How Strong is the Consumer Trust in Your Brand? Jebbit’s Taylor Donnell Reveals All

Trust in brands has seen a great shift among consumers according to Jebbit’s Taylor Donnell, Vice President, Content and Partnerships Marketing, whose company just released the results of a new online study of 2500 25-64 year olds. Some business sectors were hit hard as consumer trust declined precipitously. Others benefited, debunking previously held beliefs of what is needed to cement consumer trust.

Charlene Weisler: What are the study's major takeaways?

Taylor Donnell: Highlights include the following - This CDTI edition’s rankings reflect the largest shifts in brand trust rankings to date - Google fell from #4 most trusted brand to #89, Apple fell from #17 to #43, and Netflix went from #8 to #43, indicating there’s room for brands to improve the education (and communication tactics) that they provide to their users regarding data privacy changes.

Brands must be thoughtful and strategic with the data points they seek to capture as 30% of consumers said ‘asking for too much information,’ again ranked as the #1 factor that results in brand mistrust.

Pandemic trends are no longer trends because they're here to stay, with 63% of consumers surveyed saying their online shopping usage has increased since the start of the pandemic, and 40% say they’re seeing more irrelevant online ads than ever before - 46% agreed that irrelevant online ads from a business based on past purchase data decreased trust in that brand.

D2C brand Bonobos jumped to #9 from #90, indicating that legacy brand awareness doesn’t guarantee a high trust index ranking - 43% trust brands in both D2C and traditional brand categories the same.

Weisler: How does this compare to your previous study?

Donnell: For one thing, we saw quite a big fall in rankings among some of the tech giants, (Google fell from #16 in our last report to #89 in this one). This annually recurring study was first published in 2018 and indicates that consumers’ distrust in major brands continues to increase as many businesses that once held top spots on the consumer trust index have made major shifts down the ranks.

Weisler: Regarding the privacy landscape - both nationally and globally - how do you think this will impact businesses going forward?

Donnell: The CDTI report found that while 63% of consumers are spending more time shopping online than they were prior to the start of the pandemic, 75% of businesses had a harder time building and maintaining trust with their customers. To gain and/or maintain consumer trust, business must be more transparent than ever about their privacy and data collection practices as well as ensure digital communications with consumers are relevant, welcome and engaging. 46% of consumers agreed that irrelevant online ads from a business based on past purchase data ultimately decreased the amount of trust they had in the brand whose ad they saw, showing that brands cannot afford to send irrelevant, repetitive or intrusive communications to shoppers.

Weisler: How fully informed is the average consumer on Google and Apple privacy policies, in your opinion?

Donnell: 30% of the 2,500 consumers in the survey stated that they were unaware that Apple and Google made any changes to privacy policies at all. We think there is plenty of room to provide more education and educational resources that will give consumers a better grasp as to how businesses, mobile-apps, browsers, etc. track their online behavior and generate revenue using their personal data.    We also believe that while these changes are good and built to protect consumers, big tech continues to take advantage of burying communications about any changes/updates that impact users by burying them in their complex and lengthy privacy policies and / or terms & conditions pages.

Weisler: Do you think Google's fall in the rankings might be due to other factors?

Donnell: On the one hand, many of the biggest players in tech continue to tread against bad PR, which may provide some evidence for Google's at least part of the reason that Google dropped 73 spots! However, this is a bit of a head scratcher given that Google has taken momentous steps to put consumers and their privacy first, including both company's announced privacy changes to their Android operating system as well as its plans to deprecate the third-party cookie.

Weisler: What should businesses do to maximize trust with consumers?

Donnell: Businesses should proactively communicate how they collect and use consumer data in order to build trust. When consumers willingly volunteer more information about themselves (i.e. first- or zero-party data) businesses should respond by clearly demonstrating the genuine value they can in turn provide for consumers, through helpful and welcome communications. Over time, this will help the customer trust the business to use their data respectfully and ultimately increase the lifetime value of the customer. One key takeaway was that while legacy brands may have the advantage of brand recognition (35% of consumers polled stated that they still trust traditional brands more than online, direct-to-consumer brands), they should also take a page from many D2C brands, which seem to fare better in consumer trust, perhaps because they appear to better understand the needs of digital consumers, which enables them to focus on delivering an engaging and relevant user experience. Although only 22% of consumers polled trust D2C brands more, 43% trust brands in both categories the same!

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

 

 

The Audience is Everything. Nielsen Announces Nielsen One Cross-Media Solution

We are fortunate to be involved in the time of the great expansion of media. But with this great expansion comes measurement challenges and Nielsen has been grappling with how to calculate cross platform behavior so that it can be an independent measurement on a single platform. 

Their solution is the recently launched Nielsen One which is, according to David Kenny, Nielsen’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Diversity Officer, “a single cross-media solution to drive comparable and comprehensive metrics across all platforms.”

Nielsen One is Announced

“What started out as just television and movies has now grown into a multi-platform cross media landscape, bigger than anyone ever anticipated,” explained Kenny. “Consumers are no longer limited to engaging with video content at as particular time and place. They now have endless options for viewing whatever and whenever they want to.” The endless choice of platforms, devices, mediums and ad formats coupled with an increased commitment to privacy has led to a wealth of data from a range of sources that can often be duplicative. Nielsen One aims to solve for all of these exigencies. “With Nielsen’s cross-media solution, Nielsen One,” he asserted, “we are aiming to provide marketers, advertisers and publishers with a single metric, across digital and linear that is trusted, independent and standardized across the industry.”

In mapping out Nielsen One’s complete roll-out by 2024, Nielsen’s Chief Operating Officer, Karthik Rao, explained that while the industry is at a major inflection point with innovation, it has been accelerated by Covid. “The amount of disruption and innovation that we have experienced in the past nine months would normally happen over the course of a few years,” he noted. Between the fifteen new streaming services launched in the course of two years to the +33% increase in spend for addressable in one year and the push to full distribution of smart TVs where nearly 8 out of 10 homes have a least one, the industry’s expansion is taking place on many levels. Add to that is an increased focus on, “privacy restrictions, increased consumer awareness and regulatory changes. Digital ad tech, measurement, activation will be reborn in a world without reliable  persistent identifiers such as cookies  and mobile ad ids and there is a massive shift to streaming while  the walled garden walls are growing higher and the open web remains a question mark. These changes intensify the need for standard measurement and audience de-duplication,” he concluded.

Nielsen has already made great progress in cross-media measurement and this effort, through Nielsen One, is expected to ramp up over the next two years. “We are already evolving the national currency to include  addressable measurement in the first half of 2021,” Rao noted, “We are leveraging our own ACR data and announced the integration of data from Direct TV, Dish and Vizio’s Project OAR. Starting in late 2021, for live television, we will be previewing sub-minute ads and content metrics… In 2022 we will fully launch the cross-media product and expect the market to fully transition by the fall 2024 season.”

And The Industry Responds

For Luis di Como, Executive Vice President Global Media, Unilever, the need for a single cross-media solution is paramount. “One of the biggest advantages we have at Unilever is our coverage,” he explained, “If you see thought the lens of geography, portfolio and channels, we have millions of data points and signals that we can use to understand the future,” in a global marketplace. Today, Unilever boasts a People Data Center. “This is the place where we capture, store, analyze and leverage all of the data that we have from first party data to second and third party to get a holistic view of the consumer and to get unique insights,” he stated and added, “Covid accelerated that trend,” moving the markets from ecommerce to “e-everything,” creating that much more data to handle and changing consumer behaviors. One single measurement will enable companies like Unilever to mitigate waste and manage frequency resulting in optimizing company efforts and creating a better consumer experience.

Many companies have been working independently to find cross-media solutions. How can we best combine our efforts to get to an industry standard solution?  Michael Kassan, Founder Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Medialink, moderated a panel of executives from across the media industry. “We have made progress in the last year but … we need to move faster, marketers are getting frustrated, digital continues to grow,” he stated. Moving into 2021 and beyond, Kassan posited four major questions – How do we increase user engagement in advertising? How can we create new, more non-interruptive experiences that would be preferred by consumers and work for marketers? How do we make it easier for marketers to connect to the audiences that move their brand? How do we insure your messages are in front of the right viewer?

For Kirk McDonald, North America Chief Executive Officer, GroupM, “the challenges facing the industry will require us to work together and be more cooperative to make the industry function better,” and move towards single sources of measurement for video across all distribution platforms.

With an extremely diversified portfolio, Linda Yaccarino, Chairman Global Advertising and Partnerships, NBCU, believes that since the pandemic, “strategic priorities have changed dramatically. Did we anticipate, unfortunately the theme parks being largely closed down? Did we anticipate the studio business being what it is today? But additionally, did we anticipate the broadband business having extraordinary and meteoric growth with no anticipation of that slowing down?” Broadband, aggregation and streaming are now the new priorities to, “put the consumer at the core.” She added, that as the industry comes together with, “a common purpose for an open platform that is dedicated to safety and transparency, we can really make strides and get ahead to meet the consumer needs.”

Having worked on both the client and agency side, Ben Jankowski, Group Head of Global Media, Mastercard, has been quoted as saying, “The biggest decision we have to make as marketers is where we put our money.” This is a challenge that is not yet being solved by today’s measurement. “Today we can’t measure the holistic view of the consumer. Today, with the research challenge we have and the business realities of people in the marketplace who have built products that are not conducive to being comparable, we have fragmentation which is more difficult to measure than any time before. We have to get in front of it,” he admonished.

Tara Walpert Levy, Managing Director of Global Ads Marketing, Google, noted, “The viewer is all that matters. They define what television is. If you are a buyer, it is critical to have objective, comparable, independent measurement which buyers and sellers both have confidence in and that lets you operate at scale.”  For her, Nielsen One will make this process easier and impactful.

Kenny explained that Nielsen is hyper focused on solving this industry challenge. “Nielsen has been part of the challenge,” he admitted, “We have tried to measure everything historically in different methodologies so there was a digital ad rating, TV ad rating, cable rating. When I got here two years ago we did a complete overhaul to get to one id platform and the one ability to measure all of it in the same de-duplicated way. It is the only way we can solve this problem.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

 

The Many Challenges for Media Technology Departments

With all of the change and transformation taking place in the media industry today, we may tend to forget that there is one area of expertise that is under great pressure to get it done, get it right and get it within the budget as quickly as possible. That would be corporate technology departments who must find efficient, successful methods to build the systems that will drive the business and that, oh by the way, will not become obsolete just as it is completed. It is quite a feat!

This week I attended an off-the-record roundtable on this subject that included representatives from such companies as AMC, Charter, Disney, Google, Legends, NBCU, Nielsen, NY Times, NPD Group, Ogilvy, Scholastic, Vice and WarnerMedia. This event, sponsored by Eliassen Group and hosted by WarnerMedia, shed light on the challenges that technology departments face in building and off-loading measurement and sales systems. With the ever expanding range of data sets (that sometimes have to be normalized and cleansed) to addressable and programmatic advertising sales components (that need to be built into current sales, inventory and traffic systems) to the promises of groundbreaking custom media systems (that cross siloed internal departments), there is a lot that can go wrong or miscalculated. And let’s not forget the need to comply with ever-evolving privacy legislation.

Organizing and Managing Project Teams

How does a CTO start to herd all the cats in a major technology project cross company? To some, this was less of a challenge in smaller companies than in larger ones. “A small company is federated,” noted one attendee. For those in larger corporations, “small agile teams,” might be the way to start but there needs to be some type of centralized body or council so the governance doesn’t slip and a set of corporate standards to set general parameters and deliverables.

Collaboration tools can be an unexpected challenge. According to another participant, tools can vary within a company. “Some use Slack,” he noted, but other departments use other systems. “Some don’t use Hangout.” Picking the right collaboration tools is pivotal, noted another attendee, so that the technical tools “get normalized.” There is great value in being proactive by immediately training in any collaboration tool when on-boarding a project. Sometimes rejection exists simply because the person doesn’t know how to use it. One executive suggested incentivizing employees and offered the following example: In moving from Office, her company offered Amazon gift cards to those employees who made the change.

Privacy

In the discussion of privacy, the thought was that, as CCPA goes into effect and with GDPR, advertisers would have to go back to contextual advertising from more personalized targeting.

For one participant, the irony is that as the TV side of the market becomes more addressable, it is possible that digital may become more contextualized.

Most agreed that it was a “hard regulatory environment,” where CCPA is the first salvo but not the last. One executive added that there were different criteria depending on the legislation – opting in for GDPR or opting out for CCPA. Anecdotally, she noted that, “with GDPR there is some blindness to opt-in. Consumers in 40% to 50% of cases ignore it” which is, “similar to ad blindness,” although there is no feedback as of yet on CCPA. And with legislation going out state by state it is really an, “evolving story.”

For another attendee, the concern is “reputational risk,” where we need to ascertain exactly what is going out to the consumer. “Where have you pulled the personal information and what are you doing with it? What are the exceptions?” It all must be within scope. His company demands privacy on enterprise level but individual nets may manage risk in different way and is “operated in a siloed manner” because of all of the different businesses they own. For another company that offers subscription streaming services, the consumer can delete their data but then they do, they are unsubscribed.

Privacy legislation could impact recommendation engines. Services like Chrome will be phasing out of cookies. Both of these situations present their own challenges in tracking consumers. As a result, some participants believe that this will result in more of a move to subscriptions.

Direct to Consumer Model

Being content with the status quo is not an option nowadays. For one executive, “We’ve had such a stable model for such a long time, you didn’t need to change anything. It just worked.” Now, faced with strict functional silos and the need to think differently, change management has been a challenging process and their current informal structure will be forced to evolve.

For some, the impact of mergers, purchases and consolidations creates a much larger company that needs to focus on assembling the organization within an aggressive time line. Content Rights is also undergoing a shift. It used to be more profitable to “split rights and sell them off to different parties. But now there is a scramble to re-aggregate these rights.”

In a world of cord-cutting, is there a future for cable television? For many, the answer is yes by upgrading the network to offer higher speed for gaming and more experiential content with aggregation being a solution for brands and distribution. “It’s a fun time to be in the distribution business. I don’t see the cable companies going away. Where would you go,” one participant stated.

As viewers increasingly watch individual programs and may not be aware of the network it is on, branding will be more and more pivotal going forward. “There is always a market for high end production,” concluded an attendee … as long as the consumer knows where it originates.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Epoll Study Finds that Streaming Hardware is Critical to Success

A recent study by Epoll found that streaming hardware is vitally important to consumers as part of their enjoyment of content. The study concludes that, “with cord-cutting becoming a reality for more consumers today, devices that connect to these services will need to appeal to the masses.”

An example of this phenomena is Roku which, according to eMarketer, has more users than any other streaming device (excluding smart TVs) at 86.2M in the U.S. Compare this to the E-Score Brand survey, where Roku has the highest Appeal score at 49%, with close to a third of consumers (31%) agreeing that Roku is better than competitors.
Other takeaways include:

• Streaming devices are mainly used to watch shows and movies but some have additional features such as games and music. For those reasons, Roku is considered most Entertaining (41%) followed by Amazon Fire TV (39%)
• Other features such as voice activation, 4K resolution, game controller support, (Xbox/Playstation) and brand ecosystem are things users also find valuable. Apple TV leads for Innovative (27%) and Amazon Fire TV Stick (23%) and Apple TV (22%) are considered more Cutting Edge than Google Chromecast (16%) and Roku (15%).
• As streaming devices are fighting to be the hardware of choice for cord-cutters, Apple TV’s early rollout gives it a slight advantage as being High Quality, Innovative and Cutting Edge while the others in the space have higher Appeal than Apple TV. Consumer comments suggest Apple’s premium pricing ($150-$200) may be difficult to justify for most consumers compared to Roku ($30-$100) and Chromecast ($35-$70).

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

How Ghost Ads Can Help Prove the Incremental Revenue of Campaign Spend

It’s not enough for an ad to simply trigger a sale: Today’s marketers want to know which ad it was, and on which platform and network it was featured. Ghost ads are emerging as one of the most popular measurement solutions to monitor ad efficacy and efficiency.

These types of ads, introduced by Google in 2015, are now receiving more recognition by the industry at large for their use on Google and Facebook. As Google notes, “It’s difficult to know whether that marketing expenditure is making an impact . . . The pressure to prove value is all the more important because marketers know the budget for one campaign can often determine the investment for their next one.”

But what are ghost ads? And can brands really benefit from their use? Let’s take a look at how this form of advertising is being used by publishers today.

The Potential to Reach More Consumers

Ghost ads are essentially conversion lift tests which, as Shane O’Neill, director of content at Nanigans, explains, monitor a control group of target consumers and flag when a brand’s ad would have been served to a user in that group. An advertiser can then bid on that impression using a ghost ad, which is so named because it is invisible to the user. If the bid wins, the ad is fed to the control group.

This data can be seen by the advertiser and ad platform and is used to ascertain whether there is a difference in consumer behavior among those who have seen the ad versus those who did not see it. O’Neill concludes that ghost ads “create apples-to-apples comparisons of users who were exposed to ads versus users who would have been exposed to ads.”

Another Means to Measure Incrementality

The use of these ads to test consumer behavior answers a huge question for the advertiser: Did my campaign spend result in incremental revenue? Incrementality is “measuring the lift that advertising spend provides to the conversion rate of the target population,” explains Rick Bruner, vice chair for the U.S. at i-com.

“We’re good at targeting the people who are already most inclined to buy a product,” he continues. “So for the advertiser, the question then is: What effect did my ads have on that target audience above the rate at which they would have bought anyway, absent the advertising?”

Using these ads to measure incrementality is easy. An ad campaign is fed out to a group of targeted consumers while at the same time, a control group of consumers who would have normally been chosen to see that ad is shown the exact same message. Each group’s reactions to the ads are then tracked.

The data from each group can then be compared to identify which ad creative, publisher, platform, user behaviors, piece of content, scheduling, etc., are more likely to generate a winning bid and eventual purchase. This not only answers the incrementality question, this comparison also gleans information for attribution measurement—a win-win.

How Valuable Are Ghost Ads, Really?

In understanding which ads facilitated purchasing and increased revenue, advertisers will be better prepared to optimize their future campaigns. For researchers, these ads eliminate selection bias in the testing. Algorithms often target consumers who are the already the most likely to buy; with ghost ads, publishers discover if the consumer would have bought anyway—regardless of whether they saw the ad.

For advertisers, these ads are a cost-effective measurement tool that’s easy to implement and tracks near real time, putting us one step closer to knowing exactly when a consumer made the decision to buy.

This article first appeared on the Videa blog.

Measurement Metric: Attention vs. Inattention

Attention is one of those measurement metrics that is important but difficult to quantify. What is attention? How is it measured? “Attention is more elusive than people realize,” noted Duane Varan, CEO, MediaScience, “similar to how we use the term engagement, which is often misused.” His firm recently partnered with Google to help answer some of attention’s unknowns. “Attention may be eyes on the screen … but not paying attention. Or looking away but actually listening,” he posited.

Varan believes that it is important to go back to basics and conducted an extensive literature review that underscored his belief that attention is heavily researched but there are still a lot of blind spots. “It is remarkable how little time is spent on inattention,” he added. To that end, Varan believes that inattention is not the same thing as low attention, especially when it comes to advertising. But the difference between passive and active attention is another matter. “Lean back attention is not a bad thing. It is relaxing,” he explained, “Same too for lean forward attention.” It may depend on the content being viewed.

Using the standard neuroscience measurements like eye tracking to monitor for fixations per second, is eye moving or not, Varan started to identify the good stimuli in a test of 105 short video clips identifying the degrees of attention.

Claire Charron, Research Manager,Market Insights, Google offered the following conclusions:

• Attention and inattention are two sides of the same coin.
• The best way to capture attention is through inattention.
• The absence of inattention is attention.
• The most accurate measure is blink duration and this is not usually used. It is the time it takes to blink. It drives levels of inattention.
• Fixations per session is another high measure.
• So the two main measures of attention – blink duration and fixations per second – have to do with the eye.
• In this test, “eyes on screen” didn’t have much variation because the test required participants to keep their eyes on the screen. So it is possible that in a natural setting, eyes on screen may supplant two metrics from lab test. At this point, we don’t know.
• Other measures, such as alpha waves and heartbeat, also correlated with self-reported attention and also picked up inattention. But skin conductance only garnered a mild correlation.
• All of this indicates that there is not much overlap between measures. Each contributes something different and which one you use depends on what you are trying to achieve.

“Attention is the absence of inattention,” concluded Varan, “And inattention can be accurately measured. Attention is not one kind. It is many kinds with many measures.”

The testing continues. Next step: apply to ads, and tease out different dimensions.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis

Once Disruptive, Video Games Are Being Disrupted

Disruptions in the media industry occur constantly. But now it seems that the speed of disruptions, even among disruptors themselves is accelerating. The ARF noted that according a recent study by Axios, video games, which has disrupted media consumption, are undergoing a major usage/business change as well and the change is occurring not just on the software/content but also on the hardware of consoles and controllers.

Packages Instead of Single Games
Economics are shifting in favor of the consumer. In the past, gamers had to purchase a game outright. Now they are able to subscribe to a more economical package of games. “In the past, you plunked down $60 at GameStop for a copy of Grand Theft Auto or Madden NFL and played it out — after which you could trade it in or let it gather dust,” the AP News reports. “Now, you’ll increasingly have the choice of subscribing to games, playing for free or possibly just streaming them over the internet to your phone or TV.” Gamers won’t have to buy individual games anymore. And presumably the cost of entry for gaming companies would be lower

Veering Away From Specialized Hardware
Subscriptions will not only move storage and software into the cloud, it will make access easier across any device and be cheaper since there will not be a requirement to buy any extra equipment, which is often expensive and may only work specifically for certain games.

Examples of games moving into the cloud include Google’s Stadia platform that, “will store a game-playing session in the cloud and let players jump across phones, laptops and browsers with Google’s software,” per the AP. Apple Arcade “subscribers will get to play more than 100 games … on the Apple-made iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.” Snap Games will allow users to play real-time, multiplayer games with their friends, with new ad experience in games so all that “our (developer) partners can see monetization from day one.” And with Fortnight, a free-to-play game, “a key aspect of the game is being able to play it on anything from your phone to a decked-out gaming PC.”

It remains to be seen how quickly this transformation will occur. There is still the need for technology companies to broker deals with game developers to distribute their games. But, as with other media, the consumer is increasingly setting the pace and voting with their wallets.  “We’re in an environment where people want content and media when they want it, how they want it,” CFRA analyst Scott Kessler said. “You can play a great video game with a console or on a computer or with a mobile device and you might not have to pay anything. That’s a dramatic departure from even a few years ago.”

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.