public health, is considering new regulations that would impose broader restrictions on food advertising that is targeted at those under 17. It could cover everything from TV, online and print advertising to product labelling, in-store displays and even end some sponsorships for sports teams. Health Canada's consultations (link is external) on how it should approach restricting advertising of "unhealthy food and beverages" to kids began in June of 2017 and concluded in early August last year. Although a few contributors opposed any attempt to restrict marketing to children, the summary report (link is external) states that "Overall, the proposed approach and supporting evidence for restricting marketing of unhealthy food and beverages to children were well received." The authors of the report point out that the "issue of age was not an area of inquiry," but most contributors supported the idea of including children between 13 and 17 years of age. Aiming to define "unhealthy foods," the consultation proposed to focus on restricting certain nutrients of concern (sodium, sugars, and saturated fats), and most commentators supported setting the stricter threshold option (of 5% ) for the proposed restrictions, which were based on a percentage of daily values (% DV). Commentators strongly preferred that option over the weaker proposal (15% DV). Using the percentage of daily values to define which foods are "healthy" or "unhealthy" relies on the already existing mandatory food labelling for most relevant foods. In addition to the proposal to restrict certain nutrients of concern, the proposed restrictions to the marketing of non-sugar sweeteners to children was also positively received. For the consultation, Health Canada looked at the Quebec ban (link is external) on advertising to children, which has been in place since 1980, and covers any advertising, not just food-related advertising. In that province, companies cannot market unhealthy food to children under 13 years old. Quebec has the lowest obesity rate (link is external) in Canada among children aged six to 11 and the highest rate of fruit and vegetable consumption. The Stop Marketing to Kids Coalition (link is external) (M2K Coalition), which includes the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, the Childhood Obesity Foundation, the Canadian Cancer Society, Diabetes Canada, Dietitians of Canada, and the Quebec Coalition on Weight-Related Problems, supports the so-called Ottawa Principles (link is external). These evidence-based, expert-informed and collaboratively arrived principles call on governments to restrict the commercial marketing of all food and beverages to children and youth age 16 years and younger. Restrictions would include all forms of marketing with the exception of non-commercial marketing for public education. The M2K Coalition has taken this stance because of the complexities associated with defining healthy versus unhealthy food. The ad industry in Canada has some self-regulatory restrictions in place under the Canadian Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (link is external). That program, in which many major food companies are participants, sets out nutrition criteria for products that can be advertised in environments where kids under 12 make up 35 percent or more of the audience. The Association of Canadian Advertisers has criticized Health Canada's proposal as "significantly overbroad," calling it an "outright ban on most food and beverage marketing in Canada." The Canadian advertising initiative has tightened its criteria over time and is now monitoring online advertising more closely. 2016 was the first full year in which participating companies that advertise to kids had to ensure their products met new, tighter limits (link is external) on calories, sugar, sodium and saturated and trans fats. However, in 2017, a study (link is external) from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada called into question how effective this effort has been. It looked at the most popular websites visited by children and teens, and found ads for products high in sugar, salt or fat. During the time that the Canadian government began to explore the right approach to restricting the marketing of unhealthy foods to children, Senator Nancy Greene-Raine introduced a private members bill in the Senate in the fall of 2016, seeking to amend the Food and Drugs Act to prohibit the marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children (Bill S-228). This would put the activities of Health Canada on a legal basis. The Senator amended the bill to reflect the federal government’s proposed approach on raising the age limit to age 16 and under and kept the focus on “unhealthy” food and beverages. Bill S-228, The Child Health Protection Act (link is external), unanimously passed the Senate in September 2017. Two amendments to the bill were introduced during the first hour of debate in the House of Commons in December 2017, which included a reduction in the age of protection to under 13 (from 17) years, and the introduction of a 5-year post-legislation review period. The rationale for the change in the age amendment was to make the bill more likely to withstand a court challenge, given that the Quebec legislation restricting marketing to children under 13 years withstood a legal challenge in the case of Irwin Toy v Quebec (1989). In this case, the Supreme Court of Canada allowed limits on commercial advertising to children under 13 as constitutionally valid. The Court confirmed that "...advertising directed at young children is per se manipulative." (link is external) And so, while the Court found that the restrictions violated the freedom of expression under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a majority of the Court considered this violation to be a justifiable limitation necessary to protect children. For now, the bill is working its way through Parliament. Hopefully, the food industry will not further water down the requirements of the bill. If all goes well, our neighbor to the north will have a law in place by September 2018 that will advance public health and put children's health above the profits of the food industry. --- See attached infographic.
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Press Release
Death of Net Neutrality Will Spur Greater Loss of Digital Privacy, Further Content Consolidation & Control
Statement of Jeff Chester, CDD
The phone and cable lobby will use its new power over the Internet to further erode the privacy rights of Americans. Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon will be entirely free to tap into the data flowing from our mobile devices, PCs, gaming and streaming platforms and set-top boxes. These ISP giants have already built up a formidable (link is external) commercial data gathering and Big Data analytics infrastructure. Now they will expand their gathering of our personal information, inc. financial, health, media use, and also force competitors to share the data they collect. If you want ISPs to give you preferential treatment, content providers will be forced to give up your data, so phone and cable can further expand their ad revenues. Independent and small content companies—including non-commercial and diversely-owned services—will be pressed to consent to terms that favor the digital gatekeepers that control our broadband highway. The FCC’s Net Neutrality decision will trigger a powerful wave of consolidation and deal making that further reduces the range of content and services we should expect in the 21st Century (including for children). We also believe that Google, Facebook and other providers will likely make their peace with the big ISPs, creating a powerful alliance that controls the U.S.’s digital destiny. CDD will be a part of the collaborative work to address this. We urge everyone to also “follow the data” as they examine the digital marketing plans of Verizon, Comcast and AT&T (link is external). There they will find plenty of opportunity to educate the public about our digital future has been placed at great risk. -
Google Brings Big Data Personalized Ad Targeting to TV
Smarter TV Ad Breaks Automatically Optimize Your Ad Break to the Revenue-Maximizing Combination of Ads, Personalized and Relevant for Each Viewer
Google's DoubleClick team October 2017 Opt-Ed piece: I believe that the future of TV is one that’s smarter — that brings together the TV content you love with the seamless experience of digital — on every screen or surface. Building towards that future, at our Partner Leadership Summit in Chicago early this month, we announced several new products and features to DoubleClick for Publishers, made for our TV. Video ad experiences get smarter, live and on-demand, with Dynamic Ad Insertion Over the years, we’ve rebuilt our video platform from the ground up — we knew that TV was a very different experience from the web and we knew that broadcasters had different challenges, infrastructure, distribution partners and content from web publishers. With TV coming to digital, we put our stake in the future of building for a better user experience — one that was connected, always on, and on-demand. Powering dynamic ad insertion has become a leading benefit of our platform. Over the last couple of years, we’ve successfully powered dynamic ad insertion for live streaming and on-demand content for many of the largest news, sports events and episodic premiers. In fact, over the past two years alone we’ve seen a 4X increase in ad impressions delivered via our Dynamic Ad Insertion product by TV partners like CBSi, AMC, Bloomberg, TF1 (link is external) and many more. Smarter TV ad breaks optimize revenue within each pod, programmatically We’re also bringing new updates to a key feature of our platform — smarter TV ad breaks. With this update, ad slots no longer need to be sold as fixed lengths in the break. Smarter TV ad breaks automatically optimize your ad break to the revenue-maximizing combination of ads, personalized and relevant for each viewer. For example, a ninety second ad break can now be filled by two 15-second and two 30-second ads or one 15-second, one 60-second and two 6-second bumper (link is external) ads depending on what will bring you the most revenue. Importantly, we’re able to do this across your programmatic or reservation deals, while respecting your business rules, such as competitive exclusions and frequency capping within the break or stream. Content gets smarter with TV Content Explorer To effectively monetize TV content, you need a platform that can better understand the content you’re monetizing, the audiences engaging with it and serve the right ad in just the right moment no matter where users are consuming it. That’s why we’re launching TV Content Explorer in DoubleClick for Publishers, available in beta by the end of 2017. Leveraging Google’s machine learning expertise and smart heuristics, TV Content Explorer creates and automatically organizes an intuitive catalog of your shows and clips. We analyze millions of signals from video content feeds, automatically applying classifiers and making recommendations for how content should be organized across dimensions like show, genre, trending, dayparts, etc. With this inventory catalog, you’ll get a clearer view of the opportunities and packages available to sell. But that’s not all. To ensure that you aren’t leaving any revenue on the table, the Explorer will also proactively surface deeper insights into audiences and monetization opportunities via insight cards (link is external). We’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible with this feature and are excited to bring even more innovation to this Explorer in the future. --- For the full article, please visit http://bit.ly/2zvJUEk (link is external) -
Google Continues Big Data-Driven Tracking and Analyzing of Individuals for Cross-Device Targeting
Presented by the Google Agency blog "Introducing Ads Data Hub: Next generation insights and reporting"
Mobile has fundamentally changed how we live our lives. With our devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find, watch or buy anything at anytime. That’s why earlier this year we shared (link is external) that we’re developing a new, cloud-based measurement solution for YouTube, designed for a mobile world. Today, we’re announcing the beta for this solution, Ads Data Hub, to help advertisers get more detailed insights from their campaigns across screens while also protecting user privacy. We are also announcing that Ads Data Hub is a solution not just for YouTube, but a tool that offers access to more data and helps unlock actionable insights across Google ad platforms, including the Google Display Network and DoubleClick. And with Ads Data Hub now in beta, we’re expanding who can use it. Built on infrastructure from Google Cloud, including BigQuery (link is external), Ads Data Hub gives advertisers or their preferred measurement partners access to detailed, impression-level data about their media campaigns across devices in a secure, privacy-safe environment. Data from other sources, such as a CRM system or marketing database, can be incorporated as well. With this full view, advertisers or their partners can analyze the data and draw out insights specific to their business. For example, if an e-commerce retailer wants to understand what the path to conversion looks like, they can bring additional online data about their customers into BigQuery, and Ads Data Hub will enable them to combine that data with their ads data so they can see what a typical journey is from first encountering a user until conversion. Consistent with our commitment to privacy (link is external), no user-level data can be removed from the secure Cloud environment. Impression-level data is only accessible for the purposes of analysis and generating insights. In the future, advertisers will be able to act on the insights they get from Ads Data Hub and buy media with greater precision. As an early alpha partner, Omnicom Media Group helped to define the solution and has seen significant value from both the amount of data available through Ads Data Hub and the broad set of analyses and custom queries that are possible. --- For the full blog post, visit http://bit.ly/2yBWYv1 (link is external) -
Google + Ad Industry Study Shows Influencers on YouTube Sell Snacks, Toys, Alcohol
Illustrates Need for 21st Consumer Safeguards for Unfair/Deceptive Marketing
Sanjay Nazerali, Chief Strategist of Carat, a global media market leader in digital media, writes about how YouTube influencers are rewriting the marketing rulebook. Working in strategy at one of the world’s largest media agencies, I’ve witnessed countless pitches about influencer marketing and the growing power of creators. With engaged audiences in the millions and passionate fans hungry for content, YouTube creators are already an established channel for brands looking to run ads. In fact, Carat’s latest analysis suggests online video investment (including YouTube) can be increased by 3X compared to planned level. But increasingly, these influencers are also becoming attractive partners for deeper collaborations. Clients are initially enthusiastic, assuming this is the digital age’s answer to celebrity marketing and endorsement. Then the thorny business questions arise, such as: So what’s it actually doing for my brand? Do I do an endorsement or product placement—or what? Isn’t it just for millennials, beauty brands, and makeup tutorials? These have always been tough questions to answer. Even though almost everyone has been jumping on the influencer bandwagon, few understand what “influence” really is or how it works. Until now. Celebrity marketing and influencer marketing offer fundamentally different benefits for brands. Together with YouTube and Nielsen, my team analyzed the results of hundreds of brand and creator videos in the U.S. and the U.K to understand the impact of influencers for brands. It’s a critical first step in establishing a business-led rulebook for this new world—and it’s already changing how I approach my own plans. 1. Influencers are not the same as celebrities Influencers, however vast their reach, are absolutely not “today’s celebrities,” and celebrity marketing and influencer marketing offer fundamentally different benefits for brands. For instance, we found that celebrities are more effective at driving recall than creators (84% versus 73%). Given that a celebrity’s job is to be famous and memorable, that makes sense. Where YouTube creators really start to gain the upper hand is in deeper brand involvement. Brand familiarity is a good example. If we want to get an audience to really understand us, our work, our values, or our products, then collaborations with YouTube creators are 4X more effective at driving lift in brand familiarity than those with celebrities. When it comes to purchase intent, it’s an even match: our research found that influencers were just as likely as celebrities to drive buying decisions. Influencer marketing appears to play a fundamentally more pragmatic role. Why? My hunch is that it’s because fans feel very connected to the YouTubers they love. The best creators have formed authentic bonds with their fans, which means fans trust what they have to say, and turn to them for brand and product recommendations. 2. It’s not just a ‘beauty’ thing Beauty brands were one of the first to team up with influencers, and creators have established a huge presence among the YouTube beauty community. About 86% of the top 200 beauty videos on YouTube were made by creators rather than professionals or brands. But what’s interesting about our findings is just how far influencers stretch beyond the beauty category. We tested nine additional categories, including auto, alcohol, snacks, and toys. Across all nine categories, working with influencers leads to lifts in brand metrics, from familiarity to affinity to recommendation. In some categories, such as snacks and alcohol, they can have even more impact, driving significantly higher than average purchase intent. So the idea that influencer marketing is purely for young people who are looking at fashion and beauty brands simply isn’t true. 3. The ‘how’ matters as much as the ‘who’ Celebrity marketing has historically focused on endorsement, sponsorship, and product placement. Influencer marketing has developed far more options, and it’s important to understand which of these work best—and for which marketing goals. Deep thematic integrations with creators stand out as driving the highest results for brands. These are more involved integrations where the influencer plays a role in creating a piece of content – such as a demo – with the brand. It’s far deeper than product placement and it works more effectively. While there were many consistencies across categories, we also saw some nuances, which are important for clients to understand. We found that simpler brand integrations, like a product endorsement or just featuring a creator in an ad, also showed positive results for brand affinity in all categories tested. Of course, deep collaborations can be more than some brands are ready for. For some objectives and categories, simply running their own ads on YouTube creator content will still be the easiest and most effective way to tap into the power of these influencers. 4. Don’t lose sight of why people love YouTubers We often assume that the right influencer is either an aspirational version of our target audience or that they’re just like celebrities. Neither of these assumptions is correct, and it’s perhaps here that celebrity and influencer marketing differ the most. Whereas celebrities need to be trendy and stylish, consumers expect creators to be friendly, funny, and, yes, sometimes irreverent. Irreverence is interesting, because it drives credibility. Irreverence strongly suggests independence, and it’s this that builds trust. It can also be incredibly valuable for brands. If a creator usually ridicules things they don’t like, you can be sure that when they praise something, they mean it. Humour is also interesting, because it reflects a sense of community. YouTube helps forge a special relationship between followers and influencers, one that reflects a sense of co-ownership. This familiarity creates a degree of intimacy that makes the use of humour seem much more natural than it would do with celebrities. This is probably also why we see celebrities, such as Dwayne Johnson, increase their influencer scores when they get really active on YouTube. Prioritization and strength of attributes by gen X and gen Y associated with celebrities are different to creators. --- For the full article, visit http://bit.ly/2z6MHng (link is external) Is it Hype? Or is it Real? Decoding the Influence of YouTube Influencers Read more at http://newyork.advertisingweek.com/CALENDAR/-google-seminar-2017-09-26-1... (link is external) -
Leading radio streaming service Pandora partners with Oracle Data Cloud (link is external) on two important measurement initiatives: a custom offline sales meta-test of consumer packaged goods (CPG) campaigns and automotive Buy Through Rate (BTR) measurement. Connecting online ad exposure to offline sales requires billions of data points. Massive scale is crucial. With more than 76 million logged-in listeners per month, 1 billion data signals every day, and cross-platform reach, Pandora is uniquely positioned to provide our advertisers with the crucial data they need. In both the CPG and Auto studies, Pandora‘s listener data was matched anonymously, one-to-one with Oracle Data Cloud user-level data set. Pandora’s cross-platform media was then connected with offline transactional consumer data from the Oracle Data Cloud. For marketers, being able to accurately measure a campaign’s impact on in-store sales truly is the holy grail. With 67% of the buyer’s journey (link is external) happening online, digital marketing has never been more directly connected to offline sales. It’s also the thing that keeps marketers awake at night and a challenge that here at Pandora, we’ve taken to heart. Campaign-level sales insights are equally important for automotive marketers as their CPG counterparts. Yet, auto purchase cycles are even longer and more complex, making sales attribution a struggle. Pandora is proud to lead the charge in this space and is the first non-endemic publisher to leverage Oracle Data Cloud Buy Through Rate at a raw impression/user level, exposing detailed and granular campaign-level insights. --- For more information, visit http://bit.ly/2g3Ic5u (link is external)
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Learn more about Krux’s data management platform solution ‘marrying human insight and machine learning’. People are unique, from their different characteristics to preferences to behaviors. People engage with brands in infinitely different ways, and they certainly don't fit neatly into standard audience personas. More granular and dynamic audience segments can be discovered and defined through Salesforce DMP machine learning capabilities powered by Einstein. Salesforce DMP Machine-Discovered Segments deliver: Machine-learning algorithms that detect similarity and correlation between users to find hidden patterns and behaviors Prescriptive audience recommendations based on all data sources Unique audience personas that differentiate and augment the value of your first-party data Intelligently targeted and personalized engagement Complete analysis and actionable data to discover, activate, and measure Key Features include: Programmatic Attribution Modeling: Smart insights for smart ad buys and activation across all screens, channels and systems. Turnkey Lookalike Modeling: Audience expansion in which you control the tradeoff between reach and similarity, without reliance on external black box providers. Restricted Data Leasing: Safe, supervised data flow to authorized partners according to times, terms and conditions of your choosing with automated tools for auditing and verification. --- For more information, visit http://bit.ly/2xghY5Y (link is external)
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Learn more the Audience Center 360, a Google analytic solutions data management platform that helps brands make strong decisions based on a complete understanding of their audience insights, and create relevant and engaging experiences across the entire customer journey. --- For more information visit, http://bit.ly/2xSzX6a (link is external)
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Blog
Big Data Turns Your TV into Powerful Digital Spy
Simulmedia, Oracle Data Cloud Partnership Aims to Bring Data-Driven Ad Targeting to Linear TV Networks
Targeted TV ad company Simulmedia is partnering with Oracle Data Cloud, a data service company, to target advertisements to consumers based on their in-store purchases. Data-driven advertising is picking up in the linear TV world as cable companies look to cash in on the big data trends that digital platforms base their decisions on already. The data that Oracle Data Cloud is providing via Simulmedia is worth more than $3 trillion in household-level purchase data, according to the announcement (link is external). Simulmedia’s “VAMOS” platform creates data-driven audiences, predicts viewership of the audiences, builds optimized performance-based media plans and reports on media delivery and outcomes. “Bringing Oracle Data Cloud’s purchase-based audiences to national television is a defining moment in the transformation of TV to a data-driven, audience targeted business,” said Dave Morgan, founder and CEO of Simulmedia, in a statement. “By using Simulmedia’s VAMOS platform to precision target Oracle audiences on national TV, brands can align their audience strategies across TV and digital and improve the overall ROI of their advertising spend.” Joe Kyriakoza, vice president-general manager for automotive and TV for Oracle Data Cloud, told MediaPost (link is external)Thursday that this is the first announced partnership in the TV space—though for years the company has already been targeting ads this way in digital. Simulmedia claimed that advertisers will receive an average of between 30% and 100% higher ROI for every campaign. Oracle Data Cloud’s audience numbers quantifying offline transactions are aggregated through data from Oracle’s relationship with Visa Advertising Solutions and DLX Auto audiences, powered by Polk from IHS Markit. Marketers will also be able to deliver ad campaigns to syndicated and custom audience segments from Oracle’s BlueKai Marketplace, as well as onboard their custom CRM and other first-party data. --- For the full article, visit http://bit.ly/2xCxIlD (link is external) -
Blog
Consorting With the Frenemy: Ad Tech Players Partner For Shared Identity Matching
AdWeek article written by James Hercher
Seven independent ad tech companies debuted a programmatic consortium on Thursday that pools their supply- and demand-side cookie IDs into one shared identity asset. The consortium is helmed by AppNexus, MediaMath and LiveRamp, which provides the data matching. Other launch partners include Index Exchange, Rocket Fuel, LiveIntent and OpenX. And it’s a shot across the bow of Facebook and Google, which suck in a majority of digital ad dollars. “The big giants have had an advantage over the open internet in that they have their own deterministic identities for users that allows more precise targeting and cross-device matching,” said AppNexus product VP Patrick McCarthy. Ad tech platforms like AppNexus, Index Exchange and OpenX have the combined online reach marketers want, McCarthy said, but an advertiser must match its data against each platform independently and use LiveRamp to create one-to-one matches. “A universal cookie ID eliminates all the user syncing that goes on between platforms and the lower match rate that necessarily goes with it,” he said. While Google and Facebook have users who contribute deterministic data, the newly formed ad tech consortium can apply first-party data from advertisers and logged-in data from publishers. Marketers and supply sources who are a part of the consortium will access for free the shared cookie pool. LiveRamp’s cross-device graph IdentityLink can be extended to the campaigns, but LiveRamp is still considering commercial terms for ad buyers who want to add a cross-device matching component, company CMO Jeff Smith told AdExchanger. The lack of a unique identifier to date has been one of the biggest factors in fueling concerns around transparency, fairness and control in the digital advertising ecosystem For now, though, any marketer who wants to take advantage of the consortium’s cross-device offering must be a LiveRamp IdentityLink customer. Smith is acutely aware that LiveRamp gains a new business funnel, noting that onboarding potential consortium partners is “definitely is a benefit for us.” “And hopefully the broader benefit is if everyone standardizes around a common identity, the value and efficiency of their marketing will go up,” he added. While the DSPs and SSPs in the consortium may not view it as a new business play, “there certainly will be benefits” that could lead to budget and supply-source consolidation, said MediaMath product VP Philipp Tsipman. For instance, a European video supplier working with MediaMath on a campaign could match its viewers one-to-one with MediaMath’s cookie pool. If that relationship were to occur through the consortium, the match rates would be higher and the profiles would be more robust, since suppliers across the web are contributing data as well. AppNexus’s McCarthy said the system doesn’t cut off buyers from suppliers that don’t use the consortium, but “they will get better matching and better results, so it could naturally funnel more budgets to suppliers that participate.” The market needs “a unique identifier that is neutral,” said OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan in a statement about joining the consortium. “The lack of a unique identifier to date has been one of the biggest factors in fueling concerns around transparency, fairness and control in the digital advertising ecosystem.” --- For the full article, please visit http://bit.ly/2fLZtAB (link is external)