In just a few years, the number of publishers building out branded content has soared from 15 to more than 600—and counting. But it’s not just their ranks that have grown. Many publishers have expanded their capabilities, harnessing teams, talent and tech to help brands create sponsored content and capture audiences. The New York Times has gone one better, establishing T Brand, a complete content studio, to create unconventional immersive and artistic projects that go far beyond native advertising.
Graham McDonnell, International Creative Director for T Brand Studio
Through the strategic acquisitions of Hello Society, an influencer marketing agency, and Fake Love, a design-driven agency specialized in one-of-a-kind live experiences, T Brand has also nurtured new expertise in video, 360-degree filming, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Here, Peggy Anne Salz – mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove – catches up with Graham McDonnell, International Creative Director for T Brand Studio, to discuss the company’s mission to create dynamic and innovative content with a decidedly human touch.
PAS: T Brand is leveraging its tech abilities and acquisitions, but it also benefits from audience trust in The New York Times. How do you make the most of both without blurring the lines between content you create for your brand partners and editorial content?
GM: There is quite a clear divide between the newsroom and advertising; it’s very much church and state. We obviously can’t use journalists from the newsroom. However, the studio is staffed with fully qualified journalists, many of whom have come from our competitors. So, we have the strength of a newsroom, in integrity, and talent, and we leverage this for our advertisers. We also maintain a high standard for our audience. After all, the audience coming to The New York Times expects New York Times journalism and content. So, it’s expected that our branded content should hit those heights as well.
It’s also very important to identify branded content as a piece of advertising content. As soon as an audience feels duped or tricked into reading branded content it will lose trust in the publisher and—ultimately—in the brand. Our most common branded content pieces are labeled “paid posts.” Traditionally, that post was a destination. So, it was a URL that readers could visits via our website or via our app—content that was paid, posted and lived indefinitely. The aim was to make that content accessible to audiences. We still make branded content a destination. But we also make it a journey because getting eyeballs on a page isn’t enough. We’ve started to add what we call “branded footers” to each piece of sponsored content we produce. This way, when a user is finished consuming a piece of content, we offer the opportunity to continue that conversation outside our paid-post environment.
PAS: Branded content is a major revenue driver for publishers, but not all publishers have been able to get brands to buy in for the longer term. How can publishers make that connection?
GM: Storytelling is what we as humans do and relate to—going back to cave paintings and hieroglyphics. Storytelling is an intrinsic part of our human nature and the best branded content taps into that. The best stories come when publishers partner with the client and dig deep into the story the brand wants to tell. You want to nail the narrative first, and you want to think about the execution second. It’s important to tell a human story, one that’s relatable for the audience, and not get ahead of yourself by trying to figure out if VR, for example, might be the best way to tell the story. This is a point many brand marketers forget and it’s up to the publisher to remind them. No one knows their business better than our clients, but no one knows our audience better than us. Put the two together, and that’s when you get the best—and most sustainable—results.
It’s all about the ability to marry the storytelling expertise of the in-house team with the advertiser’s goal to address its audience and express its point of view. So, brands come to us with their brand message and they look to us to position that message within a story that will resonate with our audience. Of course, brands will push hard to put their message first. It’s up to the publisher to push back and put the storytelling first.
PAS: Does it requires some “tough love” to strike a balance between the two?
GM: Yes, and that’s what will drive results. For example, some clients come to us and say they want AR or VR. They want all the bells and whistles and all the flashy toys. But we tell them it’s much more important to think about the story first and then how to tell it. Even in the word ‘storytelling,’ the story comes before the telling. This means taking a step back to think about the type of story your audience will want to engage with, not the tech you’ll need to tell it.
We were one of the first content studios. So, over time, we have found what works, and what doesn’t. Over time we’ve seen that we have much more time spent on our content than on the content given to us by brands. Sure, we get brands coming to us saying, you know, “We have got this video of our CEO. He’s very engaging. It’s 32 minutes long. We just want to put it and you don’t need to do anything with it. Just put it on and people will love it.” My response is, “No, that might not be the best idea.” You have to put the brand message in a story people will like – one that will take them on a journey not blast them with details and stats.
PAS:What is the best way to tell brand stories?
GM: There’s a simple sort of formula that all good stories follow called the narrative arc. The first thing you do is introduce an element, usually a character, that the audience likes and is emotionally invested in enough to care what happens to this person. Then you present a problem or a hurdle, some sort of challenge that must be overcome. Finally, you reveal the outcome, some kind of goal or reward. The brand message is an integral part of the story, but it shouldn’t be too obvious. Just like parents who convince their children to eat vegetables by hiding it the food kids are sure to like, branded content blends the brand story within the story—because these are the things you want your audience to digest. Making the brand message part of the storytelling makes it much more palatable. Once you’ve got the story, then you think about the execution.
The biggest trap content marketers fall into is trying to tick all the boxes. Sometimes they are pushed by their brand clients, and other times they are pushed by their own ambitions. They put together a package of four videos, three infographics and loads of cool stuff for impact across every channel. Without a strong narrative to link each piece to the next the outcome is a Frankenstein monster of fragmented content. We have found it’s more effective to limit yourself to telling very focused stories.
PAS:It’s clear that branded content has to be emotive, but it must also be effective. How do accomplish and measure this?
GM: The best results come when you have a deep partnership with the advertiser and a deep understanding of how audiences engage with content. Knowing the time of day people are consuming content on their devices is an important data point. It’s part of a larger, much more data-driven approach to know when to serve the right content at the right time. Targeting context increases engagement. If you have created a data-heavy infographic that is best consumed on the desktop or tablet, then there’s really no point in serving that during commuting times when most users will be viewing their mobile feeds and devices.
We’ve also found that around three-quarters of our programs have dwell times above the Moat benchmarks for audience attention. So, not only are we getting people to visit our content; we know they are staying to engage with it. Moreover, a vast majority of our programs surpass the Moat benchmark for scroll depth. This means they are scrolling down and exploring the content. We have succeeded in building a narrative arc that offers a reward well worth the audience’s time and attention. You’ve really done your job if you can bring rather drab content to life and a great example of this is when a client wanted us to help promote a white paper. We decided to do it in a quiz format that would draw the reader into the content. We had seven questions and after every question they asked, we gave them a little snippet of content, a statistic related to the answer they just gave. It was a reward scheme, and it worked—showing that it’s a very underused tactic but effective tactic to keep people engaged.
PAS: The international arm of the T Brand Studio is perhaps best known for its award-winning campaign for UBS, highlighting AI and what it takes to be human. The native advertising included a chat bot, a five-chapter article and a documentary-style video, surpassing target reach and engagement metrics. Another more recent campaign for Kia brought the Cadenza model to life in a series of live events. Should traditional creative advertising agencies feel nervous?
GM: As I said earlier, the best content comes from partnership. We don’t usually offer our services like an off-the-shelf product; we build a relationship with the client to tell a story in the way our New York Times audience expects it to be told. It’s not a case of jumping in on every brainstorm or every RFP; it’s a case of looking at what the client wants to achieve and answering the brief with a strong journalistic approach because that’s our strength. A lot of the time we’ll partner with other agencies when we create content for brands. We’ve also worked in tandem with other publishers on certain program to suit the needs of the client. The industry is moving fast and getting faster. Therefore, it’s important we all learn from each other, not fight against each other for first place. The bar for branded content is high—and so are audience expectations.
In May of 2017, Bill Simmons, former ESPN personality and creator of The Ringer, made an interesting decision to move his successful sports media empire to Vox Media. Simmons maintained editorial independence but relied on Vox for all the non-content creation requirements of a traditional publisher. This included all revenue and product development because as Simmons said “they are great at sales and technology.” The plan, it seems, was to offload the “publishing” part of the publishing business. This allowed Simmons to focus on content creation for his widely popular podcast and website.
This wasn’t a viable model 20 years ago when publishers had established oligopolies by controlling distribution in their respective geographic regions. As a result, the publishing needs of the business, HR, printing press, sales, and distribution existed to support editorial and content creation. Now that the internet has driven distribution costs to near $0, and oligopolies no longer exists, there is little need to combine traditional publishing sales, product and HR overhead with the journalism it is intended to support.
Even so, content creations like Simmons still need to make money. To do so, they rely on content management platforms like Chorus, the purpose-built platform Vox created to manage content and revenue. As of July, Chorus supported 350 media brands. The system includes “content management, data-informed multi-platform content distribution, integrated advertising, and a suite of publishing tools.” Media brands that strip away activities not directly related to content creation establish a sustainable model that allows them to create even more great content, a reinforcing cycle of success.
In his May 2017 post, Ben Thompson covered the changing business model while referring to platforms like Vox’s as the “Faceless Publisher.” The platform handles all the monetization, resources, and infrastructure, which allows journalists to focus on creating amazing content.
The term “Faceless Publisher” might be a misnomer in Vox’s case given they have established several great brands in the market including SB Nation, Vox and Eater. However, it is clear that this federated group of journalistic brands, supported by a single business platform, creates great efficiencies. This efficiency will deliver what readers and content creators need: a sustainable business model that delivers amazing content.
As of May 25, 2018, Google announced that DoubleClick users will be unable to rely on cookies or mobile device IDs to connect impressions, clicks and site activities from DoubleClick logs. Instead, they will be limited to Google’s own Ads Data Hub for those metrics.
For some, this means that they are satisfied to stay within the Google stack. But not every brand’s solution will be and should be limited to Google. If media buyers want to analyze their spend outside of Google’s platform and offer up any attribution, then just using Google won’t work.
“Some marketers who spend 75 percent or more of their budgets on Google will be fine just letting Google do the analytics,” saysAlice Sylvester of Sequent Partners.
Google wasn’t the only one to lock down its platform. In response to the combined pressure of GDPR and theCambridge Analytica scandals (related to handling of personal information), Facebook decided that it would shut down ad tools called “Partner Categories” powered by outside data brokers. Those tools let Facebook advertisers target ads at people based on third-party data such as their offline purchasing history.
This means advertisers will have access only to their own data, and data Facebook collects itself. If an advertiser wants to pull campaign-level insights to inform future campaigns, or use the data for the basis of an attribution model, then they are out of luck.
Introduction of Data Clean Rooms
Data clean rooms allow large inventory partners like Facebook and Google to share customer information with brands, while still maintaining strict controls. Data clean rooms were named for the completely airtight rooms where microchips and other sensitive materials get made. In this case, the rooms enable a shared environment between two or more companies that are completely secure from external access (no wifi), and where each company decides the level of visibility to their data. This eliminates – or severely restricts – the possibility of data leakage (which is what happened with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica).
“We and a partner combine a data set with very specific rules and controls around how each party can operate within the shared environment,” said Scott Shapiro, a product marketing director for measurement at Facebook, who noted thatFacebook didn’t invent the clean-room concept.
The driving force behind the concept is to create a safe space where data can be shared and manipulated without leaving the inventory partner’s environment. Specifically for Facebook, a brand can create anaudience based on first-party data – like a list of email addresses – and then push that list into Facebook, match it, and grab a copy which they can later combine with their data as the basis for attribution, measurement, and modeling.
How it happens in reality is that an advertiser will load a clean or wiped laptop or device that has never been connected to the Internet with that advertiser’s first party data, which in most cases is an email list. A second clean computer is loaded by Facebook or Google with impression-level and non-personally identifiable information (“PII”) campaign data.
Maybe, The Answer to Scaling The Walled Gardens?
For advertisers with reams of data and substantial programmatic advertising budgets, this is a great opportunity to scale the otherwise elusive walled gardens. Data clean rooms create a safe environment for data providers to share marketing information that brands need and crave to model future media buys and advertising strategies. If managed properly, with appropriate methods and standards, this technique would allow brands to really understand their walled-garden ad spends within the larger marketing ecosystem. For both advertisers and publishers alike, the stakes are high in the post-GDPR world of data governance, and there is no room for unintended data sharing because consequences are severe.
Marketers have been eager to get more insights out of Facebook and other walled gardens, but it remains to be seen how aggressively brands and agencies will use data clean rooms to make the most of the spending with the largest inventory providers (e.g., Google, Facebook).
There are two prevailing views for what the future holds:
Glass half-empty: These same inventory providers lack a compelling incentive to play well with others in clean rooms, beyond delivering another level of customer service in a marketplace they continue to dominate.
Glass half-full: It’s been a daunting year or more for the industry category, with virtually continuous coverage related to privacy violations, bad actors influencing politics, and fraud and transparency challenges. The ‘clean room’ concept may be a half-step that the duopoly can get behind, if only as a signal of good faith to the industry.
There is also the overriding issue of what kind of manpower (likely significant) would be involved to make the clean room option a viable reality. The usefulness of data in this kind of an environment may also be somewhat limited No matter, though: The data clean room concept is one that’s getting some attention. And, considering its appeal among the dearth of options out there that seem appealing to all the affected players – brands, agencies and inventory providers – it could be one that ends up getting traction.
About the author
Karen Moked is the Vice President of Marketing at Digilant, a programmatic media company in Boston. A veteran of the advertising and technology industries, she previously worked for Akamai and O’Reilly Media. Karen is a graduate of MBA-ESG in Paris and York University in Toronto. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Before bringing your “A” game, you have to know your end game.
With digital publishers facing an ever-increasing need for a constant stream of new and clickable content, it’s not surprising that content creation strategies tend to prioritize quantity above all else. But there’s a smarter way to create content – one that focuses on both quantity and quality while simultaneously developing measurable KPIs.
This process of creating content with intent means identifying what purpose your content serves early in the content development process. The key to doing that is matching your content format and distribution channels with your business needs and developing scalable processes for creating that content as cost effectively as possible.
While every company’s needs are different, the process for deploying this content strategy works no matter what your content goals are. Here are five steps to making it happen.
Get Outside the Content Bubble
Before you start developing a content strategy you need to fully understand what purpose content serves for your business. Delivering content to as many people as possible is not necessarily the most important thing for every publisher. For some, the main purpose of their content is driving revenue or leads. For others, content is mainly focused on brand building or customer retention. However, for most companies, it’s all of the above.
Identifying your goals requires involving all stakeholders in the early stages of the content-planning process. From sales and marketing to social and SEO, make sure everyone’s voice is heard early and often. It will result in a more solid content strategy that aligns with your broader business plan.
Setting Goals
Once you’ve mapped your content strategy with your business plan, you should determine early on what success will look like. If your goal is to drive traffic, figure out what your ideal traffic growth numbers are. If it’s revenue, do the same. Even if you don’t make your goals, setting them early on will give you something to aim for and help you measure your success later.
Keep in mind that your goals may change. You might discover that your intended audience is misaligned with the content you’ve created for one purpose, but in the process discover a new value for your content you hadn’t considered. Be open to adapting and evolving your goals as you learn what works.
Change the Channel
In the age of content everywhere, many publishers are struggling to find a strategy that targets their core audience and instead find themselves trying to be everything to everyone. With limited editorial resources that strategy rarely works. The result is too much content that doesn’t perform well in any particular channel and a watered-down brand that doesn’t resonate with any one, loyal group.
Before you start developing your content, assess where your desired audience likely lives and how they are most likely to find your content. Identifying a few key distribution channels will help you sculpt your content to maximize performance within a given channel.
Target Your Content
Now that you know what your content will be about and where your audience will find it, it’s time to make sure the content itself is packaged in a manner that aligns with those goals. That means identifying what formats and templates work best for your intended audience. While social media loves eye-catching images and clickable headlines, content designed to drive organic search traffic should be SEO-focused and formatted for search-friendly performance.
Aligning your content format to your end goals means again leveraging teams outside of content to gather data and advice on what works and what doesn’t. This will change over time, so a big part of targeting content requires a willingness to innovate and evolve over time.
Measuring Success
The most important step in creating a strategic and purposeful content strategy is the follow up. Find ways to measure the actual success of your content initiatives that are focused on your company goals – not simply based on standard one-size-fits-all approaches. Measuring overall traffic or page views, for example, may not be the best way of determining if what you’re doing is serving your needs.
Make sure your approach to analyzing the success of your efforts is effective by bridging the communication gap between your decision makers and your data analysts. Too often, our data experts don’t understand our broader business goals and end up assessing the data in ways that are logical but not necessarily aligned with predicting the businesses’ desired outcomes.
While each of these steps may appear to be common sense, too often they get lost in the content planning process. Teams are siloed and often don’t discuss strategy until after the content is already created. Discussing each team’s needs and concerns early will result in better performing content and more efficient processes. It may also result in better understanding across teams and shared learning that results in better performance by each.
About the author
Jeanette Mulvey loves telling small business stories. From hardware stores in Saskatchewan to fashion designers in Milan, she’s traveled the world learning what makes entrepreneurs tick and hearing their struggles. As VP of B2B Content at Purch, she is responsible for content and social media and for Business.com and BusinessNewsDaily, where she strives to ensure both sites are the go-to destination for small business advice and inspiration. Follow her on Twitter @JeanetteB2B
For so long, Facebook has been the classroom bully in social media, with Snapchat taking it on the chin when Facebook copied Snapchat’s Stories format on FB, Instagram and WhatsApp. But now, the little tyke is exacting revenge as Facebook deals with blow after blow in the public arena: ongoing Russian meddling on the platform, incendiary posts inspiring real-life violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and a stock market plunge that encapsulates its challenges fighting misinformation. Meanwhile, Snap has been quietly rolling out new deals with publishers and making itself out to be a much friendlier space to do business.
While it’s hard to compete with Facebook’s 1.47 billion daily active users, the story of Snapchat as the underdog fighting back is one to watch — especially as publishers tire of Facebook’s litany of problems.
‘Brand Safety and Control’
While Facebook consistently dominates tech news coverage, Snapchat also turned heads recently when it launched a private marketplace for advertisers akin to its own premium programmatic advertising marketplace. Now, advertisers can book space on specific shows and channels from a variety of publishing partners, including BuzzFeed, ESPN, and NBC Universal. Previously, brands could buy Snapchat ad inventory, but not target their advertising to specific publishers.
The beauty of this? Publishers can set their own ad rates, target only certain segments of a show’s audience, and advertisers can find more brand safety on Snapchat than they currently do with Facebook and Google’s YouTube. This is of course a boon for Snapchat too, as AdAge’s Garrett Sloane put it:
“Advertisers have been concerned about the type of content that appears on both YouTube and Facebook. Snapchat is trying to take advantage of the industry’s unease by offering a higher level of brand safety and control: Discover already operates as a gated community for professional publishers only, and the private marketplace now lets advertisers expressly select the shows they want while still using ad tech.”
On top of this, Snapchat is planning to sell six-second, unskippable ads in the private marketplace — meaning the chances of sustaining audience attention is even higher.
Broadening Discover’s Horizon
Snap also recently announced a new Discover partnership with an LGBT publisher — its first one — the U.K.-based website PinkNews. According to PinkNews CEO and editor-in-chief Benjamin Cohen, part of the incentive is that Discover is still a curated platform, meaning that accessing the humans behind the automation is still possible. Snapchat was also enticing in part because Facebook traffic for PinkNews— as is the case with many publishers — has gone down, Cohen said, and so he was looking to broaden audience traffic elsewhere.
The idea of working with a social platform like Snapchat that is actually willing to pay publishers became even more attractive for PinkNews. The partnership is also, undeniably, a win for Snapchat. It gains an outlet that will help the platform attract a young audience willing to push the boundaries of sexuality.
Indeed, it’s obvious that Snapchat is on the hunt to broaden its 191 million daily active users. In addition to working with traditional publishers, Snapchat has made a bigger effort this year to partner with digital publishers and social media stars that appeal to younger audiences. That includes Daquan Gesese, a hip-hop and pop culture personality with a huge presence on Instagram, and Fanbytes, an 18-month-old digital media company that runs four popular accounts on Snapchat, and operates a network of mostly 15- and 16-year-old creators who run their own accounts and publishing brands on Snapchat.
In May, Daquan launched his own Discover channel, and Fanbytes and Snapchat are currently trying to figure out whether “official” versions of its channels could be tailor-made for Discover.
More Flexiblity
But here’s what’s ironic about the Snapchat comeback: It wasn’t that long ago that Snapchat was ridiculed for a redesign that paired friends and family in one stream, and publishers and advertisers in another. Audiences complained, publishers worried.
“Content producers from eight publishers I spoke to said that the redesign had made their metrics go haywire,” Vanity Fair’s Maya Kosoff wrote. So it seems pretty natural that some publishers don’t necessarily see Snapchat as a particularly good long-term strategy if they can monetize better elsewhere, as one publisher anonymously confessed to Digiday last month.
However, it’s also understandable — decent, really — that Snapchat is letting publishers introduce non-exclusive shows to Snapchat Discover. Syndication is not particularly sexy, but even if shows have already aired on YouTube or Facebook Watch, this is a chance for Snapchat to build a Discover audience — and it’s a chance for publishers to ignite new revenue streams for its most popular intellectual property without having to create something original for each platform.
While publishers aren’t going to give up on a massive platform like Facebook anytime soon, Snapchat is getting back in the game on two counts. First, it’s actually the steady performer as Facebook struggles. And second, it is finally serving publishers in more ways while opening itself up to newer creatives. As with all platforms, there’s only so much trust publishers can give third parties who change their practices and rules on a whim, but it’s a good thing that Snap is trending up at just the right time – finally getting off the mat to give Facebook a few good licks.
Every day we’re reminded about the limited resources facing our industry, from the time people have to produce stories to the lack of insights we have about decisions made at the big platforms. There’s an irony then that it feels like there’s more data available to us than ever before. Yet many people still aren’t sure how to make the most of it.
Trying to improve business models, audiences, or content simply by adding more data doesn’t guarantee any success. Now, more than ever, the answer is finding the most relevant data—and making sure we’re uncovering all the available opportunities the data we have can provide.
Historically, some of this data has been hard to get to. The major technology platforms see it as theirs to wield. So, without major undertaking, it can be hard to piece the different types of data that audiences coming from Facebook, Google, your own editorial efforts, and untrackable sources actually show.
The Parse.ly data team, using Currents, looked at a recent major news story, immigration, as an example, to uncover opportunities for media companies that might have been missed in other data sources.
Finding the under-covered angle of the story
When Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy separated children from parents, #KeepFamiliesTogether picked up steam on social media. But how did that translate to attention for the articles publishers wrote, and what did people want to know more about?
Over the course of one week, June 18 – June 25, there were 590 articles about immigration getting attention in our network. And that attention was vast: 16 million views.
Data from Currents, June 18 – June 25
So many articles means the topic was well covered, right? Not necessarily. Take the topic of “asylum seekers” for example.
Only 20% of these stories were related to asylum seekers. However, they received over 30% of the attention. High traffic per story suggests this angle was potentially under-covered and under-promoted.
Understand the differences between referral types
So where exactly were people finding stories about immigration? The biggest source of traffic was social media, which drove one-third of traffic to immigration stories. Given how much the media industry talks about Facebook, this may not seem surprising. But this is actually about double the typical traffic the network sends to any given story. It also bucks the trend of Google as the dominant source of traffic.
Other important ways readers learned about this issue? Directly from news sites, no platforms needed. About one-quarter of the overall traffic to immigration articles was from editorial promotion: site homepages, section pages, and links within articles.
For the specific topic of asylum seekers, we looked at where else people talked about this topic:
Data from Currents, June 18 – June 25
Twitter sent almost as much traffic as Google to stories about this topic. And Instagram shows as a significant referral – one of the more surprising results of this data to me. With data about what’s relevant to readers right now, and where, teams can be more pointed in how they spend precious resources, including their time.
Narrow in on what topics matter to different localities
Where people are paying attention to stories doesn’t just apply to places on the internet—search, social, etc. Readers’ physical locations impact attention, too.
For stories about immigration, attention wasn’t at the same level across the entire country. Certain areas, including parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, over-indexed, represented by darker colors on the maps below.
Geographic data can also inform where a story gets distributed. If you’re pushing your immigration story out on Facebook and Instagram, geo-target cities or states where attention, and therefore interest, is already high. Or if your newsroom is part of a network that spans multiple regions, this information can help guide syndication strategy.
Don’t get more data. Get relevant data
It would be amazing if organizations had more of everything: more staff, more resources, more time, more universally accessible sources of data and information. But the reality is you have to pick and choose your data wisely. You need to use sources that can find opportunities for your site, instead of accessing the same list or information that everyone else uses can make the most of that data.
In the absence of time and resources, focus on making sure you have the right data at your fingertips. Pay attention to the data that’s relevant: what audiences care about right now, where they’re finding that information, what stories are related, and where the gaps are.
After last week’s uproar over Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on censorship, Axios asked experts what they would do to decrease the fake news on Facebook. Clearly, this is not a simple problem to address but we must. In fact, because Facebook hasn’t taken proper action over the past two years, governments all over the world have stepped in to take steps to address the problem of misinformation.
As the trade organization representing media brands that seek long-term consumer trust through the creation of high quality news, information, and entertainment, we take the problem very seriously. In 2016, we wrote an unanswered letter to the CEOs of Facebook and Google – Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai – to provide our perspective on the dangerous proliferation of “fake news” throughout the digital ecosystem.
In the letter we asked Facebook to aggressively harness their brilliant minds and massive resources to clean up the garbage that was flowing, with little friction, through their platform. We also cautioned against acting as a censor. Given the escalation of concerns and the fact that the 2018 midterm elections are less than 100 days away, it’s critical that Facebook take more significant and concrete actions to help ensure their platform isn’t used against our democracy again.
In the spirit of transparency, here are a few things we mentioned to Axios that Facebook could do today.
Eliminate the viral and monetization benefits for known fake news peddlers. Take Infowars as an obvious example. (1) At this point, Infowars should only reach users who explicitly follow its account. We’re not asking for the account to be banned entirely, although the arguments to do so are reasonable at this point. (2) Infowars shouldn’t be able to buy advertising with creative containing links to Infowars content and (3) user activity (likes/clicks) on Infowars content should not enhance its presence in the feeds of users who don’t follow it. Essentially, their content shouldn’t be exposed to users unless they explicitly ask for it. It’s why on Tuesday I asked what percentage of the views of a grotesque Infowars clip were viewed by Infowars followers. The answer could be very revealing.
Publish a clear escalation policy (as YouTube does) which would suspend and permanently ban accounts which repeatedly violate their hate speech and harassment rules. Although YouTube’s escalation seems to have loopholes and oddities, as proven yesterday, it’s at least transparent and up for scrutiny by the public.
Elevate the brand presence around content. The brand is a proxy for trust and Facebook (and Google) have long minimized the brand in their experiences. This is important for those who have built up trust through their reputation but it’s also important to newer publishers who want to build their brands. If you’re reading an Axios story on Facebook in your feed, you should know the source. Likewise, if you’re reading a Russia Today story, you should know the source.
Develop a transparent ranking system by domain/brand. This is not a novel approach: Google does it. Email services do it. If Infowars wants to keep publishing garbage, then let’s see their domain score fall off a cliff. The score has to mean something. The fact is that most respectable news publishers, regardless of subject matter or leanings, would score well and not be impacted. However, the trash would get taken out.
Hire more human moderators. Algorithms are amazing but personal responsibility should involve people. The company needs to take ownership over its “news feed” or stop calling it a “news feed.” We also need transparency on where these moderators are being hired. As platforms have challenged the economics of local news, we’ve also lost local accountability to the public. Moderators need the proper context for the areas, countries and cultures they’re serving.
Engage with member associations and non-profits to get advice on codes of conduct that responsible news organizations follow. Facebook had a significant misstep here when they rolled out their political advertising labels and archive. They dangerously conflated boosted news coverage about political issues with advertising about political issues. Facebook chose to ignore counsel from publishers and shut off communication with member associations despite more than 20,000 news publishers expressing concern to its CEO and COO.
A couple of executives at what is arguably the most impactful news distributor on the planet are making business decisions that have a massive impact on the political dialogue in our democracy. They should thoughtfully listen to concerns, advice, and legal inquiry in order to become a responsible member of the digital ecosystem from which they reap great profit. The problem of misinformation is not small, it is not easy, but it’s a problem that we all have a stake in solving.
