Publishers Are Skeptical About Facebook's Planned News Tab; Take a Peek Inside Disney Supply Stack

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Publisher Traumatic Stress Disorder

Publishers, does this sound familiar? Facebook is offering to pay licensing fees to news outlets to participate in a news section it plans to launch later this year. It’s knocked on doors at ABC, Dow Jones, The Washington Post, Bloomberg and others. Facebook will shell out as much as $3 million a year to newspapers to license their content, a departure from the rev-share model it uses for Instant Articles. News outlets will be able to host the content on Facebook directly or add links to drive traffic back to their own sites, The Wall Street Journal reports. Publishers, which have been burned many times in the past by Facebook, are understandably skeptical. “It’s asking a whole lot of publishers … to commit to something that none of us have any idea if it’s going to work,” said an unnamed source. More. Related: Facebook may be heading down the vMVPD route as it tests offering subscriptions to video services through its Watch portal. More.

Kitchen Table Issues

Kraft-Heinz is ready to reinvest in branding. The company had sharply reduced ad spend since around 2013, which was partly to blame for a $15 billion writedown on Kraft and Oscar Meyer. But agencies shouldn’t get too excited. The CPG giant wants to trim costs from marketing for stuff that happens behind the scenes, new CEO Miguel Patricio, previously the CMO of AB InBev, told investors during the company’s Q2 earnings call last week. Aka, Kraft-Heinz plans to spend less cheddar on agency fees, production and research. “[Investment in] the things consumers see are declining to pay for other expenses,” he said. “These are inefficiencies we can redeploy.” Kraft Heinz isn’t the first CPG to slim down its agency roster to bolster its true media spend. Procter & Gamble reduced marketing spend by $350 million in Q2 after cutting back on agency fees. More at Marketing Week.

Keys To The Kingdom

Disney and The Trade Desk, one of the entertainment empire’s demand-side partners, co-hosted a “bootcamp strategy session” earlier this year to pitch Disney’s new ad tech to advertisers, Business Insider reports. With ESPN now sold through Disney’s consolidated supply stack, programmatic can bring valuable new features to live sports. For instance, live OTT sports often just reload the same advertisers if a game goes into overtime or extra innings, sometimes even giving away those spots to their in-game sponsors. Dynamic ad insertion could help tap into real-time swings in demand or help frequency cap when the same commercials are being shown over and over without an alternative. In digital media, dramatic traffic fluctuations can be a sign of bot fraud. “We don’t want you to think it’s fraud, we don’t want you to think this huge influx of traffic is not viable, and we want to make sure that you get the best games of the week,” said Laura Nelson, Disney’s SVP of performance advertising and solutions. More.

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