This report contributes to policy debates by providing evidence on the dynamics of markets for audiovisual advertising in which both audiovisual media services (AVMSs) and video sharing platforms (VSPs) are operating. It addresses the following questions: - To what extent are audiovisual media services and VSPs competing in the same markets as comparable services? - What conditions are shaping the levelness of the field on which they are competing? The investigation covered Belgium, France, Italy and the UK. Using a detailed literature review, 26 key informant interviews, and a comparative legal analysis, the research found evidence that: - Though TV advertising and online video advertising on VSPs and other services do not serve exactly the same function for advertisers, AVMSs and VSPs are certainly competing for the same budgets and building relationships with the same advertisers in largely the same way, with media agencies playing an important mediating role. - The playing field is not even. The main reasons that the playing field on which AVMSs and VSPs are competing for advertising budgets is not level are related to imbalances in the human and financial resources they can invest in building relationships and in their ownership of and ability to use data. Interchangeability The distribution of advertising budgets resembles concocting a recipe from a number of different ingredients all of which have different features. Agencies do not see it as competition between offline and online, but about finding the right mix of numerous options to reach certain objectives, and they engage in extensive research and complex modelling to do this. Nevertheless, budgets are not expanding currently and there is increased pressure to achieve efficiency and short-term effects, reported against key performance indicators (KPIs). Agencies and advertisers still view TV as crucial for advertising, especially for brand building and awareness, and often TV advertising is the flagship around which the rest of the campaign is designed. TV is trusted because its regulatory framework ensures it is a ‘brand safe’ environment and a good viewing experience, and because the audited measurement systems provide transparency in terms of where advertiser money is going and what it is getting. For agencies and advertisers, online video advertising is attractive for its efficiency in reaching target audiences, often with significant cost saving and in extreme detail, and for the ability to receive rapid feedback on the response to ads placed. They also value online options for small or experimental campaigns. Despite remaining suspicious of much of the data that is produced and concerned about brand safety, they often need to reach the audiences no longer watching TV and they get excited about the optimisation possibilities available. There are differences in the qualitative rules around advertising and agency respondents reported being able to do things online that they cannot do on TV. Some of these rules have been equalised with the 2018 update to the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD). Rules on misleading and comparative advertising are largely harmonised at the EU level and apply to all services, so this area of law was mostly the same in all four jurisdictions studied. A ban on political advertising on AVMSs was also common to all four, with no equivalent for VSPs. Efforts to address political advertising online are nascent, mainly focused on ensuring disclosure, and tied to efforts to combat disinformation. There is also a difference in product placement rules. The 2018 AVMSD includes user generated content (UGC) in the definition of product placement and allows it for the most part, but the exceptions, such as children’s and consumer programmes, in which it is prohibited for AVMS providers do not apply to VSPs. RECOMMENDATIONS As they implement the AVMSD, Member states should devise co-regulatory mechanisms that will be effective in enforcing content and advertising standards on VSPs and adhere to the Directive’s intention of levelling the playing field. The Commission’s guidance as to what qualifies as a VSP and criteria for co-regulatory mechanisms should be designed to maximally even out conditions among advertising-dependent services. Though there is no need to regulate UGC producers such as vloggers and influencers, national regulators should provide disclosure guidelines similar to those for content on AVMSs, and the European Regulators Group (ERGA) should investigate whether there is a need for the AVMSD’s product placement exceptions to be extended to VSPs. Industry bodies with support from national regulators should work towards standardisation of measurement within and across channels, including both agreement on a ‘common currency’ measurement for video and innovative ways in which the need to service KPIs can be addressed by all players. Relationships AVMS providers and VSPs take similar approaches to building relationships with agencies and advertisers. Both nurture long-term relationships with agencies, with personal relationships still being crucial. They also engage directly with larger advertisers to understand their aims and make them aware of the options they provide, particularly when rolling out new ones, such as the 6 second un-skippable ads online or addressable TV options. Whereas the most popular VSPs are global companies able to use that status advantageously for tax purposes and draw on extensive financial and human resources, AVMS providers are often prohibited by national-level rules aimed at protecting media pluralism from collaborating or even combining resources within the same group in ways that might allow them work towards addressing these imbalances. Some AVMS providers are engaged in transnational collaborations. Rebates and discounts based on scale and duration are common practice in how prices are set both for online and offline inventory, except when they are determined by auction in the programmatic systems. These and other contract conditions are subject to negotiations that, for AVMS providers in some jurisdictions, are constrained by trading frameworks. RECOMMENDATIONS Member states should revisit media plurality measures, including cross-ownership rules, with a view to enabling AVMS providers to co-operate in some areas, in which greater scale or scope may be crucial to allowing them to compete against global VOD and VSP services, without reducing the pluralism of views and content available to citizens. Member states should adopt transparency requirements similar to the French Sapin law in fair trading policy and EU policy makers should consider harmonising EU-level rules. The European Commission should closely monitor the implementation of national-level taxes on the B2B revenues of platforms, such as Italy’s 3% “web tax,” to assess the effects on the wider ecosystem and other businesses, and consider roll out across the Union. Data Ownership and Use VSPs can leverage the consent that they gather from their vast user base for targeting purposes and for the kind of tracking of an individual’s post-exposure journey needed to provide ROI results and make attribution claims. On the other hand, AVMS providers have only recently been requiring registration for users to access their AVOD and this is still giving them a rather limited type and amount of data on their users. The extent to which addressable TV gives AVMS providers useful data depends on the arrangements with the company providing the set top boxes to households. There is also an imbalance in access to online campaign-related data. The agreements that agencies and advertisers have with demand side platforms give them ownership of such data for their own campaigns. However the AVMS providers, or other publishers on the supply side, do not get such data for the campaigns run on their sites or around their content. A parallel might be if BARB, Auditel or Mediametri data was only available to agencies and advertisers. Our evidence indicates that data is an essential element of competition, and inventory holders such as AVMS providers and VSPs must be able to address the need for advertisers to demonstrate performance. Agencies and advertisers have concerns about dominance in the exploitation of data in this ecosystem that merit investigation. Respondents from various categories noted that GDPR appears to have further concentrated power in the hands of global platforms operating in the programmatic systems. Several mentioned the challenges of trying to compare across “walled gardens” of data maintained by those providing online advertising inventory and the lack of choice about what platforms they can use. RECOMMENDATION Competition authorities and data protection authorities should work together to assess possible concentration in the programmatic advertising system and in the wider market for video advertising.

This book describes and critically addresses the innovations and shifts made in the revision of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) adopted by the European Parliament and Council in 2018. Reflecting on European Union regulation and policy practice in all its Member States, the book’s unique approach places in-depth case study topics against the broader theoretical background. Taking a Europe-wide angle, an international team of authors focuses on key aspects of the AVMSD: the expansion of its scope to include video-sharing-platforms such as YouTube; the update of the rules for commercial communications; the first attempt for harmonized, minimal requirements at EU level regarding transparency of media ownership; new rules to ensure that video-on-demand services offer, invest in, and prioritise European content; the obligation on television distributors and smart TV manufacturers to pass on broadcasters’ signal without any interference, alteration or modification; and, the formalisation and consolidation of new forms of collaboration among national regulatory authorities. This thorough analysis of the cornerstone of European media policy makes this edited collection a crucial reference for scholars and students of media and cultural industries, media law and policy, European and EU media policy, and technology studies.

This report analyses the processes that turn data into economic value for online search, e-commerce and media platforms. It concludes that forcing data sharing through policy intervention would not prevent dominant incumbents to continue to benefit economically from greater access to data over new entrants. Instead, policy makers should focus on enabling niche entry, niche growth and a level playing field for competitors in new and emerging markets. Data play a central role in the business models that shape competition and innovation in digital markets. As dominant providers of online services collect ever more user data they generate data-driven network effects. They can then improve their services faster, and venture faster into related markets than competitors with less data, thereby raising entry barriers for innovative start-ups. The authors, Sally Broughton Micova (CERRE & University of East Anglia), Jan Krämer (CERRE & University of Passau) and Daniel Schnurr (University of Passau), have analysed processes that transform data into economic value for online search, e-commerce and media platforms. They find that in each case, more data, especially on user behaviour, gradually improves the quality of the service, thereby generating high economic benefits for the firm. The authors find that data-driven network effects can nevertheless be a source of efficiency which can ultimately benefit consumers. Even if some data is shared through policy intervention, dominant incumbents will continue to benefit economically and competitively from greater access to data over new entrants. “We conclude that it is neither realistic nor desirable to try to break data-driven network effects through policy intervention. Instead, we would strongly encourage policy makers to focus on enabling niche entry and niche growth. To do so, they should facilitate the sharing of behavioural user data gathered by the dominant firm with other firms.” The authors provide policy recommendations for data access remedies to safeguard competition, innovation and the openness of the digital ecosystem: 1. Remedies that achieve a more level playing field in the digital economy by breaking the data-driven network effects of data-rich incumbents should be entertained as a last resort and only under specific conditions. 2. Policy makers should foster data sharing on two levels to strike a balance between consumers’ privacy, competition and innovation. They should require the sharing of aggregated and anonymised raw user data in bulk, after a careful review and on a case-by-case basis. They should also facilitate the sharing of detailed raw user data through improved data portability, based on individual users’ consent. Bulk sharing of raw user data should be limited to data that was collected as a by-product of the incumbent’s dominant user-facing service, such as search logs, in order to maintain incentives for innovation and data collection. The main challenge will be to balance privacy concerns with maintaining enough detailed data to ensure it is of value to third-parties. 3. Dominant firms should also be obliged to allow consumers to port their raw data to another provider continuously and in real time. Privacy concerns can then be overcome and the shared user profiles can be more detailed than under bulk sharing. In concert with bulk-sharing, data portability can be a valuable source for attaining both detailed and representative data sets.

Pulp Politics helps us understand how political ads work by exploring how people think and feel, how our brains work, and how we tell and listen to stories. The book dissents from much popular and scholarly opinion that contends that political advertising only despoils democracy. It proposes that the fabric of popular culture, not the essentials of informed consent, constitutes the communicative core of contemporary political campaigns. The book subjects campaign spots to compellingly detailed and nuanced analysis.

The Essential How-To Guide for Social Media Marketing by Leading Expert Shama Hyder, Named "Social media’s zen master of marketing" by Entrepreneur magazine and One of LinkedIn's "Top Voices" in Marketing & Social in 2015 In 2001, at the dawn of the millennium—and the digital marketing age—the first edition of The Zen of Social Media Marketing became a global hit. In the ensuing years, updated editions helped even more marketers, entrepreneurs, students, and professionals of all types navigate the sometimes-stressful world of social media. Now, this new, fully updated edition offers timely insight to the ways social media marketing has changed and specific steps to show you exactly how to thrive and profit with ease and efficiency. Whether you’re a novice, struggler, or mastery-seeker, you already know that engaging in social media is no longer optional. People are talking about your company online and you need to be part of those conversations. However, social media marketing isn’t like traditional marketing—and treating it that way only leads to frustration and failure. In The Zen of Social Media Marketing, Shama Hyder, social media expert and president of The Marketing Zen Group, teaches you the “Zen” of using social media tools to find your own marketing nirvana. The newest edition of The Zen of Social Media Marketing gives you: - A comprehensive overview of why social media works and how to use it to drive traffic to your website and fan page - A proven process to attract followers and fans and convert them into customers and clients - The latest social media trends and step-by-step guidelines for sites and apps such as Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and more - Innovative tips for mobile design - Essential advice on content marketing, email marketing, video, and targeted tactics to enhance your SEO - All-new information on why, when, and how to use online advertising - Why self-expression is the true driver of social media use and how to leverage it for your business - Insights from dozens of leading online marketers and entrepreneurs, with strategies for success

Television has become so saturated with commercials that it is difficult at times to tell the different images apart, much less remember or care about them. But, on closer look, television commercials can tell us a great deal about the interplay of market forces, contemporary culture, and corporate politics. This book views contemporary ad culture as an ever-accelerating war of meaning. The authors show how corporate symbols or signs vie for attention-span and market share by appropriating and quickly abandoning diverse elements of culture to differentiate products that may be in themselves virtually indistinguishable. The resulting "sign wars" are both a cause and a consequence of a media culture that is cynical and jaded, but striving for authenticity. Including more than 100 illustrations and numerous examples from recent campaigns, this book provides a critical review of the culture of advertising. It exposes the contradictions that stem from turning culture into a commodity, and illuminates the impact of television commercials on the way we see and understand the world around us.

In a 'video first' world, video is one of the most effective tools marketers can use to raise brand awareness, engage consumers, drive website traffic and increase sales. Video Marketing takes a step-by-step and in-depth look at planning and creating great video campaigns, as well as activating, testing and measuring their success. Featuring case studies from global household names such as adidas, Kleenex, and Red Bull, it explores which video types and platforms brands should use, using multi-video campaigns, live videos and webinars, as well as creating and editing video campaigns on a budget using DSLRs and smartphones. Updated with the latest developments, this second edition of Video Marketing contains new chapters on understanding your audience and buying media space on ad networks and social media, as well as further content on personal and personalized content and avoiding potential pitfalls such as frauds, fake views and updates. Accompanying online resources consist of video links for campaigns discussed in the book and a downloadable strategy planner for readers to complete and put into action.

Harness the power of video and create effective video marketing campaigns that will raise brand awareness, increase sales, drive website traffic and deliver ROI on marketing budgets, with this invaluable guide to creating engaging content. Written by the experienced and award-winning video marketer, Jon Mowat. Video is the single most effective tool that marketers can use to cut through the noise and deliver measurable results. Driven by consumer demand and with the backing of the largest social media platforms, our world is becoming 'video first'. Video Marketing Strategy allows marketers to harness the power of video, with an in-depth look at the world's most powerful medium and how it can radically magnify a brand's voice by creating a level of emotional engagement that can't be achieved any other way. Exploring both theory (why are humans so affected by video on mobile devices?) and practice (what's the key to making videos that deliver results?), this book looks at how multiple videos can form wider campaigns, while exploring content hubs, activation strategies and testing. Filled with invaluable advice, tips and strategies for incorporating video into a wider content marketing plan, plus insights from prominent industry practitioners and case studies from around the world, across sectors and industries, this book offers readers the magic formula for using video campaigns successfully.

Media and Entertainment Law presents a contemporary analysis of the law relating to the media and entertainment industry both in terms of its practical application and its theoretical framework. Looking at key aspects such as TV and radio broadcasting, the print press, the music industry, online news and entertainment and social networking sites, this textbook provides students with detailed coverage of the key principles, cases and legislation as well as a critical analysis of regulatory bodies such as the Press Complaints Commission and OFCOM. Media and Entertainment Law is also the first book to discuss superinjunctions and the phone-hacking scandal involving News of the World.

From Shama Kabani, president of the web marketing firm Marketing Zen, comes an essential guide for using social media tools to help business succeed.