- WSJ: Apple’s Tim Cook Skewers Those Who Don’t Protect Privacy (2 min read)
- Ad Age: Tensions Run High as Advertisers, Publishers Discuss Fraud at IAB Meeting (2 min read)
- MediaLink: Currency in an Attention Economy (3 min read)
- The Verge: Google adds fact-checked medical information to search (2 min read)
- Seth Godin: Is Google making the web stupid? (4 min read)
- Ars Technica: AT&T charges $29 more for gigabit fiber that doesn’t watch your Web browsing (3 min read)
- Nick Denton: Of course a brand can be your friend (7 min read)
Category results for "Perspectives"
DCN’s Recommended Reading: Week of February 19, 2015
The Next Chapter from Code/Media
They were the perfect foils: Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer of Facebook followed by Nick Denton, CEO of Gawker. After dinner on day one of Code/Media, host Peter Kafka interviewed Cox and Denton in a brilliant bit of programming, which juxtaposed these two viewpoints:
Cox represented the evil platform intent upon vacuuming up all data, content and humanity to maximize clicks by us, the “human” robots, to support Facebook’s almighty quest for shareholder growth.
Denton represented the modern-day media czar who candidly–even caustically–fights off the controls of the platforms to protect the sustainable, independent voice for the future.
The problem was that I believed everything they both said.
While original content creators have had a love/hate relationship with Facebook for many years, there was no denying Cox’s eloquence in expressing Facebook’s current ambition to provide better consumer content experiences, particularly on mobile, by hosting content on Facebook rather than on publishers’ own sites. He deftly answered Kafka’s pointed questions about Facebook’s News Feed changes, publisher relationships and user experience decisions like auto-playing video.
To be fair, DCN has cautioned our members about putting too many eggs in one gigantic Facebook basket. And I’ve long rejected the assertion that Facebook algorithms are “neutral” (ultimately humans are behind the math) and I’ve been an active critic of Facebook’s policies around ubiquitous data collection, publisher distribution decisions.
But I can’t deny that Cox was the most authentic speaker I’ve ever seen from Facebook. As a rule, Facebook speakers usually leave me feeling a bit disappointed; like I’ve received the corporate playbook. But Kafka didn’t throw a lot of softballs Cox’s way and Cox wasn’t ducking.
I witnessed an hour of genuine answers that, regardless of whether or not I agreed, left me feeling like Cox was candidly sharing many of the complexities of Facebook’s global business. He explained how Facebook is different from all “archaic platforms” like Yahoo!, AOL and Google in that it’s held together by the notion that your friends and family will deliver the best content and info to you. If you agreed with Chris Cox, you should aggressively license content to Facebook’s platform where the largest audience congregates and the most conversations happen every day.
Needless to say, this is not a world view Nick Denton shares.
Denton smoothly shifted gears, channeling (if not quoting) Fred Wilson’s wise counsel to “Be Your Own Bitch.” While not quite the fiery Denton of yore, he deftly navigated Kafka’s many challenging questions. He didn’t flinch from topics that included Gawker’s publishing decisions — including the Sony files and Charlie Hebdo covers — and Gawker’s relationship with its audience, employee culture, Denton’s public exchanges with his reporters, GamerGate and anything else in the world according to Gawker, where controversy breeds like rabbits.
Denton made it clear that he doesn’t want to be informed about the news by the selections of his friends and family, which take place through some sort of democratic vote. He said that his news habits are aspirational and that he looks to brand experts to make what’s-newsworthy decisions for him. If you agreed with Nick Denton, you would defend your independence from any single platform and focus on engaging in conversations with your audience on your own platforms.
As I stood outside the spectacular Ritz Carlton waiting for my car at the end of the night, I found myself talking to a young student from California Marymount — recalling that BuzzFeed Publisher Dao Nguyen has often pressed me to find millennials to talk to about their media habits. So I asked this student what he thought of the event. He highlighted how much he had learned from listening to one of the event’s earlier speakers, New York Times CEO, Mark Thompson, and then Cox and Denton.
The young man said he was just thrilled to be in attendance as the topics covered at <Code/Media> aren’t likely to be discussed in his classrooms. In his words, “the history books on digital media haven’t even been written yet.” He’s absolutely correct. We’re writing them now. And I have zero doubt that the names Chris Cox and Nick Denton will appear in those books. And I bet, as we look back at this phase of the media business, we’ll find that they were both right. Content matters. Audiences matter. The conversations between the two matter. And great content conversations can happen everywhere.
Top photo: Re/code’s Peter Kafka interviews Nick Denton, CEO of Gawker Media
Lower photo: Kafka interviews Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer of Facebook
Photo credit: Asa Mathat for Re/code
More than Millennials and Mobile: Looking Behind the Headlines of Multiscreen Preferences
Not since the introduction of the television have entertainment and media consumption shifted so rapidly. It’s easy to overgeneralize that this rapid shift in media consumption means that everything goes mobile (particularly for younger audiences). However research we released last week in our Getting Audiences Right report, shows that the real headline is the extent of audience fragmentation across both media consumption and shopping behavior.
Nonetheless, this is not a disorganized fragmentation, rather we see that screen engagement coalesces around two organizing principles: the generation which an audience is a part of (we studied Millennials, GenX and Boomers) and the digital task which an audience member will perform.
The Audience Generation
Generation is so important in how we understand media consumption and channel receptivity, because generation rolls up not only life stage events (career, children, and retirement), but also a set of beliefs that that cohort holds about itself (consider, for example, a 2010 Pew Research poll that asked audiences of these generations if they thought their own generation was unique, about 60% of Boomers and Millennials said yes, in contrast to half of Gen Xers). These life events and world views influence generations’ preferences for channels, devices, and even how they purchase.
In our Getting Audiences Right Research we see three generational trends emerge:
- Millennials have moved to mostly mobile (particularly smartphones) and have moved away from traditional entertainment channels (like network and cable TV) for more curated entertainment (like Netflix and YouTube);
- GenX is task-dependent and gender plays more of a role for men in entertainment consumption than any other generation (for example 68% of GenX men report using YouTube on a weekly basis compared to 47% of GenX women).
- Boomers, who often pride themselves in their facility with and use of technology (31% of them shop online via their laptop more than once a week and 18% shop online with their smartphone once a week) still prefer traditional channels for entertainment (cable TV is still the screen they’re most likely to watch on a weekly basis — 68% of women watch cable on a weekly basis and 62% of men).
The Task at Hand
Nonetheless, in the consumer path to purchase, all generations lean towards PCs as the device of choice.
Even Millennials rely heavily on PCs and laptops for shopping activity. The largest proportion of Millennials had searched or purchased consumer packaged goods using their laptops/PCs (39%) and the same was true for consumer electronics (36%) and financial services (31%)
GenX was most likely to use a laptop/PC for all purchase paths and were particularly strong adopters of laptops for the search or research of consumer packaged goods (49% of GenX had purchased or researched consumer packaged goods on their laptop in the past 6 months, compared to 27% having used smartphones for the same). Interestingly, GenXers use of tablets for CPG search/purchase was higher than that of other generations (20% of GenXers had used a tablet to research or purchase consumer packaged goods in the past 6 months).
Finally, Boomers shared a preference for laptops (54% of them have used a laptop in the past 6 months to search/research consumer packaged goods, 46% for consumer electronics and 41% for researching or purchasing travel).
All audiences stated that the primary drivers of their screen preference were screen size and the performance and speed of the device. However, our research also reveals that task time plays a large role in screen preference. Almost all audiences (81%) prefer to complete a five minute task on a smartphone. However, that percentage drops to 43% for tasks over 10 minutes.
The Message for Marketers
Task and generation are so important because advertising is much more successful when contextualized and when the advertiser’s call to action can be heeded without switching tasks (or devices for that matter). We think that these findings give rise to the following three considerations for marketers:
- The marketers who are beginning to consider how time shifting and on-demand viewing affect their full communication plan will be a step ahead, particularly with audiences under 50 (GenX and Millennials). The use-case for YouTube may be easier to grasp as marketers begin to understand the elements of good pre-roll, but the marketers who understand the role of advertising and the type of advertising that is effective in over the top will have an advantage.
- GenX is the perfect generation for experimentation with a brand’s media mix, because GenXers still consume traditional television content (though more on cable than network TV), but have also moved to emerging channels like over the top (OTT). Given GenX’s omnichannel behavior, marketers must consider the ways in which messages can be sequenced across the channels. They must also be mindful of whether the content running on the channels ladders up to the branding objective for that channel.
- Even though mobile resonates with younger audiences, Millennials (and the emerging Gen-Z (audiences under 18) still lean to laptops for lower funnel purchase behaviors. Continued expansion of and investment in the PC/laptop consumer journey is still essential in achieving maximum digital ROI.
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Note: Millennials: Born after 1980 (18 to 34); Gen X: Born 1965-1980 (35 to 50); Boomers: Born 1946-1964 (51 to 69)
Joline McGoldrick is a Research Director at Millward Brown Digital. Joline was an early member of the Dynamic Logic Team, beginning in 2001 and is well versed in studying how audiences respond to Digital advertising. Joline is a product designer and marketer and a frequent speaker and panelist on understanding the digital audience experience. Joline’s work has been featured in Forbes, Adweek, AdAge, the Economist, Media Post, and Mobile Marketer and she has spoken at conferences including the ARF, MRIA, OMMA, MRMW, the Market Research Event and AdTech.
Joline is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Carnegie Mellon University
Snapchat Discovery: Boon or Bust for Publishers?
The never-ending quest to find millennials in their native habitat has led to many strange bedfellows for publishers. Count Snapchat as another one, but this one has massive numbers: more than 200 million monthly active users. The service is best known for temporary content that disappears after it’s been sent, giving everyone license to sext to their heart’s content. But because the service has such a treasure trove of wired, young millennial users, many content players couldn’t resist the chance to be part of the service’s new ”Discover” zone with specially produced photos, text and video. The question is what role content will play in a hyper-personal, temporary space such as Snapchat.
So far, 11 different media partners, including National Geographic, ESPN, Vice and CNN, are on board. Discover works by allowing these different companies to release new content every 24 hours on their own specific channels within the messaging app. With each new update, previous content vanishes. Utilizing Discover is not only an opportunity for content outlets to reach new audiences on the Snapchat platform — particularly the coveted younger demographic who eschew traditional media and are even fleeing Facebook — but it’s also a chance for advertisers to take advantage of the service. Brands can buy advertisements that appear alongside Discover content after every three or four swipes. In effect, Snapchat now breaks through the parameters of what we might consider “social media” — it’s now a messenger, social network and media network in one mobile platform. And publishers are buzzing about potential reach.
”I can’t tell you what the numbers are, but they’re fucking incredible,” one unnamed publishing exec told Digiday, which ran a rundown of what publishers are doing there.
So what are publishers doing? CNN serves up a mix of news photos, video and even interactives. NatGeo has experimented with original quizzes. ESPN has stuck mainly to short-form video clips and stories. Some publishers have sponsors and others are working on it.
Unlike other social networks where publishers have to depend largely on people to share stories into feeds, Snapchat’s content is controlled entirely by publishers in a ”walled garden” or ”portal” type setting.
The question remains: Will users buy in? The beauty of Snapchat originally was that the ephemeral messaging service actually made the platform a preferred destination to keep in contact with friends, as opposed to say Facebook, which has become inundated with ads and links users want to share with their networks. Snapchat, in comparison, was simple because it focused on messaging. But that simplicity is now itself disappearing, and the service has upset a large chunk of the user base.
“This is like Snapchat’s wannabe version of Flipboard and I really don’t see what this offers that makes it beneficial to the user or utilizes Snapchat’s core functionality,” the user Vallsurf commented on The Verge.
More hurtful yet was a student at Butler who told the student newspaper: ”I also don’t like the Discover thing. I will never use it.”
Of course, people were up in ams when Facebook initially launched the News Feed, but that didn’t last long. A bigger problem might be that Snapchat currently makes it impossible to collect data on user behavior to enable targeted ads. Any information that might assist with that never stays on Snapchat’s servers.
The new Discover app, perhaps tellingly, also doesn’t allow users to share content outside of Snapchat. So even though publishers are excited for it and people are anticipating how Discover might change mobile news consumption, there are still a few key concerns. Among them: Will users make a habit of the Discover section? And will Discover lead to more consumption on publishers’ own domains? It’s really a long-running question that extends to any content distributed on social networks. As Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram put it: “The main beneficiary of this deal [between Snapchat and publishers] is the platform itself.”
But then again, if the content is monetized on the network, as it is on Snapchat, does it really matter as long as it’s more revenue in the pockets of publishers? We will keep a close eye on Snapchat… until it disappears.
ANA Finds Marketers Will Increase Native Spend, Ethics Essential
Citing contextual relevance as the main benefit, 63% of marketers plan to spend more on native advertising over the next year according to the ANA’s (Association of National Advertisers) 2015 survey report “Advertising Is Going Native.” Eight in 10 marketers surveyed by the ANA employ native advertising via articles, and roughly six in 10 use native video and photos. Consistent with earlier DCN research among media companies on best practices in native advertising, the ANA found that “Disclosure and transparency are major concerns about native advertising that keep respondents up at night.”
According to the ANA:
- Two-thirds of respondents agree that native advertising needs clear disclosure that it is indeed advertising. Only 13 percent feel that such disclosure is not needed.
- Both the publisher and the advertiser have a responsibility to ensure disclosure.
- Three-fourths of respondents feel that there is an ethical boundary for the advertising industry when it comes to native advertising.
Pay Attention: A Quality Content Conversation at the DCN Summit
Thank you for your attention. I should be grateful for it, given that the average human attention span is now 8 seconds, 1 second less than a goldfish. I’d say let that sink in, but I may have already lost you.
I came by this remarkable statistic by way of Rhonda Crawford the Vice President of eCommerce at Delta Air Lines, a speaker at Digital Content Next’s annual member Summit, held January 21-23 in Miami, FL. She faces the daunting task of creating a content experience that meets the needs of her audience—travelers—during each phase of their journey. While her content perspective differed from many of the event’s speakers—who hailed from The New York Times, ESPN, Business Insider, NBCUniversal, The Daily Beast, among others—her goldfish statistic hit home with everyone. It also elegantly reflected the theme for DCN’s 2015 Summit: The Attention Economy.
In today’s Attention Economy, as DCN CEO Jason Kint put it in his opening remarks, “we are competing for attention with individuals, institutions, and brands… Media companies used to hope for 30 minutes of focused attention every day or maybe every week. Now, it is more like hoping for a few minutes every day. The goal, of course, is to improve the quality of that time.”
In an Attention Economy, quality rises to the top—and not just as a measure of traditional media engagement. For example, Tony Haile, CEO of Charbeat said that a number of brand recognition studies report that good creative is one of the best predictors of advertising success. Haile is one of a growing number of advocates of moving away from click metrics to time spent as the way to measure ad impact. Brendan Spain, US Commercial Director at the FT, echoed this sentiment and emphasized that brand marketing must be outcome-oriented and “optimized for attention.” This is in line with his publication’s editorial strategy as well, which focuses on the connection between great content and reader attention.
This theme was consistent throughout the event, whether the speaker was a media or marketing executive. As Julie Fleischer, Director of Media and Consumer Engagement at Kraft put it, “They only call it branded content when it’s lousy. Otherwise, they call it content.” She called for constant innovation in marketing creative and distribution, going so far as to suggest that media companies rethink who they bring to sales meetings and include “the dev guy and the product people. Progress happens when we stop thinking about packaging and build something new.”
R “Ray” Wang, author of the forthcoming book Disrupting Digital Business said that “good content rises above all the noise” and urges businesses of any type to focus on “transformational innovation.” The future, according to Wang, is about “the fan experience and mass-personalized journeys at scale for an audience of one.”
Fleischer from Kraft said that all organizations must “Know their customers on a proprietary level,” which leads to content and experiences that truly engage. And content creates a two way street with customers; she finds that “we learn an incredible amount from our consumers based upon their interaction with our content.”
So has the FT, particularly when it comes to ad impact and what Spain calls “the new currency of the web: time.” In its studies of the impact of exposure time on ad recall, the FT found 17% recall in ads viewed for under 5 seconds, and an almost 80% increase in recall for ads seen for over five seconds. According to Spain, they’ve already shifted their internal sales conversations from quantity to quality, focusing on the value of attention. And from what was heard at the 2015 DCN Summit, the larger industry conversation will be moving that direction as well.
Truste Looks at Consumer Confidence (or Lack of It)
In case you missed it, Truste released its 2015 Consumer Confidence Index this week. We’ve been one of the louder voices on the importance of trust among consumers, marketers and publishers. We even baked it into our DNA by crafting our Trust Principles. Consumer and marketer trust is the basis of our members’ businesses and we must constantly strive to build and maintain it.
Unfortunately, that trust is a fragile thing and there is much taking place online that undermines it. For example, consider the rampant, untethered growth in the digital supply chain causes a daunting amount of tracking activity like this to happen. It seems likely that this level of tracking and data collection without more meaningful choice will undermine consumer trust
We are clearly not alone in our concern about consumer trust online. Truste calls it “a hot button issue for Americans with 92% concerned about their privacy when using the internet and 42% more concerned than a year ago.” Other of the key data points and takeaway from the Truste report include:
- Lack of trust harms publishers: 77% of consumers moderated their online behavior because of privacy concerns. 51% of consumers have not clicked on an online ad because of privacy concerns.
- Lack of trust harms advertisers: 86% of consumers took active steps to protect their privacy including deleting cookies, changing settings, turning off location tracking.
- Consumers may be confused, but their behavior is telling: 63% of consumers deleted cookies in order to protect their online privacy but only 10% opted out of behavioral ads. Why the difference? Is it because consumers don’t know that they can opt out? Is it because opting out is difficult to do and reliant on cookies?
I hope this data makes everyone stop what they’re doing to think about how we actually grow trust across the media ecosystem. We need to ensure that the consumer and marketer trust in premium brands remains strong. We need to focus on building the future of trusted content, a future in which brands can stand the test of time because we have built a sustainable model based on a foundation of trust.
The Big Four: Challenges We Must Face as an Industry
I could not be more thrilled at the enthusiasm for great content across the media industry— whether in the advertising, press, investment or journalism communities. That enthusiasm was never more apparent than at the 13th Annual Digital Content Next Summit last week, which gathered senior executives from across our membership to explore opportunities and innovation. We also came together to tackle challenges. And, in my opening remarks for the Summit, I captured four common themes that challenge content companies as they strive to reach their full potential in the digital transformation:
1. Pressures on display advertising.
The flat to declining ad prices, which have resulted from abundant supply, have triggered a downward spiral that can only be slowed by the quality dimension. The transition to viewability will help, but the viewability conversation is mired in a malaise of too many inconsistent ad solutions and buyers taking advantage of the transition.
Fraud in the digital display chain is also massive problem: It tops the list of marketer concerns. And let’s not forget about the shift to mobile, which continues to accelerate. This shift is a good thing because it provides opportunities for personalized, useful content experiences. But we need to keep in mind that ad pricing on mobile is 30% of that on tablets and desktop.
The result, which I wrote about in The Trust Principle, is a marketplace that is mostly bought and sold on direct response without value for environments and brands. Google, Facebook and countless intermediaries have swallowed up the roughly 65% growth in digital advertising that has taken place in the past three years, while content companies’ revenues have remained flat overall.
2. The Attention Economy.
It’s in full swing. We now have the opportunity to consume media 24/7 on countless devices, unleashing significant opportunities for content companies.
Here’s the rub: Anyone can be a media company. Individuals now compete with century-old institutions. Non-profits go head to head with for-profits. The competition is fierce whether the company is pre-revenue, or raking in billions.
I would argue the goal of capturing a consumer with 30 minutes of entertainment once a week is dead. Capturing 30 minutes each more morning with a newspaper is dead. Now we’re all trying to get a consumer to come by for a few minutes each day. We must provide a service to them—whether it is entertaining or informing and make sure to use their time well.
3. Business model innovation.
The days of brainstorming non-advertising revenues as an opportunity are gone. It’s now a requirement to innovate your business model. Companies can’t simply compete by attracting mass audiences and serving ads against them. Being a great media brand is not enough. Today, organizations of any size or longevity need to think like start-ups and continuously experiment and innovate.
Yes, brands must own the relationship with individuals and monetize that relationship through advertising, but also in countless other ways to bring value back to their business—by delivering value to their user.
4. Protect our art.
Data is all the rage, but it is art that defines us. Whether it be the journalism and free speech we fight so hard to protect, or copyright and content piracy, this so-called “content” is precious stuff. It is why consumers rely on us, and trust us and it is how we get to know them in the process. So yes, protecting our first party data (which comes out of customer relationships, as well as those with marketers) is also essential. But we build our businesses on this art and we need to protect it to make sure we can continue to fund and pay for it in the future.
Big challenges: Hell yes. But we are facing them as an industry, together.
Hit me up on Twitter (@jason_kint) if you want to dive deeper into any of these challenges or if there are others that you think we need to focus on.
An Insider’s Guide to Native Ad Sales
If you are a top tier media company in this day and age, chance are you have a native advertising strategy in place. You’ve done your research, read the success stories and concluded that native ads can drive incremental revenue. However, the question remains: Are you taking advantage of your greatest asset?
I’m not talking about your editorial staff (not to in any way undervalue them); I’m talking about the folks that bring in the checks. Take a closer look at your ad sales team and ask if you are giving them the ability to sell native as a part of their online solutions? If the answer is no, start making changes today.
Most publishers I’ve talked to have a native strategy, but oddly, that strategy often doesn’t include having their sales teams offer native as a part of the sales pitch. Native has become somewhat of a monetization commodity that is being sold by others (ad networks, exchanges) instead of being sold directly by your sales teams. That’s because a $5.00 guarantee on impressions will be enticing to many. (Check out our earlier post on Guarantees for Native Inventory.) Besides, it’s easy to slap some code on the page and add that revenue to your bottom line. But this approach fails to capitalize on the serious revenue that brands are anteing up for great native advertising presented in high-value contexts.
Any guarantee you may get from a third party is really just a floor, remnant if you will. The real value comes when you have at the ability to create and run native placements on your Owned and Operated properties–at scale and for big dollars. Sales teams already connect with brands on a daily basis. They are out there pitching your sites’ audience and all the wonderful media placements you have to offer. Why not give them the ability to sell native to those same brands? It’s actually much easier than you think.
Here’s three ways you can integrate native advertising into your current ad sales strategy:
1. Build on your advertisers’ current campaigns by offering to create native ads as an extension of their marketing efforts. Creating native ads couldn’t be easier, all you need are readily available assets like a YouTube link, Tumblr post, or Instagram photo and some simple ad copy tied to a destination URL. Plug those pieces into a native ad network’s ad creation studio and out pops a native ad. There’s no need to hire extra designers or copywriters. With the right ad serving tools, native display campaigns can be set up to run in under two minutes flat.
2. Redistribute branded content the advertiser is already running (i.e. videos, long-from articles, etc.). Everyone is telling marketers to start acting more like publishers, and they are. Countless brands have developed in-house content marketing teams that crank out content on a regular basis. Help brands ensure that their efforts are worthwhile by re-posting their content on your site with clearly labeled modifiers like “Sponsored By Brand X” or “Presented By Brand Y” (DCN has done some research on these best practices among its members).
3. Create your own form of sponsored content or advertorial (here are a few tips on that), and drive the value of your native advertising campaigns up even higher. Remember how I said that you need tap into your available assets to better monetize with native advertising? Now, I want you to take a look at your editorial staff. Evaluate your writers and pick (or hire) one or two that would be able to create content that can both align with your current editorial offering and your advertisers’ campaign goals. The best native content does both.
Again, you must clearly label the content to indicate that it was paid for by an advertiser. (It’s important to be above board at all times, so as not to mislead your readers and risk losing their trust.) The best part is that this form of native allows you to charge a premium for your editorial services, while ensuring that your readers will still be engaged. After all, who knows your audience better than you do?
Hopefully your convinced that you need to start selling native direct. If you need another nudge, consider this: Brands are projected to spend over $4.3 billion on native advertising in 2015. With a pie that huge, it’s time for you to start taking a bigger piece. Now go schedule a meeting with your head of sales, and start making more money with native today.
Kevin Van Lenten is SVP of Partnerships at AdsNative. Previously he was CRO and GM of Uvidi.com and held various senior sales positions at Vertical Search Works, Touchstorm, Adknowledge, and LearnVest.
Getting Attention in Miami: Tweet-Wisdom from DCN Summit 2015
It’s no surprise that photos of sunshine, swaying palm trees and shots of the shoes-optional networking on the beach were highlights of the tweet stream from this year’s Digital Content Next (DCN) Summit, held January 21-23 at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami.
However, in addition to lovely weather and networking, this year’s members-only DCN Summit generated non-stop discussion of the event theme: The Attention Economy. From the kick off by OKCupid Founder (and author of Dataclysm) Christian Rudder, who looked at the relationship between data and dating, to the closing session in which EVP Rick Allessandri showed how deeply Univision understands and connects to its customers —speakers, DCN Members and special guests alike, remained engaged and attentive, despite the lure of the sandy beaches.
In case you missed this year’s Summit, here are three key takeaways:
1. Relationships Matter. When seeking to attract and engage audiences, understanding them and catering to their interests and needs is a top priority.
Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, set the tone for the 
importance of trust in the age of data, pointing out that, given the ever-increasing competition for user attention online, trusted sources will move to the front of the line. That trust requires building a personal relationship with audiences; data allows us to do so, when ethically collected and skillfully applied.
Ray Wang, author of the forthcoming Harvard Business Review Press book Disrupting Digital Business urged attendees to strive for “mass, personalized scale for segments of one.”
Editor-in-chief John Avlon demonstrated his understanding of The Daily Beast’s millennial-dominated audience: “Don’t bottom feed to attract millennials… offer a high-low mix that doesn’t taste like medicine.”
Vice President of eCommerce Rhonda Crawford spoke about Delta’s content strategy, which strives to optimize content for different “stress-levels” of the traveling experience (from planning to boarding passes). “When balancing content and functionality, ask yourself if are you enriching the experience or getting in the way?”
Rick Allessandri discussed Univision’s customer-centric philosophy, which has led to a successful series of brand extensions all arising from its close audience relationship and a desire to maintain their trust by serving their needs.
2. The Need for Speed. Throughout the event, speakers emphasized the need for continuous experimentation and innovation without fearing the fast-failure.
Julie Fleischer, Director of Media and Consumer Engagement at
Kraft, may have summed it up best when she said, “The pace of change will never be slower than it is today.” She discussed Kraft’s agile approach to marketing, which emphasizes creativity and fresh thinking over tried-and-true.
Kendall Aliment Ostrow, Digital Agent at UTA, offered a Hollywood’s-eye view of the transformation that’s taking place in the entertainment industry and, in particular, the pace at which younger consumers adopt and drop social media and technology tools. Keeping up, according to Ostrow, is essential in order to identify the best channels and formats to reach audience younger audience and also to identify talent, suggesting “…find a 14-year-old to follow—one that won’t make you feel creepy for doing so.”
Noble Ackerson, co-founder and CEO, LynxFit, shared that
while wearables ”launched” in 1780 with the first pedometer, the pace of development has ramped up exponentially of late. Rather than chasing the next thing, Noble encourages companies to focus on creating useful wearable content experiences.
DCN CEO Jason Kint echoed the “need for speed” mantra when he spoke about DCN’s focus on the business issues of today and the future for digital content companies noting the change in its board structure voted in at the event which will better reflect this evolution and surface creative ideas from the breadth of its members.
3. Quality, not Quantity. Another recurring theme of the Summit was that, in an Attention Economy, it is important to make the most of customers’ valuable time through excellent content experiences.
Edward Felsenthal, Managing Editor of Time.com pointed out 
that the tension between content we want to consume and the limited time we have to consume it is not new: He kicked off his talk with a Henry Luce quote from the 1923 prospectus for TIME: “No publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend on simply keeping informed.” And while his publication continues to attract and engage audiences almost a hundred years later, TIME’s continued focus is on high-quality journalism that respects the value of its reader’s time.
Brendan Spain, US Commercial Director of the Financial Times and Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, offered a candid look at what it’s like to transact ad-sales based on time. As Haile pointed out all ad views are not created equal: “impressions are not a commodity. There is a difference between one that gets a lot of attention and one that doesn’t.” Spain spoke about the FT editorial team’s focus on writing deeply-engaging content to support the time-spent monetization model. Their paying subscribers spend 10 or sometimes 100 times more minutes with content and that, in their beta tests, “the shift to attention over impressions yields more engagement and more value.”
Frank Igrec, Brand Director of Dick’s Sporting Goods pointed out that engaging content can be branded, yet as interesting to the viewer as editorial. He played some of Dick’s Hell Week series to hammer home the point that native advertising can add value to a publisher’s site when well-executed.
Ray Wang, author of the forthcoming Harvard Business Review Press book Disrupting Digital Business, summed it up when he said that “We’re moving from selling products and services to selling brand experiences….You are competing for time and attention; focus on delivering experiences and outcomes to succeed.”
Hidden Tracking Undermines Consumer Trust
The recent revelation that healthcare.gov was sending highly personal data about consumers to third parties highlighted two important ways that consumer trust is undermined.
One, healthcare.gov needs to be a far better steward of the direct relationship they have with consumers. Rightfully, consumers have an expectation that websites and services will protect their sensitive data and certainly not recklessly broadcast that data to the world.
Second, there needs to be greater transparency and controls for consumers around what data is being collected and used by third parties. Some companies have a presence on a website simply to help that website operate. See the well-written reaction from Tony Haile at Chartbeat http://blog.chartbeat.com/2015/01/22/chartbeat-healthcare-gov-personal-information/.
The role of some third parties, however, is far less clear or even apparent to an average consumer. Revelations like this one with healthcare.gov highlight the need for a more effective and simple tool for consumers to express choice over how their data is collected and used. Given the explosion in the complexity and capability of the Internet and the different relationships that consumers have with various companies on the web, it is more important than ever for industry to develop a reasonable Do Not Track (DNT) standard that will give consumers a meaningful choice over how their data is collected and used by companies with which they have no relationship.
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Time is Money in the Attention Economy
Time is money: true. But time, as it turns out, may not always be on our side.
The web is awash with stories about ad viewability problems and the need for measurement standards. The hard truth is that because we can count clicks, we do. Yet almost anyone really thinking about the true measure of digital content success realizes that a click might measure little more than clumsy fingers or fleeting glances. What content creators—whether from media or marketing—really want is engagement. And, as DCN research recently revealed, an emerging measure of engagement is time spent.
Yet as anyone with an overstuffed inbox and more push notifications than they can handle will attest, there are never enough hours in a day to do what we need to do, much less read everything we want to. Time is among people’s most valuable resources therefore if a consumer spends time with content, we can assume that the content provides them some value.
This topic is so meaty and relevant to aspects of our business both today and in the future, we decided to make the theme of our annual member’s-only DCN Summit this year: “The Attention Economy.” We’ll examine how everyone in the digital media business needs to put the customer first and create experiences that make the most of their valuable time.
One of the most vocal champions of time based measurement is Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, who will team up with Brendan Spain, the FT’s US Commercial Director to discuss the real-world applications of time as a metric for advertising performance. The FT has been an early mover in selling display advertising based upon the amount of time its audience spends with content. Spain plans to come armed with FT data generated by the first six months of experimentation with this strategy to provide insights into whether or not time spent with an ad message does, in fact, generate greater measureable impact.
Demonstrating engagement on one platform is challenging enough, but many media organizations reach consumers across a broad range of channels and need to measure the entirety of their audience. At this year’s Summit, three organizations—ESPN, NBCUniversal and AOL’s Adapt.tv—will explore how they are tackling cross platform measurement.
While advertising is certainly an important means to deliver advertising, an increasing number of brands compete for consumer attention with content. Dick’s Sporting Goods has gone all-in on content and Brand Director, Frank Igrec plans to reveal his beguilingly simple content marketing strategy: create content people actually find compelling. Attendees will also hear from Delta Airlines, which approaches content as a means to of super-serving its customers, as well as Mt. Dew, which has found content to be the best way to reinforce its brand among its millennial target. These sessions will look at the innovative work these organizations are doing to step up their content game in order to attract and genuinely engage audiences.