The Rise of The Digital ConsumerDiscover how media companies are

responding to digital transformation

and the great consumer power shift.

Contents 1 Introduction

7 Expand Your Media Portfolio

12 Amass Actionable Audience Data

13 Socialize Your Digital Channels

15 Optimize Your Content and Editorial

16 Keep it All Legal

18 Summary

IntroductionTraditional media and publishing models have been dramatically transformed by the rise of mobile broadband, use of multi-screens and the proliferation of social networks. As a result, media owners are now suffering from declining print circulations, time-shifting TV ads and a move away from their owned properties to social networks.

In response, forward thinking media companies have focused on how they can reinvent their digital channels and extend their media portfolios beyond traditional advertising formats to drive valuable traffic, boost advertising revenue, increase subscriptions and protect subscription renewals.

After all, why compete with Google and Facebook, who between them have over 50% of the advertising marketing stitched-up with static banners, video and image ads?

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The Rise of The Digital ConsumerThe pace of digital consumption is accelerating and today’s publishers and media owners must blend their existing digital properties with mobile, TV and social channels.

According to PWC, digital revenue from advertising has risen from just 14% of total advertising revenue in 2009 to 25% in 2013. It is forecast to hit 33% by 2018.

If traditional media owners don’t adapt to the new digital economy, they’ll find it increasingly hard to compete. To protect and grow their share of this exploding market, publishers must:

Source: PWC Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2014

Offer innovative promotional formats to advertisers Optimize traffic to their owned digital channels Maximize ad impressions and exposure Improve the performance of their inventory Increase ad revenue and commerce

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Consumers are becoming the most persuasive and powerful influencers in the new digital economy. In fact, recent research from Ipsos suggests that purchase decisions among millennials are more influenced by user generated content (UGC) than any other form of content or promotion:

Growing Consumer InfluenceThe balance of power is rapidly shifting from brands and media owners towards their consumers. It’s now the man on the bus, the teen at the concert and the woman at the beach who are creating and sharing photos, videos and updates like never before.

Sources: Pew Research - State of the News Media 2014 PWC Global entertainment and media outlook 2014–2018

of all online news consumers have submitted their own content (including videos, photos, articles or opinion pieces) to news websites or blogs.

of social network users share or repost news stories, images, or videos.

discuss news issues or events on social network sites.

of US consumers now look for content recommendations online.

Source: Ipsos Millennial Social Influence Study 2014

User Generated Content

Traditional Media

Banner Ads

11%

50%

46%

63%

53%

44%

23%

53%

44%

23%

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Social is a Primary Source of TrafficResearch shows that consumers are progressively using social media as their main way to access media websites. So, rather than clicking-through from an online ad or visiting directly, if they’re on a mobile device, visitors are more likely to be referred from a social network like Facebook or Twitter.

In fact, a recent study of the top 250 news and publisher sites highlights the share of referrals by source on both mobile and desktop traffic during January 2013 - January 2014.

So, rather than focusing solely on their owned properties to

activate their audiences, media owners must ensure they have a unified strategy to activate their audiences

across social, mobile and web channels. While ensuring

valuable traffic is channeled through to their owned

properties, where it can then be effectively monetized.

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Referrals from Social Network:

Mobile Desktop

34% 17%

Referrals from Search:

Mobile Desktop

33% 33%

Session duration (average time spent per site visit)

Duration per user (average time spent on site per visit)

Total time spent on site (by total audience)

Ad exposure time (time an ad was in view)

Page view duration (average time spent on page)

Content exposure time (time the content was in view)

Other

Engagement and Time-Based Metrics are KeyIn a world dominated by mobile media consumption, some traditional advertising models appear to be losing relevance. Not only are audiences consuming more content than ever before, it is now on multiple screens. The onus is on media companies to innovate and offer consumers interactive campaign experiences in tandem with compelling editorial and user-generated content. The pressure is on for media owners to prove their sites are the most competitive, most socially engaging and most effective in the marketplace. And, they can only do this by creating a deeper, more authentic relationship with their readers.

Sources: Digital Content Next How Time-Based Measurement is Grabbing Digital Publishers’ Attention October 2014) Digital Content Next

Time-based metrics publishers share with advertisers

71%

65%

59%

53%

47%

12%

6%

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So What Should Media Companies Do?Media owners and publishers need a new suite of tools, a broader media portfolio and more detailed insights into the behavior and preferences of their audiences. Ultimately, it’s about offering tangible value to advertisers, driving more revenue and optimizing the relevance, efficiency and performance of their commercial products.

In this section of the white paper, we’ll explore how media owners can:

Expand Their Media Portfolio

Amass Actionable Audience Data

Socialize Their Digital Channels

Optimize Their Content and Editorial

Keep it All Legal

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Expand Your Media PortfolioMedia owners are now offering their advertisers products from an extended media portfolio, offering native advertising and re-imagining the way existing promotions can run on their websites and social channels.

Competitions and Sweepstakes: It has never been easier to use competitions and sweepstakes to acquire richly-

profiled audience data to improve segmentation and the targeting of offers and

ads. However, many media companies are using outdated competition platforms,

often built in-house with little flexibility and poor social media integration. Plus,

there’s limited ability to integrate the captured data with other data sources, such

as CRM, email and subscriptions, into a single data warehouse.

Media owners need to adopt modern competition platforms that make it easy to

deploy, customize and launch promotions at the required frequency. At the same

time these platforms need to be flexible and optimized to capture richly profiled

and actionable audience data. Ultimately, it’s all about being able to run promotions

for their advertisers that maximize entries, boost virality and capture data.

“Media companies can drive up to 25% of their digital revenues through

competitions and sweepstakes.”

Media owners can run competitions to profile their own audience database or as an additional type of promotion for advertisers.

AOL run promotions such as sweepstakes and quizzes across their portfolio of brands. It’s big business.

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Maximize Ad Impressions: When visitors are engaging with multi-step competitions or interacting with

curated social content, there is now the opportunity to serve new ads into the

page hosting the competition app. Each new action within the promotion

can trigger a new ad to display around the iframe. This can be triggered after

each step in a multiple-choice quiz, clicking through a gallery or on final

form submission.

This approach to event tracking means media owners can offer a higher

number of ad impressions during a single visit to their web property. On

future visits they can increase effectiveness through effective profiling and

targeting based on user behavior and expressed preferences.

Scripps Interactive Networks collects hundreds of millions of entries a year. That’s an awful lot of data and an incredible number of page-views, given each entry represents multiple clicks.

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Adopt Native Advertising: With a lack of new advertising formats and products to offer advertisers,

and increased social referral traffic, there’s an opportunity to gain traction

around each of the engagement metrics featured in the previous section.

In fact, publishers are beginning to offer “native advertising” packages to

advertisers that feature an optimal mix of curated UGC, branded content and

planned editorial.

And it seems to be working. According to research from IPG media lab,

native ads are viewed for the same amount of time as editorial content and

are much more likely to be shared than a banner ad (32% versus 19% of

respondents said they would do so).

Sources: Online Publishers Association (OPA) and Radar Research 2013

57%

43%

33%

US publishers primary measurement for the effectiveness of native advertising:

Engagement

Traffic

Social sharing

57%

43%

33%

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Take Advantage of the Second Screen: Recent research from Nielsen confirms what we all instinctively know: more than 40% of us use our tablets and smartphones simultaneously

while we’re watching TV. But how do media owners take advantage of this trend?

60 Minute Photo Contests Launch hashtag and photo contests that last for the duration of a TV program. It’s all possible with the aggregation and curation capabilities of the EngageSciences platform and the Content API to inject UGC directly into live TV ad formats.

Drive from TV to Web and Social Promote competitions and sweepstakes during TV programs, safe in the knowledge that you’ll get instant participation at scale from second screeners.

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Activate Your Audience Wherever They Are: To ensure an effective presence across multiple channels and to maximize

the number of participants, campaigns should be federated to multiple

social networks and digital channels. For example, you can enter via a

Facebook contest, upload a selfie via a website, share a tweet on Twitter or

a photo on Instagram via a hashtag.

The buzz around Jermain Jackman’s new album was achieved by curating UGC content from Vine, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and more on the dedicated website. Competitions were launched on Instagram and Twitter where entrants could create and share content using a specific hashtag, driving further reach on social channels and more traffic to the website.

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Amass Actionable Audience DataBy running activations across social, digital and mobile channels, media owners can develop a killer marketing database that can accurately segment and target their audience and power the performance of other marketing channels.

Targeting and Segmentation: Run promotions to collect audience data across your primary digital channels

and a range of social networks. By integrating social audience data with CRM and

marketing databases, media owners and publishers achieve more accurate, more

efficient and more effective targeting of email marketing and advertising.

Power Digital Channels with Social Data: Build a unified view of your audience over-time by connecting email, Facebook,

Twitter and Instagram profiles to a single audience record and match them with

CRM profiles. If publishers own multiple titles, all social data captured across these

properties can be integrated into a single data warehouse.

If they do it right, media owners can build closer relationships with their

digital consumers, while going beyond the traditional reader/subscriber

demographics to gain meaningful insights that can be applied across multiple

digital channels.

Yahoo!7 captures richly profiled audience data through sweepstakes that can be used for onward profiling and targeting.

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Socialize Your Digital ChannelsMix Curated Social Content With Promotions. Given the undoubted influence of UGC, media owners need to harness its power and mix it shrewdly with branded content from advertisers and editorial content.

22%

10%

11%

300%

Sources: Data from aggregate of EngageSciences customers

increase on click-throughs on calls-to-action when pages ingest social content.

decrease in bounce rates on web pages that feature social content and interactive apps.

increase in dwell time on pages with social content and interactive apps.

increase in web traffic on sites that feature social content and interactive applications.

Huffington Post regularly publish social hubs that feature opinions and reactions of their readers around a subject or an event. This social hub displays curated content from the visitors and journalists at the Wilderness Festival to inspire conversation and encourage engagement.

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The optimal mix of UGC and branded content can be embedded directly into a variety of owned digital properties or using automated content feeds.

Websites Facebook

Online adsMicrosites

YouTube Event screens

Retail installations

Mobile apps

Capture Additional Insights As well as extracting higher performance from

web pages, user-generated content can also deliver

valuable insights into customer demographics and

behavior. You can also feature a range of elements to

drive further engagement and data acquisition:

User ratings and reviews

Instagram and Twitter hashtag competitions

Interactive apps (hosted on your own website or Facebook)

Voting/polls

Third-party reviews

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Content posted by the publisher to social networks is tagged with relevant terms e.g ‘competitions’ and ‘sport’.

An unidentified reader engages, comments, shares and likes this content.

Analysis of the content tags concludes the reader is mainly interested in ‘surfing’, ‘competitions’ and ‘adventure sport’.

They enter a competition via the publisher website, such as a sweepstake or photo contest, around a specific topic, opting in to emails, and answering profiling questions as part of their submission.

Optimize Your Editorial StrategyIt’s important to understand how your editorial is resonating and who it’s resonating with. Use a platform to tag all of the posts you publish to your social profiles. Choose the right taxonomy to determine social engagement and measure how your content is performing. More importantly, profile and target individuals and groups of consumers connecting with your brand.

Here's how it works:

UFC use Messaging and Tagging on the EngageSciences platform to optimize their editorial to create the biggest impact and target the most engaged audience members (likes, comments, shares) to drive merchandise and ticket sales.

They then interact via a social network e.g Facebook, providing further data, including email address, likes, shares gender, location and other publicly available profile information.

This engagement may then encourage the reader to sign up for a subscriber account – providing even more profiling data.

Over time they return and connect with your promotions and content through your website and social networks. You can then group activity against individual email records in your data warehouse.

You use this profiled audience data to identify interested consumers and improve segmentation and targeting via other marketing channels.

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Keeping it All LegalCOPPA Compliancy If you’re a media owner in the US, you’re probably acutely aware of the

stringent requirements of COPPA. But, are you confident that your current

approach to sweepstakes and competitions is fully compliant and will keep

you clear of litigation?

Publishers need to ensure they use a platform that identifies users who

are under 13 years of age and restricts and subsequently blocks them from

future submissions. It’s also good idea to feature Captcha integration,

fast track fraud detection and automated participant export, so you’re fully

covered.

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Rights Management As part of their campaigns, media companies will typically encourage participants to create and share UGC that can be re-used in future

marketing promotions. The good news is that you’ll typically have explicit permission to re-use the shared content if it has been submitted

via a form embedded in a promotion or via a campaign on a social network featuring a unique campaign hashtag.

However, there are times when you might want to re-use the content in a different format, such as TV advertising, or use public content

that has been curated on any number of popular social networks, but not shared as part of a campaign. In these cases, media owners must

adopt an approach to:

Request rights to re-use the most compelling

content

Track rights requests and have an audited

history of the permissions process

Optionally set content to automatically publish when rights have been

granted

Filter, curate and review UGC from many

different sources

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SummaryThe explosion of consumer-generated content, social networks and mobile is unstoppable. Media companies must accept the social user's experience is now collaborative and inclusive. And with half of digital ad revenues now being taken by Facebook and Google, media brands should be looking to offer their advertisers something that neither of these behemoths can: a truly interactive experience.

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About EngageSciencesThe EngageSciences marketing engagement platform enables publishers and media companies to dramatically boost digital ad revenues and socially referred commerce.

EngageSciences operates across 76 countries, working with some of the largest and most respected media and publishing brands in the world.

Request A DemoIf want to see it in practice, book a demo of the EngageSciences marketing engagement platform:

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Take a look under the bonnet to find out how easy

it is to create unique digital propositions for your ad

partners, boost user engagement across your web

and social channels and collect unrivalled customer

insight.

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